PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A new term created as protests erupted after the killing of George Floyd this past summer is entering the mainstream.
Pandemic, lockdowns, an epidemic of Black men and women being killed at the hands of police, and then an election season unparalleled in the history of the nation all are part of The Cool Zone, which was coined as a way to describe these events.
Brian Creech, journalism professor at Temple University, said it originated in leftist memes on Twitter, on podcasts and on Tumblr.
He said it describes “the collision” of Black Lives Matter protests, the pandemic and its economic fallout.
“The feeling that, at the time, the U.S. was approaching almost 30% unemployment, there were mass protests in nearly every city in the country, and everyone was also deeply worried about catching COVID-19,” Creech explained.
Creech said the term “comes from the idea that historians identify these certain moments in history that seem really cool to read about, but also would have been a really terrible or chaotic time to live through.”
The phrase was spreading over the summer, then regained traction as hostile protesters descended on Washington D.C. this week.
“It will, and has started to, spread outside of leftist political communities because it's a really useful term to describe this experience of witnessing history,” he explained.
The chaos as the Capitol, he said, is another day in the long list of events in this unprecedented time of our history.
The events of the past year are not without context, he said. Social movements like Occupy and the Tea Party gave traction to the idea that the permanent world we took for granted was on the verge of changing. He said the Cool Zone describes what it feels like when those changing conditions start to manifest.
The turbulence of the 1960s was another example of a Cool Zone in recent American history, he said.