03-08-2025
How the George Floyd Protests Changed America, for Better and Worse
SUMMER OF OUR DISCONTENT: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, by Thomas Chatterton Williams
Over the last several decades, the United States has occasionally experienced dramatic transformations during compressed stretches of time. In 1968, the twin assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, separated by merely two months, yielded broad disillusionment. Six years later, as the simmering Watergate scandal boiled over and prompted President Nixon's resignation, many Americans adopted a posture of deep distrust toward elected officials. And, of course, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, inaugurated an enduring era of anxiety over safety and security. In these critical periods, an existing American order declined and a new paradigm ascended.
In 'Summer of Our Discontent,' Thomas Chatterton Williams argues that the United States witnessed another such epoch-defining moment five years ago. The inflection point, he contends, arrived on May 25, 2020, when Derek Chauvin slowly extinguished George Floyd's life outside the Cup Foods convenience store in Minneapolis.
The ensuing indignation over Floyd's murder, alongside the then-raging pandemic and extensive lockdown orders, fused to generate the largest protest movement in our country's history. That activism at once marked and marred the American psyche, Williams insists, as 'the residues of the normative revolution of 2020 have lingered.' In his view, a grave shift in mores and attitudes fomented a racialized 'wokeness' on the left that, in turn, generated a ferocious backlash on the right, bequeathing our current, anguished hour.
Williams is right that the last several years have brought unusually intense ferment to American racial politics, and that the turmoil packed into what we might call the Long George Floyd Moment — beginning in the Obama years and stretching into Joe Biden's presidency — deserves rigorous scrutiny.
A staff writer at The Atlantic and prominent commentator on race and identity, Williams would seem well suited to explore how these recent seismic shifts have jolted American society. Amid a sea of intellectual orthodoxy, he admirably stands out for his willingness to pursue independent lines of thought, no small feat given his combustible topic. Much of his recent journalism can be construed as a broad-gauged expansion of the project initiated in his last book, 'Self-Portrait in Black and White' (2019), which denounced what he viewed as America's pathological fixation on race and racial categories.
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