It appears that the turn the United States took in 2020 in recognizing and addressing its systemic racism was just another dead end — an illusion that provided the nation with a brief feel-good moment and nothing more. Despite all the promises to tackle discrimination in education, employment, housing, and law enforcement amid the COVID-19 pandemic, massive Black Lives Matter protests, and a particularly contentious presidential election in 2020, little has actually been achieved in bridging the deep racial rifts in American society.
It seems that all the promises American leaders made four years ago were just a bid for the moment. President Joe Biden said after his election in 2020, “We can do racial justice,” but his promise was clearly hollow. Biden hoped the national conversation would change, America would get back to business as usual, and its pervasive racism problem would be put on the back burner.
It is no surprise that all the ambitious promises of anti-racism were abandoned in just a few years, as this has happened many times before in American history.
For example, just a few months after passage of the Civil Rights Act in December 1964, Malcolm X told a crowd at Oxford University that he did not expect the bill to bring any meaningful change.
,[T]In 1964, the same thing is happening to us as happened in 1954, 1924 and 1884…No matter how many bills are passed, [Black people’s] Life is not worth even two paise.”
2024 could easily be described as “same as it was” when it comes to the issue of persistent racism and discrimination in America.
Yes, 2020 saw unprecedented protests and equally unprecedented promises from US leaders to deliver racial justice. Yet, in a June 2024 Pew Research survey, three out of four African Americans said they still experience discrimination “regularly” or “from time to time”, and “these experiences make them feel like the system is built for their failure”. Washington Post-Ipsos Voting Meanwhile, April showed that a third of black people believe integration has not “improved the quality of education received by black students,” mostly because persistent residential segregation has defeated school desegregation efforts. Whether it’s 1964 or 2024, the half-measures and mediocre promises made by the federal government and other American institutions to tackle systemic racism are not to be trusted.
It’s hard to believe that just four years ago, the United States experienced what some considered a sea change in social justice. The police killings of Black Americans like Breonna Taylor and especially George Floyd led to months of Black Lives Matter-driven protests demanding the abolition of the police and defunding of law enforcement. Cities like Minneapolis and Washington DC Many initially believed this was a commitment to eliminate funding of law enforcement in favor of mental health services and other forms of nonviolent de-escalation for vulnerable populations.
But in the four years since, every major city where some progress has been made to “defund the police” has increased its law enforcement budget. The Biden administration has pledged billions of dollars to “fund the police more.” Barely a year after massive protests, politicians in Minneapolis, Portland, Oregon, and Congress abandoned those early commitments, citing a rise in crime in 2021. Despite all the talk about restorative justice, leaders across the US have chosen the same racist, classist, and ableist policing that led to the murder of George Floyd in 2020. All this while ignoring that the drop in crime rates actually came alongside a drop in law enforcement employment — through retirements and resignations — in the cities that saw it.
In 2020, Americans saw many people make commitments to take “anti-racist” action. Corporations and private entities invested millions of their dollars in programming around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). They invited leading anti-racist scholars like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo to speak at workshops and trainings, and poured money into anti-racism and DEI centers located in NGOs and universities with the intention of “eradicating racism once and for all.”
Four years later, as Black Lives Matter signs have begun to fade on the front lawns of liberal Americans, so have efforts to dismantle endemic and systemic racism through DEI trainings and anti-racism workshops. For example, Kendi’s Boston University Center for Antiracism Research “went from raising $40 million in 2020 to raising a fraction of that — $420,000 — in 2021.”
Some critics across the political spectrum have accused Kendi, DiAngelo, and others involved in anti-racism work of being opportunists, even frauds. Meanwhile, powerful Americans on the right have used their deep discomfort with anti-racism work and DEI programs to attack and restrict such efforts.
Since 2021, more than 12 states have passed laws to reduce or eliminate DEI-related programs in K-12 education, public colleges and universities, as well as businesses and NGOs that intend to use state or federal funds for such purposes. Commitment to DEI in the private sector has also decreased. According to data collected by Revelio Labs, “DEI jobs peaked in early 2023, then fell five percent that year”, and another 8 percent in the first two months of 2024. People from various political backgrounds have also come out against any race-based program that excludes white people. A federal district court recently ruled unconstitutional a venture capital fund created to help Black women become entrepreneurs, which the plaintiffs deemed “racist”.
It seems the only permanent change from 2020 is that the US has the additional holiday of Juneteenth, an unapologetic apology by the federal government for an additional 90 years of slavery of African people. Also, a two-block stretch of 16th Street in northwest Washington, DC, has been renamed by the city as Black Lives Matter Plaza.
On June 20, Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama hosted its first Major League Baseball (MLB) game in honor of the old Negro Leagues and their stars. The tribute coincided with MLB’s decision to finally combine all Negro League records with all MLB records, a move that should have happened decades ago, as the percentage of Black Major Leaguers has dropped from 18 percent in 1991 to 5.7 percent today. During the pregame broadcast on Fox Sports, Hall of Famer and all-time great Reggie Jackson talked about his memories of playing minor league baseball in Birmingham in 1967. “It’s not easy coming back here. The racism when I played here…I wouldn’t wish that on anybody…I’d go to a hotel and they’d say ‘That’s the way I played.’ [n-word] “I can’t live here,” Jackson, 78, said.
The forced segregation and racial discrimination that 21-year-old Reggie Jackson faced in 1967 is also happening to rich and famous black people like molecular biologist Dr. Raven Baxter and actor Wendell Pierce in 2024. In May, Dr. Baxter posted on X”My real estate agent’s broker called me at 9pm on a Friday to tell me the seller did not want to sell me a house because I was black,” this happened after a contract was negotiated and a downpayment for a home in Virginia Beach, Virginia. A few weeks later, Pierce, of The Wire, Treme, Suits and Jack Ryan fame, reported a similar experience. “Despite my proof of employment, bank statements and real estate holdings, a white apartment owner denied my application to rent an apartment… in Harlem, of all places,” Pierce posted on X in early June. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 be damned, as well as the additional Civil Rights Act of 1968. [PDF]which specifically prohibits housing discrimination, and the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. At least as far as America’s mesh of systemic racism goes.
Malcolm X was right. The federal government, private corporations, and colleges and universities will never do the hard work of dismantling the systems and structures that allow racism to thrive. Whatever anti-racism efforts they make are half-hearted, mostly symbolic, and extremely short-lived. To this middle-aged black man of nanosecond fame, that means my and my 21-year-old son’s chances of seeing America turn a new corner on race might be equivalent to a 300 million-to-one shot of winning the Powerball jackpot.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
