There is no example of this erasure more striking than the continual destruction, removal or slow vanishing of much of the street art produced in the wake of Floyd’s killing.Īccording to a database compiled by three professors at the University of St. The Great Erasure is underway, not so much an attempt to erase the uprising itself as an attempt to blunt its effects. Ron DeSantis of Florida barred citizens from protesting outside private homes), and more than a dozen have now criminalized teaching full and accurate racial history. Dozens of states have passed laws restricting the right to protest (just this week, Gov. Now not only are their allies reversing course on issues like police reform the country is also facing a full backlash toward protest itself. They were the ones who most believed that change was not only possible but imminent, only to have America retreat and retrench. It is their faith that’s most vulnerable to damage. But I worry about young people in all of this. I have embraced the “wise desire not to be betrayed by too much hoping,” as James Baldwin put it. I’ve learned not to expect much from America it has a deep capacity for change but a shallow desire for it. And the founders of Black Lives Matter have been drawn into controversies about how they handled its money. Federal police reform and federal voter protection both failed to pass the Senate. Support for Black Lives Matter has diminished. Inflation, a war in Ukraine, public safety, abortion and even a baby formula crisis have overtaken the zeitgeist. In the end, transformative national change proved to be an illusion. Individuals began personal journeys to become more egalitarian and more actively “antiracist.” And artists produced hundreds of murals and thousands of pieces of other street art that, for a time, transformed this country. Money poured into Black Lives Matter, as well as other racial justice organizations and Black institutions. Some states and local municipalities passed or instituted police reforms. Some good came of the protests, to be sure. They talked about the protests in the lofty language of a “racial reckoning,” an “inflection point,” a fresh start on America’s path to absolution from its original sin.īut flashes of guilt, outrage and shame often stir fleeting fealties, and the heavy gravitational pull of racial privileges and power can quickly draw mercurial allies back into the refuge of the status quo. Some saw in the uprising the potential for revolution. The killings of Black people had become almost banal in their incessancy and redundancy, but something about this one - captured during an advancing pandemic that had forced people apart and inside, watching the world through windows and screens - drew thousands of people out into the streets, where boarded-up storefronts produced the tempting tableau of a country strewn with canvases. Wednesday will be the second anniversary of the lurid street murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
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