A long time ago, someone—I no longer remember exactly who—described America’s struggle to deal with race as America’s great “national tripwire,” lying dormant until some hapless soul stumbles across it, detonating a bomb. The explosion resulting from George Floyd’s unspeakable murder on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis took place with devastating force—and the repercussions continue to this day.
At the time, I’d recently joined a reading group that hadn’t been planning to focus exclusively on race. We were a half dozen acquaintances who had decided—in a world brought to a standstill during the COVID-19 pandemic—to meet via Zoom every weekend for conversation around published works that we’d found compelling. If we had any objective at all, it was merely to stave off boredom and social isolation.
High school students at a Black Lives Matters protest in Berkeley, California.
© Jeremy Adam Smith
As we embarked on this project, anti-racism protests filled the streets. In online debates and on television news programs, politicians and pundits agonized over his senseless killing and the outpouring of public outrage that followed. How had we gotten to a place in this country where a Black man, crying out for his long-deceased mother, could simply be executed in the street?
In the weeks and months that followed, many Americans—myself included—had allowed themselves to think that the nation might have turned a corner, that, perhaps, out of the national trauma and tragedy, some good was going to emerge. It felt like a watershed moment: Finally, it seemed, America was poised to reckon with its problematic history on race. And for a while, it did. Among the myriad of changes, Confederate Civil War monuments came down, and buildings and institutions bearing the names of known racists got new ones.
Five years later, much of that outrage has abated and programs and policies put into place in an effort to counter generations of racial discrimination have been pushed to the side, if they ever were allowed to materialize at all. An untold number of diversity officers who were quickly hired at public and private institutions following Floyd’s death have since been fired. Initiatives meant to level the playing field have been scuttled, and efforts to document the more unflattering aspects of our nation’s history are being erased.
This is a political moment when white South Africans are among a dwindling number of people being given refugee status in the U.S., even as those from war-torn countries and dictatorships are being barred or even driven out after years of building lives in the United States. Inexplicably, the Trump administration is erasing the accomplishments of people of color from government websites. Even an outsized legend like Jackie Robinson was kicked off of a Defense Department website. The Pentagon also reimposed the names of Confederate officers on military bases (cynically keeping the Civil War–era names, but saying the change was meant to honor different individuals). And that barely scratches the surface. The list is too long to catalogue.
Americans are now embroiled in a debate over whether anything of enduring significance emerged in the unsettled several weeks that followed Floyd’s killing. The evidence has not been encouraging. A recent Pew study noted that in September 2020, 52% of U.S. adults said the increased focus on issues of race and racial inequality in the aftermath of Floyd’s death would lead to changes that would improve the lives of Black people. Today, 72% acknowledge that this has not happened. Was it all, as the National Urban League asked in a report released in the days preceding the May 25 anniversary, a movement, or just a moment?
Cynics say George Floyd’s death didn’t move the needle on race. I disagree. For millions upon millions in this country and abroad, the mere act of heading out into the streets to demand change was unprecedented. What emerged was a cadre of Americans newly aware about, and deeply shaken by, the inequalities upon which our country was founded. I don’t see how any such groundswell can be seen as inconsequential.
Reading through race
And sometimes, the impact of change can be measured by the conversations that might not otherwise have taken place, the human-level interaction that begins to seem not just possible, but imperative. Neighbors talking to neighbors, old friends talking about the unthinkable event that had just occurred, and what action they could take in response.
That’s exactly what took place among my circle of acquaintances who shared several books together as well as sometimes-difficult conversations about race in America.
The members of the group—Black, South Asian, WASP, Jewish, all of us scattered across the North American continent—had not decided a priori that each book we read would focus on our country’s thorny relationship with race and racism. Nevertheless, as each member took a turn suggesting what work would be next on our agenda, the issue of race ineluctably was where we landed. We set about trying to better understand the sickness at the center of America’s soul.
We started with Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and later consumed Tiya Miles’s magnificent All That She Carried, a book so full of erudition and sorrow that I can barely think about it without weeping. We pivoted to Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed, and planned the places in his travelogue of America’s history with race that we would visit as well; I have already been to a few. We were grateful for the comic relief of James McBride’s brilliant The Good Lord Bird, and contemplated John Brown’s bold, principled, but improbable bid to foment an uprising of enslaved people a few years before the Civil War. And the sweeping, historical novel by Honorée Fannonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, explored centuries of racism in America, alternating between poetry and prose.
Book after book, some of us were filling in small gaps in the knowledge that we had gathered all our lives about race; others were being introduced to many of these concepts for the first time. A few years in, as our group was winding down, we tackled Robert Samuels’s and Toluse Oluranippa’s Pulitzer prize–winning book His Name Is George Floyd, and learned about the contours of his life beyond his tragic death. It was a fitting way to end.
Progress isn’t a straight line
Today, even as I shake my head in disbelief at rollbacks and reversals happening right now, I refuse to become discouraged.
But I’m not a Pollyanna. The police officers who took part in Floyd’s execution have been convicted and sentenced, but generally speaking efforts to reform police departments around the country have not yielded very much. The setbacks have been real enough, including the current political leadership’s demand that the city of Washington, D.C., tear down Black Lives Matter Plaza.
But here’s the thing: It’s not possible to unsee and un-do what took place five years ago. Thousands of people took part in demonstrations that traversed those very streets, and millions more watched from the sidelines. That history, that reality, cannot be reversed, and the imprint that it left upon us won’t be readily erased. We honor George Floyd’s memory by holding on to the lasting change that has been achieved.
The impact of the reckoning of five years ago may be muted, but it’s still with us. People who had never protested for anything in their lives turned out to take part in demonstrations calling for an end to racism. I didn’t know that so many people in this country ever could, or would, fill the streets to protest anything. It gives me a measure of hope that they might flex that muscle and take to the streets in massive numbers again, if the situation becomes sufficiently dire in the future.
Americans with no people of color in their social circles began asking why that was, in a country as diverse as ours. Workers who had colleagues of color began to ask how they could be more supportive of them.
Some of our best-known cultural icons seemed to know exactly what time it is, and what they were called upon to do: I’m reminded about the group once known as the Dixie Chicks, which dropped the “Dixie” from its name a few weeks after Floyd’s death, saying they wanted to “meet the moment.” Just a couple of years earlier Dolly Parton renamed her Dixie Stampede dinner show and removed plantation imagery from the spectacle, to the displeasure of some of her fans. Lady Antebellum also rebranded after Floyd’s death, saying they were “regretful and embarrassed to say that we did not take into account the associations to the period of history before the Civil War, which includes slavery.”
I also take heart from the words of Ibram X. Kendi, who told the New York Times that racial progress was never going to advance in a straight line. “I know it became particularly popular in recent decades that there’s this singular arc of racial progress,” Kendi said. “It’s political rhetoric, but it’s actually not historical reality.”
Signs of change
Even so, the rollbacks and retrenchment have been heartbreaking and, to an extent, demoralizing. But the half-life of a newly raised social conscience is longer than some cynics would have you think.
If you’re looking for evidence of the enduring impact of the movement that erupted following George Floyd’s death, you might find it at the human level. As a Black woman who has lived in many communities in this country and abroad, I was a longtime veteran of the strained racial dynamics that sometimes play out among neighbors, some of whom could be effusive and welcoming, others reserved and hesitant.
The greeting I received from my neighbor as I took my daily walk one day was of the latter variety. But as neighborly greetings went, it was an upgrade. Previously he had viewed me with what I interpreted as suspicion—barely a grunt and a sidelong look. No one was more surprised than I, not long after Floyd’s death, when he erected a “Black Lives Matter” sign on his front lawn. Had I misjudged him? Had he always been secretly “woke”? More likely he was like a lot of Americans—decent caring people having a line that they could no longer ignore.
Similar signs sprung up all over my neighborhood and in communities that seemed far less likely places to see expressions of silent protest. What was once seen as a battle cry of the fringe left had become ubiquitous. It’s true enough that some of those signs have since been removed. But on my morning walks, these days, I can’t help but notice that his sign is still up.
I am not the same person after George Floyd’s murder, and I have also been changed by our group’s reading and ruminations. I was changed by our literary examinations on race, and the probing questions we asked each other at each meeting about the role it plays in each of our lives and in the society we live in.
While pollsters didn’t frame the question quite this way, I suspect a lot of people would say that their lives, in ways tangible and intangible, are profoundly different in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, as well. For that, we have the political moment as well as the political movement to thank.
Comments