No Bad Protestors: Ethics, Class War, and the George Floyd Uprising

Arturo Castillon

Release Date: May 15, 2026

ISBN: 979-8-9997930-3-4

The 2020 George Floyd uprising was the largest upheaval in the United States in half a century. Within days of the horrifying police murder, thousands of people in hundreds of cities were marching, fighting, and throwing down for Big Floyd.

Drawing on extensive interviews with front-line participants from Minneapolis, Atlanta, Richmond, and Detroit, Arturo Castillon uncovers a key motivation for the George Floyd rebels: in a world governed by laws serving racial capitalism, the revolt opened the possibility of ethically meaningful action.

In a time of grief, crisis, and isolation, Castillon highlights how the revolt opened up a space in which front-line fighters could experience the shared ethical life denied to them under the current order. Far from a marginal aspect of the George Floyd uprising, No Bad Protestors shows how this ethics of class war was a central dimension in shaping why American cities rebelled in 2020, gathering lessons discovered in this fight that we all need to hear.

Praise for No Bad Protestors:

“After decades of counterrevolution, the George Floyd Uprising finally gave this godforsaken country a communist theory that was relevant, compelling, and, most importantly, practicable. From the very start of the Hot Pandemic Summer, Arturo was on the frontlines, sharpening those weapons of critique. If you’re serious about getting ready for the next round of the throwdown, No Bad Protestors is the crucial manual to make sure that the boys never manage to push us back inside.”
– Idris Robinson, author of The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World Has to Offer (MIT, 2025)

Arturo Castillon is an independent researcher and teacher living in Philadelphia. With Shemon Salam, he is co-author of several texts that appeared in The Revolutionary Meaning of the George Floyd Uprising (Daraja, 2021) and The George Floyd Uprising (PM Press, 2023). Other works include “Policing and Resistance in Philadelphia,” in Black Quantum Futurism: Space-Time Collapse II (The AfroFuturist Affair/House of Future Sciences Books, 2020) and the zine Bury Me Not in a Land of Slaves (Fragments Distro, 2019).