It's been three years since a white police man killed Gorge Floyd, and the viral video of the 8 minutes and 36 seconds with the officer's knee of Floyd's neck prompted a reckoning with racism across the United States. Now, three years to the day since Floyd's murder, African Americans still await signs of change.

Across the U.S., black Americans have been lived in fear of armed white police personnel, who helped launch centuries of violent and racist behavior towards black Americans. According to the Map of Police Violence, in police killings between 2013 and 2022, Black Americans were 2.78 times more likely to be killed by police than white people, and unarmed Black Americans were 1.3 times more likely to be killed by police than whites.

However, police violence is but one of many forms of "chronic diseases" propagated by structural racism. 

Rising hate crimes and widening social economic gap

Hate crimes based on racial bias in the United States increased dramatically between 2020 and 2022. According to Pew Research released in 2022, a total of 81 percent of Asian Americans say violence against Asian communities is surging.

In May 2022, a teenaged white supremacist shot 13 people at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket, and killed 10 African-Americans. In May 2023, a mass shooting in a Texas mall, which has killed 8 people, was the second-deadliest in the U.S. in 2023. The Latino shooter, Mauricio Garcia, targeted the mall, not specific types of people, according to the local authority, which also said he had "neo-Nazi ideation.”

The Texas mall shooting, also the second in Texas in less than a month, infused an intense sense of vulnerability, fear and the worry that nothing will be done politically to the Latino community. 

In recent years, hate crimes and hate speech incidents in the United States have increased significantly, and people of color and ethnic minorities continue to face systematic discrimination in medical care, education, housing and other fields, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said.

An examination of wealth in the U.S. found that the typical net worth of a white family was found to be nearly ten times that of a black family in 2016. African Americans are twice as likely as whites to lack health insurance and are more likely to work in service industries and live in densely populated areas.

All of these issues made African Americans more vulnerable to the Covid-19 during the pandemic. Floyd 's autopsy report said he had been infected with Covid-19, but that this was not the cause of his death.

Racial discrimination accelerates the cycle of gun violence in the U.S.

Racial discrimination, gun and police violence, and wealth polarization are rampant "chronic diseases" across the U.S., leading minority groups live with pervasive insecurity, injustice, and the fear of losing their lives, the Report on Human Rights Violations in the U.S. in 2022 said.

In 2020, the sale of guns to Black American rose 58 percent, according to surveys of firearm retailers by National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), a firearms trade association in the U.S.

Further, in the first quarter of 2021, another NSSF report revealed 90 percent of gun retailers reported a general increase of Black customers, including an 87 percent increase among Black women. 

"And you wonder why?" said Michael Moody ,who works for the U.S. federal government. “You look at Buffalo and the feeling of 'This could have been me' is there. We could be the next target. And when it's you, what are you going to do? Are you going to run and hide? Or are you going to be able to protect yourself? Protect your family? I didn't want a gun; I'm not a gun person. But this world has made me get one. Getting one for my wife next.” 

However, more firearms do not keep people safe, but in turn are linked to more crimes: murders, rapes, and others. 

In 2023, there had been over 200 mass shootings in the U.S. , according to the Gun Violence Archive website, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are injured or killed. 

"When the United States connived to spread racist speech, indulged police violence against people of color, watched people like George Floyd unable to breathe, and watched Asian Americans be discriminated against, attacked, or even killed, did they care about the individual human rights and freedom of these people who suffered from systemic racism and hate crimes?" spokesperson of China's Foreign Ministry Hua Chunying said in 2021.