Front Burner - George Floyd’s legacy of racial progress — and backlash

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

Four years ago, George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His death sparked a massive movement in the U.S. and around the world as protestors passionately rallied against police violence and systemic racism. Not only that, but companies and politicians promised to enact change.But since that reckoning, has progress really been made? Or is there now a cultural backlash that’s cutting down progress? Washington Post journalist Tolu Olurunnipa, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book on Floyd’s life, joins us to talk about Floyd’s legacy.Help us make Front Burner even better by filling out this audience survey.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Four years ago, a black man was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Video soon emerged, and it showed a white officer with his knee dug into the man's neck for nearly 10 minutes,

as three cops pinned his body to the ground. In the video, you see a man in his death throes, crying out for breath, and his mother. That man's name was George Floyd, and those cries for help would ultimately become an international rallying cry in the weeks and months that followed his murder. His killing sparked what many have called the largest protest movement in American history. And demonstrations against racialized police violence and anti-racism more broadly spread everywhere from Nigeria to South Africa, Brazil, and across cities here in Canada. There were efforts to reform the police. Companies across the world began to adopt these corporate anti-racist frameworks that have come to be known as DEI.

But four years on, what's really changed? And are we now seeing a kind of cultural backlash that's not unlike the one that followed the civil rights movement in the 1960s? Tolu Olorunipa is a journalist with the Washington Post and co-author of a Pulitzer Prize winning book on the life and memory of George Floyd. And he joins me now towinning book on the life and memory of George Floyd. And he joins me now to talk about civil rights and the legacy of George Floyd four years on. Tolu, thank you so much for coming on to FrontBurner. Thank you, Jamie. It's really great to be with you.

So it has been four years now since George Floyd was murdered by law enforcement in Minneapolis. The video of his killing, as I mentioned, rallied this global movement and became this real watershed moment, one that people refer to as like a racial reckoning. And when you think about that time in the summer of 2020, how would you describe that moment? If I had to use one word, I would say awakening. It was a period of time in the country and across the world where people were awakened to systemic racism as it has existed for hundreds of years. And as so many people have known it, but as it has not been known by so many others. And so people saw George Floyd, and in the harrowing video of his death,

people saw the symbol of state violence, state oppression against someone who is a minority, someone who did not have power, someone who was crying out for relief and mercy and receiving none of it. And in that image, people started to look at the broader forms of institutional racism that we have in America and elsewhere, including policing, but not restricted to policing. And so people were starting to become more aware and they showed an eagerness to learn more. We started to see books fly off the shelf, books that had to do with anti-racism and racial justice. We started to see people show up for protests who had never shown up for protests before. And so we were at the

important cultural moment in our country and across the globe where people were really interested in learning about racial justice and pushing and moving for racial justice and even marching and protesting for racial justice. And that's where we were four years ago. No more silence. From Washington's newly named Black Lives Matter Plaza to San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. In London, thousands of people gathered in Trafalgar Square with signs while chanting George Floyd and a more subdued demonstration in Iran where students held up signs in solidarity. They're gathering in cities across Canada by the thousands, a country with its own enduring struggles with racism and injustice.

Before we get to what happened after that, I just would love to hear your answer to why it was reluctant to even get involved in the news coverage. I was a reporter at the Washington Post at the time, as I am now, and I was reluctant. We were in the middle of a pandemic. I had covered past racial justice protests, and I wasn't sure that anything would change after doing this kind of sometimes harrowing reporting that can be emotionally taxing. But as things started to play out and as we started to see more and more people engaged in this movement, we started to see the diversity of the movement expand. And we started to see that hunger for awareness and knowledge of racial oppression and understanding of how institutional racism works. I saw that there was an opening to

share what I had experienced, to share what I knew about racial injustice with a broader audience. And so we started to learn more about George Floyd. And as I learned more about George Floyd, the person, not just the symbol, I was really taken by his personality, by his ability to strive in the face of all of the racial injustice that he faced over the course of his life. And we started off with a series in the Washington Post that was done by myself and a handful of other reporters that examined George Floyd's life, not just his death, but his life and his experience with institutional racism and housing and the court system and the healthcare system with policing, and even going back several generations into his family and how

institutional racism impacted his family's economic struggles. And so as I learned more about George Floyd, the person, and as I learned more about his family, I realized that this was an opportunity to write a story not only about a man's death and the tragedy surrounding his death, but about his life and about the fullness of that life, the ups and downs that he went through, and all of the ways that he strived and struggled in the face of institutional racism with the goal of helping people understand that same emotion, the same energy that people felt after George Floyd was killed on camera. There was a number of other reasons to be outraged by the way he was treated during the course of his life. I just want to say I've been an admirer of your work and people on my team have been admirers of your work as well. And this idea that you were talking about George Floyd, the person and not just the symbol, you hear people talk a lot about how when an incident like this happens, the victim can become kind of canonized. They go from being this person to having their photos emblazoned on

t-shirts and flags and their names incorporated into protest songs. But of course, you lose something, right, when that happens. Yeah, that was really important for us. We did not want George Floyd to just be this icon of racial justice, stripped of all of his humanity, stripped of all of the things that made him who he was. And so we started to talk to people who knew him, not just the people who were sort of outraged by his death and came to know him through the video of his death, but people who knew him in his intimate moments when he was a child, when he was growing up, when he was coming of age. And we got a fuller sense of who he was. And a lot of that was evident in the video of his

death. As we looked at that video and we saw him saying, I love you, even on the video and calling out for his mother and saying he couldn't breathe and asking for a little mercy from the officer. That video showcased a lot of the personality traits that George Floyd had, including his propensity for telling everyone I love you and his love for his mother and his deep relationship with his mother and how scarred he was by her passing. But we started to talk to people who knew him and knew all of the struggles that he had over the course of his life and his outlook on life, which remained positive even in his darkest moments.

And it helped us to try to restore some of that humanity into what had become sort of this larger than life figure that people had what had become sort of this larger-than-life figure that people had created in the aftermath of his death, because his death had sparked such a huge outrage and a huge response. So now let's talk about what has happened since that moment. And, you know, I'm really interested in interrogating what happened to all that energy and enthusiasm for change that existed in the summer of 2020. And what I've read about time and time again is this notion of a backlash that through American history, moments of progress are always followed by these periods of retrenchment or these lurches backwards. And how would you describe the moment that followed George Floyd's killing? It was swift.

It was swifter than a lot of people expected. And it was very powerful, this retrenchment that happened after we saw this huge outrage and outpour of commitments and efforts to try to build a more racially just society. We had corporations involved. We had cultural institutions involved. We had schools and individuals involved in saying, you know, we want to build a more just society. And people were taking to the streets and making commitments. And that set off a lot of alarm bells among the powers that be, among people who were afraid that those changes were coming too fast. Shortly after the election of Joe Biden in November of 2020 and into 2021, we saw sort of a retrenchment. We saw a number of states who had shown an openness to changing their laws in a way to make them more racially equal. We saw them start to back away from those things and in some cases not only back away and go back to the status quo but push even further towards banning books. Over 3,000 books were banned in the past school year, a 33 percent increase from the previous year. Nearly 4,000 books have been challenged

in libraries so far this year and that's predominantly in Republican-led states. According to the study, most of the top targeted books were by or about Black or LGBTQ people. Toward banning certain lessons. Last year, the Tennessee General Assembly banned critical race theory from schools. A teacher in one county was fired for referring to white privilege in his lessons. Toward, you know, restricting businesses

and other institutions from being able to implement diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has signed SB 17 into law. Now, this is a bill that bans DEI offices from state funded colleges and universities. Yes. With that vote in Tallahassee, state colleges across the state can no longer spend federal or state dollars on DEI or diversity. Until that backlash really started to gather steam, it became sort of the core of one of the political parties in the United States. And it became central to our political discussions, such to the point that the original movement started to fade and started to shrink and the energy behind that movement started to be sort of overcome by the energy surrounding the retrenchment

and the backlash. And so we started to see anti-woke forces winning elections and passing laws and banning books and doing a number of things that maybe they had wanted to do before, but they hadn't had the momentum behind them. And so that backlash was able to build up a lot of steam. And it is, as you said, very similar to what we've seen throughout history, where periods of racial progress are often followed by major setbacks and major retrenchment. And this backlash has been going on for several years now, much longer than the original movement. And it remains to be seen whether the forces behind the original movement are able to sort of gather themselves, pick themselves up and take another stab at pushing for racial justice in the face of all of this retrenchment. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some

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one of the things we made sure to point out in our book was that the period of time that it took from the moment of the Montgomery bus boycotts, where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat until the passage of the Civil Rights Act, it was nine years. And so in the interim, there was backlash. There were forces that even engaged in violence against civil rights marchers. March 7th, 1965, hundreds of civil rights demonstrators gathered on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. State police violently cracked down with billy clubs and tear gas. Those images were seen around the world, sparking a final push for approval of voters' rights legislation that would come six months later. And so it's hard from this vantage point, even though four years

feels like a really long time, to write the story of what the final verdict is on the George Floyd protest. I think we're in the middle of it. There will be push and pull. There will be back and forth. At this point, it definitely feels as if the forces of it. There will be push and pull. There will be back and forth. At this point, it definitely feels as if the forces of retrenchment are winning and that they've sort of quashed much of the movement. But that would be too simple of a story to write. I mean, first, we have to point out that there have been a number of changes, both at the local level with local police being reined in in some ways and laws being passed to restrict the uses of chokehold and no-knock warrant and other police tactics that had been

seen as overly aggressive and discriminatory. And so that's happened at the local level. There've been cultural changes in terms of the kinds of words and songs and statements that can be changes in terms of the kinds of words and songs and statements that can be accepted and things that are no longer accepted. And so those incremental victories for the racial justice movement have been established and they're not being pushed back against in any kind of major way. Right now we're in the period of retrenchment and it just remains to be seen whether or not there will be continued progress in the immediate future or whether or not we'd have to wait for a long time for people to get fed up again and take to the streets again as they did in the summer of 2020. You know, one thing that I was reading earlier today was that, just to come back to policing for a moment, last year was the deadliest year for police shootings in American history.

Are you surprised by that? No. It's unfortunate, but I'm not surprised in part because a lot of these institutions that we examined in the course of our writing about George Floyd's life, they are very well entrenched in our society. They've been entrenched, they've been institutionalized for decades, centuries in some cases. And so it's very hard to make major changes. Even after the biggest protest movement in the country's history, it's very hard to see change happen in part because these institutions have been in place and they are entrenched in a lot of ways and it's hard

for them to change. And so policing is one of those institutions that is very difficult to change. There are practices that have been in place for a long time. And so it's difficult. It's one of the reasons why the forces of retrenchment sometimes have that sense of inertia on their side. And policing and police killings are sort of one of those institutions where it is just sort of a given almost in this country that there will be hundreds, if not more than a thousand people killed by police every year. And we haven't seen any major changes, even as we've seen protests about police killings, even as we've seen people raising awareness, even as we've seen the introduction of body cameras and all of these other policy changes to try to address the prevalence of police killings. changes to try to address the prevalence of police killings, it's not clear that those will be enough on their own to make a difference in the number of people being killed by police. There's more

awareness about it. There's more outrage about it. There are more protests about it, but it hasn't yet resulted in fewer people being killed by police officers. This idea that awareness, killed by police officers. This idea that awareness, there isn't a straight line to material change. I think a noteworthy thing that came out of the protests in 2020 was that they made their way to the highest levels of the American government, sometimes in kind of absurdist ways, right? There was one event where Democratic members of Congress like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer wore like African kente cloth and took a knee at the Capitol. They said that this was dedicated to the memory of George Floyd. You see how long it was to have that knee on his neck. when he's left.

Then-candidate Joe Biden also took a knee. What do you make of what a lot of people call the performative nature of a lot of the protests and advocacy that we were seeing at the time? Yeah, it's really fascinating. In hindsight, a lot of that performative activity looks much worse than it did at the time, in part because it was not followed with substantive change that the marchers were calling for. The marchers were not saying, you know, don't take a knee with us, don't come out to our protests, don't show up for us at the time. They were happy to have support, especially from the highest levels of power, because they thought that support would lead or provide an opening

to actually changing the laws. They wanted those people who were taking a knee to then go back to their halls of power and pass laws that could actually change things. Now, the fact that that didn't happen, the fact that the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the major civil rights legislation that was supposed to pass through Congress never passed, it makes it look much worse that we got performative change and not substantive change. And even George Floyd's family members who we spoke to for this book said that they don't feel like they got justice. We've been fighting for the same law for 2020 since my brother was murdered. That day after the funeral, I had to come here and

speak in Congress. Nothing has been passed. If we can't pass a law to stop what's going on in America, how can we get the chance to be able to live without being in fear for the rest of our lives? They feel like they got what one family member said was Instagram justice, sort of this performative justice that you can post online, but not anything substantively changing at the federal level. And so four years on, a lot of the actions and activity and performative things that were done ring hollow because they were not followed with major changes that the people who were taking those actions had the power to do but ended up not following through on. And that justice, that big justice bill that you're talking about, I think it's named after George Floyd, right? Like,

why has that gone nowhere? What's happened to it? Yeah, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was a bill that was written in response to George Floyd's death that would have, you know, reined in some of the policing tactics that were used against him. Get rid of something called qualified immunity, which basically shields police in America from being held accountable for their individual actions. It ended up falling apart, like a lot of the political issues fall apart in this country because of partisanship and special interests who saw that if this law passed, it would make things harder for a certain group, potentially put more police in the crosshairs of civil liability and punishment if they were to take action that resulted in the death of a citizen. And so once police started to come out against portions of this bill, it became a political football for politicians who rely on their support of their police unions and rely on the support of

certain interest groups. And they started to back away from the bill and it fell apart before it could reach the president's desk. And so, you know, President Biden ended up passing some of these measures through executive action on a limited basis, but the impact was much less than what you would receive if you had actually passed a law that would be able to be applied across the country for all policing institutions in communities large and small. One last feature of the summer of 2020 that I do want to ask you about was like the popularization of an anti-racist framework, right? Corporations adopting DEI into their offices to account for racism and equity in the workplace. But many people have since critiqued these efforts as like corporate window dressing. So, you know, not dissimilar to what we were just talking about. They have said

that they have really failed to deliver material change as well. And I just, I wonder what you would make of that criticism. Yes, very similar to some of the performative activity we saw from lawmakers. A lot of the corporations made major pronouncements, put out statements and press releases after George Floyd's death, committing to do more for racial justice. And those were welcomed by activists, but there were also things that activists looked at and said, we want to make sure that you follow through on those things. And so now four years later, we've seen that a number of those corporations have stepped back from some of those commitments. Some of them have been less willing to speak out now on racial justice than they were at the time.

Some of them have been targeted by the backlash that we've seen from lawmakers, and they've become a little bit more timid about wading into issues of race and other controversial issues. And so in hindsight, a lot of those pronouncements also ring hollow because they did not lead to major systemic changes. A lot of those companies and corporate entities are right back to doing the things they were doing before. And a lot of them have become much more timid about speaking out because they don't want to get into the crosshairs of what has become a major political controversy over whether or not we should be talking about race, whether

or not we should be teaching about the country's racial history and its flaws on that front. And because a lot of these companies just want to sell products or just want to make money and don't want to get involved in some of these other issues, we've seen them back away from the controversy. And we've seen a lot of the solidarity that we saw after George Floyd's death really fade away. And instead, we have a diffused situation where some companies are willing to speak out, others have taken other stances, and a lot of the major commitments that were made were never followed through on. And instead of that, we've seen them shrinking away from those and saying that they don't want to be part of a controversy. They just want to do their job, just want to do their business. And so it's a major shift from where we were four years ago. You are entering, your country is entering into a seminal federal election. Again, the two candidates put forward are both older white men who have checkered histories on racism and policing. For example, Trump was sued for housing discrimination in the 70s.

And Joe Biden is a co-author of the 94 Crime Bill, which is one of the most polarizing pieces of modern legislation. And what do you think that says about the moment that we are in today? 94 Crime Bill, which is one of the most polarizing pieces of modern legislation. And what do you think that says about the moment that we are in today? Well, it's one of the reasons why there is a lot of disillusionment in the electorate about this upcoming election, especially among Black voters who helped Biden get into office in 2020, in part as a result of the George Floyd protest. in 2020, in part as a result of the George Floyd protest, they said that Biden, they saw in Biden someone who had embraced the protest, who had put out a racial justice platform that was very much in line with what they were calling for. And now four years later, there have been some things that have been delivered, but the broad sense is that Biden's presidency has not fulfilled the promises that the protesters

and the voters called for. And so now that they're staring out a rematch of two candidates who, in the minds of a lot of voters, do not represent their interests, are not willing to use their political capital to advance the cause of racial justice as they might. It's part of the reason why you've seen the polls start to tighten between Biden and Trump among Black voters. And so it is a pivotal election. Black voters have been one of the most loyal constituencies of the Democratic Party. But there is a sense of disillusionment about whether or not that vote is being taken for granted, whether or not there's more that can be done to show Black voters that their vote matters and that politicians,

even 80-year-old white male politicians, are going to listen to them and show up for them and use their political capital for them and not abandon them. That is a major question. And I think whichever candidate can showcase to voters that that is what they will put forward will have a better shot at sort of ginning turnout and getting people excited about the election. But right now, what they're facing is a sense of disillusionment about whether or not this election actually matters and whether or not whoever wins will be able to make a difference in the lives of the millions of people who vote for them.

Okay. Tolu, thank you for this. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you tomorrow.

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