Despite broad popular support for legislation to curtail police violence, Congress got nothing done. Democrats, despite controlling both the House and Senate in 2021 and 2022, slow-walked the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, insisting on bipartisan support that never materialized. Ending qualified immunity, the legal standard that prevents police officers from being sued for wrongdoing even when they knowingly break the law, was deemed not urgent by Jim Clyburn, then the highest-ranking Black member of the Democratic House majority, despite that being a core demand of the protest movement. Once that slipped away, it opened the door to even smaller reforms floating out of reach.
In the end, despite the embarrassing photo op in which Democratic leaders donned matching kente-cloth stoles and knelt on the floor of the Capitol building, no reforms were passed into law. After much hand-wringing over activists’ use of the slogan “Defund the Police,” no major efforts to defund large police departments were ever implemented. Police killings continued to increase: Officers killed at least 1,232 people in 2023, the deadliest year in a decade.
Now not even a single representative who swept into Congress on the heels of the popular mandate of police reform remains.
It’s a stark outcome. Consider, for example, Georgia Rep. John Lewis, an activist during the Civil Rights Movement and the leader of the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, Alabama. Lewis continued his activist work for years afterward, arriving in Congress only in the 1980s, but he served 17 terms as a celebrated member of the Democratic House caucus until his death in 2020.
Worth noting, this opinion piece came out before Ilhan Omar’s primary took place, which she ended up winning
e; wrong archive link
Yeah…
Look at all the people who get REAL fucking pissy if you say “LGBT” instead of “LGB”
And as for racial equality? At the same time people were acknowledging the systemic prejudice against black people (but not acknowledging TOO hard because still gotta get theirs) EVERYONE, left and right, were making snide remarks about how COVID was China’s fault and Asian elders were being attacked in the street. And we were told to shut up because it was detracting from the real issues. And… we did because that is what we have been trained to do.
The BLM protests were a beautiful thing and I marched as part of my state efforts. But, like with most activist movements, it was immediately forgotten once something else happened (or, in this case, we were allowed outside again). But it was incredibly specific and mostly just highlighted people’s inability to care about multiple things at a time.
But hey, we solved racism in the same exact way we solved sexuality and gender!
Less ‘allowed out’ and more ‘forced to return to work’. Good luck getting mass unemployment when another pandemic happens (when, not if). People not being wage slaves worried about their survival opens up a lot of dangerous freedom to demand change.