America caught in the act: from Trump to Derek Chauvin
After the murder of George Floyd, there was an unprecedented public outcry and protest movement. I’m not talking here about Black Lives Matter (BLM), since this movement already started under Obama. But it was only after George Floyd that white liberals decided to throw their support behind BLM and protest alongside them. What changed? Yes, there was overwhelmingly clear video evidence of the murder for all to see, but we’ve had many murders with video evidence for a while now, stretching back to Eric Garner in 2014.
I would argue that the real driving force of white liberal solidarity with BLM after George Floyd was shame. Since the election of Donald Trump, American liberals became increasingly conscious of how America looks in the eyes of the rest of the world, sharing photos of civilized European leaders rolling their eyes at brutish Trump at international conferences. Whereas under Obama, Americans were able to pretend that racism is over (barring some pockets of religious fundamentalists), Trump exposed the lie of that. Under Obama, officer Daniel Pantaleo (Eric Garner’s murderer) could be passed off as a bad apple, but Derek Chauvin couldn’t appear as anything but an enforcer of Trump’s explicitly racist social order.
With George Floyd, white liberals didn’t suddenly have a change of heart about racism, neither did they suddenly wake up to the fact of racism. Rather, it became impossible to “keep up appearances”, to maintain plausible deniability, because of Trump being in office. Now that we have Biden, having won on a campaign of “restoring the soul of the nation” (i.e. going back to pretending), we will see if the genie can be put back in the bottle, or in which way America’s reckoning with racism will continue.
