By Jimmie Briggs\Vanity Fair
Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Facebook\Wikimedia Commons
When I think of America’s trajectory since the murder of George Floyd, I can’t help but hear in my head the lyrics from the Notorious B.I.G.’s 1994 hit “Juicy”: “It was all a dream.”
Five years ago this week, George Floyd—a part-time bouncer, rapper, and former high school athlete—was killed in broad daylight by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who was later found guilty of murder.
The slaying was captured in a cell phone video by a daring teenage onlooker named Darnella Frazier. She managed to keep her camera running for a harrowing 10 minutes, much of the recording showing Floyd being pinned to the ground, under Chauvin’s knee. The footage of Floyd, essentially narrating his own death, quickly went viral.
The protests that followed were overwhelmingly peaceful, interfaith, multiracial, intergenerational. The ripple effects from those demonstrations gave hope to millions, brought meaning to many, and spurred sweeping social action.
As part of a national “racial reckoning,” corporations and academia rushed to make financial and structural commitments to bolster efforts supporting equity and justice. A long-observed holiday in the Black community, called Juneteenth, became a federal one.
Arts spaces and the public square became even more fertile grounds for elevating too-little-discussed narratives of the experiences of communities of color.
But in the half decade since, America’s capacity to grapple with itself has swung widely from the arc of justice, to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to a more cruel, divisive state of being.
The US now seems to be at a juncture in its historical journey that calls to mind the gravest periods of the nation’s past. READ MORE…
