What Was Said at the TIME Impact Dinner: The Road to Justice

Yahoo

21-05-2025

Dylan Penningroth, Raquel Willis, Tarana Burke Credit - Courtesy; Robin L Marshall—Getty Images for ESSENCE; Steven Ferdman—Getty Images
Sunday, May 25, marks five years since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer—a moment captured on video that sparked global protests and a nationwide reckoning with racism and police violence. Since then, many of the demands for justice voiced in the streets in 2020 have been met with retrenchment: calls for police reform have been rolled back in cities across the country; diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs have ended; and laws banning certain ways of teaching history have taken effect in dozens of states.
Against that backdrop, TIME convened an Impact Dinner on Tuesday night in Washington, D.C. Under the theme The Road to Justice, the evening featured reflections from six speakers, who spoke about what it means to remember, to tell the truth, and to defend hard-won progress in the face of mounting political and cultural backlash.
The dinner coincided with the release of TIME's special report, 'Five Years Later: America Looks for a Way Forward After George Floyd,' which features a collection of interviews and essays from scholars, activists, and artists, exploring why the pursuit of racial justice remains so challenging in America.
Dr. Phillip Atiba Solomon, the co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity—which presented the event—began by asking attendees to reflect on how they felt five years ago when Floyd was murdered. He noted that while the conviction of involved officers offered a measure of accountability, it fell short of the deeper, systemic justice that protesters had called for. The goal, he suggested, was never just to see a few individuals imprisoned but to transform the conditions that allowed such violence in the first place.
He warned that without a shared commitment to the truth, accountability—and by extension, justice—becomes impossible. 'If we can't tell our truths, then the ways that we try to become a better version of ourselves are not possible,' Solomon said. 'So in this moment, it is more important than ever that we be truth-tellers.'
That theme—the necessity of truth-telling—reverberated throughout the evening. Several speakers warned that efforts to suppress historical realities and silence honest reflection are themselves barriers to justice.
Below are highlights from each of the toasts.
Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term 'intersectionality,' explained that the battle for our democracy is the battle for memory: 'If we can't tell the story about the inequality,' she said, 'we can't demand that it be fixed.'
A driving force in the evolution of critical race theory, Crenshaw spoke about the hopeful signs she saw in the weeks after Floyd's murder—mass protests, corporate statements, a sense that the country might be ready to confront its history more honestly. Yet even in that moment of apparent progress, she could see the beginnings of a backlash. 'In that moment, I was both happy and terrified,' she said, in part because she knew retrenchment was already forming. 'It's going to cause the others in the room to dig deep into history to find things to repress us.'
Fast forward to 2025, she said, and those fears have been realized. 'They found [that they] can repress us by saying 'certain words you can't say anymore.' So literally, the story of George Floyd could not be written today in the federal government, because you can't say words like 'racism', 'discrimination', 'Black', 'African American'—I can go on and on. The basic point is, if you can't tell the story, you can't demand reform.'
Crenshaw ended by raising a glass 'to the importance of memory, the importance of courage, and the importance of understanding that we cannot save our democracy without saving anti-racism.'
Former WNBA star Maya Moore, who retired from basketball in 2023 to work on criminal justice reform, described the U.S. prison system as a pipeline fueled by poverty, prosecutorial misconduct, and systemic neglect driven in part by a lack of investment in education.
'The prison pipeline is overflowing with a culture of hyper-punitive, dehumanizing practices that lead to more violence and higher recidivism, that makes the exit to the pipeline essentially a pathway back to the entry,' she said. 'But I get so inspired because I see people working to expose the pipeline, to disrupt the pipeline, and to reform the pipeline.'
Moore recounted how her advocacy began with the case of Jonathan Irons, a man she helped free after he spent over two decades in prison for a crime he did not commit. The two married nine days after his release in July 2020, and together they run Win With Justice, a nonprofit she founded that's focused on prosecutorial reform. 'Let's keep inviting everyone you can into exposing and disrupting and reforming these losing ways that don't work,' she said. 'There's a better way, a more humanizing way.'
Moore urged the audience to think of justice as a collective project: 'A real championship is all of us thriving,' she said, closing her toast by invoking the language of teamwork. 'We can't be true champions if we don't first embrace that we're all meant to be teammates.'
Historian Dylan Penningroth shared a personal story about his great-great uncle, who was born in 1892 to formerly enslaved parents in southern Virginia and recorded an oral history in the 1970s. His relatives weren't famous historic figures; they were just regular folks whose stories about slavery were often not taught in schools or textbooks.
For Penningroth, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who received a MacArthur Fellows Program grant, listening to his great-great uncle's story was a bridge between the distant past and the present. 'History is not just about the past; history is literally present in all that we do,' he said, citing James Baldwin.
Penningroth warned about the resurgence of what W.E.B. Du Bois called the 'propaganda of history'—narratives that minimize or distort the realities of slavery and its aftermath. He cited new restrictions on how race and history are taught in schools as a sign that we are once again in a fight over who gets to tell the story of America.
He encouraged attendees to treat history not as a closed chapter, but as a living force. 'We become connected with a past that is more beautiful and terrible than we can imagine,' he said. 'I'd like to raise a glass to the never ending struggle for a history that is true and that could bring us together, even if it sometimes hurts.'
Raquel Willis, cofounder of the Gender Liberation Movement and a 2025 TIME100 honoree, connected the struggle for transgender rights to broader fights for racial and gender justice.
'As a Black trans woman, I carry within me the fight of all of my ancestors, seeing injustice anywhere as injustice everywhere,' she said. Raised in Georgia, Willis said she grew up knowing that 'a vast constellation of folks had fought for my generation demanding to be fully human in a country that was obsessed with denying it.' But it wasn't until adulthood that she learned about queer and trans leaders, like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, and how their stories had been marginalized. 'They did not march and organize and survive so that their descendants could be policed and silenced,' she said.
Willis reflected on her work with the Gender Liberation Movement, a grassroots collective responsible for the Brooklyn Liberation Marches that drew thousands of people in 2020 and 2021. Last year, GLM organized an inaugural Gender Liberation March in Washington, D.C.
'Despite our steadfast presence … we consistently had our leadership and experiences cast aside as footnotes,' she said, noting the disparity in public response to the deaths of Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade. 'But I'm proud to say that in that moment, we surprised even ourselves when nearly 20,000 people gathered outside the Brooklyn Museum… and for the first time, we chanted in a righteous chorus that we believe in Black trans power.'
Willis ended by raising a glass 'to a prismatic racial justice lens that does not retreat from nuance but holds it close as crucial to the fight for Black liberation.'
Artist Tajh Rust, whose painting of a Black family standing in water appears on the cover of TIME's special report, gave a toast to authorship: the power of being able to tell one's story. 'We have the ability to create our own narratives,' he told the audience, 'and we don't have to leave it to a select few to determine our story.'
'When news cycles were portraying people who looked like me and my brothers as victims and criminals, I knew I wanted to make paintings to address these forms of representation and also give a chance for the people in my community to have a say in how they were represented,' Rust added. 'Our stories aren't over, and everything we do as citizens in this country can help us author our present and future.'
His painting on TIME's cover—titled Holding On (Blue)—involves a water motif that speaks to a shared history and a collective memory across the Black diaspora, giving viewers a chance to reflect on its meaning. He said that he would not be an artist today if he hadn't been introduced to other Black artists or hadn't read books by Black authors. 'To visualize something for oneself, you have to believe it is possible,' he said. 'And it helps to have examples that have come before you to model yourself after.'
Rust added that 'it is not uncommon for women or people of color to be relegated to the margins with the discussion around programs like DEI' and that 'we're made to believe that the success of people in these demographics were given and not earned.'
'But as this room is evidence,' he said, 'that's just not true.'
Tarana Burke, founder of the #metoo Movement, concluded the evening by reflecting on what gives her hope in this moment regarding racial justice in America. 'I thought for weeks about how to answer this question without platitudes and cliches,' she said. Then she saw an Instagram post from Dr. Bernice King:
'Being truthful about the state of our nation and world does not equal losing hope. Hope sees truth and still believes in better; and is willing to strategize and work for it,' the post read.
It was a reminder, Burke said, that Black people in America 'have always had the truth on our side.'
'The truth don't flinch, no matter who speaks it,' she explained. 'Black people have endured, and we have the receipts that prove not only that endurance is possible but that victory is possible. That's true; it has always been true; and it will remain true regardless of who tries to obscure it.'
Burke, whose work with sexual violence survivors has received global attention over the past decade, went on to explain how every significant social justice movement in America has been built on the foundation of truth-telling: speaking truth to power, documenting injustice, recording stories, preserving history. 'When truth is your foundation, what you build will stand, even against the strongest headwinds,' she said.
Burke then raised a glass to 'the steadfast, the bravehearted, and the hopeful': 'To truth as our foundation. To hope as our strategy. And to liberation as our destination.'
TIME Impact Dinner: The Road to Justice was presented by The Center For Policing Equity.
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