5 years after George Floyd’s murder, the backlash takes hold

By Clyde McGrady

Black Lives Matter Plaza is gone from Washington, D.C. The bold yellow letters that once protested police violence are now paved over, though police killings nationally are actually up.

The Justice Department has abandoned oversight agreements for police forces accused of racial bias, even as it begins an investigation of Chicago after the city’s Black mayor praised the number of Black people in top city jobs. The U.S. refugee resettlement program is effectively shut down, but white South Africans have been granted an exception.

Sunday was the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, a searing moment of brutality that ignited what may have been the largest social movement in U.S. history. Five years later, the movement that his death helped begin may feel like it’s in reverse.

There has always been a rhythm to American social movements: forward momentum followed by backlash. Abolitionism’s triumph gave way to the Ku Klux Klan and the end of Reconstruction. Civil rights marches dissipated, as Richard Nixon and his “silent majority” rose to power.

But even by historical standards, the current retrenchment feels swift and stark. Five years ago, Republicans and Democrats shared the nation’s streets to denounce police violence and proclaim that Black lives matter. Now, Donald Trump, a president who has long championed white grievance, is setting the tone of racial discourse.

To conservatives, the shift is a necessary course correction away from violence in the streets and crippling mandates that overburden police departments.

“President Trump is tirelessly enacting policies to ensure America’s safety, prosperity and success for all Americans,” said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson. “The Trump administration is committed to stopping crime, upholding justice, protecting communities and empowering federal, state and local law enforcement.”

But Manisha Sinha, who teaches American history at the University of Connecticut, sees the resurgence of old power structures as intentional though not inescapable.

“I don’t think that there’s something inevitable or cyclical about it,” Sinha said. “As historians, we know that things just don’t happen on their own.”

The Black Lives Matter movement well predated Floyd’s death, emerging from the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in 2013 and the 2014 deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York, both of which happened at the hands of police.

But it exploded after the killing of Floyd. A half million people turned out in nearly 550 communities across the United States on a single day, June 6, 2020. Between 15 million and 26 million people participated in demonstrations or showed their support in the weeks after May 25, 2020, including Republican mainstays such as Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, and Nikki Haley, Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations.

Much has changed since then. Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center found that 72% of Americans say “the increased focus on race and racial inequality after Floyd’s killing did not lead to changes that improved the lives of Black people.” The popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement has dipped 15 percentage points from its June 2020 peak, though a slight majority of the public still voiced support.

Ibram X. Kendi, a professorial proponent of “anti-racism,” has seen his academic star dim since 2020, when he founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University with $55 million in donations. But in an interview, he said he still was taking the long view. The “anti-racist revolution” has slowed, he conceded, but it was never going to ascend unimpeded.

“I know it became particularly popular in recent decades that there’s this singular arc of racial progress,” said Kendi, who will lead the Institute for Advanced Study at Howard University in Washington. “It’s political rhetoric, but it’s actually not historical reality.”

Still, it is difficult to ignore the headwinds facing racial justice activists, especially when those gusts seem to be blowing hardest from the highest levels of American power.

Trump may have vowed in his second inaugural address to “forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based,” but the president’s belief that “anti-white” discrimination has tilted society in favor of African Americans remains a driver of administration policy. Those policies include the dismantlement of “diversity, equity and inclusion” in government, the targeting of perceived racial preferences in academia and the private sector and the rooting out of what Trump called “improper ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution.

Historians note that even when social movements are met with backlash, change is never fully rolled back. Despite the violence and terror used by southern states to suppress full Black citizenship in the post-Reconstruction era, slavery was not reinstituted.

And Black activism is American activism, said Steven Hahn, a history professor at New York University, even if some of the white allies who once stood shoulder to shoulder with Black protesters have turned away.

“You wouldn’t have democracy in this country, or at least a sense of a robust democracy, without Black people and their own struggles,” he said. “They were the most committed to real democracy that was not bound by exceptions and exclusions.”

But Hahn expressed real worry.

“People get silenced, and then before you know it,” he said, “we’re really back at a really bad square one.”

The police reform movement that was sparked by Floyd’s murder has had lasting impacts. Many police departments still require officers to wear body cameras. No-knock warrants are banned in some areas. Data collection on police brutality has been enhanced.

Trump’s efforts to eradicate DEI, which has increasingly become a catchall term to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male, is beginning to meet grassroots resistance. On Wednesday, big-box retailer Target reported a drop in foot traffic and sales, a response in part to its retreat from diversity policies, in part to tariff anxiety. The company’s sales fell 3.8% last quarter compared with the same quarter a year ago.

On the flip side of that is Michael Green, who like many was moved by the protests of 2020. A self-described “flag nerd,” Green thought marchers should have proper banners that could match the iconography of Trump’s movement, so he started Flags for Good, which makes signage for progressive causes, including Black Lives Matter.

A company once run out of a spare bedroom has now become a career. Items in the Black Lives Matter section in particular have seen a huge leap in sales that, he said, was driven by Trump’s reelection.