Assata Troi, which came out on Juneteenth. A few weeks after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, it was impossible to start our conversation anywhere else. “It’s a tumultuous time,” she told me, describing the scene in Philadelphia — a mix of peaceful protesting and ATMs on fire, brutal accidents caught on tape, the deaths of young activists.
But the violence, for Shirelle, is just a symptom of the illness. “Structural racism is so deeply ingrained in the country — it’s literally how the country became what it is.