Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. This week was the fifth anniversary, May 25, of the tragic death of George Floyd.
It seems that it just happened but it was actually five years ago. And almost everything that has transpired after that in terms of racial relations has been disastrous. And now, maybe at the end of five years, we can look back with a little bit more circumspection and see what actually happened.
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George Floyd was a career felon. He was in the process of trying to pass off counterfeit bills. He was reportedly under the influence of severe, powerful drugs, perhaps fentanyl, in addition. He may have been suffering from post-COVID-19 syndromes. He had a heart condition. One of his prior felonies was putting a gun to a woman’s belly in a home invasion.
Nevertheless, when he tried to pass this counterfeit bill, the store owner called the Minneapolis police. They tried to arrest him. He resisted arrest. He was a very big man. And then Officer Derek Chauvin, who was supposedly an expert in techniques that were institutionalized by the Minneapolis Police Department, unfortunately, put his knee on George Floyd’s neck. And there were varying autopsies. One said that killed him. Another one, perhaps, said it didn’t.
But nevertheless, the expression on Officer Chauvin’s face was frozen into eternity. And that sparked the idea that he was a white policeman conducting a typical murder of an unarmed black suspect. And what followed was near mayhem.
Officer Chauvin, remember, was convicted of second- or third-degree murder. He was sentenced to 20 years. His appeals have run out with the Supreme Court. He’ll be in prison probably for much of his life. George Floyd, of course, died at the hospital or on the way to the hospital.
And what happened immediately was this huge riot, five years ago. Unlike the Jan. 6 riot, this thing went on for the end of May, June, July, August, September. Remember, former Vice President Kamala Harris said it wasn’t going to stop, nor should it stop. It’s going to keep going to Election Day. She said that, of course. Then later, when called on it, she said she didn’t mean the violent aspect.
But violent aspects there were. There was $2 billion in damage. There was a police precinct burned to the ground in Minneapolis. There was a federal courthouse that was burned. There was a historic St. John’s Church—across from the White House—that was torched. A mob tried to go into the White House grounds and reach the president.
But even more serious than all of that, we were coming off COVID-19. People had been in a lockdown. There had been a national quarantine. And their news was from the television in an isolated situation in their own home with no human interaction.
So, these riots were kind of an expression of breaking out. And more importantly, they were subject to rumor, suspicion, lies. And one of the great lies was that George Floyd was iconic or emblematic of young black men, middle-aged black men that were systematically being killed while unarmed by the police. That was not true. The Washington Post even said it wasn’t.
That year there were only 18 black males who were stopped by the police in the entire population of 340 million people. This year there were only 10. It was proportionate to the number of people by race who were stopped by the police, 11 million or 12 million each year.
Professor Ibram X. Kendi and professor Robin DiAngelo, or journalist DiAngelo, they created this idea of systemic racism. And you had to be racist in an anti-racist fashion. In other words, the only way to deal with this systemic racism was to be pro-black.
And what followed then was a defunding of the police. It caused a huge spike in crime. I think 20,000 murders in 2020. The Black Lives Matter group was energized. And now as we look back at it, the architects of that movement have ensconced with the money. It has collapsed. The women that were in charge have, apparently, embezzled the money or taken it. They have nice homes. But it’s an inert group.
It had a lot of other deleterious effects. Universities trying to get in on the virtue signaling and performance-art caring dropped the SAT. They dropped the comparative ranking of high school GPA. They dropped meritocracy. They started really enforcing DEI, in the sense of loyalty owes—you have to show us that you’re loyal to the concept of DEI, that you’ve done something for it, or we’re not going to hire you. And the universities then went into something that we could call repertory admissions.
Fast forward five years, looking back, and looking at all the damage of the downtowns in America—many of them that were destroyed. Today they have not recovered, in many cases. Look at the intense dissension and acrimony and racial relations that related to it. Look at the universities who were chastised by the Supreme Court for using race in a racist fashion in admissions. They’ve been discredited. And the people who capitalize on the death of George Floyd are, for the most part, discredited.
And the country now is learning its lessons. It’s trying to find a sober solution, a reaction. I think they’re trying—we’re trying to come to a conclusion. Why in the world did we go completely collectively insane? And the result of that is we don’t think the quarantines were a good idea. They were more injurious to the country than was COVID-19 itself.
We don’t think and we know that the police should be defunded. Much less are they attacking black unarmed males. Just the opposite is happening.
We look at the career of professor Kendi, he went through $45 million at Boston University for an anti-racism center. And apparently, the money was squandered. I mentioned the BLM squandering.
So, we’re getting back to the idea that, when you use race in any fashion, for bias or preference, it’s racist. It doesn’t matter what professor Kendi says or it doesn’t matter about the reactions to the death of George Floyd, it’s racist.
As far as George Floyd is concerned, had Officer Chauvin not had that expression on his face and had he lifted his knee up when George Floyd said he couldn’t breathe, this entire catastrophe probably could have been avoided—or maybe not because there were people who were looking for an occasion like this to spread mayhem and to recalibrate race relations in the United States into what they would call anti-racism. Which means it’s permissible for someone who considers themself a victim to be a victimizer. If you think you’re a victim of racism, then you can use racial preferences yourself with impunity.
In any case, it was a sad chapter in American history.
Victor Davis Hanson, a senior contributor for The Daily Signal, is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and host of “The Victor Davis Hanson Show.” His website, The Blade of Perseus, features columns, lectures, and exclusive content for subscribers
Reproduced with permission. Original here: The Lasting Damage of the George Floyd Riots
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