Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. George Floyd’s murder in 2020 was the catalyst for numerous protests across the United States against racial discrimination and unjust policing practices. What was the incident with George Floyd? How did this tragic incident fit into a longer American history of police brutality?

Teaching Suggestion: Published in 2019, A Good Kind of Trouble was written prior to George Floyd’s murder but still in the midst of the rapidly growing Black Lives Matter movement. Black Lives Matter was formed in 2013 in response to another incident of police brutality: the murder of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old Black teenager in Florida. From the start, one of the primary goals of the Black Lives Matter movement has been to eradicate The Pervasiveness of Racial Bias, particularly with regard to police brutality against Black people and other people of color, which has a long history in the United States. George Floyd was a Black man who, in May 2020, was murdered by police officers in Minnesota after a store clerk accused him of using a counterfeit $20 bill.