[] Backburner DA – Vertical organizing absent racial ethics makes their movements color blind to racial issues which always puts black and brown bodies on the backburner for the interests of the party.

Brown is one of who showed up to protest police violence against Black people in the United States following the deaths of , , and more. Protesters marched through U.S. cities and across the world. At times, U.S. police lobbed flash-bang grenades at protesters and . And many people — including some credentialed journalists — were arrested. This movement also comes in the middle of a — with — that . "I've had friends come to me, concerned about my showing up to a protest and saying, 'Imani, who's going to get you first, the cops or the COVID?'" said Brown, who, as a cancer survivor and a lesbian, has been participating in demonstrations for years. "There are many times in my life where I have protested for my rights, whether it be my right to get married or my right to exist as an African American in this country," she said. National attention may wane, camera crews and the larger crowds may fade, but some protesters are still staging rallies and marches in cities across the nation, from . to to How do these activists continue to fight for racial justice without burning out? In early June, Nearly 500 people responded, some of whom described how tough it can be to keep up the fight against racism, and the exhaustion that can come with it. "Sometimes you can have depression, and sometimes it's this very real feeling of hopelessness," said Cher Weixia, an associate professor of legal studies, social justice and human rights at the School of Integrative Studies at George Mason University. "All of this adds up together to a chronic phenomenon of activist burnout." When the scope of the fight feels overwhelming, Paul Gorski, an activist and researcher who studies activism burnout in North Carolina, said activists can feel "like a sellout" if they take a break. For some, this manifests in a fear that if they don't fight their hardest today, all of the work will have been for nothing. Keshia Crosby-Williams, a 38-year-old from Brooklyn, N.Y., noted that fear. "A lot of my anxiety comes from that, from all this effort, from so many people coming together, so many protests, so many conversations happening around the dinner table, [what] if at the end of all of this, nothing changes, nothing gets better," Crosby-Williams said. Activism burnout is particularly rife among Black racial justice activists, not only because they are fighting a centuries-old fight, but they're also experiencing something called racial battle fatigue, which Gorski says is the "cumulative impact of experiencing racism day to day."