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.
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…
