The Death of George Floyd – Five Years on. # 199. 20/05/2025

Out of Many, One people

Welcome. As the anniversary of George Floyd’s death will be widely marked, here is my reflection of what it does and doesn’t stand for. Am I right? Let me know.

The Death of George Floyd – Five Years on.

The death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 at the hands of a white American police officer will become an important date in the history books of the future. Unlike the deaths of Treyvon Martin, Michael Brown and others, which had given energy to the Black Lives Matter movement, Floyd’s death had an impact that has been both continuing and worldwide. We can speculate on how far it was a ‘final straw’ incident that decisively tipped over black rage against the police in the USA, but certainly there were two specific developments that led to Floyd’s death having long-term and far-reaching impact. It was filmed, that is it happened on the rolling swell of smart-phone usage so that incidents which a decade or two earlier would have generated rumour, anger, accusations, rebuttals and distortions had now been filmed for all to see. ‘Racism isn’t getting worse, it has gotten filmed’ commented the actor Will Smith; though filming only ever gives one amongst various vantage points. The subsequently revealed police body camera gave a wider perspective. Secondly Floyd’s death occurred at the beginning of the Covid epidemic and consequent disorientation of people’s lives, time schedules and relationships. Just as many activities were suppressed, so other events could take on heightened significance.

So, with the benefits of a longer perspective, and writing from a British context rather than the United States epicentre, what has characterised the consequences of Floyd’s untimely and tragic death.

George Floyd’s death has led to a ‘racial reckoning’.

As well as a personal tragedy, Floyd’s death has become an iconic moment, initially in the United States and then world-wide, including Britain. One consequence has been to expose to far greater popular view the historical sequence that his death was part of. The reality of recent racism, of its roots in enslavement both in the United States and in Britain’s Caribbean possessions, and then broadening out into the whole history of colonialism and north Atlantic rule over many parts of the world, including the decisive formation of its economic outline – all focussed down onto the specific incident of Floyd’s brutal death.

One consequence has been to popularise the ‘decolonisation’ debate. The old sense of British pride in large areas of the globe being once coloured red has rightly given way to a sense of what that configuration of power may have meant to its subjects. Clearly it involved much arbitrary government, exploitation, brutality and racialised arrogance. Realising of which led to a much-needed loss of innocence for white people. But history writing is a process of endless revisionism. That triumphant Euro-centric versions have been rightly contested does not mean that ‘decolonised’ narratives that highlight the evils of empire should be the enduring ‘true’ story. ‘Empire’ was too geographically variegated and motivationally complex to allow any simple evil/good assessment to hold sway. But one important and enduring consequence of the ‘racial reckoning’ has been that for Britain, as for the USA and the other European colonial powers, our history of global governance needs sober, and often at times, shamed attention.

So too on the more personal and local scale Floyd’s death has led to a change of tone. Someone from a disadvantaged ethnic group was killed by someone from the dominant ethnic group that operated most of the levers of power. Whilst Britain’s differences from the American situation are significant (and widely under-recognised), nonetheless for a society that now recognises that its racial diversity is permanent then the re-evaluation of how far its black minority was subject to discrimination, under-valuation, stereotyping and wilful misunderstanding was long overdue. Whilst firm evidence is difficult to produce, my impression is that George Floyd’s death and its immediate outcry has led to white people seeing the need to clean up our act and be more self-analytic and self-critical about approaches, judgements and attitudes that demean black people; not for the most part in clear, conscious choices but rather in instant responses, valuations and mis-perceptions that fall under the heading of micro-aggressions.

George Floyd’s death has been widely mis-perceived.

The overwhelming perception of Floyd’s death was that it was a ‘racial’ killing – the killing of a black citizen by a white police officer exemplified the true nature of a racist society in the USA, and by extension in Britain. (Though note that one of the supporting officers on the scene was black, regarded apparently as the best candidate of his intake, though now also imprisoned). But the rush to file Floyd’s death under the category of ‘race’ seriously distorts its significance. This is not simply the sort of thing that happens to you if you have a black skin, but never happens to white people. In fact a white man, Tony Timpa, had been killed at police hands in very similar circumstances a few years before.

For leading black figures, including Cabinet ministers and bishops, to have said ‘this could happen to me’, is to wilfully obscure how different their life stories are from Floyd’s. He had been passing counterfeit currency, was severely disorientated by drugs, physically refused to get in the police car, and was already saying ‘I can’t breathe’ whilst still standing. He was not any black man.

To make him ‘typical’ is to ignore the specific social configuration that George Floyd emerged from, and which most black leaders either never knew or have successfully escaped from and left behind. For Floyd, as for many others, it was a configuration marked by abandonment by his father when he was two years old, growing up in a community with poor amenities and lacking positive male role models, an education which offered little to engage his interests apart from his disappointingly unrealised sporting success, ready access to drugs, insecure employment and housing opportunities, his own inability to carry through his fatherhood responsibilities, imprisonment, mental instability and seeking support in the Christian faith; but with tragically unrealised transformative potential. I have met several black men in Britain who resemble this configuration, but a great many more who don’t. Also I have known white men who fit with it. We live in a society were achieving stable, settled adulthood for men of any ethnicity is increasingly fraught because of both structural and cultural factors. Structurally because of reducing employment opportunities for those with few qualifications and with the possibility of having a home of your own on a low income becoming unrealisable; and culturally because the increased availability and acceptability of soft and hard drugs, and a popular climate of sexual irresponsibility that decreases the support of stable family formation all work together to create an anomie and rootlessness which was the dominant theme of George Floyd’s tragically shortened life.

To see his death as characterising ‘race’ on either side of the Atlantic is a damaging misunderstanding. Certainly it connects with ‘race’ and racism to the degree that black men with an enslaved heritage are particularly vulnerable. But race was not the primary factor; rather it was disruption of the process - once much simpler and well-trodden but now increasingly fraught - by which boys proceed to take on the mantle of becoming adult, independent men. It is the social configuration where that process is fractured that lies behind the death of George Floyd.

The response to George Floyd’s death has had damaging consequences.

Mistaken diagnoses lead to damaging responses. Seeing Floyd’s death as caused simply by racism rather than a much broader but specific social configuration has invited responses which have not been particularly helpful and at times have been damaging.

* A mis-placed white guilt reaction.

The racial reckoning following Floyd’s death rightly caused white people to look at ourselves and identify the many ways – personal, structural, global – in which we had treated black people unjustly. The result was undue haste by white authorities to get on board and demonstrate their anti-racist credentials. Unhappily this occurred under the dominance of an ‘anti-racist’ mindset which saw white racism as the only player in the game so that any disparity was the consequence of racist decisions that disadvantaged black people. The result was an anti-racist mindset where inequalities could only be due to racism. The virtuous corrective was to maximise black appointments. Black people were chosen for senior positions, black authors were published, black speakers invited – all indications that we are now penitent anti-racists. The nonsensical illusion that all ethnicities had equal capabilities in every field after white racist lenses had been removed meant that it was illicit to ask about quality. So, as senior black academics such as Glenn Loury have observed, their genuine professional excellence was invalidated. Any and every black hire could be invalidated as a DEI appointment. The outcome was that white institutions determined to show anti-racist credentials by appointing a black person – whether of high or less-than-high quality - as a token of their virtue, achieved ‘moral’ status at the cost of de-stabilising the deserved status of black people. Overwhelmingly white institutions came out smelling of roses, black appointees forever bore question marks as to whether they were appointed by virtue of colour or capability.

One consequence of its desire to hear ‘black voices’ without seriously interrogating their value is that the Church of England has saddled itself with two reports – from ‘The Fund for Healing, Repair and justice’, and ‘Behind the Stained Glass’ (blogs # 151 & # 185) – of inferior quality which at best deserve a C- evaluation, but are now an albatross around its neck.

The cost of over-moralising race is misleading simplification. If brute white racism was the problem, the answer is to get on board by resisting it. In effect, this has meant a return to the 1960s and the heroic days of the Civil Rights movement when the distinction between the goodies and the baddies was then clear for all the world to see. As one small example, St Paul’s cathedral has recently given substantial attention to the 60^th anniversary of Martin Luther King preaching there – an attention that I don’t recall being given to the 50^th anniversary, but the racial reckoning since then has caused them to foreground it. All honour to King and his heroic and life-costing struggle. But those days and that situation is well past. As noted above, the context in which George Floyd died isn’t that simple. He was a victim of a much more complex set of circumstances than a black man simply being oppressed by a white society. As noted in last week’s blog on the Policy Exchange report ‘A Portrait of Modern Britain’ social class is now a much more determinative outcome of social well-being than race. But also a much more difficult and elusive issue for the Church of England to engage with. When the Policy Exchange report advocated for improvements to further the socio-economic integration of ethnic minorities ‘in terms of on-the-ground career advice in urban communities, having the tools to build mainstream professional contacts, and navigating the competitiveness of the labour market’, it continued to add appositely ‘This also applies for ‘left-behind’, post-industrial working-class areas with predominantly white-British populations’ (p 25).

* Unhelpfully strengthening a black grievance narrative.

As with white guilt, this narrative is not entirely wrong. There are multiple causes for black grievance. But over-playing them can have damaging consequences. Indeed, fatal ones. Abuse of black people for experimentation by the medical profession in the past was re-surfaced to provide a narrative to refuse inoculation against Covid. I know of a black church leader who died as a consequence. Similarly the post George Floyd move to ‘defund the police’ led to a reduced police presence in many predominantly black areas in America with a consequent upsurge in black deaths through violence.

The five years since Floyd’s death have seen not only the rise but also the fall of black advocacy movements. One of the main beneficiaries was Ibram X Kendi, an academic who headed up the Boston University’s Centre for Anti-Racist Research, which received $43 million dollars of funding (Jack Dorsey of Twitter gave $10m - a further example of white institutions trying to buff up their anti-racist credentials whilst paying minimal attention to the hard work of discerning what might actually benefit black people). By 2023 the Centre was closed down with concerns over Kendi’s management style and that its meagre outcome was not worthy of its wealth.

Meanwhile Black Lives Matter itself has been mired in scandal over its misuse of funds. In 2020 they received$10.6 million in gifts and grants, whilst the BLM Global Network received a staggering $90 million, but once more there has been widespread discontent that the outcome is minor compared with the money received.

White people in the USA and Britain who see themselves as being on the right side of history by accepting George Floyd as straightforwardly a victim of racist white society - rather than his tragic life being an outcome of both economic injustices that affect the poor and of cultural patterns that hinder the poor from escaping poverty – have accepted a narrative that no longer fits current realities, but instead are accepting a moralistic, rhetorical and sentimental version that since 2020 has brought little benefit to the overwhelming majority of black people.