In death, Floyd fueled push for global change
Movement strong, but activists say many steps remain
Richard Wallace had seen it all before, and he wasn’t hopeful.
It was, he thought, the same old story: Police kill a Black person, protests erupt, politicians pledge reforms and corporations offer platitudes about supporting needed change. But Wallace, the 38-year-old founder and executive director of Equity and Transformation, a social and economic justice advocacy group in Chicago, came to realize that this time was different.
This time the victim was George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black father of five captured in a sickening citizen video taking his final breaths under a white officer’s knee. And this time, the victim would become a global symbol for change much broader than criminal justice reform.
“George Floyd has taken systemic racism from personal problem to America’s issue,” Wallace said. “It’s clear we’re seeing a growing and maturing of a movement.”
As Minneapolis braces for Monday’s opening statements in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the ex-officer who is charged with murder and manslaughter in Floyd’s death, so does the world. Floyd was the spark that set the U.S. ablaze. In the days and months after his death on Memorial Day, millions of Americans, along with thousands in cities abroad, took to the streets in protests that were often peaceful but sometimes violent and destructive.
Even as many new supporters rallied to the Black Lives Matter cause, then-President Donald Trump’s move to transform the unrest into a winning political issue, and his embrace of white supremacism, left the U.S. seemingly more divided on issues than ever.
Still, Floyd’s global impact is undeniable. Federal, state and local governments have taken concrete steps — like supporting reparations and reinvesting in community resources — to address decades of harm visited on Black Americans and other minorities. Corporations, nonprofits, media and the entertainment industry have launched promising diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
People will remember 2020 not just as a year of upheaval over Floyd, but as a year in which people demanded and took bold action toward systemic change, said Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and activist in Minneapolis. But, she added, much more of it is needed.
For Levy Armstrong, the stakes of the trial are high. The former Minneapolis NAACP branch president has watched her community rise up in response to unchecked police violence, only to have their spirits crushed by an acquittal and lack of grand jury indictments in the cases of Philando Castile, a Black man killed by police in a nearby suburb in 2016, and Jamar Clark, a Black man killed by city police in 2015.
“We have for too long lived inside of a culture of ignorance, not just in the U.S. but worldwide,” she said. “I don’t think that this country in particular, but the world itself, has ever had to reconcile the mistreatment, the abuse and the dehumanization of
Black folks. But for some people, they’re now beginning to see we have a problem, and we need to begin to take steps to address these problems.”
Her assessment of the international impact of the case is not hyperbole. Some of the protests abroad — in Asia, the U.K., France and other European nations — rivaled American demonstrations last summer.
In the U.S., the House of Representatives passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that implements bans on racial
profiling, chokeholds, no-knock warrants and other law enforcement tactics that have precipitated the deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police.
However, the legislation’s chances in a Senate very narrowly controlled by Democrats are slim, and the Movement for Black Lives, a national coalition of more than 150 grassroots organizations associated with the BLM movement, has opposed the legislation as inadequate.
Many are looking to carry the push for change well beyond the outcome of the trial, in Floyd’s
name and in the names of so many others.
“What the Black Lives Matter movement has done is use these various incidents to allow us to reevaluate the underlying cultural narrative,” said David Hooker, associate professor of the practice of conflict transformation and peacebuilding at Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs.
Hooker, Wallace and others say that narrative — with its assignment of people into “good” and “bad” categories — promotes violence against racial minorities
and aims to keep them from flourishing.
Floyd, they say, is a perfect example: Here was a man once imprisoned but striving to make a better life. His life mattered more than the few, less-savory details about his past that had been reported and that could come up in his accused killer’s trial, Wallace said.
“That’s how racism works,” he said. “It’s about the bifurcation of Black people into silos of those deserving and undeserving of love, care, respect, or whatever.”