The 2020 uprisings could have sparked a multiracial working-class movement against systemic oppression, but liberal elites defanged its radical potential. By reducing Black liberation to performative activism and corporate DEI schemes, they preserved the very structures that murdered George Floyd.
“Floyd is no more than one symptom of the structural domination we experience. The focus must be on the structures of domination not some individual case, even though we use individual cases to highlight the structural issues” - Ajamu Barka
Last Sunday marked five years since the world witnessed the public lynching of George Floyd at the hands, or as it was, the knee of the State. The aftermath of the livestreamed white “supremacy” webinar on the denial of the human rights of Black/Afro-resident people in the United States was the proliferation of incendiary uprisings nationwide that saw the incineration of buildings that housed businesses and even police precincts. - The nation was jolted awake after months of being moribund due to State-sanctioned covid quarantines and isolation. The streets were transformed from apparition avenues to lively lanes of social activity as people of all races, ethnicities, and genders coalesced to demand “justice” for Floyd and Brianna Taylor, both executed by the State, and Ahmad Aubrey who was shot to death by a civilian lynch mob.
While the bourgeois press would have the masses believe that the summer of 2020 and the aforementioned executions advanced a national “racial reckoning,” in focusing on the loss of three lives, both “liberal” and “conservative” news outlets fail to comprehend the loss of a great opportunity to forge and maintain a solidarity of the masses, which is necessary to usurp and dismantle myriad elements of State repression that continues to deny humanity and human rights of Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor people from the United States, to Palestine, Africa, and the world over.
Well before George Floyd’s murder, the economic status quo was in duress as the masses, driven by months of isolation and economic anxiety, expressed waning trust in the systems that had been exploiting their lives and labor for decades. For instance, in 2017 Ben Schiller, reporting for Fast Company, revealed that a survey of 10,000 people indicated two-thirds of respondents distrusted the Fortune 500, with 85 percent of Democrats and 72 percent of Republicans holding that companies shared too little of their success with employees. The fact that a majority of people in both political parties seemingly concurred that neoliberalism continues to adversely impact their lives should have been an opportunity to foster multi racial and multiethnic working class solidarity by connecting the murders of Floyd, Taylor, Aubrey and others to a larger material condition of the willingness of the State to maintain a corporate kleptocracy that’s been pillaging poor and working class people.
Instead, 2020 became fertile ground for the corporate and philanthropic to successfully facilitate an elite capture of the 2020 moment as the masses, with the full and willing cooperation of reactionary liberals and their institutions. The loss of Black life became a lifeline for neoliberalism. As Jennfier C. Pan points out in her book, Selling Social Justice: Why the Rich Love Antiracism, ostentatious as it was, the enthusiasm for racial justice charities and new diversity initiatives from the business sector in 2020 wasn’t only moral grandstanding or a bid for positive press,” she continues, “The corporate support for racial justice that year was rather part of a larger capitalist attempt to shock new life into the economic order precisely at a moment when public trust in that order—and the stability of the system itself—was rapidly disintegrating.”
It was, of course, warranted to make the connections between Floyd, Taylor, and Aubrey’s murders and the larger legacy of police violence and the interdiction of human rights directed at Black and all oppressed people. Yet by failing to elucidate and communicate the root causes of these executions to the masses, the liberal establishment - including the Democrat Party, the nonprofit industrial complex, academic institutions/think tanks, and corporate media - rendered an opportunity for long-term momentum into an ephemeral moment. Liberals were peddling fantastical narratives of a reckoning, while white “supremacy” ideology engineered a renaissance arguably not seen since the era of redemption shortly after the insidious compromise of 1877 that open the cage to spring Jim/Jane Crow free and shut the door on the nation’s era of Reconstruction.
But this was not a failure of the liberals as much as it was a conscious choice to maintain the status quo in service to their corporate masters who enjoyed actual windfall profits and the increased consolidation of political power while far too many celebrated symbolism and performative platitudes, be they a few streets/plazas bearing the sobriquet, “Black Lives Matter,” kente cloth photo ops, and commitments by corporations and nonprofits to so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion. Some would have us believe that the “gains” of the Summer of 2020 represent a pastiche of the 1960s Civil Rights epoch, but in reality it’s an insult to make comparisons to an era that facilitated the rise of a Black Radical Tradition that eschewed race reductionism as well as class reductionism and produced the likes of the Black Panther Party, Combahee River Collective, Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and intellectuals/radical thinkers from Walter Rodney to Assata Shakur.
The results of this choice are being felt domestically and internationally as we’re now witnessing an increasing loss of liberties including, but not limited, free speech and expression, the loss of basic human needs to sustain life including, access to clean air, water, and quality education and healthcare, and the loss of lives as the world continues to sit idly while observing a live streamed genocide at the hands of the zionist ethnostate of Israel.. Moreover, through the seduction of false commitments to racial justice, corporations and their political acolytes have successfully shifted the focus of the public from the fact that while poor and working class people the world over lost an estimated $3.7 trillion in earnings and savings during the height of the pandemic, the U.S. bourgeois, especially the billionaire and corporate class, alone reaped in $5.7 trillion in new profits.
The consequences of this choice are being felt today more than ever as the Trump Administration continue the work of the Democrats to increase austerity in a concerted effort to continue the atrophy of public funding for social safety nets from Medicare/Medicaid, to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), while also using public funding to maintain U.S. domestic and foreign imperialism and empire as indicated by the increasing and expanding presence of the U.S. military in Africa, the Caribbean/Latin “America,” Europe, and the Middle East. Yet the signs of the squandered opportunities that emerged in the summer of 2020 were displayed less than three months after Floyd’s death.
For instance, by September 2020, support for the Black Lives Matter movement plummeted across all racial groups/ethnicities, save for Black folk, and political affiliations. This loss of mass support formed the impetus for Joe Biden during a campaign speech to proclaim the solution to police violence was more funding of law enforcement at a time when many were making connections between police budgets, corporate power, and the oppression of poor and working people. I
Languorous comparisons of the summer of 2020 to 1964’s “freedom summer” that don’t account for the fact that while the latter influenced ratification of key legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (also known as the “War of Poverty”), the Food Stamp Act of 1964, the Social Security Amendments of 1964 that established Medicaid/Medicare, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we’re still waiting for any semblance of reforms that were promised when Joe Biden and the Democrats took power in 2021.
Not only was the tawdry and meretricious George Floyd in Policing Act never signed into law and the number of people killed by police has increased since the summer of 2020. If anything, policing has become more dangerous and oppressive as demonstrated by the proliferation of “cop cities” and other instruments such as Artificial Intelligence and more weapons of war to increase the power of the police state and allow for an even greater corporate capture of the people’s governments and institutions. We see this being played out in real time as Trump and some elements of the GOP are currently seeking to further weaken and, in some cases, flat out erase many of the social safety nets that were established in 1964 and 1965 - and it should be noted that these programs same programs were not immune from being diminished under previous Democrat party control of the federal government.
To counteract an authoritarianism that may be more pronounced by Trump, yet put in place by the duopoly long before he came to power in 2016 and more recently in 2024, requires we must resist any temptations that would allow for ourselves or are communities to believe the summer of 2020 led to justice. We must confront and dismantle the mendacious narrative that the arrest and conviction of Derrick Chauvin represents “justice” for George Floyd when Chauvin was nothing more than a human sacrifice to obfuscate the masses and have them believe in a fictitious racial reckoning or the achievement of gains for poor and working class people under the Biden presidency.
We must do all that is necessary to assist people in understanding that 2020 represents a missed opportunity for increased and maintained solidarity that contributed to the current season of social justice solitude. Working class people more divided than ever, and social justice itself is under massive attack, including the right to stand up and speak out against genocide, by Democrats and Republicans alike who are aligned in a crusade against “wokeism,” which is nothing more than code for throwing the most vulnerable under the bus in an effort to maintain the material conditions that led to Floyd, Taylor, and Aubrey’s lynchings in the first place.
Until we collectively embark on a people-centered human rights that provides for a broad, radical framework that unites broad sectors of the population, we will be unable to understand the strategic and intentional failures of 2020, which serves no one better than corporate forces and their class traitors in the form of law enforcement officials and lawmakers of the capitalist duopoly who continue to act as sentries for a global bourgeois hegemony.
No Compromise
No Retreat
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is an international climate/environmental liberation and racial justice advocate and practitioner, a writer, and policy expert who resides in the United States with his family and mischievous cat, “Evil” Ernie. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and Movement for Black Lives. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.
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