Black Lives Mattered. Then America Moved On

It’s official: Black lives don’t matter any more, if they ever truly did.

Four years ago, a white man suffocated George Floyd, a Black man, to death on a gritty Minneapolis street corner as bystanders begged for mercy. That brutal killing of an unarmed Floyd — caught on camera — turbocharged the Black Lives Matter movement, put the phrase “white privilege” into the national lexicon and inspired philanthropists to throw bushels of money at social justice nonprofits.

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Monday brought us yet another reminder of how fleeting that reckoning truly was when a white man was found not guilty of suffocating Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old Black man, to death on the floor of a grimy New York subway train as bystanders called for mercy.

The acquittal of Daniel Penny — already a vigilante hero among the far right — comes just weeks after Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris for the presidency in a racist campaign, Walmart became the biggest U.S. employer to shut down its DEI program, and social justice nonprofits realized philanthropists are closing their checkbooks to avoid Trump’s enemies list.

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Now that he’s been acquitted, Penny is likely to become the next hero of the far right, a soon-to-be Fox News icon who saved the day by selflessly killing a mentally ill, homeless, unarmed Black man because the man made people feel unsafe.

But the verdict slams the door on the George Floyd Era, all five metaphorical minutes of it.

Examples abound: the Supreme Court’s dismantling of affirmative action in college admissions; state and local laws restricting the teaching of Black history; corporations turning their backs on diversity, equity and inclusion.

Last week, two white police officers were acquitted for killing Herman Whitfield III, an unarmed Black man who died after they restrained and tased him to death.

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When Floyd was murdered, it set off protests worldwide, and Chauvin’s trial drew international coverage. By contrast, the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter could barely scrape together more than a handful of protesters to demonstrate during Penny’s trial.

Ginia Bellafonte, a columnist for the New York Times, noted that 38 years ago, in the same Manhattan courthouse, subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, a white man, was acquitted for shooting four young black men on the subway whom he thought was going to rob him; a Times poll found a majority of New Yorkers agreed with the verdict.

In 2013, a juror who voted to acquit George Zimmerman of murder charges for killing Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager, said she had no doubt Zimmerman, a self-styled neighborhood vigilante, feared for his life. And study after study shows Black males are typically seen as larger and more threatening than they actually are.

In other words, in 1977 and 2013, juries have told white men it’s OK to use deadly force if you believe a young Black man is going to harm you. George Floyd’s murder was supposed to change all that.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.