Five Years After George Floyd
We tried to jump timelines—and ended up squarely back in White America
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 Police Department (NYPD) officers in 2014, in words he uttered just before his own death: enough is enough.
I wasn’t prepared for the violence in Indy that evening. Disconnected from on-the-ground organizers, we found ourselves caught between police-propelled smoke grenades on one side, and protesters igniting fires in the streets on the other. Later, I learned that two people were killed in downtown Indianapolis that evening. Nationally, over the course of that summer’s uprising, according to recent reporting from NPR, around two dozen people died in street clashes. But what I didn’t realize until hearing NPR’s reporting was just how many of those deaths were caused by far-right demonstrators. As we took to the streets protesting police killings, white supremacist vigilantes were apparently also out there, engaging in timeless racial terror. And as NPR reports, the white supremacist backlash to the George Floyd uprising began almost immediately after his death—and still continues to this day.
Yet those of us taking to the streets on the side of justice, in defense of Black lives, amounted to the largest urban uprising in U.S. history (even larger than 1968).
In the twelve months that followed, even in the small city in the Appalachian Mountains where I live, new racial justice groups formed. People marched and were assaulted by local police. Protesters sat down with city officials in back rooms, and spoke out defiantly at public meetings, demanding, and dreaming into being, a world without police. Defunding the police was not just a slogan. It was an actual conversation entertained on the local level—here, and in cities and towns all across the U.S. Not full defunding, but at least taking money away from the drones and rocket launchers (that small municipal police departments like ours were buying surplus from the U.S. government) and putting that money into unarmed first-responders and crisis intervention teams.
People were making connections then between policing and prisons, as well, and learning about the political theories and strategies of abolitionism. White people were becoming committed anti-racists—or at least joining the study groups and doing the work (until they weren’t).
Students and workers demanded DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs at their institutions—programs that would take into account the long histories of racial discrimination and exclusion at these institutions, and made restorative amends—and the students, and the workers, remarkably won so many of these fights.
People formed TJ (transformative justice) groups and mapped out their relationships to their neighbors. We learned of, and taught others to utilize, alternatives to calling 911, alternatives to calling the police. (So much for that, I learned, a few years later, when a neighbor called the police on me, a trans woman, because of an incident involving my dog. When the police came knocking on my door with an arrest warrant, I knew that our political education program had failed.)
And, in at least a few high-profile cases, police officers were even arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced for murdering U.S. citizens. Which, of course, was not a utopian anti-carceral solution, but it was a massive sign of change. America was decidedly turning the corner on its racist past.
Or was it?
Fast forward five years, and my partner M and I are on a camping trip in central Virginia. I notice that the GPS has routed us through the town of Appomattox, and being the good historian that I am, I ask if we might take a seven-minute detour to the old town of Appomattox Court House, which is now a National Parks Service (NPS) site. It’s an NPS site because it was here, in the so-called McLean House, that two generals sat down in 1865 and signed papers marking the surrender of the most important armed forces of the renegade Confederate States of America (CSA). Yes, that storied federation of states that fought against the U.S. government to maintain a system of chattel slavery—a system that, on the eve of the U.S. Civil War, held over four million people in bondage. The Confederates’ fever dream came to its crashing end—sort of—right on this spot.
As we walked out the back of the McLean house on our self-guided tour, we came face to face with two white-washed nineteenth-century outbuildings: a summer kitchen (where enslaved people cooked food for the white family in the McLean House), and the so-called Slave Quarters (where enslaved people owned by the white family lived). Government records indicate that the white family living in the McLean house in 1860 owned as many as eighteen people.
I walked the small wooden steps up to the landing of the domicile where enslaved workers had slept and had some semblance, if any, of a private life. I imagined the lives of the Black women here who worked endless, overlapping shifts: caring for the white adults and children in the big house; cooking food for the white family in the summer kitchen; transporting that food into and out of the main house; caring for their own young in the enslaved people’s quarters. I imagined a Black woman serving tea to General Grant and General Lee in the parlor of the big house as these men signed the papers of surrender. I wanted to imagine her poisoning them—both of them—saying fuck both of y’all’s settler colonial white supremacist regimes. (Of course, this is a white fantasy, a redirection, a projection.) And then I thought of the nearly five thousand enslaved Black people living in Appomattox at the start of the war (representing a majority of the county’s population). (A majority. That means that a white minority in Appomattox ruled over a Black majority.) And I thought of the roughly five thousand so-called Colored Troops—Black Union soldiers from the North—who were then encircling Appomattox when Robert E. Lee realized that his goose was cooked.
It all came together for me in that moment. Black people in North America had fought a two-hundred-plus-year war against slavery. From 1619 to 1865. An endless war fought for generations upon generations, until it all came crashing down. But what came next was not some utopian new world order. It was nothing that Black people deserved. It was everything that they had feared. It was another system of racial violence, oppression, and terror.
One month earlier, M and I had camped at Occoneechee State Park in Southside Virginia. On an afternoon hike in the woods, we happened upon the foundations of a former mansion, and the earthen mounds of a massive terraced garden. It’s all forested now, but in the time before 1860, as many as one hundred and sixty people lived on this land where the state park is now located, and they built this massive terraced garden sloping down from the mansion’s front porch, overlooking the nearby river. I touched the stones of the former foundation and imagined it all again in my head. The Black men and women who built this world, our still-world: the houses, the gardens. They made wealth with their labor. They made wealth for white people. Intergenerational wealth that is still circulating today in the U.S. South, and in the North. (Indeed, the college where I taught for the past ten years was built by enslaved people. Everything here was.)
I was living in New York City when the Black Lives Matter movement began. I was at Union Square the night protesters gathered with skittles in our hands to hear Sabrina Fulton, the mother of a murdered child, Trayvon Martin, speak. That was in 2013. I marched with protesters as we took over the West Side Highway after Eric Garner’s murder. I participated in the die-in in front of Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn. I was witness to the birth of a mass movement led by Black women who said: enough is enough.
And then, five years later, George Floyd’s murder propelled the Black Lives Matter movement into overdrive. There was a new, brief American consensus that something massive had to shift. Something had to be done.
And yet. We tried to jump timelines, to leave American history behind and start an American future—to shed this country’s racist past—yet instead we ended up squarely back in White America. We dreamed of a future and almost grasped it, and then were sling-shot back into America’s perennial past.
And now even National Parks sites, like in Appomattox where I stood in the doorway of a building that once housed enslaved people, are under U.S. government pressure to stop telling us even that. (I say that as if the two-hundred-plus-year history of chattel slavery in the United States can be accounted for, fully and factually, finally, by all Americans. It is a wish. But at this moment the that is still very much this. We are still in it.)
We now find ourselves akin to characters in an Octavia Butler novel—the distinctions between past, present, and future colliding, all jumbled up, in a whirlpool of space and time that we just can’t seem to get out of. The government will tell us that violent protesters disrespected the legacy of George Floyd, rather than that white supremacists opportunistically used that summer to advance their vision for the future. They will tell us that white Americans have earned their lives through a meritocracy, rather than that Black people labored for hundreds of years so that white people could become rich and powerful.
Our biggest task right now is to psychologically resist being fucked over by the government propaganda and revisionist history. My Gen Z friends like to say “touch grass.” I say, touch the worn stone of the house foundation in Occoneechee where a white family enslaved over one hundred and fifty Black people. Touch the rough-hewn log walls of a cabin at Appomattox where enslaved people, descended from generations of other enslaved people, kept fighting each and every year for their liberation. Touch the sidewalk in Minneapolis where George Floyd was strangled to death by a white cop.
Never forget. And never stop fighting.
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