It was around midnight when Yuko Watanabe crouched in the corner of her restaurant in downtown Los Angeles and called her parents in Japan, yearning for a comforting voice. Rioters had hurled concrete blocks into the window of her restaurant. Raucous looters, night revelers, loud bangs, and smoke filled the streets. Broken glass and dead plants were scattered across her restaurant. 

“Did you call the police?” her mother urged. 

“Mom, you don’t get it,” Watanabe said. “They’re targeting the police!” 

The weekend that my city, Los Angeles, roiled in anguish, anger, and chaos, my husband and I were in the mountains, about a two-hour drive away. Our plans to detox from technology and society disintegrated into ashes like the wood in our campfire. 

Los Angeles Police Department officers stood in the middle of Second Street with helmets on and legs spread apart. With their fingers, some slowly drummed the batons hanging at their waists. The officers obstructed the target of a crowd of protesters: city hall. When it reached the line of police, the crowd chanted, “March with us! March with us!”—a reference to law enforcement officers in other cities displaying solidarity with protesters by bending the knee or marching with them. Many protesters knelt and raised their hands to show that they came in peace.

If you have a journalist for a friend, I am sorry. Or maybe it’s just me. My friends can’t enjoy a decent hang-out session with me without me fact-checking their statements, sharing my opinions on every relevant and irrelevant issue, and reminding them of all the dark and depressing issues that they’d rather not dwell on at that moment. Please have pity on my friends. 

On what would typically be a busy Thursday morning, beach town Venice in Los Angeles was mostly bare and silent. But the avenues of Third and Rose, which residents dub “Skid Rose” after Skid Row in downtown LA, were still ripe with body odor and activity. Tents and makeshift shelters jammed the sidewalks from block to block.

Gavin Louis Uridel is not a “protesty kind of guy.” He’s not an activist perpetually enraged over broken systems and broken people. He’s a pretty happy guy—a jacked-up fitness enthusiast with shoulder-length blond dreadlocks, beach-kissed skin, and vein-popping thighs. He quit his job as a lawyer to open a gym next to the Pacific waters after professing faith in Jesus Christ.

In mid-March, as the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths began to rise in Michigan, Kato Hart braced himself for a particularly grueling season for his community in Detroit. As the founding pastor of Hold the Light Ministries Church of God in Christ, a tiny storefront church of about 15 members, Hart knew that once again, the disaster would strike hardest the poor and the marginalized like those in his church neighborhood, which is about 94 percent black with a median household income of $20,502.