Progress Is Not Permanent

George Floyd, backlash, and what history keeps trying to teach us.

Yesterday marked another anniversary of George Floyd’s death.

I remember watching the video and feeling sick.

I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean physically sick. You know exactly what I’m talking about. The knot in your stomach. The heaviness in your chest. The elevated heart rate.

I remember staring at my screen waiting for somebody to intervene. Another officer. A bystander. Anybody. Because your mind keeps searching for the moment where this stops being real. The moment somebody pulls him off the pavement and says, enough.

But the moment never came.

I knew police violence against Black people wasn’t new. Black communities had been telling these stories for generations. Naming realities much of white America had learned how to avoid, reinterpret, or explain away. Still, there was something about watching George Floyd die in broad daylight, under the knee of a police officer, while people pleaded for mercy, that felt impossible to unsee.

And then there was the response from so much of the white American church.
That part still unsettles with me.

It wasn’t that every church got it wrong. Many pastors and congregations listened. Just as many marched and lamented. Some did the hard work of looking honestly at things they had spent year avoiding.

But I also watched Christians move frighteningly fast toward defensiveness. They moved toward caveats, toward protecting institutions and political identities and personal comfort with a speed that was incredibly shocking.

I watched people parse property damage faster than they grieved a dead Black man. I watched Christians who preach compassion become experts in tone policing. They started demanding perfect protest etiquette from communities carrying generations of trauma.

How are we arguing about this?

How are we debating whether racism shapes American life while millions of people are grieving in plain sight?

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A few days later, there was a march here in my city.

I went with the lead pastor I was on staff with at the time. We stood in a crowd of thousands. Handmade signs. Families. Clergy collars. Teenagers. Older folks who had probably never attended a protest in their lives. Sweat running down faces in the Florida heat. Strangers talking to strangers like they’d known each other for years. The kind of moment where, for a minute, the usual lines between people seemed thinner than they had been before.

At one point, the speaker asked the crowd if they were feeling hopeless.

Without hesitation, my pastor turned toward me and said, no.

I knew what he meant.

He was looking out at that crowd and seeing possibility. Seeing people who had shown up. People paying attention. People refusing to look away. I understood that instinct. Standing there, it was hard not to feel the gravity of that many bodies gathered around grief, anger, and the fragile belief that things could be different.

But the speed of his answer caught me off guard.

He didn’t pause. Didn’t wrestle with the question for even a second. Didn’t seem to register that the question might land differently depending on the life someone had lived or the body they moved through. Didn’t consider that for some of the Black and brown people standing around us, hopelessness might not have been a theoretical question posed from a microphone. It might have been familiar. Personal. Something they had learned to carry long before the rest of us arrived at this moment.

Hope wasn’t necessarily the first thing everyone was feeling.

For some people, hope was labor. Hope was costly. Hope was something held onto with tired hands because letting go wasn’t an option.

I didn’t say anything.

I just stood there beside him, watching him take in the crowd, feeling both the sincerity of his hope and the limits of it at the same time.

And somewhere in that moment, I felt a distance between us neither of us had language for yet.

That distance was its own kind of answer.

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And yet, there was still hope. I’m talking about real hope.

Not the shallow kind built on a trending hashtag or a corporate statement everyone forgets three weeks later.

The feeling that maybe enough people had finally seen enough. That maybe, just maybe, this country was willing to tell itself the truth about race, power, history, policing, inequality… all of it. Standing there in that crowd, change didn’t feel inevitable. But it felt possible in a way I hadn’t felt before. It felt tangible… almost close enough to touch.

That’s part of why this moment feels so hard to name. Just look around now.
The language shifted fast.

Words like equity, diversity, and inclusion moved from mission statements, classrooms, boardrooms, and sermon series into the crosshairs of political warfare. DEI programs disappeared. Books disappeared. Historical truth became negotiable again. Efforts to dilute Black political power gained traction. Representation became something people talked about like it was a luxury instead of a safeguard hard won through generations of struggle.

None of this is theoretical. Between January and August of 2025, Black women lost roughly 251,000 jobs. Which is more than half of all job losses among women during that stretch.

Don’t be in a hurry to move past that.
Sit with it.

Those numbers represent rent payments that suddenly became impossible math. Parents staring at grocery bills and childcare costs with feeling sick to their stomach. People refreshing job sites late at night after putting their kids to bed. Communities already navigating wage gaps, wealth gaps, healthcare inequities, and systemic barriers getting hit again.

Black unemployment climbed. Black-owned small businesses took disproportionate hits as economic policy shifted. Those aren’t abstract economic indicators.

Those are livelihoods.
Those are dreams people spent years building.
Those are families trying to stay afloat in systems that have rarely offered them the same margin for error.

That’s before you even touch the quieter damage. The exhaustion of watching hard-fought gains become political talking points. The message sent when representation is treated like a problem to solve instead of a public good to protect. The cumulative weight of living in a country that continually asks people of color to prove, again, that their dignity, safety, history, and participation matter.

This isn’t just a policy conversation. This is about real people carrying real consequences in their bodies, their bank accounts, and their neighborhoods.

Which is exactly why remembering that crowd matters to me.
Because for one brief moment, it felt like enough people understood that.

Or were finally beginning to.

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Progress is not permanent. It never has been.

Every push toward justice has met resistance from people invested in keeping things as they are. Reconstruction met Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Movement met “law and order”. Every generation of people who believed change was finally here has had to reckon, at some point, with the people determined to roll it back.

Please don’t misread me. That doesn’t make this hopeless.

But it means we have to stop confusing awareness with transformation. A viral moment is not structural change. Public grief is not policy. A crowd full of people hungry for justice, powerful as that is, does not automatically become a sustained movement capable of weathering years of backlash.

I think about my old lead pastor’s quick no more than I realized.

Not because he was wrong to feel hope. But because the speed of it… the way he didn’t even consider the question. That’s the thing we keep getting wrong. We see the crowd and we think we’ve arrived. We feel the hope and we think the hard work is behind us. We call the moment transformation and we don’t notice when the moment passes and the structures are still standing.

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I don’t feel that same certainty I felt in that crowd.

But I haven’t forgotten the feeling. And more often than not, the feeling alone isn’t enough to keep me going. I’ve needed something more concrete than that.

I need stories. That might not be what you expected but stay with me for a moment.

I need the stories of people who kept moving after the moment passed. After the crowd went home. After the headlines moved on and hope got expensive and quitting would have been completely understandable. Fannie Lou Hamer, beaten and surveilled and threatened, still standing at the 1964 Democratic Convention telling the truth into a microphone in front of the whole country. John Lewis, skull fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, crossing it again. Countless people whose names we don’t know who chose, in ordinary moments with no audience, to keep going.

Those stories don’t make me optimistic. They make me stubborn.

They remind me that every single person who ever moved justice forward had a moment (probably many moments) where stopping made more sense than continuing. And they continued anyway. Not because they felt certain. But because they decided the work mattered more than how they felt about the work.

That’s what “keep going” actually costs. It costs you the luxury of waiting until you feel ready. It costs you the comfort of needing the moment to feel significant before you show up. It costs you the out of saying things are too hard right now when hard is exactly the point.

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We should tell the truth about where we are.

Six years later, the backlash is real. The rollback is real. The exhaustion is real. The grief of watching something you almost touched get pulled back is real, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.

But so is this: people have been here before. In harder places than this, with less visibility, less technology, fewer allies, and more to lose.

And they did not stop.

That’s not a reason for shallow optimism. It’s a reason to get stubborn.

Tell the truth about where we are. Call this moment what it is. Find what keeps you moving when hope gets hard to hold… a story, a person, a community, something that outlasts the feeling.

Then keep going.

Not because it’s easy. Because it’s necessary. Because the people who came before us decided that was enough of a reason.

It still is.

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