The New York Times ran a Memorial Day “news analysis” marking five years since George Floyd was killed while being detained by police in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020: “5 Years After George Floyd’s Murder, the Backlash Takes Hold -- The Black Lives Matter movement, kicked into high gear after Mr. Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, has given way to the politics of ‘white grievance’ championed by President Trump.”
Symbolism over substance reigned from the first paragraph of the story by Clyde McGrady, a D.C. based-reporter who covers “how race and identity is shaping American culture.”
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.
What does one have to do with the other?
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.
Are valid suspicions of racial discrimination no longer important to the liberal Times, when the usual racial roles are reversed?
Sunday is 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.
McGrady offensively compared the justified conservative backlash to the radical, anti-Semitic, sometimes violent excesses of BLM, to the Abolitionist movement being challenged by the KKK.
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 M. 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 J. Trump, a president who has long championed white grievance, is setting the tone of racial discourse.
With far less property damage and murder, he failed to add, though McGrady allowed a conservative argument:
To conservatives, the shift is a necessary course correction away from violence in the streets and crippling mandates that overburden police departments.
He talked to the big boss of racial grievance, the now-discredited scholar Ibram X. Kendi, whose books once dominated the social media feed of your earnest liberal friends, but who has since been revealed as a thin-skinned “intellectual lightweight.”
Ibram X. Kendi, a professorial proponent of “antiracism,” 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 “antiracist revolution” has slowed, he conceded, but it was never going to ascend unimpeded.
He’s now Howard University’s headache.
McGrady mourned the “dismantlement” of government DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs and Trump’s “targeting of perceived racial preferences in academia.”
For some who achieved a new level of fame after Mr. Floyd’s death, to only later receive recriminations and scorn, the last five years have been disorienting.
Fame driven by years of timid, baby-soft coverage from legacy media like the Times.
McGrady spared a sentence of criticism toward Kendi, though immediately allowing the man himself to neutralize it.
But Dr. Kendi has also faced criticism from his ostensible allies that his framework for antiracist activism is unworkable and counterproductive. Dr. Kendi has said that most of his critics “either haven’t read my work or willfully misrepresent it.”
Even the paper's negative assessments, such as allegations of BLM mismanagement dug up by ProPublica, were framed not as justified criticism of the movement but only as depictions that “harmed the reputation of the movement’s leaders.”
