{"id":12237,"date":"2024-01-07T23:29:48","date_gmt":"2024-01-08T04:29:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=12237"},"modified":"2024-01-12T02:12:12","modified_gmt":"2024-01-12T07:12:12","slug":"anti-racist-rebellion-and-the-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2024\/01\/anti-racist-rebellion-and-the-left\/","title":{"rendered":"Anti-racist rebellion and the Left"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>t has been a little over three years since the beginning of the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020. Given the intense conservative backlash in the wake of the movement, 2020 in some ways feels like a distant, foggy memory. Since those protests, and especially more recently, I\u2019ve found myself thinking about that summer\u2014both struggling to remember what it felt like and asking myself a number of questions: How did it feel to be out on the streets? How open was the political moment for a more radical social transformation? What did we think was possible? What were the greatest strengths and weaknesses of the movement? What impact were the protests going to have moving forward, and how were things going to change?<\/p>\n

With the benefit of hindsight, we perhaps have partial answers to some of these questions. There is still much that the Left has to discuss in order to make sense of what happened; in a way, it feels like this momentous, historic series of events took place, and then things just returned to \u201cnormal,\u201d if we understand normal to be the dystopian times in which we are living. Although the opening created by the movement that summer has closed for now, things will undoubtedly never be the same. Whatever shortcomings they contained, the protests altered the discourse, logic, and trajectory of American society.<\/p>\n