The Battle for Our Memory Is the Battle for Our Country

Yahoo

01-05-2025

Crews use concrete saws, jackhammers and excavators as they continue to dismantle the Black Lives Matter Plaza street mural on March 11, 2025 in Washington, DC. Credit - Chip Somodevilla—Getty Images
On June 7, 2020, Representative John Lewis made his last public appearance at the Black Lives Matter mural, painted on the road adjacent to the White House. He was so moved by the mural that he wanted to see it in person. Lewis noted, 'The people in D.C. and around the world are sending a powerful message that we will get there.' The installation was commissioned by Mayor Muriel Bowser, who, at the time, recognized that "there are people who are craving to be heard and to be seen and to have their humanity recognized. We had the opportunity to send that message loud and clear on a very important street in our city.'
From the vantage point of the summer of nationwide protests following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Lewis' appearance on Black Lives Matter Plaza felt like a coda to the unfinished business of the civil rights movement, a symbolic christening of the nation's renewed journey to a more equitable future. His words recalled the prophecy of his mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King, who in his own last public appearance, foretold a racially just future in his 'I've Been to the Mountaintop' speech—one that he might not see, but one that just as surely would arrive.
Unlike the public monuments scattered around the country that continue to trumpet the Confederate message that Black lives don't matter, the plaza reflected the opposite commitment. But if this hope-filled public declaration that 'Black Lives Matter' reflected the moral arc of the universe being bent toward justice, then the Mayor's capitulation in 2025 to Congressional Republicans' demands that she dismantle the plaza reflects a twisted spiral in a different direction—to a more-of-the-same future.
All too often, decision-makers concede what they deem as symbolic fights in hopes of living to fight another day. 'We have bigger fish to fry' was the beleaguered mayor's comment on being forced to erase a message that she had earlier proclaimed people were craving to hear. But for those who know the dirge, it was a disappointing but not unexpected verse to the chorus of race reform's retrenchment. The removal of Black Lives Matter Plaza was but one example of the erasure that has been the hallmark of the fraught history of African Americans in the United States. In fact, the abandonment of the reckoning it symbolized in less than five years is surprising only because of the speed at which the denouement of the movement arrived.
The much more disturbing reality is that the retrenchment is often deeper and more enduring than the modest and frequently symbolic reforms that the crisis engendered. Laws passed during Reconstruction to address more than a century of enslavement in and exclusion from the United States were gutted less than two decades after they were passed, while the racial tyranny of state and extrajudicial violence under which most Black Americans endured extended into the mid-20th century.
Following this pattern–not two steps forward, one step back, but the reverse–appears to be the goal of the factions that have recently grabbed power. Beyond reining in the promises surrounding the reckoning is a more profound effort to push the battle well behind the line of scrimmage that prevailed prior to 2020. The destruction of the plaza is of a piece with other efforts to bury any recognition of the past that continues to live in the present—from censoring words and banning books to defunding education and threatening museums. These are not mere excesses in cost-cutting. Wiping out our collective memory is part of their targeted strategy to suppress historical literacy, empathy, and our capacity to fight for a racially just democracy.
The protests that engulfed the nation in 2020 were spontaneous expressions of a broad multiracial, intergenerational, and bipartisan coalition of Americans who saw with their own eyes George Floyd's life extinguished with brazen indifference. The movement appeared to have reached far beyond the traditional constituencies that marched for civil rights protections in the '60s.
In that moment of horror, everyday Americans witnessed the inhumanity that had long been a feature of anti-Black police violence. Breonna Taylor's killing as a consequence of a botched no-knock raid further amplified that even the comfort of one's home provides no safe harbor from the ways that agents of the state can legally take an innocent woman's life. Black Lives Matter and #SayHerName became conceptual containers for the energies that these tragedies unleashed, finding expression in the protests and demands for accountability that followed. Heightened recognition that laws, institutional culture, and public opinion facilitated practices that disproportionately imperiled Black lives led millions of people in the U.S. and around the world to realize that the endangerment of Black life was not some one-off occurrence expressed by a singular bad actor. Nor was racism a past-tense problem.
This confrontation, as one of the largest civil mobilizations in American history, drove new conversations across the country. From the streets of protests to the boardrooms of corporate America emerged a variety of commitments ranging from concrete police reforms to efforts to break the decades-long impasse on improving the life chances of Black Americans. Congress introduced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act to enhance police accountability; corporate America embraced the imperative to rethink practices that contributed to its glass ceilings; Hollywood expanded its efforts to curate a wider template of cinematic storytelling; media and publishing gave voice to perspectives that had been marginalized; and philanthropy sought to expand the fraction of all its dollars directed to addressing racism's continuing consequences.
And yet the sentiment-driven promises of the moment have rarely been sustained beyond the memory of events that produced them. For example, the great conflagration that gave rise to the promise of equal citizenship and equal protection—the Civil War—was momentarily realized in biracial governments in the formerly slave-holding South. But those promises were so thoroughly dismantled that the American story that most people learn overlooks or denigrates it.
As the five-year anniversary of the George Floyd protests approaches, not only have Lewis' hopes expressed on Black Lives Matter Plaza not materialized, they have faced stronger headwinds than many among us could have ever imagined. Police reforms that were negotiated as consent decrees have been indefinitely paused. Congressional proposals to enact a range of reforms have been whittled down to bare minimums and never passed. In Kentucky, Breonna's Law—limiting the use of no-knock warrants that put Taylor in harm's way—was passed and yet, no one was held accountable for her death. And despite the chants of #SayHerName, available data suggests that race remains a significant factor in Black women's vulnerability to police violence. While women overall are far less likely than men to experience violence at the hands of police, Black women experience everyday violence in routine interactions with police at rates that match or even exceed the violence encountered by white men.
Not only are many institutions stepping away from their unrealized commitments, they are conceding that the impulse to respond to the inhumanity that the world witnessed was flawed. Initially targets of (and now collaborators in) the so-called 'war against woke,' they are now bedfellows with those seeking to ensure that this response to racism will never happen again. In addition, some educators, elected officials, pundits, and others have capitulated to the right-wing defaming of critical race theory and anti-racist education as unpatriotic; they have readily relinquished the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and some have even demurred in the face of efforts to censor or distort the stories of slavery, the Montgomery bus boycott, Ruby Bridges, and even King's 'Letter From Birmingham Jail.'
One need only consult the recent list of words that are unacceptable throughout the federal government and its tentacles into civil society to understand how following these repressive orders would ensure that the stories of Floyd and Taylor cannot be accurately reported, remembered, or meaningfully addressed. Consider trying to teach, research, commemorate, acknowledge, or build any kind of response to the tragedies of 2020 without the essential concepts that convey the meaning of the story: discrimination, racism, bias, Black, oppression, prejudice, systemic, historical, intersectional.
In the opening months of the second Trump Administration, we have seen efforts to release police departments from modest efforts to roll back practices that have been proven to harm Black citizens. We have also seen the erasure of Black history from our shared context (including the National Park Service removing references of Harriet Tubman from its webpage for the Underground Railroad, only to reinstate it after massive public outrage), Black leaders from our government, Black students from our universities, and Black employees from corporate America. The very presence of Black people in positions of authority has been associated with a derogatory embodiment of DEI, which has, in turn, been weaponized to undermine what gains from the civil rights movement remain. Even "safer" objectives like combating Black maternal mortality, and environmental racism are at great risk. There is no case to be made for reform, of policing or any other policy, when fighting discrimination itself has been framed as discriminatory.
In the years since 2020, it has become evident that neither Floyd's nor Taylor's lost lives could gain lasting traction until a stark and persistent truth was confronted: Americans have always been and will continue to be willing to accept a certain degree of racial injustice to make them feel safe. The failure to sustain meaningful efforts to protect Black Americans from this violence is a feature of our society, not a bug.
We merely have to look to Congress's unwillingness to pass legislation criminalizing lynching for more than a century to see the enduring association of Blackness with threat, one which was a bitter harvest of a society founded on the forced and stolen labor of Black bodies. Attempts to curb the lawlessness that reigned in the South had to be balanced with claims that Black populations were in need of discipline and control—an oppressive compromise that stretches into the present.
The groundswell of public support for race reform following the Floyd protests gave reason to hope for something different. This echoed similar inflection points in our history. In his biography, John Lewis revealed how Emmett Till's lynching, and Mamie Till's courageous demand that the world bear witness to the profound savagery of white supremacy was a pivotal moment in awakening an entire generation of young Black Americans. Similarly, in the aftermath of Floyd and Taylor's killings, murals of their faces, banners of 'Black Lives Matter," and demands to #SayHerName invited a new generation of young people to reckon with the very real, very human costs of our racist policies.
Lewis and his contemporaries—the Freedom Riders, the sit-in demonstrators, and the youth-led wing of the movement that really pushed beyond what we had seen before—were part of the Emmett Till generation. Nine years after Till's death, the movement this generation went on to advance gave us not only the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicaid, and other civil rights advances, they also poured a foundation upon which the rights of other marginalized groups could be legally enshrined. These hard-fought victories chipped away at the legacy of slavery and the infrastructure of Jim Crow, while widening the democratic imagination to include indigenous rights, the women's liberation movement, marriage equality, disability rights, and many others.
It is precisely this intergenerational and cross-issue transfer of ideas that those pushing the anti-woke agenda aim to suppress. The erasure of both symbolic tributes and tangible policy gains in the aftermath of 2020 not only strikes a blow to the objectives of the great reckoning but also is perhaps the most dangerous, radical attempt to reverse course since the massive resistance to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.
This spells worrisome signs for a multiracial democracy that has faltered on its Achilles' heel yet again. The painted-over Black Lives Matter murals are not so different from the erasure of the database of facts and evidence of January 6 from the Department of Justice, the dismantling of the Department of Education, and the firing of thousands of federal workers dedicated to a functioning bureaucracy to support our rights. These are all part of a widespread effort to move away from the possibility of a diverse democracy by making people forget the stakes, challenges, and capacity to overcome.
The forces who would want us to forget Floyd and Taylor's names would love nothing more than to dismiss their memories—the same way their killers dismissed their lives. There will be those who will demand more than the erasure of these stories, and the destruction of a public monument that claims that they mattered.
We refused to look away then, and we should refuse the invitation to do so now. The battle for our memory is the battle for our country. And for America to matter, Black lives must matter. There is no paving over that truth.
Crenshaw, a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law, is the Co-founder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum, and the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School.
This project was supported by funding from the Center for Policing Equity.
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