George Floyd’s Murder: Two Years Later

“The murder rate in Minneapolis nearly hit a record last year with 96 homicides, double the number from 2019. That increase coincided with a mass exodus from the police department. More than 300 officers out of 825 have quit since Mr. Floyd’s death.

To the visitor, the lack of order is most readily apparent in George Floyd Square. The barriers that blocked traffic during the past two years are gone, but the four-block area is still essentially an autonomous zone… The city has proposed refurbishing the square as a community plaza, but the mixture of racial-justice activists, residents, and local gangs vying for control make it unlikely.

“This is still an active protest space,” says activist Susan Heineman. “So we say, ‘Meet our demands and then we’ll talk.’ ”

Those demands include firing numerous city leaders, ending qualified immunity for police officers, and giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to the various groups occupying George Floyd Square. According to a manifesto posted in the square, activists won’t consent to the community-plaza proposal because “the George Floyd Memorial is first and foremost a place of protest, not commissioned by the City but by the people against the City.”

This sort of intransigence will keep Minneapolis from healing, says Don Samuels, a former city councilman, who has emerged as the leader of a criminal-justice reform movement that explicitly rejects defunding the city’s police. Mr. Samuels, who marched in the initial protests after Floyd’s death, says that as soon as he saw rioting begin, he understood that the movement would be hijacked by extremists…

Mr. Samuels still thinks there is a path to recovery, though it will be difficult for cooler heads to prevail.”

“For American progressives, evil only comes in one color—white; woke progressives have bought into a worldview in which people are classified and persecuted entirely due to their racial genome.

This orthodoxy is dangerous and divisive. It's also fundamentally wrong. The truth of the matter is, Americans have never been less deserving of being called racist than we are today…

Most Americans are not racist. Roughly three in four Americans—including whites, Republicans, and independents—regard racial diversity as "very good" for the country.

Such progress does not fit well with what President Biden promised in his inaugural address would be a central commitment of his presidency: to focus on the "sting of systemic racism" and encroaching "white supremacy." With these sentiments, the President was reprising an elitist vision that took hold during the Obama years… that people be appointed to high office in large part based on race…

Obama's failure, like Biden's, lies in focusing on symbols rather than on material issues like class. Of course, it's good that legal and social barriers have fallen for racial minorities, but even in the best of times, our economy fails many minorities as well as working people in general…

These fundamental problems cannot be addressed by genuflecting to the increasingly discredited Black Lives Matter movement… or by issuing confessional mea culpas about racism and embracing Critical Race Theory. The real problem—for minorities and many other Americans—lies in the economic challenge faced by working class people. Minorities make up over 40 percent of the nation's working class and will constitute the majority by 2032. Without them, our country's labor shortage and issues with aging would be far worse.

Instead of confessions about our inner racism, we would do better to focus on how to create better prospects for these Americans.”