Visiting George Floyd Square with a few friends on the fifth anniversary of his murder, I wandered past a little pond to a small field filled with row upon row of makeshift tombstones, each carrying the name of a victim of racial violence. Born as a spontaneous act of protest and mourning in the wake of Floyd’s killing, Say Their Names Cemetery felt holy in the way that only spaces sanctified by tears, grief, and rage can.
Offerings had been placed before many of the plastic and cardboard markers — sweets, pastries, solitary roses. Even nature got in on the act with a blaze of dandelions. As we wandered silently through the rows looking for names we recognized, a young person shouted from a passing yellow school bus, and several of our group waved and called back. “Those kids,” one of our group said, her voice catching, “they are everything.”
I wandered back up to the street and followed it into the square. Along the route were the colorful murals captured in so many photographs, hopeful calls from another time for unity and justice, more names of more victims written on the pavement and the street, and shops and homes where people continue living their lives amid this place of memory and defiance. A resident reminded us that George Floyd Square is really the meeting point of four neighborhoods still being forged uneasily into one by tragedy and history. Nothing about that process is easy or certain.
At the street corner, on the asphalt where George Floyd’s life was stolen from him, lay the iconic mural of his face gazing out from amid a kaleidoscope of yellow, green, red, orange, and blue. All around were more offerings — potted flowers, container gardens, trinkets, stuffed animals bleached colorless by weather and time but still recognizable as cats and bears and sorrow and love.
Sayings and images were everywhere. A raised fist. My cries are for humanity. If not now, when, if not me, then who. Say their names.
Later, my friends and I talked about what came up for us during our visit. I did not immediately name the feeling that most struck me. The country’s engagement with the issues that erupted here has shifted so much and so abruptly in the years since. Being in this spot of intense remembering felt strangely clandestine, subversive.
The young people who created the cemetery and then led the movement for racial justice sparked by Floyd’s murder wanted to know something about the rest of us: Do you see us, do you hear us? Now, just a few years later, amid an onslaught of national policies and decrees targeting even the merest acknowledgement of injustice and attacking even the most benign and broadly inclusive attempts to end it, the only honest answer would be, no.
How strange, then, to recall the passion that burned so brightly in this place. George Floyd Square today felt like a monument to suddenly forbidden feelings, censored thoughts, and transgressive histories. We are in a time of deliberate forgetting, of pretending there is no injustice, that it all lies in a past we will sanitize and erase, and that the only real sins are the excesses of those still trying to draw our attention to it.
This is not new, of course. In the history of our country, progress against injustice has always been punctuated by periods of backlash, brought on by the terrible but seductive lie that one people’s gain must inevitably mean another people’s loss, that the road to one people’s prosperity lies through the oppression or diminishment of another.
As I walked back along the street away from Floyd’s memorial, though, I was struck by the inarguable reality of what happened in this space and the truth that I believe will eventually lead us back to a greater sanity. Some may find it convenient now to minimize what followed as a set of “woke” obsessions with identity and over-reaching DEI practices, as though that was the story. But behind that, before that, there was a man gasping for his life. Here you are forced to confront the truth that injustice is not the fever dream of some easily dismissed mind virus but a real thing that manifests in real people’s lives in ways too immediate, unfair, and sometimes violent to ignore. A conscientious society, and a conscientious people, do not turn away.
Acknowledging that basic truth does not make life better for some of us and worse for others of us. On the contrary, it makes for a better country for all of us. Health care unimpeded by racial and other barriers is better healthcare, period. Medical research that considers not only our similarities but also our differences produces a more complete picture of human health and potential cures for everyone. Bringing diverse people and perspectives into the sciences, medicine, the arts, and the ways we celebrate culture and our young people, is a formula for higher quality and better outcomes. Embracing a spirit of belonging — and being honest about the very real barriers that get in the way of achieving it — is the only way we can create the sort of communities we all want to live in and share.
Leaving George Floyd Square, I looked up at the clouds overhead. They were the color of dandelion fluff, and I thought of a yellow school bus passing a makeshift cemetery that should never have had to be built. Those kids are everything. America is a beautiful promise imperfectly achieved, but it has found its way forward and ever closer through the passage of time because successive generations of Americans have ultimately demanded it. Why? Because in our hearts we eventually come home to the deepest of human truths, which is that all of us, every single one of us, deserves the right to live a life of dignity, opportunity, and respect.
