George Floyd, a Black man, was killed on May 25, 2020, by a white Minneapolis police officer. The cop, who was eventually found guilty of murder, pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for nine-and-a-half minutes while he lay handcuffed on the ground, pleading that he couldn’t breathe.
A young woman bystander filmed the killing on her phone, as others shouted at the police to release Floyd.
His death led to nationwide and international protests affirming that “Black Lives Matter!” and demanding a re-examination of societal and institutional racism and policing.
Five years later, what is the legacy of Floyd’s death and the movement for justice and police accountability?
Simply put: the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), which won modest gains and raised the consciousness of millions, is now in the sights of Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) offensive. MAGA’s agenda is to reverse the gains of the civil rights, women’s, LGBTIQ and workers’ rights movements.
Trump is a lifelong racist who says diversity, equity and inclusion is “reverse discrimination” against whites. Floyd was murdered in Trump’s first term and he supported excessive police brutality, including against BLM protesters.
Lip service to rollbacks
When he took office, Democratic President Joe Biden, who depended on the Black vote, gave lip service to limited police reforms while praising cops for doing their jobs.
Days before Biden left the White House in January, the city of Minneapolis and Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) signed a proposed consent decree that would enact substantial changes in the city’s police department.
Updates to officer protocols included banning chokeholds and neck restraints. The consent decree also directed officers to report any colleagues, no matter their rank, if they believed they were violating another person’s rights.
Trump’s new DOJ recently ended the consent decree and is pushing anti-Black lies, labelling the teaching of truth about racism as “racist”.
Derek Chauvin, who murdered Floyd, was convicted in a state trial. This is significant and means Trump cannot pardon him. Only Minnesota has that power.
Five years later, much of the progress won through mass street protests has been rolled back or is under fire. White supremacists openly run the White House and Congress.
However, that openness to defend white privileges against Black rights is not new. It is a return to what existed for most of US history, when African Americans were treated as slaves, or second class — or less.
Only twice in 400 years have Blacks been hopeful of being accepted as full citizens: first, for 20 years after the end of the Civil War; and second, for 50 years after the victory of the 1960’s civil rights revolution. In both cases, the state supported legal and extra-legal actions to erode and overturn these gains.
There is debate over the future of George Floyd Plaza in Minneapolis, established to honour Floyd’s legacy at the site of his death.
“Michael McQuarrie, the director at the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University, who conducted research at the Minneapolis square during the 2020 protests, said the city has been divided on how to move forward with the area for the past five years,” reported the Guardian.
“He sees the street closure from 2020 to 2021 as transformative for the community.
“But some community members, city council members and members of Floyd’s family say there’s no way to rush healing. Council member Jason Chavez of Ward 9, where part of the square is located, said it needed to be recognized as ‘a historical component in our city history that will never be forgotten’.
“’We can’t sanitize what happened here in the summer of 2020,’ Chavez said.”
Soon after Trump returned as president, he forced Washington DC municipal authorities to destroy the city’s George Floyd Plaza.
Reckoning needed
There is generally a broad agreement in the Black community about racist violence by police and the need for real reform — although little has happened over the past five years. The Democrats and other liberals gave it support during the election, knowing it would never succeed because of right-wing and Republican opposition.
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King jnr said in the 1960s that white liberals were the problem for telling Blacks to slow down their fight for fundamental change. Meanwhile, white segregationists were open about their racism.
Keka Araujo of Black Enterprise magazine summed up the sentiments of most African Americans: “Five years after Floyd’s tragic and preventable murder, the struggle for authentic accountability and equitable justice is far from concluded; indeed, in many respects, it feels like it is recommencing, with exigencies more pressing than ever.
“Five years have now passed since global consciousness was seared by the agonizing demise of George Floyd beneath disgraced former cop Derek Chauvin’s knee on a Minneapolis street. May 25, 2020, remains a stark inscription in our shameful shared history, igniting a worldwide insurrection against racial inequity and law enforcement malfeasance that only a fundamental reckoning could fix.
“Yet, as this somber anniversary arrives, the initial fervor of outrage and the urgent calls for systemic overhaul have yielded mainly to a troubling stillness, a creeping tide of regression that leaves many to question if the very conditions leading to Floyd’s death are being tacitly allowed to re-emerge.
“Floyd’s harrowing final moments, captured with unblinking fidelity by a bystander’s lens, starkly illuminated the ingrained biases of racialized policing for a global audience. His frightened plea ‘I can’t breathe’, was a visceral truth, mobilizing millions into the streets across the United States and internationally.
“However, as history consistently reminds us, the path to justice is rarely linear. The nascent impetus for comprehensive police reform at the federal level largely stalled, with legislative efforts failing to gain bipartisan traction.
“While some local reforms were enacted, many have been piecemeal or have faced significant resistance. The potent energy that galvanized the summer of 2020 has, in many ways, been met by a persistent counter-current, a discernible pushback against the very conceptualization of systemic racism and the demands for accountability.”
What Araujo and others don’t say is that the root of racism, police violence and white supremacy is the capitalist system. There can never be an end to racism, including police violence, unless the system is overthrown.
Araujo continues, “The Trump administration’s recent decision to terminate endeavors aimed at securing federal oversight agreements for police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville … constitutes a salient rollback of federal civil rights enforcement. The Justice Department is also concluding investigations and rescinding prior determinations of misconduct concerning six other police departments, characterizing these inquiries as 'overreaching’.”
We must continue to fight and resist until that reckoning of the system takes place. And we must do so with our eyes wide open. The Black community knows this better than any other oppressed population.