LOS ANGELES — As he reflected on the past few months, Tomajae Tolliver started by saying everything was fine. Then he paused.
Actually, he said, everything felt like too much right now. When he thought about COVID-19 and the economy and what he would do if his job didn’t call him back to work, a question looped through his mind:
“How am I going to survive?”
The 20-year-old Angeleno applied to several clerk positions and warehouse jobs last fall but almost never heard back — a silence he thinks has something to do with his September arrest on charges of misdemeanor battery. But he kept applying, motivated in part by the people he had met through a national group called the Bail Project, which paid his $41,000 bail when he couldn’t afford it.
In the weeks since George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, more Americans, including many white Americans, have begun to engage in conversations about how systemic racism shapes the criminal justice system in the U.S. The dialogue has often focused on shifting money away from law enforcement and into social services, housing initiatives and jobs programs.