5 years after Floyd’s death, US’ racial reckoning stalls: WashPo

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: The Washington Post
Today 14:50

Public support for police reform and racial equity has declined sharply since 2020, as corporate pledges fade and DEI programs face political attacks.

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The sun shines above a mural honoring George Floyd in Houston's Third Ward on Sunday, June 7, 2020. (AP)

Five years after the killing of George Floyd, his final minutes captured in a video that shook the world, the sweeping calls for racial justice and police reform that followed have largely faded. What many hoped would mark a transformative era in American race relations now appears to be a moment of lost momentum, diluted by backlash, political opposition, and public fatigue, a new piece by The Washington Post argued.

Floyd’s death in May 2020, amid nationwide lockdowns, ignited some of the largest protests in US history.

Across the country, demonstrators demanded sweeping police reform, greater racial equity in healthcare and education, and corporate accountability for systemic discrimination.

Corporations pledged more than $50 billion toward equity initiatives. City officials renamed streets and painted “Black Lives Matter” in massive block letters on public avenues. Universities, foundations, and public agencies poured resources into DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs.

But that reckoning is now in retreat, as per the piece.

Under President Donald Trump’s second term, the federal government has launched a broad rollback of many racial justice initiatives introduced in 2020. In a series of executive actions, the Trump administration has worked to defund and dismantle DEI programs across universities, government agencies, and major corporations. On Thursday, the US Justice Department announced it would no longer pursue police reform agreements in cities like Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed.

“We’re witnessing a full-blown reversal,” said Jake Grumbach, a public policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He noted that even liberal-led cities such as San Francisco and New York are stepping back from the criminal justice reforms they championed just four years ago.

Much of the corporate sector has also backtracked. Firms that made large pledges, from tech giants to major banks, have either quietly reduced their commitments or abandoned DEI programs altogether. Companies like Verizon have also scaled back diversity efforts to align with federal contract requirements.

Corporate promises withdrawn, public support declines

This retreat coincides with shifting public sentiment, as per the piece. In 2021, 55% of Americans believed that racial discrimination was the primary reason Black Americans faced worse economic and housing outcomes than whites, the highest level ever recorded by the General Social Survey. By 2024, that figure had dropped to 45%.

Support for the Black Lives Matter movement followed a similar arc. “You saw a surge in support after Floyd’s death, especially after Trump threatened to deploy the military to stop protests,” said Stanford political scientist Hakeem Jefferson. “Then it fell off a cliff.”

Jefferson, who teaches and researches race and identity, said he’s since landed on a right-wing watch list. He describes 2020 as a moment that felt unprecedented, a moment of alignment between mass mobilization, widespread visibility of state violence, and cross-racial solidarity. “People really did believe these big, multicultural protests were going to be transformative,” he said. “They were, just not in the way people expected.”

Historians and political scientists note that US racial politics often move in cycles: periods of visible progress followed by backlash and retrenchment. Floyd’s death arrived during a “perfect storm” of national crises, a deadly pandemic, economic instability, and a rise in racialized violence targeting Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian communities.

Yet the energy of that moment, as per the piece, has largely dissipated. The Black Lives Matter mural once painted outside the White House has been removed. DEI grants are vanishing. And the promise of a structural reckoning has given way to what some scholars now call a “managed retreat.”

Still, the conversation has not disappeared entirely, The Washington Post argues. “What happened in 2020 changed the political vocabulary,” Jefferson said. “It redefined what is possible, even if we’re now fighting to keep those gains from being erased.”