There is a sardonic phrase often used among contemporary justice advocates when recalling the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder: “The 14 months when people cared.”
In casual conversation, it works as a darkly humorous observation on the rapid adoption and equally rapid abandonment of commitments to diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracist education. But underneath that lingers pain, frustration, and resignation, drawn from the fleeting hope that perhaps the nation was finally on the verge of reckoning with its legacy of racial violence and state-sanctioned terror against those who inhabit darker bodies.
The eight minutes and forty-six seconds, captured on video as George Floyd struggled to breathe, called out for his mother, and ultimately died, became a space for ritual and reflection. Across the nation people paused and prayed for the same length of time, creating a kind of time capsule. In that silence the cries of the Indigenous, the enslaved, and the massacred seemed to resurface, making a collective appeal for this nation to finally confront the brutality of its past and end, once and for all, its love affair with domination.
In hindsight I feel foolish for having believed, even briefly, that this might be a turning point. I watched as investments poured into racial justice studies and as new positions were created for diversity and equity practitioners. For a moment it looked like groundwork for transformation. But the dissonance was too dense for communities and institutions to move through, and without doing so there could be no lasting change. Gains that once looked durable were exposed as temporary, giving rise to a backlash that not only dragged us back to pre-pandemic levels of racial disparity and violence but also awakened a movement intent on resetting civil progress entirely. The retreat had, ironically so, seen our world regress to foundational pillars of the plantation.
The recoil summoned the colonial architects who justified their violent behavior towards darker-bodied peoples through biblical principles, classifying us as either savages to be subdued or animals to be slaughtered, never as humans worth the labor of true recognition. That gaze inaugurated a system of violence that demanded the surrender of either one’s life or one’s liberty, laying the groundwork for a persistent structure: physical death at the hands of the State or ontological death through assimilation. What seemed historical in origin re-emerged in real time, not as memory but as method.
As an anti-violence practitioner for more than two decades, I knew what the fury of antiquity would do when summoned. True to form, the colonial strategy revived itself. It attacked the credibility of those committed to justice with allegations of misused funds, banned books and frameworks that exposed racial hierarchy, co-opted language to re-inscribe supremacy, and exaggerated isolated acts of harm to re-summon old tropes of savagery. The brief moment when violence was analyzed structurally was drowned out, marking the symbolic end of the 8:46 pause. Acts of violence were once again framed as “senseless,” though in the American imagination violence has never been senseless. It has always been tied to power, progress, and preservation. Violence is not an aberration. It is an organizing principle. Here, violence has never been random. It has been sacred.
We wrestled with the murder of George Floyd not over its horror but over whether it could be excused. For a brief moment the moral scale tilted and then snapped back into place. But violence has always been sacred in America, and our history has been a negotiation over who may lay offerings on its altar and who must become the offering itself. It is the line between heroism and villainy, between success and failure, and it determines who will be counted among the chosen and who will be condemned without question.
As our country stews in the pot of a fascist state for the next three years, we still have the power to rewrite history and control the narrative of America’s legacy for future generations. We have to confront the brutality of our past and dispel the mythology that has formed around it. We can acknowledge that violence is not a loyal ally, and condemn its sacred power. Because long as violence is sacred, life will never be.
Marcel Woodruff is an organizer, philanthropist, and leader with the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color
Man, Well said. Sad but true. I have asked many times, “Where did all the George Floyd folk go?”
Wow, it’s hard to read because I think that we want to be treated equally and without prejudice and it’s hard because I want to believe that people have been changed or they don’t have those thoughts but it always keeps coming back around and around that African American people sometimes are treated unfair and that’s not something that a human race should ever get Use to dealing with. It’s wrong and unacceptable but it happens again and again.