Five Years After George Floyd

We tried to jump timelines—and ended up squarely back in White America

A photograph I snapped just before we were chased off by police, Indianapolis, Indiana, May 30, 2020.

Five days after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, I found myself in Indiana visiting my then-partner. We drove an hour and fifteen minutes into Indianapolis, a city of nearly one million people, to join a chaotic protest on the fifth night of a national uprising. Indianapolis residents were marching for justice for George Floyd, but also for their own communities’ victims of police brutality, including nineteen-year-old McHale Rose, who three weeks earlier had been gunned down by Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department (IMPD) officers. The police murders of Black men were happening everywhere—in every state, in every region (including in Southwest Virginia where I live, where eighteen-year-old Kionte Spencer was gunned down by Roanoke County police officers in 2016.)

To paraphrase Eric Garner, another Black man who was strangled to death by New York Poli…