Ballooning foreclosure rates, the loss of value for “mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and derivatives,” and the decline of “solvency of over-leveraged banks and financial institutions” (AIG, Lehman Brothers, etc.) caused the Great Recession.

Due to its long-segregated neighborhoods and municipalities, St. Louis was seriously affected by the Great Recession, also known as the subprime mortgage crisis, which began in December 2007 and lasted until June 2009.

With the election of the first African American president in 2008, Barack Hussein Obama, many people believed that the United States had moved past its racist history. However, the “birther” argument during Obama’s election campaign and throughout his presidency revealed that racism had not died. Rather, new tools and new approaches emerged to spread its ideas.

In February of 2012, Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old African American teen was shot and killed by a neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman.

After George Zimmerman shot and killed African American teen Trayvon Martin and was then acquitted for the murder in 2013, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter began circulating on social media as a way to signal solidarity against the perceived racially motivated acquittal. Protesting discriminatory policing tactics and racist prejudice among law enforcement, the movement spread across the internet and across cities demanding fair treatment and re-evaluation of the criminal justice’s approach to race.

On August 9, 2014, Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed an unarmed, African American teen named Michael Brown on Canfield Drive in Fergusson, Missouri. The national public reaction to the events, narratives, and legal proceedings revealed both a racially divided perception of policing practices and a systematic legal deference towards police officers and against black persons.

In response to the protests and this critical self-evaluative moment many companies and institutions declared their solidarity with Black Lives Matter and a general antiracist movement: “Schools began incorporating antiracist curricula, and companies pledged to fight anti-blackness in their organizations.”

On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend Kenneth Walker were sleeping at her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky when police knocked on the door and then forced entry using a battering ram.

On May 25, 2020, police in Minneapolis, Minnesota were called to a local convenience store in response to a “forgery in progress.” Earlier a 46-year-old, African American man named George Floyd had made a purchase using a 20-dollar bill that the clerk suspected as being a possible counterfeit (Bogel-Burroughs and Wright, 2021). The clerk reported the possible counterfeit to his manager, though he also stated on the record that he didn’t think Floyd knew the bill was a fake. The police were called, and when they arrived on the scene, they violently removed George Floyd by force from the vehicle in which he was sitting, handcuffed him, and pinned him down on the street.

The events of 2014 and the summer of 2020 reinforced the degree to which structural racism tainted all aspects of American life; this racism is especially clear within the criminal justice system. Bonilla-Silva (2018) notes, “a record number of black people were killed by law enforcement in 2015, more than the deadliest year of lynching in the United States.”