To See How America Unraveled, Go Back Five Years
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/george-floyd-summer-2020-riots/683697/
The social-justice movement that began in earnest with Trayvon Martin’s shooting in 2012, and culminated eight years later, after George Floyd’s murder, once looked unstoppable. By the summer of 2020, a slew of recorded killings of Black people had seemed to convince a pivotal bloc of Americans that the persistence of racial injustice was both inarguable and intolerable.
Yet the ensuing riots—and the disorder they appeared to countenance—prefigured a surge of white grievance that still hasn’t subsided. Throughout the summer of 2020, many on the left exalted lawlessness and violence as pardonable offenses, if not political virtues. Within a few months, this impulse had migrated to the right, yielding even worse damage to the liberal order, most notably on January 6, 2021. The mass unrest of the preceding year certainly did not cause the sacking of the Capitol. But that winter siege amounted to an outgrowth of the summer revolt—the rotten fruit of imitation.
This article has been adapted from Williams’s forthcoming book.
At the moment of his death, two George Floyds came into public view. First, there was the mortal man, the son and brother, unemployed when law enforcement encountered him dozing in a parked car that long May weekend in Minneapolis. Methamphetamines and fentanyl flowed through his system. Moments earlier, he had allegedly passed a counterfeit banknote, which even the cashier seemed embarrassed to report. This George Floyd had survived a bout of COVID-19, only to be asphyxiated in broad daylight by a police officer he’d once worked with at a nightclub. The mortal man’s biography fixed him in a specific time, when the coronavirus pandemic—and Donald Trump’s mismanagement of it—had primed the nation for protest.
Then there’s the immortal George Floyd, whose last breaths exist in a wretched loop that can be conjured on our screens. The man spawned a meme, as Richard Dawkins defined the term—an idea that spreads by means of imitation. In a 10-minute-and-eight-second clip, many Americans found evidence of an idea that had long simmered in the national psyche: By perpetrating violence, the state forfeits its legitimacy and must be resisted, even if that means inflicting violence in return. This immortal Floyd was put to death by horizontal crucifixion in a midwestern Golgotha. A man who died for all Americans on that squalid pavement, not asking why his father had forsaken him but calling for his deceased mother instead.
David A. Graham: George Floyd’s murder changed Americans’ views on policing
Floyd’s killing inspired a summer of revolt that seemed, to much of the country, obviously justified. The postracial promise of the Barack Obama era had subsided. Some Black Americans and many more of their supporters saw little hope of achieving equality, let alone safety, without rebellion. The following January, this same underlying idea—that the unheard must speak through violence—was used to justify terrible wrong. (A different group of Americans naturally regarded that wrong as indisputably right.) In this way, the summer of 2020 and the siege of the Capitol are fratricidal twins. They imbued all factions of American society with antipathy and certitude, a perilous combination that continues to touch virtually every aspect of our public lives, and much of our private ones also.
During the season of rebellion that followed Floyd’s death, nearly 8,000 Black Lives Matter rallies took place across the nation—not to mention the mass protests that erupted in places as far away as Paris, Amsterdam, London, Seoul, Taiwan, and Helsinki. Millions of Americans rose up, disgusted by what they saw, taking part in what was likely the largest demonstration against racism in the history of humanity.
Hundreds of the protests in the United States involved violence or property destruction, or both—a fact that much of the media addressed by noting that most of the protests were peaceful. That incessant refrain was true, but it obscured the extent of the bedlam that Americans of all political persuasions were witnessing. In Minnesota, the Twin Cities alone incurred some $500 million in damage.
Much of this chaos was unrelated to racial injustice. In New York City, one week after Floyd’s death, “hundreds of people who had no apparent connection to the protests commanded the streets of Manhattan’s SoHo district,” The Intercept reported. “They looted businesses, and robbed each other, with impunity. Burglar alarms blended with the roaring of getaway engines, the chaotic medley punctuated every few moments by tumbling plywood, crashing plate glass, and grating steel. Then a gunshot went off, as a 21-year-old man was shot.” That same night, an off-duty security guard told a New York Times reporter, “I don’t think this has anything to do with Black Lives Matter. It’s just chaos. People are just using this as an excuse to act crazy.” The reporter noted that “the man declined to give his name, because he, too, was looting.”
Why did all this come to pass in the summer of 2020 but not after any number of previous killings? In 2014, a New York City police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, dragged the unarmed Eric Garner to the sidewalk for the crime of peddling loose cigarettes, compressing Garner’s windpipe beneath his forearm, deafening himself to the dying man’s protests. That was when Americans first heard the phrase I can’t breathe, which Floyd would echo in Minneapolis (and protesters in Paris would learn to chant in English).
Two years later, Philando Castile bled out on Facebook Live in front of his girlfriend and her daughter. Castile had done nothing wrong; in fact he’d done everything right, calmly announcing after being pulled over that he was carrying a licensed firearm. Protests broke out when a jury found the cop who’d shot Castile not guilty, but they didn’t compare to what was coming.
Sue Rahr: The myth propelling America’s violent police culture
These are just two examples from a long list of Black men, women, and children whose outrageous deaths could well have triggered sustained nationwide protest. But none of them did—not until the pandemic overturned American life. By May 2020, many of us were sidelined from our daily routines, homeschooling and working remotely or panicking about not working, anxious about a juvenile president whose ineptitude had turned lethal.
That’s when a fatal confrontation in Georgia came across our screens. Ahmaud Arbery, a young Georgia man, had been ambushed and shot while jogging in a predominantly white neighborhood. A few weeks after Arbery was killed, Kentucky police broke into the home of a young medic named Breonna Taylor and shot her to death. Then the turning point: Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck.
“To draw momentous conclusions from a single video shot on the sidewalks of Minneapolis might seem excessive,” the author Paul Berman wrote in the journal Liberties. “Yet that is how it is with the historic moments of overnight political conversion.” Berman cited the case of Anthony Burns, who’d fled slavery in Virginia and been captured in Boston, where his ensuing trial inspired protests that drew national attention and galvanized the abolitionist movement. “There were four million slaves in 1854,” Berman wrote, “but the arrest of a single one proved to be the incendiary event.”
For a significant portion of the American left and center—and even some of the right—the possibility that the country had a racial sickness suddenly seemed undeniable. Many in this group were white people aware of the disproportionate toll COVID-19 was taking on communities they did not belong to. In those early months of the pandemic, whatever illusions these Americans may have had about the robustness of their society, and the general direction of progress within it, was obliterated.
Secular social-justice rhetoric took on a religious fervor. In particular, “whiteness” was reconceived as an original sin. Adherents of this idea became convinced that they were implicated in a constellation of racism and implicit bias. And they believed that these structures had allowed a madman like Trump to hazard American lives with the same lack of concern that a policeman evinced as he knelt on the neck of a handcuffed, writhing civilian.
These Americans felt the need to revolt against something. While Trump and his supporters rebelled against stay-at-home orders, progressives found their own outlet for rebellion in the protest against police brutality. They saw their opponents on the right as exacerbating a scourge that disproportionately killed Black people, whose lives they saw themselves as fighting to save. This dichotomy opened a furious new front in intra-white status jockeying. It created a renewed opportunity for “those who see themselves as (for lack of a better term) upper-whites,” as Reihan Salam wrote in 2018, “to disaffiliate themselves from those they’ve deemed lower-whites.”
An understandable and even noble regard for the health and safety of Black communities metastasized into something else: an oppressive moral panic in response to Floyd’s murder that chased after all real and perceived racial inequity, and resorted to violence and property destruction to make its argument. It helped spawn a counterreaction that America still hasn’t escaped.
I’ve rarely felt farther from America than when I was hunched over my smartphone in Paris, watching dozens of people scale the sides of the Capitol.
As I witnessed the event in real time—and replayed clips over and over again—I was struck by its artificiality. Rioters wore costumes, draping themselves in tawdry Trump paraphernalia and Stars and Stripes; some came dressed as Founding Fathers. Many wore expressions of disbelief as they meandered the halls of Congress, marveling like tourists amid the pandemonium. O
