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GEORGE FLOYD: ONE YEAR LATER

‘Racial Battle Fatigue,’ and 365 Days of Trauma

Mainstream support for Black Lives Matter has waned. But for Black people, the fight continues — and so does the agony.

Arionne Nettles
ZORA
Published in
9 min readMay 24, 2021

A makeshift memorial for George Floyd fills with flowers and candles nearly a year after his brutal killing by Minneapolis police. Photo: Getty Images

It is now a year after the murder of George Floyd, and Black people are still exhausted.

“There’s something called racial battle fatigue, and it is the exhaustion that comes from event after event, assault after assault,” says Thema Bryant-Davis, a professor of psychology at Pepperdine University and the director of the university’s Culture and Trauma Research Center. “Because although this milestone is very significant, there have been many others right before that and after that.”

Death at the hands of police has not stopped. Since May 26, 2020 — the day after former officer Derek Chauvin killed Floyd — police have killed at least 223 Black people, according to data by the group Mapping Police Violence. Incidents caught on camera continue to dominate our timelines, and just miles away from where Floyd was killed, another Minneapolis, Minnesota, officer, Kim Potter, shot and killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright.

Yet even as police killings have continued, after last year’s widespread protests against police brutality, mainstream support for the Black Lives Matter movement has significantly waned. And despite last summer’s protests spreading to mostly White counties throughout the country, that energy didn’t last. As FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of Civiqs survey data shows, White Americans’ support has lowered to where it was before Floyd’s death. For Black Americans, though, the fight has continued — and so has the trauma.

Rep. Karen Bass (D-California) and Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) speak briefly to reporters following a May 18, 2021, meeting about police reform in Washington, D.C. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Floyd’s impact on criminal justice

For some Black people, like U.S. Rep. Karen Bass, bringing lasting change means changing laws. Bass designed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — a police reform bill that, among other things, limits qualified immunity for police officers and creates a national database of police misconduct complaints. The…

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ZORA
ZORA

Published in ZORA

A publication from Medium that centers the stories, poetry, essays and thoughts of women of color.

Arionne Nettles
Arionne Nettles

Written by Arionne Nettles

Arionne Nettles is a lecturer at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, a Chicago-based journalist, and a special needs mama.

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While we're reflecting on 2020, might be a good time to remind ourselves that more Asians died at the hands of Black Americans than Black Americans murdered by police. I mean.. only if we care about fair representation of facts, of course