Two years ago, the violent murder of George Floyd captured America’s attention. Did systemic anti-Black racism?
In 2020, I wrote this article after George Floyd was murdered by police. I explained that George Floyd’s death served as one example among many Black people who have been killed, mistreated, and disadvantaged by systemic racism. I warned that if we did not properly contextualize George Floyd’s death as a result of systemic racism, viral outrage may overshadow the underlying systems that created the conditions where he could be murdered by a police officer in front of a crowd of bystanders over the course of eight minutes and 46 seconds.
In 2022, almost two years later, I am reflecting on this article and the fact that the answer to the question posed within the title is a clear and convincing “no.” In fact, this “no” is heard loudly as I write this, with Amir Locke being murdered by police while sleeping in his living room and Patrick Lyoya being shot in the back of the head by a police officer in the first few months of 2022. Since 2020, we’ve seen Black people continue to be murdered by police, outright dismissal of efforts to defund policing and transfer funding to social services, and a white backlash - as described by Hakeem Jefferson and Victor Ray - that has led politicians to endorse political insurrectionists and attempt to effectively ban discussions about race in schools. For a lot of Black folks, this isn’t a surprise.
Thinking back on my state of mind at the time, I’m pretty sure that one of the many motivations for writing the article I penned in 2020 was to be able to refer to it in the future and say “See, I told y’all.” This was informed by the fact that at the time, my former employer - recently at the center of a Mother Jones article on anti-Blackness - was putting out statements committing to being anti-racist while simultaneously working to silence myself and another black colleague. In the summer of 2020, many folks protected their mental health and well-being by lowering expectations, knowing how painful it is to be let down after folks become aware of and commit to interrupting anti-Black racism.
Black people have been disproportionately murdered in this country since it was founded. Whether you’re talking about the enslaved people who were executed after Nat Turner’s Rebellion, the Memphis Riots, the Tulsa Massacre, the brutalization and lynching of Emmit Till, or the bombing of residential buildings by Philadelphia police in 1985, it’s an ongoing feature of the society that we live in. Each of these events had its unique circumstances and reactions, and some of them did garner outrage and prompt people to spread awareness.
Folks have been spreading ‘awareness’ about racism for a long time. It’s no secret that Black people are disadvantaged in this country - even the so-called ‘founding fathers’ were aware that Black people were mistreated and that it was morally wrong. George Washington’s gesture of freeing the people he enslaved in his will, after he could no longer benefit from their enslavement (although these plans were delayed by Martha Curtis Washington, to her benefit and to the detriment of the enslaved) serves as an example of how inaction and an unwillingness to relinquish privilege are far more powerful than awareness.
Often considered “raising awareness,” the ongoing portrayal and normalization of anti-Black violence have been found to be harmful to Black people and a recent study showed that these depictions can significantly impact how we show up at work. Some argue that it brings attention to the issue, which makes one wonder why other issues are not treated that way. For example, in 2019, a crane fell over in Seattle and tragically killed 4 people while injuring 4 others. It has been found that shortcuts in construction likely led to the collapse. Negligence in construction and under-regulation are serious issues that lead to lots of deaths every year. However, I doubt you will find someone making this case by showing graphic depictions of the 2019 Crane Collapse, and if you did, I’m sure there would be outrage over broadcasting such a personal, private, and gruesome moment for those victims and their families.
While this sporadic focus on how Black people are impacted by racism exists, it is quite rare for our society to ask why Black folks are impacted by racism. The causes are often dismissed, which is why in 2020, we simultaneously witnessed police brutalizing Black Lives Matter protesters with impunity while mainstream media made light of and misrepresented efforts to shift resources from policing to other community-based supports. Activists and Civil Rights leaders have been describing systemic racism for centuries - consider why texts and speeches by James Baldwin, W.E.B. Dubois, Kwame Ture, and other historical civil rights icons continue to be relevant to the lives of Black folks. While the ways that Black people experience racism have changed over time, the dynamics that underpin systemic anti-Black racism have largely gone unchanged.
It’s important to be clear here - I’m not saying Black folks today experience racism in the same way we did decades ago. There are many acts of racism that are no longer acceptable, such as preventing Black homeownership by including racial covenants in home deeds. Lynching Black people is no longer socially acceptable. But what I am saying in the context of this example is that disparities in Black homeownership still exist and they are driven by many of the underlying, systemic factors that have kept Black families from owning homes for centuries, including disparities in inheritance which are a direct result of the advantages that white people gained by enslaving Black people.
Photo: Jakayla Toney
With all this said, we can also acknowledge that the Summer of 2020 was an incredible moment - millions of people took to the streets to stand for Black Lives. That increased awareness has led to progress, including increased patronage of Black-owned businesses, new laws restricting police use of force, and other reforms. The issue is that this progress is not proportional to the presence of systemic anti-Black racism. We must go deeper if our goal is to eliminate racism. The factors that underlie racism, underlie our society as a whole. We cannot expect to make significant progress unless we go beyond reforms and fundamentally reimagine our social contracts.
The good news is that there are tried-and-true strategies for making this sort of fundamental change. While some people demonize abolitionism and attempt to make it seem like a radical, anarchist-adjacent approach, the truth is that slavery would have continued without it. Similar to how slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow were normalized in the past, our society continues to rest on a foundation of incredibly harmful, exploitative, and dehumanizing systems - including policing, incarceration, and a violent economic system that leaves some folks struggling to live off of less than $10 an hour while others pull in millions of untaxed dollars per hour. Abolition is a necessary approach if we intend to disrupt systems that are baked into the foundations of society. Brea Baker aptly describes abolitionism in the article, Why I Became an Abolitionist:
Abolition is just as it sounds: a commitment to eradicating and replacing harmful systems rather than incrementally reforming them. Though mostly associated with the 19th-century movement to end chattel slavery, abolition is an evergreen framework for effecting change that prioritizes radical imagination. Instead of inheriting the society that was passed on to us, we have the opportunity to build a society that works for our evolving communities and needs. Thus, abolition is an ongoing process of assessing and replacing any system that doesn’t serve all of us. It goes beyond the tearing down to also include the rebuilding that must take place.
Abolitionism represents a promising approach to eliminating racism and creating a better society. In 2020, people bought several million anti-racism books; and many of those people have since put those books down and moved on to their regular reading material. This is a flawed approach that may even be harmful to our efforts of eliminating systemic racism - it provides people with the belief that they’ve done their part while they continue to perpetuate and internalize white supremacist values. A more effective approach would be to consume various forms of media - music, movies, podcasts, books, etc - and to view continued learning as a lifelong approach.
Reading "So you want to talk about race” and other texts on racism is a good start. But to be effective in making real change, our efforts to undo racism need to be as consistent and long-lasting as the process by which we learned it in the first place. Most of us sat through at least 12 years of structured education where we were indoctrinated to believe that this country was the best country in the world and that most of our racism-related problems disappeared in the 60s. It’s going to take more than a summer of reading to undo this.
Danté Stewart, a Black writer, speaker, and faith leader, explains this in a recent essay published on CNN Opinion:
“My mind cannot escape the simple fact that so many people ran to our books and our art or to the streets in 2020, believing that simply reading or marching would somehow magically change the White supremacist power structure so pervasive in our country without fundamental change in how we live together.”
Those who believe it is unacceptable that we have not made much progress in the past two years - and even regressed in some areas - should be challenged to continue the work and learn about abolitionism as a way to continue the work that was done in 2020.
Below is a list of resources to get started. While some are books, many are not. It’s important to access information in a variety of mediums.
What About the Rapists? Interrupting Criminalization
Books
Andrea Ritchie and Miriame Kaba, “No More Police: A case for abolition”
Derecka Purnell, “Becoming Abolitionists”
Podcasts
Video
In On The Road With Abolition, Dean Spade, Woods Ervin & Kamau Walton from Critical Resistance, K Agbebiyi from Survived and Punished NY, and Mariame Kaba from Project NIA and Survived & Punished discuss proposals for abolitionist organizing.
Articles
Mariame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police”
Derecka Purnell, “How I Became a Police Abolitionist”
Academic
Duke University Carceral Studies Department
If You’re New to Abolition: Group Study Guide
At Rooting Movements, we have worked with organizations to help them ensure that their path forward is consistent with the commitments they made in 2020. If you happen to work for or with an organization that made a commitment to addressing racism in 2020, consider reaching out to us to have a conversation on how those efforts are going and how we may be able to support the organization in continuing the work.
