Five Years After George Floyd, the Backlash Is the Policy

How the system struck back — and won.

In the days after George Floyd’s murder, the country stood still—then erupted. Millions filled the streets in the largest protest movement in American history. Corporate America mouthed the language of justice. Elected officials knelt in kente cloth. For a brief moment, the old architecture of American power looked ready to shift. That illusion didn't last long.

Five years later, we’re not debating whether change has come. We’re watching how quickly it was buried. The reckoning didn’t fail. It was undone—methodically, and in plain sight.

The protests of 2020 left behind murals, statements, and slogans. They gave us new language, but not new laws. In fact, the most basic measure of progress—lives lost—has worsened.

Police killed 1,365 people in 2024, the highest number on record. Black Americans remain nearly three times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans. And the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, heralded as the legislative crown jewel of the movement, never made it past the Senate.

What we got instead was cultural theater—followed by political retreat.

On May 21, 2025, the Department of Justice dismissed its lawsuits and consent decrees against the police departments of Minneapolis and Louisville, the very cities where George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed. These were meant to be long-term federal interventions—binding roadmaps for reform. But the DOJ called them “overbroad” and closed the cases. Investigations in Phoenix, Memphis, and elsewhere were dropped as well. The federal government has quietly exited the business of police reform. No hearings. No speeches. Just silence.

That silence is policy now.

Over the past five years, state legislatures have passed waves of anti-CRT bills and gag orders aimed at stifling racial discourse in classrooms and workplaces. In 2024 and 2025, three federal executive orders dismantled DEI programs across every agency of government—fulfilling a vision Donald Trump first laid out when he threatened to send militarized federal police into American cities. The movement called for demilitarization. The backlash is preparing to rearm.

The tragedy isn’t just that we failed to change the system. It’s that the system changed us.

Five years ago, Americans rose up demanding accountability. Today, the institutions they challenged are stronger than ever, while the demands themselves have been made unspeakable. The backlash didn’t merely outlast the movement—it outmaneuvered it.

We should remember George Floyd. But we should also remember how quickly this country made it easier to forget.