It’s been five years since two Minneapolis police officers murdered George Floyd. And, despite what seemed to be progress going in the right direction, Black America is in worse shape now than it was during the protests that his murder beget.
Remember the Summer 2020? White people were posting black squares to Instagram because they wanted to declare that Black lives mattered. Companies like Pepsi, McDonalds and even Wrangler Jeans were going out of their way to articulate their commitment to fight racial injustice. People were marching in the streets from New York City to Paris demanding a change.
It was a time of hope for Black folks. There was a feeling that maybe just maybe things might get better for us. The Pew research center found that two out of three Americans supported the Movement for Black Lives, and 70% of white people in this country were having long needed discussions about racial inequity.
It was a magical summer. Then things changed.
What we did not know at the time is that not only were some white people attempting to come to terms with racism in America, but there were also white nationalists who took advantage of that summer to sabotage the protests, turning would-be allies into antagonists.
The earliest days of the George Floyd protests were peaceful. Then two days after they began, things turned violent. Trump implied it was Black folks who were engaged in the violence, but he also pointed fingers at Antifa. But all along, it was white folks who helped it turn violent. White nationalists, to be specific.
The Proud Boys, KKK and other overtly racists groups were actually the “bad actors” in these violent protests, but that got lost. Add to the fact that many Black activists started to include ‘defund the police’ in their list of demands, and all the good will that Black folks had accumulated during the summer of 2020 evaporated. That set the stage for where we are now.
Once white and Black people were proud to call themselves woke. Now, after all the ways it has been made fun of online and how the Trump Administration has vilified the idea, that word is viewed with disdain. All the relatively good faith attempts to implement DEI programs by corporations (Except Wrangler Jeans. Honestly, I have no idea what they were trying to do.), have gone by the waste side.
The past five years have been devastating. America was so close to coming to terms with the way it treated Black folks. Then it not only retreated from making that step, but it ran in the complete opposite direction. Support for BLM has cratered. DEI initiatives are all but dead. And the police are still killing us.
It’s sad to say, but we are worse off now than we were five years ago. It is clear that we cannot expect white sympathy to do anything for us. It is too fleeting and disingenuous. Our country cannot be expected to make significant changes because Trump has shown us that all it takes is one man to make things worse.
But Black people are no strangers to difficulty. We have been through difficult times. It is important to remember that we all we got. We had a moment of hope…and that is now gone.
But, in reality, that hope was misplaced. We must remember to hope not in white people changing their minds, but instead in our ability to preserver through anything.
