Little To Hold On To and A Lot To Learn
Beyond the Book: Two years since the murder of George Floyd
This past Wednesday marked two years since George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officers. The world was rocked with terror and outrage as we all witnessed video of the horrific execution of a Black man in public and broad daylight. Protests erupted around the world like many of us have not seen in our lifetimes. Pretty much any public facing entity - schools, businesses, government offices and more - was pressured to make statements in support of Black lives. There were increased calls to look at more systemic aspects of racism. Cities were forced to talk about their policing budgets, schools were forced to talk about their disciplinary practices, businesses were forced to talk about their diversity and equity initiatives. Books on race (including my own) sold out across the country in record numbers.
If you write or speak on issues of race - or even if you don’t and just happen to be a Black person with any sort of public profile - you were likely inundated with requests for interviews and appearances to talk about race, racism, and the current uprising for Black lives. If you do this sort of work, it is likely that you felt very exhausted and often exploited during those months. Very little thought was given to us as human beings who were first and foremost traumatized Black people trying to survive a country that hates the color of our skin and likes to remind us of that fact with the brutal murders of Black people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
For the remainder of 2020, and quite regularly since then, I have been asked countless times the last two years variations of the following questions in almost every interview or public conversation I’ve had with a non-Black person:
What makes this moment different than past protest movements?
What has changed since the death of George Floyd?
What progress is being made since the death of George Floyd?
Do you think anything has changed since the death of George Floyd?
What do you think will be the lasting legacy of the protests following the death of George Floyd?
It was rather absurd to get these questions only weeks, if not days, following the murder of George Floyd. I would argue that it’s still a pretty ridiculous question to ask now only two years later. If you recognize that the brutality of racism in the United States is at its core a systemic issue, then it doesn’t make much sense to ask what the legacy of our collective outrage, heartbreak and fear will be when the only change we’d been able to experience to a measurable degree in such a short amount of time was an increase in awareness and our collective increase in outrage, heartbreak and fear. Unless we’re talking about open revolution in the streets, you won’t be able to measure the lasting impact of social movements for change on our systems in a few months or even a few years. What we can see clearly, two years later, is the lack of any sort of real beginning in the work for that important systemic change that would take many years, if not decades, to complete.
So there is very little, even two years out, that I can point to as a lasting impact from the protests of 2020. Where long-term activists had goals in place coinciding with efforts that many of them began in years like 2012 or 2015, progress in addressing some of the more structural havens of violent white supremacy and anti-Blackness was made. Here in Seattle, we saw the promise to close the new King County youth jail. This was a long-held fight. I remember taking my sons with me to protests against the building of the new facility in 2017, when they were still small. Some municipalities saw small reductions in police budgets, the removal of police officers from schools, and other important changes. Many of the larger changes that protestors and activists demanded and hoped for never materialized, and many of the smaller changes that were granted have already been rolled back.
But there is a lot that I can say already that we’ve learned - or should learn - from the protests of 2020 and the response to those protests. Many of these are not new lessons, they are ones we seem to have to learn over and over again. But if we take these lessons with us into the future, then perhaps our future efforts will see more progress.
There is no form of effective protest that will be seen as “peaceful” by those seeking to maintain white supremacy. Any protest that disrupted or even annoyed white supremacy was deemed violent. In Seattle we saw peaceful crowds attacked with police pepper spray and flash grenades for opening umbrellas. In New York we saw an elderly man pushed to the ground, hitting his head and left bleeding on the sidewalk, for trying to engage police officers in conversation. News media would paint any protest area that blocked traffic as a war zone. The only “acceptable” protests were those that were permitted, silent, ended before rush hour, and were so cop friendly that officers were served refreshments.
Widespread, effective protest will be eagerly met with violence from more than just police. When I was writing MEDIOCRE, I spent a lot of time steeped in the violent conspiracist fantasies of white militia movements. It became clear to me how much of white America - and more specifically white male America - is obsessed with the idea of race war.
The fear of violence by Black Americans and other people of color has been created and maintained by white America as a way to keep everyday white Americans ready to take up arms in defense of the status quo. A large part of the brutal fantasy of white manhood in the United States centers around violent conquest - conquest of land, resources and people - and protecting said conquest from “savage hordes.” Moments of protest (or even moments of increased awareness of racial issues) activate white male identity (which at its core is an almost exclusively reactionary identity as it is allowed to remain “neutral” when not stressed, as all systems have been built in its image) in a way that is invigorating for many in white America.
This fear is not a dreaded thing to those who decide to take up guns for the “race war” - it is unifying and empowering for many white men in a way that little else is. Kyle Rittenhouse did not begrudgingly cross state lines to shoot peaceful protestors in cold blood: he did so gleefully. This current cycle of increased white male violence began with the re-election of President Barack Obama in 2012, accelerated during the Ferguson protests in 2014 and 2015 (both times where we saw increases in membership for white supremacist hate groups and increases in gun ownership) and spiked again in 2020. This violence continues today and shows no sign of slowing as we witnessed the horrific mass-murder of Black grocery shoppers in Buffalo by a young white man hoping to accelerate the race war that he and many others have been hoping for.
This pattern of enthusiastic brutality - where white America eagerly awaits instances of conflict, social disruption, or racial strife in order to unleash widespread, whiteness-defining, violence against populations of color - has repeated many times throughout our country’s history, including the repeated campaigns of genocide against Indigenous peoples, the Draft Riots of 1863, the Los Angeles Chinatown Massacre of 1871, the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, the mass lynchings and torture of thousands of Black Americans during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction years, Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa massacre of 1921, to the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin Massacre in 2012, the Charleston Church massacre in 2018, the El Paso Massacre in 2019….I could, unfortunately, go on for quite some time.
In this modern age, hordes of white people crazed with hatred taking to neighborhoods of color are no longer needed to enact regular terror and violence. The internet provides places for mobs to form and grow in relative safety and obscurity, encouraging individuals to commit acts of violence in hopes of triggering a response from terrorized populations of color that would justify their returns to mob violence and the re-solidification of white male power. It is important to realize that this violence will continue and will increase with any progress we make toward dismantling white supremacist power. That increase will serve as justification to many - especially white moderates and liberals - to dial back pushes for change. But it is important to remember that the only way out is through. That violence is an automatic response to any change that threatens white supremacist power, and will occur no matter how long we wait, or how gently we try to introduce change. The change, once solidified, is literally the only thing that will keep us safe. The white supremacy that is really killing us in the greatest numbers is the white supremacy that is happening every day, in every system we have to interact with in society.
If the promises you were given were vague, the results you got were nonexistent. How many of y’all work for a corporation forced to state that Black Lives Matter and that they pledged to “do better”? How many of y’all had to attend “listening sessions” where Black employees were coerced to open themselves up and risk their work relationships by talking about the racism they encounter every day by their peers and supervisors? How many of y’all watched one of your elected officials don Kente cloth, shed a tear, or raise a fist in the air for Black lives?
Now, how many of ya’ll saw any of that lead to anything of substance? How many of you now work in more inclusive workplaces with clear policies in place to handle harassment and discrimination and the budget and authority granted to actually follow through? How many of y’all attend schools that now have robust resources for students of color, have hired more teachers of color and are treating those teachers with the respect (and pay) they deserve? How many of y’all saw a meaningful reduction in police budgets and a meaningful increase in funding to communities of color? Where we were given little more than sentiment, and a promise to “investigate” or “do better,” we saw nothing. Where we were given clear timelines, effective budget allocations, administrative power, measurable goals - we saw some progress, and had an actual barometer to measure progress to and hold people accountable to.
We saw how much extreme change our systems are capable in a short period of time - just not for Black lives. A very unique aspect of the 2020 uprising was that it happened during a widespread global pandemic. There is much that we should have done differently and better in this pandemic - the million plus lives lost to the virus so far is testament to that. But we cannot pretend that we didn’t see our incredibly large, complex, and seemingly immovable systems undergo massive change in an incredibly short period of time - and we were like, the worst country at that change. Our education system was torn apart and rebuilt. Corporations across the country shifted to remote workforces practically overnight. Even our government - perhaps our most resistant-to-change system - looks and operates wildly differently to how it had in just 2019.
All of this could be done once it became clear that this pandemic would impact white middle America. All of this could be done once corporations needed to find a way to keep making money.
And so now imagine the same school that adopted new software, re-trained every single one of it’s teachers, rolled out new policies (and often new devices) to students and faculty, found a way to get school lunches to homes, drastically shifted school schedules in often as little as a few weeks or months is trying to tell you that reducing the amount of Black and Indigenous students being suspended, expelled, or arrested in school is going to “take some time” and is “a very complicated issue.” Imagine the same workplace that moved the majority of their employees to remote work, reworked their supply chain, and redesigned their relationship with customers in often a matter of days that addressing the hiring, retention and promotion of employees of color is a “process” that takes resources that the company “has to take the time to find.” When it comes to enacting systemic change, has never been a matter of means - it has always been a matter of will. The excuses given in the past should never have held, and in the light of the immense change we’ve seen during this pandemic, they never should in the future. We’ve seen what change these dinosaurs are capable of when it serves them.
When “allies” march for change, the change they want is often to the way they feel. A lot of non-Black people who joined the widespread protests for Black lives joined because they were shocked and even traumatized by the coverage of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and they didn’t want to feel like that anymore. Many did not feel the need to investigate their motives. They were showing up, and that was all that mattered. But even the act of “showing up” helped accomplish their goals. They no longer felt helpless in the face of disturbing violence. They did a thing. They marched, they yelled. It was cathartic. And then they were able to move on. The violence they were protesting was not the violence that Black people in America live in fear of every day of their lives, it was the violence of having to feel bad about the violence from which we are fighting to survive.
For many people who don’t feel like they actually have to fear white supremacist violence coming for themselves or their closest loved ones, the act of feeling something became doing something. They read books, they cried, they yelled at their Trump-supporting uncles, they gave $50 to a national org, they put a sign in the window of their home in the neighborhood they are gentrifying. You know - activism.
They didn’t look at where they spend their money every day. They didn’t vote for the candidates trying to defund the police or substantially increase investment in Black communities. They didn’t show up at their school boards to demand anti-racist education in their schools. They didn’t question how putting their kids in private schools was impacting the public schools that kids of color attend. They didn’t look at the racist demographics of their neighborhood and ask how they were contributing to that. They didn’t vote out prosecutors who refuse to hold racist cops accountable for their actions. They didn’t begin long-term investments and relationships with local mutual-aid groups. They didn’t advocate for more affordable housing in their neighborhood. They didn’t ask for investigations into the racist nature of the advanced placement programs they were hoping to get their children into. And as the months and years past, all that they will have to show for their activism is the pictures they proudly posted on facebook, that they will use anytime a person of color accuses them of being racist.
Oh, and those signs are still up.
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Thank you - your writing is always a call to transformation and persistence (not just awareness or even action). Your generosity and guidance helps me keep on.
Yup! All of this! TY always