White backlash to America's post-George Floyd racial reckoning helped inspire Trump's Jan. 6 insurrection: analysis

The nationwide outrage over George Floyd's murder by police did little to change systemic racism in the U.S., and instead ignited a predictable white backlash that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Millions of Americans took to the streets to show support for the Black Lives Matter movement in a moment of racial reckoning, as politicians and pundits described summer 2020, but little progress was made against racist policing, inequality worsened as the pandemic raged and the mirage of progress predictably vanished from the horizon, argued professors Hakeem Jefferson and Victory Ray in a column for FiveThirtyEight.

"But a racial reckoning that ushers in racial progress is only one type of racial reckoning," the pair wrote. "Racial backlash is a kind of racial reckoning, too. And the racial reckoning of this moment — one characterized by white backlash to a perceived loss of power and status — seems poised to be much more consequential."

The starkest evidence came one year ago, when Donald Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to overturn the 2020 election, displaying Confederate flags and lynching nooses, and recent research suggests participants were most likely to come from areas that experienced significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population.

Republican-led states imposed new voting restrictions, conservatives are moving to ban the teaching of "critical race theory" and Democratic strategists are warning against a perceived over-emphasis on race and identity -- but the authors say this is all historically predictable.

"Americans love the mythology of racial progress that highlights the brief flurries of progressive change around the period of Reconstruction and the civil rights movement," Jefferson and Ray wrote. "To be sure, the heroism of these movements was remarkable. A full accounting requires that we acknowledge the vast political power African Americans wielded in the aftermath of the Civil War, in a period known as Radical Reconstruction."

"But this racial reckoning," they added, "which promised to change the material and social conditions of newly freed Black people in the U.S., was met with another racial reckoning: The birth of the Ku Klux Klan and racist Jim Crow-era policies were reactions to Reconstruction-era progress."