‘Anti-racism became a self-help fad for liberal whites’

The murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer in May 2020 proved to be an inflection point in American life. Against the backdrop of a global pandemic and the Trump presidency, racial identity politics exploded into the mainstream. This was the summer of Black Lives Matter marches and protests. A summer in which BLM-branded ‘wokeness’ took hold of liberal America and arguably never really let go.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of The Summer of Our Discontent, recently joined Brendan O’Neill on his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to discuss the profound impact Floyd’s murder had on American life. You can watch the full conversation here.

Brendan O’Neill: How impactful do you think the fallout from George Floyd’s death was in the US?

Thomas Chatterton Williams: It was just enormous. You had this huge breakthrough for the social-justice movement when that terrible video emerged of George Floyd’s slow death in Minneapolis. It’s important to note that it happened during the lockdowns, when people’s attention was really available – it wouldn’t have been nearly so significant if you didn’t have the confluence of the pandemic, and the very heightened election campaign going on with Donald Trump seeking to be a two-term president. It was such a hyperbolic moment. The feeling on the left, and indeed throughout much of the country, was that democracy was really in peril. So at this particular time, the death of George Floyd allowed a movement that had been growing for many years to break through into the mainstream.

O’Neill: You mention in the book that everyone remembers where they were when they first saw that video. What was the impact it had on you?

Chatterton Williams: My family and I were quarantined in France. I went upstairs with my coffee, as I did every morning, and checked Twitter. That’s when I started seeing this video everywhere. I just couldn’t believe what I was witnessing. For years, there have been so many videos of, unfortunately, mostly black men being killed by police and vigilantes circulating on the internet. But this was really different. We had grown accustomed to seeing shootings, but this was a slow, drawn-out death where multiple bystanders were trying to persuade the cop, Derek Chauvin, to stop. And he just didn’t. It went on and on and on, and Floyd was calling for his mother. It struck me that we were seeing something really bad.

As America began to wake up, the video started to circulate like wildfire. I couldn’t believe how viral it was going. It became something categorically different to the other videos that had preceded it. I felt that what we had seen was so out of the ordinary, it really had to be condemned. It made sense to me.

But as the reaction to the video wore on over the weeks and months, it seemed as though the video wasn’t just being upheld as proof of injustice, it was also being used for any number of purposes that didn’t quite add up. One of the first things that truly struck me was hearing that students at Oxford University were being granted special consideration for their exams on the grounds that they had been troubled by the video. It’s important to note that, at that same time, there was also an extraordinary civil war in Syria going on. There was (and still is) a genocide in China of the ethnic Uyghurs. There were any number of tragedies happening all over the world that Oxford’s significantly international student body was not receiving dispensation for. That’s not to diminish what happened to Floyd – but it seemed like something else was going on that was really hard to wrap my mind around. Why had one singular death so captivated the entire world? I wanted to understand what dynamics were at play there.

O’Neill: There seem to be two different versions of George Floyd, depending on who you speak to – consummate victim or author of his own downfall. Do either of them bear any relation to the truth?

Chatterton Williams: I think the right has a tendency to focus rather too much on the man. There’s this idea floating around that he was a petty criminal, and therefore he ‘had it coming’. Some of them get close to saying that, if not outright saying it. Then, of course, there are sections of the left who focus entirely on this almost saint-like image of Floyd. The upshot is that he comes to mean different things for different people, depending on what their political and moral needs might be.

In reality, George Floyd had a black experience that I don’t want to say was completely unique – but it is not the definitive black experience. I would say that it’s a minority of black people’s experience at this time in the country’s development. He was certainly poor in ways that are not able to be fully extricated from his racial identity, but they don’t define his racial identity. Most black people don’t live in such circumstances. Most black people would never pass a counterfeit note, are not addicted to drugs and are never complicit in robbery or pistol-whipping a pregnant woman. He was a loved, but undeniably flawed, human being. He is a product (though not a stand-in for) the black experience in America, which is shot through with a tragic historical oppression that has not yet been transcended. At the same time, he has become something of a meme; a symbol of an ‘everlasting white supremacy’ that became very expedient for people whose lives looked nothing like Floyd’s to use and to manipulate – oftentimes in the workspace or in very elite academic spaces.

O’Neill: Do you think Floyd’s death was used to institutionalise identity politics?

Chatterton Williams: Definitely. And in retrospect, it happened in a shorter amount of time than I think most of us realised. Floyd’s death tapped into this religious impulse that undergirds a lot of anti-racism activism – the idea that whiteness is a form of original sin. Robin DiAngelo had published White Fragility several years before, but sales skyrocketed in 2020. There was this notion that whites needed to atone through anti-racist efforts, and gurus like DiAngelo and Ibram X Kendi could teach them the way to do that. It was treated like a self-help fad on the part of the narcissistic people who bought into it. A certain type of liberal white got to claim virtuosity by signalling that these liberals were aware of their whiteness, and actively transcending it. At the same, they got to remain the principal actor in the world, and blacks became the supporting characters in their own moral development. That was the energy behind all this.

The truly liberal reaction to George Floyd’s death, I always argued, would be to say that all of us should invest in the principle that police should not be able to break a man like this. That police brutality is unjustified wherever it manifests. The primary fact of this is not that the police officer was white and George Floyd was black, but that this is unacceptable.

We should be just as outraged when it happens to a white man – which it did in 2016, in Dallas. A man named Tony Timpa suffered an almost identical death, before which police officers were videotaped kneeling on him and laughing as he said ‘I can’t breathe’. But Timpa’s case didn’t catch on in the public imagination.

I think we would have had a much more successful movement had we simply been against that type of behaviour along universal principles. Everybody should have felt compelled to stand for that – not because we, for the moment, are posting black squares and saying ‘Black lives matter’, but because we permanently reject that this can happen to another human being.

Thomas Chatterton Williams was talking to Brendan O’Neill. Watch the full conversation below: