7 of our top opinion columns this week: ICYMI
In today's fast-paced news environment, it can be hard to keep up. For your weekend reading, we've started in-case-you-missed-it compilations of some of the week's top USA TODAY Opinion pieces. As always, thanks for reading, and for your feedback.
— USA TODAY Opinion editors
1. Video of George Floyd pinned by Minneapolis cops is shocking but not surprising
By Eileen Rivers
"As a black journalist in America, I often feel like my coverage of these incidents amounts to screaming into the void. The history of police brutality is deeply entrenched in an acceptance that makes it almost too daunting to end. And as a black journalist in America, I’m tired of being shocked by images of brutality. Each one bruises my psyche and hurls me into a mini-depression. It makes me wonder whether my work is making a difference."
2. 100,000 coronavirus deaths mark an American tragedy
By The Editorial Board
"Some disarray is inevitable during a rapidly evolving crisis, and COVID-19 is the worst health disaster the world has faced in a century. But (President Donald) Trump has compounded the damage by undermining his administration's scientists, heralding a risky antimalarial drug as a potential coronavirus game changer, ruminating about injecting patients with disinfectants, promoting magical thinking about the virus disappearing, and refusing to lead by example by wearing a mask in public."
3. Joe Biden questions my blackness one moment, defends racist 1994 crime bill the next
By Paris Dennard
"As a black man who voted for Donald J. Trump for president in 2016, and plans to do so in 2020, no 77-year-old white man from Delaware has the right, authority or rationale to question my blackness or the blackness of millions of Americans exercising our God-given right to be free and ... to vote for whomever we want, even if they are Republican."
4. As coronavirus deaths near 100,000, Trump makes America exceptional in all the wrong ways
By Jill Lawrence
"We officially topped 1.6 million cases (last week) and ... we’re heading toward 40 million unemployed and a 30% unemployment rate — a downturn 'without modern precedent” ... in the words of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. ... (But) the pandemic and the economy are far from the only areas in which Trump has reinvigorated American exceptionalism in all the wrong ways."
5. Coronavirus is no joke, but it's why comedy must go on
By Cappy McGarr
"I’m not saying comedians are first responders. They may not even qualify as second responders. But during a crisis, wherever they arrive on the call sheet, comedians respond. They do the impossible task of finding what’s funny about a dire scenario and give us permission to laugh."
6. Coronavirus: I was in the stay-home-until-it's-safe camp. But I just can't take it anymore.
By Michael J. Stern
"My status as a die-hard Democrat placed me firmly in the 'stay at home until it’s safe' faction. And I’ve not been shy about deriding the gun-toting mobs who insisted on standing shoulder to shoulder as they emptied their lungs at governors who are desperately trying to keep their citizens safe. ... But as time has worn on, I’ve abandoned what I thought was the moral high ground."
7. I'm a survivor of domestic abuse. Quarantine with my father would have been hell.
By Wendy Knight
"As coronavirus lockdowns begin to lift, millions of children trapped in abusive homes will emerge among its most silent and shattered victims. Stay-at-home orders issued by governors mask the brutal reality: Home is not safe for boys and girls who live with violent men. It’s hell. Long before the pandemic, I was one of those girls."
You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: George Floyd's killing, Joe Biden on 'you ain't black': Top columns