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00:00Moving on now, it has been five years since three words, I can't breathe, ignited a worldwide reckoning, really, with racial justice.
00:08Now, those were the final words of George Floyd, captured on camera as police officer Derek Chauvin held his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes, ultimately resulting in his death.
00:18Now, his killing and the perceived widespread systemic racism leading up to it ignited unprecedented calls for change, both in the United States and abroad.
00:27But Donald Trump's return to the White House has made the movement's legacy increasingly uncertain.
00:33So for a closer look than five years on, I have the pleasure of welcoming Crystal Fleming on the program.
00:39She is a professor of Africana Studies at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
00:43Professor Fleming, thank you so much for joining us today.
00:46So before we get to the legacy, there were, of course, numerous high-profile killings of unarmed black men, even children, between the years of 2012 and 2018.
00:55Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, the list goes on.
00:59So why do you think the movement that arose out of George Floyd's death was different than the others?
01:06You know, you're right.
01:07There were numerous black men, but also black women, who have been killed by police over the course of many years.
01:16I think with George Floyd, part of what happened was that video of almost, you know, nine minutes, nine minutes of watching this man be killed by the police.
01:27And I think it shocked the consciousness of people, millions of people across the world.
01:32And so the outpouring that we saw that was intergenerational, that was multiracial, that was global, the outpouring of compassion and outrage was, I think, directly connected to the fact that so many people watched that horrifying, those horrifying images and heard, you know, him struggling and articulating the words, you know, I can't breathe.
01:57And so I think, you know, in terms of the history of what's happened since then, I think it's important to be clear that Donald Trump doesn't get to define the legacy of the black freedom struggle and the Black Lives Matter movement included.
02:13And what we're seeing now, five years later, is that while there's been a dip in the number of Americans who say they support Black Lives Matter, it's about 15 percent lower now than it was in June of 2020, over half of those polled in the United States still support the black freedom struggle.
02:34And I think that it's not enough, clearly, but it's also a number that we need to be cognizant of.
02:41There are tens of millions of people in the United States, more than half of those, again, polled, who support Black Lives Matter today.
02:50And so the struggle continues.
02:52Professor Fleming, those numbers that you mentioned there are all the more interesting now because back in 2020, the extremes aside, there was general consensus that what happened to George Floyd was indeed unacceptable,
03:03including from some of the most conservative voices, people like, you know, Ben Shapiro.
03:07But the narrative around George Floyd's death has shifted radically in recent months.
03:12So what is it about this case that makes it so easy or even desirable to exploit by the right, given, again, those numbers that you just gave there about the fact that, you know,
03:21more than half of Americans still support a racial justice movement?
03:26Well, I think that, frankly, they're afraid.
03:28And when the world saw, again, the largest, you know, mass protests, I think, in the history of the United States, but also the global protests, and we know this happened in France also, you know, linking what was happening in the United States to the global struggle for racial justice, reactionaries got scared.
03:51And they used the tools of misinformation, disinformation, and fear-mongering to try to push back, right, on the progress that's being made to raise awareness and to enact policies to address centuries of racial inequity and injustice.
04:11And so I think that's what happened.
04:12The fact is protest matters.
04:16Racial literacy matters.
04:17And we know this.
04:19I wrote a book called How to Be Less Stupid About Race, and I and about 300 other authors earlier this spring saw that our books were banned from the Naval Academy Library.
04:31First of all, I think it's important that our books were acquired by the library.
04:34That matters, too.
04:35But my book, Maya Angelou's work, books about the Holocaust were removed from this library.
04:41And this is part, as you know, of a larger effort from the Trump administration to ban and censor scholarship and writing, again, that can turn knowledge into power.
04:55So they're afraid, and they should be, because the struggle for racial justice continues and is not going to be abated despite the backlash that we're seeing today.
05:04From a legislative perspective and before Donald Trump took office, what kind of reforms had been passed in the United States since George Floyd's killing?
05:15Well, one of the problems we've seen both before and after the killing of George Floyd is that, you know, there's this framework around police reform that really is limited in terms of the transformation that it can bring about for racial justice.
05:33And so a number of things that we've seen in the United States since the killing of George Floyd, whether it was a rise in awareness around the discourse of moving funding from police departments to social services and education or federal oversight over police departments that have a documented history of racial abuses and violence.
05:58Those policies and those narratives are being virulently attacked and rolled back by the Trump administration.
06:07And so, you know, we remain in the United States in a situation where those who are advocates for justice understand that reform is not enough,
06:17that we need a massive transformation that elevates lives over property and over investments in militarized police and that we need social services and education that benefits all people in the United States.
06:36And it's really important also to know that part of the backlash against Black Lives Matter is also deeply connected to the weaponization of ICE right now.
06:45And what's happening with the Trump administration, their efforts to, you know, flout the rule of law to deport individuals, mainly those who are not of European descent.
06:59But not only, we see that it's, you know, being weaponized in multiple directions to engage in restrictive immigration policies and horrific deportations.
07:09So, again, there's a lot of work to do. Reform is not enough.
07:14And advocates on the ground, as well as community members across the country, continue the hard work of advancing racial justice.
07:23Professor Fleming, we just have less than a minute left, but I do want to ask you, because you mentioned the backlash there, given the backlash that we've seen to those unprecedented movements,
07:31do you think that there is space for or even a need for some soul searching on the part of progressives about how they can adapt their narrative to the paradigm shift that we've seen under Donald Trump?
07:44I think there is ample room for soul searching across the board.
07:49I think there needs to be a reckoning around why tens of millions of Americans support racial justice, and yet tens of millions of others support white supremacist violence, inequity and injustice.
08:05And I think that is something that we have to reckon with.
08:09Progressives, of course, are almost always, I think, engaged in a lot of soul searching and trying to figure out, you know, how to create more, you know, massive movements that support equity and social services and justice.
08:26But I think, on the other hand, conservative and extremist right-wing movements, we also have to reckon with and do some soul searching around why that remains so seductive, again, for millions of Americans.
08:42Professor Crystal Fleming, thank you so very much for coming on the show today.