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Why Do So Many People Outside The U.S. Care So Much About What’s Going On Inside The U.S. Right Now?
We asked around…
We’ve been kind of astounded at the number of rallies and marches around the world showing solidarity for protestors in the U.S.
We also found stories like this one in the Atlantic to be fascinating: where Kpop fans remotely helped interfere with U.S. police efforts to identify protestors by flooding and thus overloading police tip pages with uploads of Korean pop star fan videos.
At the same time, we’re curious why all these people care so much. It’s not their country. It’s not their systemic problems. So this past weekend we called or chatted online with people we know all over the place and asked.
Here are some of the responses we got, edited lightly in some cases, (mainly because some of the people we talked with are not native English speakers). Most live overseas, others are Americans who have spent a great deal of time living and working in other countries:
“It’s the same reason Americans protested apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s — the world should be beyond the point of racial injustice by now.”
“Many similar problems involving police killing and/or racism are happening in our country, and we don’t…