How George Floyd dragged America to the right

George Floyd died five years ago today, his movement only more recently.

It is no exaggeration to say that his death was one of the most important moments in recent Western history. The viral video showing Floyd having the life choked from him by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin led to a wave of protests, riots and so much more. His death may have been more complex and multi-causal than initially seemed to be the case. However, there was no room for nuance at the time: the national consensus was that a black man had been publicly lynched by a white police officer, a supposedly common occurance.

The event that triggered a whole summer of Black Lives Matter protests occurred on the evening of 25 May 2020, when Floyd was arrested for buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 note in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He fell to the ground as Chauvin, along with other officers, tried to put him into a police car. Chauvin pressed his weight on to the back and neck of the prostrate Floyd, who stopped breathing after six minutes and later died in hospital. In April 2021, Chauvin was convicted of murdering the 46-year-old Floyd, largely on the evidence of phone footage taken of his arrest by bystanders, and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison. In 2023, the US Supreme Court rejected the last of Chauvin’s appeals. Two of his colleagues were also imprisoned.

For many Americans, Floyd became a symbol of waning, but real, problems. Indeed, he became a martyr for the cause of racial justice, his name invoked alongside that of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Thousands attended his funeral in Texas, including actors Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum. The Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, wept while touching his casket. At least three larger-than-life statues of Floyd now exist, including a six-foot bust on a pure white marble base, which currently sits in the centre of New York’s Union Square. The spot where Floyd fell is now a permanent memorial, designated as George Floyd Square.

After Floyd’s death, prominent lawyers wrote books arguing that thousands, or tens of thousands, of innocent black men are killed by policemen, vigilantes or squalid living conditions every year. They joined a collective pledge to stop what they called a ‘genocide’. A national campaign was launched against the presumed epidemic of crime and violent harassment directed at black Americans by whites. Supposed racial profilers, such as ‘Barbecue Becky’, ‘Pool Patrol Paula’, ‘Coupon Carl’ and many others became household names.

‘Scholars’ like Ibram X Kendi and Robin D’Angelo made the temptingly simple argument that all gaps between racial groups must represent ‘systemic’ bigotry. On the strength of such insights as this, Kendi was given more than $45million in donor money in 2020 to fund his Centre for Antiracist Research at the prestigious Boston University.

But within a remarkably short period of time, nearly every major claim made by BLM activists during the ‘racial reckoning’ was exposed as nonsense. Very few innocent and unarmed black men are killed by US police, certainly not the thousands per year or even hundreds per day regularly cited by the media. In the year Floyd died, the total number of males killed by police who were both black and unarmed – according to the excellent database set up by the Washington Post – was 18. Last year, it was 10 – a remarkably low number for a country with a population of 340million, in which three million people die each year.

As I have often noted before, patterns of inter-racial crime rarely fit the mainstream narrative. In a typical year, the violent inter-racial crimes that involve a black perpetrator and a white victim, or a white perpetrator and a black victim, make up only three to five per cent of the roughly 1.2million annual serious crimes recorded by the Department of Justice. Furthermore, among this relatively tiny subset of offences, more than 80 per cent of the violence is black on white.

‘Systemic racism’ is not much more defensible as a general concept than the idea of police genocide. In 1990, the talented economist, June O’Neill, pointed out that a roughly 20 per cent starting gap in wages between white and African American men closed totally following rather basic adjustments for age, region (more blacks live in the lower-income South), years of education and aptitude-test scores. She found essentially the same thing to be true, again, in a different major study conducted almost two decades later.

The systemic-racism argument collapses even further when other factors between black and white America, such as age, are considered. The average white American is 58 years old, while the average black American is 38 – a discrepancy that is obviously relevant to analysis of everything from family wealth to crime rates. According to the Brookings Institution, the average Asian American child or young teenager studies about three times as much as the average black child and two times as much as the average white child – something directly relevant to test scores and college admissions. Taking undisputed empirical realities like these into account makes a great deal of alleged ‘racism’ simply disappear.

Unfortunately, facts didn’t matter to those determined to see Floyd’s murder as evidence that the US is an irredeemably racist country. In the months after Floyd’s death, reason was abandoned as a collective hysteria was unleashed in the name of Black Lives Matter. Towns and cities were destroyed by looting and vandalism, causing up to $2 billion in damage and killing at least 25 people. A number of US cities, including Minneapolis, ‘defunded’ their police departments. Across the country, police took what could best be described as a passive approach to suspected drug and weapons offences, emboldening criminals and leading to a surge in violent crimes. In 2020, the year of Floyd’s death, more than 20,000 murders were committed in the US, the highest number since 1995.

All this disorder pushed the American public in a direction no one would have predicted at the peak of BLM in 2020. Nearly every population group large enough to measure, with the exception of educated and single women, swung hard to the right.

In November 2024, Almost 30 per cent of black males, 46 per cent of all Latinos and an astonishing 65 per cent of American Indians cast ballots for Donald Trump. The Donald was even publicly endorsed by a laundry list of black hip-hop personalities, including Lil Wayne, Ice Cube and Azealia Banks. After winning a high-profile UFC fight in late-2024, champion Jon ‘Bones’ Jones – also black – even did the ‘Trump Dance’ in the octagon.

In this brave new world, a real and unexpected puzzler may become: how do we prevent society from swinging too far toward the obnoxious right? On X and Meta, freed of the staid barriers of censorship, genuinely racist accounts, with titles like ‘Blacks Taking Ls’, are amassing hundreds of thousands of followers.

In fact, there appear to be few views the alt-right isn’t prepared to support, no matter how nutty or crude. ‘Jewish Question’ conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll was a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience in March. He followed writer and podcaster Darryl Cooper, who believes that Winston Churchill was the ‘chief villain’ of the Second World War. There are even petitions and reasonably mainstream articles that now call for the repeal of the 19th amendment to the US Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. What mathematician and writer James Lindsay calls the ‘woke right’ may soon be as big a threat as the woke left, albeit one less backed by the powers-that-be.

We’ll see. But in between the alt-right and the woke left, and the dim activists that used an unfortunate death to justify an unparalleled outbreak of lawlessness, a more sober view of the events of May 2020 is beginning to take hold. Just five years on, those big bronze and marble statues of George Floyd look more than a bit out of place.

Wilfred Reilly is a spiked columnist and the author of Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t Talk About, published by Regnery. Follow him on Twitter: @wil_da_beast630