The effort IS in action across the country…..
But that momentum has largely stalled as the country reaches another inflection point in scrutinizing its racial dynamics, according to political scientists and public policy experts. Corporations have withdrawn from billion-dollar promises to address racial inequality. Public support for sweeping police reform and the Black Lives Matter movement has plummeted. Hours into his second term, President Donald Trump started a campaign to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, including those launched in response to Floyd’s death.
And this week, the Justice Department announced plans to abandon efforts to reshape law enforcement in cities where high-profile killings by officers, including Floyd, ignited widespread outrage.
“People really did believe these mass protests, these big, multicultural protests,” were going to be “transformative” in the fight for racial justice, said Hakeem Jefferson, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University. They were, he said, just not the way people expected.
Support for the Black Lives Matter movement reached its crescendo in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s death, peaking days after Trump threatened to deploy the military to quell protests, research shows.
“Then you see it fall off the cliff,” said Jefferson, who has been added to a right-wing “watch list” for teaching about and researching the ways race and identity shape political attitudes and behaviors.
In 2021, 55 percent of Americans said discrimination was the main reason Black people tend to have worse jobs, income and housing than White people — the first time a majority of Americans thought so, according to the General Social Survey, which has asked the question since 1977. That fell to 45 percent in 2024, according to survey results released Thursday….
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History points to the cyclic nature of racial politics in America, punctuated by forward momentum and retrenchment, political scientists and public policy experts say.
During the summer of 2020, millions of people took to the streets shouting, “Black Lives Matter,” and D.C. transformed a two-block section of 16th Street Northwest near the White House into a pedestrian-only plaza with that phrase painted on the asphalt in massive yellow letters. Now, Black Lives Matter Plaza is gone, removed after pressure by the Trump administration — and the conservative movement more broadly — to eradicate diversity, equity and inclusion….
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In 2020, Trump met massive protests for racial justice after Floyd’s death with skepticism, initially saying Americans were “rightly sickened and revolted” by Floyd’s death, though eventually comparing protesters to “professional anarchists.”
Five years later, as soon as he reentered office, Trump quickly moved to accelerate efforts to dismantle diversity programs, even falsely blaming a deadly collision between a military helicopter and a passenger plane at Reagan National Airport on DEI.
Trump has ordered the elimination of DEI throughout the federal government, threatening to pull funding from universities and investigate companies for their race-conscious policies. He pardoned two D.C. police officers convicted in the 2020 killing of a Black man who was hit by a car while fleeing. When he issued pardons for 1,500 Jan. 6, 2021, rioters on his Inauguration Day, Trump defended his decision by suggesting that violent protesters in the aftermath of Floyd’s death were not adequately prosecuted.
An April Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found 51 percent said Trump was going too far trying to end diversity efforts in the government and in private workplaces, 13 percent said he was not going far enough and 35 percent said he was handling it about right.
Then, corporations promised to spend $50 billion to address health, education and economic inequality, and anti-racism research centers received an influx of money. Now, companies such as Verizon are rolling back DEI policies to secure federal approval on multi-million-dollar deals, and federal research grants are being pulled or banned at universities that have DEI programs…..
Ceremonies mark 5th anniversary of George Floyd’s murder
Protesters called for justice and decried a lack of ongoing progress.
MINNEAPOLIS — Police reform and civil-rights activists joined thousands of ordinary people on Sunday to mark the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder and decry the Trump administration for actions they say set their efforts back decades.
The Rev. Al Sharpton said at a graveside service with the dead man’s family in Houston that Floyd, 46, represented all of those “who are defenseless against people who thought they could put their knee on our neck.”