In a study published on May 7, the Pew Research Center found that in 2020, 52 percent of U.S. adults believed that an increased focus on racial issues across the country would lead to significant change in the years to come. In 2025, 72 percent of U.S. adults said that the focus on racial inequality did not lead to any changes that helped the Black community.
Furthermore, in 2025, 67 percent of Black Americans said they felt doubtful the United States would ever achieve racial equality; 65 percent felt similarly in 2020.
The 19th spoke with Black activists about the country’s progress toward equality since Floyd’s death and how they envision a more inclusive future.
Alaunna Thompson was attending a predominantly White high school in Montville, N.J., when Floyd died. His murder was a call for her to organize a protest in her local community, she said, describing her ongoing struggles with racism in school as the driver that pushed her to use her voice.
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Alaunna Thompson (left) and Gabriel Broadman (right) at a George Floyd protest they both organized in Englewood, New Jersey on May 31, 2020. (ALAUNNA THOMPSON
Protestors gathered at Mackay Park in Englewood, N.J., to demand justice after Floyd’s death. Following a route that led them around the city, participants stopped to deliver passionate speeches and craft signs that they would carry while organizing. Parents, teachers, students and Englewood residents all came out to support.
“It was a mix of us feeling some way about our school and on top of that, hearing all this stuff [about] Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd. It was back to back to back.”
Arbery was a 25-year-old Black man who was shot and killed while on an afternoon jog in the Satilla Shores neighborhood of Georgia. Arbery’s death happened in February 2020, just months before Floyd’s.
Thompson remembers feeling sadness, anger and disbelief. With the stunting pain also came the realization that this time, something felt different.
“I saw people talking about [Floyd’s] drug charges and the things he did, and I was just, like, ‘Wow, this is really sad,’ and I felt angry about it. Honestly, I thought nothing would happen,” she said. When Derek Chauvin got arrested and convicted in federal court of killing Floyd, “that was a shock to me,” Thompson said. “That’s never really happened before.”
In Thompson’s eyes, while Floyd’s murder did not put an end to racially motivated violence, it did shift our social understanding of how we discuss police brutality. Up until the day of Floyd’s death in 2020, she had never witnessed so much language that reflected how brutal police violence is.
“People are more comfortable holding these police officers accountable now. I think versus the Trayvon Martin period, people were [thinking] these are not people who are going to get prosecuted because they are above the law,” she said. “They’re also more comfortable saying that this person killed this person instead of it being police brutality. This is murder.”
At just 17 years old, Martin was shot and killed while walking in Sanford, Florida. His killer, George Zimmerman, was the captain of Sanford’s neighborhood watch and reported to police that he saw a “suspicious person” prior to shooting Martin. Zimmerman was later found not guilty in the trial.
Although Thompson does not feel there has been effective systemic change in the five years since Floyd’s life was taken, she does recognize the impact that he has had. Her place in history is what will continue to compel her to use her voice, she said.
“It’s about history. It’s not about two little kids from Englewood who may not make that much of a difference when it comes to the law, but it makes a difference when it comes to which side of history you were on.”
Angela Ferrell-Zabala, the executive director of Moms Demand Action!, speaks at the Mother’s Day of Action Rally held in Atlanta on May 13, 2023. COURTESY ANGELA FERRELL-ZABALAThroughout her life, Angela Ferrell-Zabala has looked to the strength of her mother and grandmother to inspire her activism. At a young age, her family instilled in her the belief that she has a voice and the power to advocate against injustice in the world. As she grew older, she followed their lead in the work she’s done for her community.
As a mother of four living in Washington, D.C., she wanted to do something about gun violence in the city. So she joined Moms Demand Action, a gun violence prevention advocacy group. Three years ago, she became its first executive director.
Ferrell-Zabala felt that Floyd’s murder was a continuation of violence against Black and Brown people that had become normalized. While she helped the people in her community, she had to remember to give herself grace to deal with the emotional turmoil she was also experiencing.
“In the moment, you just want to make sure everyone’s OK,” she said. “You want to wrap your arms around them, but then there’s this point about ‘What do I need?’”
Five years later, Ferrell-Zabala said that it’s a hard moment for the country — and a hard moment for Black folks in particular. Decades of pain and trauma are continuing to impact the Black community, and many in the community feel like no one cares about the struggles they are facing.
For instance, Ferrell-Zabala said that Black people are disproportionately impacted when it comes to gun violence, and communities say that solutions aren’t meeting their needs fast enough. With corporations and the federal government rolling back inclusive programs that civil rights leaders fought hard for, many people have lost hope.
“Right now, it feels particularly difficult because there’s this sense of, ‘No one cares, no one gives a damn,’” she said. “But I think what makes it harder [is that] now, it’s beyond not caring. It [feels] like intentional cruelty.”
Ferrell-Zabala told The 19th that the country has a long way to go when it comes to creating true equality, equity and justice. She looks to her grandmother’s resilience as a reminder to keep working toward a better future. To move forward, she said that the Black community has to think about where they are and balance it with their radical visions of what could be.
“That’s one of the things I hold onto,” she said. “I hope many people hold onto who we are, where we come from and the possibility that lies ahead.”
Destine Riggins says she was the only photographer at the various West Jefferson, NC racial justice protests she attended and documented, such as this 2020 march. (VICKI RANDOLPH)Destine Riggins saved on her phone an album of pictures labeled Black Lives Matter March. She took these photos five years ago in West Jefferson, a town in the rural Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. She was the sole photographer there.
Riggins used to look at the photos and see impact, unity and change. Now, when she looks at them, Riggins said she feels like “the whole world is against us again.”
“I feel like we’re in a worse scenario right now than we were five years ago. With the current administration we have, police brutality is easy for them to slip under the rug or even for a policeman to get off, especially with [President Donald] Trump wanting to pardon officers,” Riggins said.
Floyd’s murder immediately made Riggins think of Trayvon Martin and Sandra Bland, a Black woman roughly handled and arrested by the police in Texas and then found dead in her cell a few days later by what the local police consider suicide. There was also Sonya Massey, who was shot and killed in her home by the police last summer.
Since the march, Riggins has watched the national conversation around race and policing shift, making her feel tired, heavy and more unsure than ever.
“Each time we see these murders by the police it feels like another hit to the Black community. Another disappointment. Another reason to not like the cops. And another reason for a White man to be able to kill a Black man,” Riggins said.
Millions of people across the country have been protesting against the Trump administration through efforts like the Hands Off and 50501movements. Many Black communities have decided on other forms of resistance and several people, like Riggins, are choosing to turn inward, by resting and leaning on their community for support.
“There is no protection for Black people except us, we’re the only thing protecting each other and right now that feels kind of disintegrating. My biggest opinion is to lay low right now,” Riggins said. “I don’t want to bring any extra attention to myself because I don’t have time to try to fight a justice system that was never meant for me in the first place.”
Protest leaders give speeches during a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in West Jefferson, NC where Queue Wellington also worked as a leader in the local racial justice movement. (DESTINE RIGGINS)While Riggins took pictures, Queue Wellington helped lead the march in West Jefferson, where more than 300 people protested in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Growing up Black in a rural, White, conservative and poor region, Wellington constantly saw how white supremacy and police brutality negatively impacted everyone.
“White people love to cling to power, but that power is white supremacy. As this country continues to lean overtly more into fascism and acceptance of police brutality, then that means Black people will keep dying, White people will keep dying and everyone will keep dying — largely by the hands of the police or people in power,” Wellington said.
After the summer of 2020, Wellington saw an increase in White people in their town attempting to unlearn anti-Black behavior, understand systemic issues and work in community with Black movements. Since then, they said those same people have faded away and that their actions were likely performative.
“There was a wave of White people trying to become more conscious or get more informed on things, but where are they now?” Wellington said. “Black people have always had to juggle it all at the same time: work, bills, lives and oppression.”
While Wellington feels that things aren’t better for Black Americans since the summer of racial reckoning, they do believe that at least more White people are grasping the reality of police brutality.
“If we can’t get a thousand White people to understand, maybe having one White person on board or seeing the reality of police brutality will change things or even create safer environments for Black folks,” Wellington said.
Wellington thinks this understanding could even be found in places like the Appalachian Mountains, where Stuart Mast, a White man, died while in deputies’ custody in a similar way to Floyd.
Several community members are outraged by Mast’s death, and people who once “backed the blue” are now questioning the system that police brutality has created.
“The fact that White people in my community are outraged over police violence feels oddly familiar. We should all be asking why folks are getting killed by the police. This murder has started to cause a divide between the police and White people here,” Wellington said. “Police brutality shouldn’t just be personal to Black people, but to everyone because it affects everyone.”
Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, participates in the People’s March on January 18, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (CARĒS JARON)
In 2020, Monica Simpson and her community felt caught in the middle of challenging moments: Trump was finishing his first term and the COVID-19 pandemic was at its peak.
As the executive director of SisterSong, a reproductive rights group based in Atlanta, Simpson joined other members to create mutual aid opportunities for those in need and help pregnant women get access to birth workers.
Then Floyd was murdered. When the news broke, Simpson was immediately reminded of the other Black men and boys who were murdered by White men, such as Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice — and the list keeps going, she said. But it felt like the world had to keep moving forward. Simpson had to continue doing the work for her community.
“We were having to still hold our community in all the ways that we need to for the work that we do every single day,” she said. “We had to be on the frontlines at the same time.”
At that time, the country saw what the media called a racial reckoning and Simpson felt that it took away from the grief the Black community was feeling after Floyd’s murder.
In 2025, with Trump back in power and making more changes to disenfranchise marginalized communities, Simpson feels that Black communities did as much as they could to restore what Trump’s 2016 administration destroyed. Black-led advocacy organizations came together, despite their contradictory beliefs, to put forth the work necessary to help their communities and each other.
Overall, Simpson said the Black community knew a second Trump presidency “would be detrimental.” Ninety-two percent of Black women voted for Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential election and mobilized their communities. During his first five months in office, Trump has made strides to roll back diversity, equity and inclusion programs and positions in the federal government, and many corporations have followed suit.
“I think we’re in more danger now than we were before,” Simpson told The 19th. “We’re in the same position of our rights, our bodies, our communities being under attack.”
To create a more inclusive future, Simpson said that the Black community must continue to work together across religions, political values and identities because “disrespectability politics … have kept us divided.” The Black community has to come together to advocate for their needs, which includes educating each other, reclaiming their culture and embracing moments of joy.
“We need all the Black joy as possible because our joy has to be non-negotiable at this time,” she said. “That’s a powerful and necessary part of how we make it through.”
Five Years After George Floyd’s Death, Activists Say the Promise of Change Remains Unfulfilled was originally published by The 19th and is republished with permission.
Over the last decade, a growing number of organizations have launched bridgebuilding initiatives: efforts designed to reduce division through dialogue, relationship-building, and developing mutual understanding across lines of difference. Some well-known examples include Braver Angels, Millions of Conversations, and BridgeUSA.
Many bridgebuilding initiatives are rooted in contact theory—the idea that positive interaction between groups can reduce prejudice and improve intergroup attitudes. Contact is a powerful and important approach—yet a growing body of research suggests that focusing solely on attitudes may not be enough to drive real small-d democratic change. As a democracy strategist and a program evaluator, we’ve spent the past few months collaboratively consolidating our thinking on what makes bridgebuilding effective and how it can be strengthened.
Here’s what we’ve concluded: if bridgebuilding is to fulfill its highest potential in contributing to a just, cohesive society, we should focus on behavior change, understand the limits of contact theory, and hone our skills for managing unintended effects and scaling up impact.
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There’s no social change without behavior change. While attitudes profoundly shape our thoughts, feelings, and intentions, only behaviors can translate those internal shifts into real-world impact. Yet research shows that attitude change doesn’t always lead to behavior change—especially when social norms, systemic barriers, or privilege get in the way. That’s why tracking behavior matters more than measuring sentiment alone.
We recommend that bridgebuilding evaluations include a focus on observable actions—what participants actually do differently as a result of their experience. This is especially important because the intangible nature of attitude change data can make it challenging to credibly analyze and interpret, particularly if it stands alone without reference to other types of data. On the other hand, behavior data and attitude data together make for a stronger package of evidence.
One behavior-focused evaluation approach we’ve found effective is Outcome Harvesting, which was developed by Ricardo Wilson-Grau. Rather than assessing only pre-defined metrics, Outcome Harvesting identifies real-world behavior changes—intended or unintended—and traces how the program contributed to them. This makes it especially useful in the complex and unpredictable civic environment of today’s United States. Michelle Garred’s firm, Ripple Peace Research & Consulting, has adapted Outcome Harvesting to include shifts in attitude and explore their relationship to behaviors, which matters greatly in bridgebuilding.
Contact theory, first developed by Gordon Allport in the 1950s, proposes that positive interactions between members of different identity groups can reduce prejudice. This idea remains foundational to many bridgebuilding organizations. The popular programs informed by contact theory include “light-touch bridgebuilding”—interventions that aim to improve attitudes across differences (often through brief or one-off dialogues), without seeking specific changes in action. These efforts are necessary as effective tools for reducing bias and polarization and increasing social trust—but cannot do all of the work to repair a tattered social fabric.
Comprehensive research compiled by Pettigrew and Tropp (2013) affirms that contact is typically effective—but it works best under certain conditions:
When these conditions aren’t met, contact can fail—or even backfire. In the U.S. context, where there are major disparities in power or privilege, disadvantaged participants may feel dismissed or harmed by the experience, leading to a negative contact experience. Advantaged participants may leave feeling good but unchanged in action, contributing to what researchers call the principle-implementation gap (Dixon, Durrheim, and Thomae, 2017).
In some cases, “single-identity contact”—where all participants are encouraged to see themselves through the lens of one shared identity—can even reduce disadvantaged groups’ engagement in collective action. This is because emphasizing sameness can mask structural inequities and discourage people from addressing them. In contrast, “dual-identity contact” encourages a shared identity while maintaining subgroup identities—and research shows it’s more likely to produce behavior change and a commitment to equity (Glasford & Dovidio, 2011; Banfield & Dovidio, 2013).
In short: bridgebuilding in the U.S. should be designed with a clear eye toward power dynamics and evaluated with tools that measure impact beyond sentiment.
Bridgebuilding is not alone in facing unintended consequences and in being necessary yet insufficient to transform society on its own. The same is true of every social impact intervention, and there are strategy and design tools available to help us. Here we recommend two international tools created by CDA Collaborative Learning.
To address unintended effects, Do No Harm (DNH) helps programs analyze and modify how their work interacts with “Dividers” (factors that drive groups apart) and “Connectors” (factors that bring them together). The aim is to avoid inadvertently exacerbating Dividers or undermining Connectors while actively working toward improved relationships. DNH promotes adaptive design, helping practitioners prevent or mitigate harm and amplify constructive effects.
To grapple with the reality of being necessary but not sufficient, we turn to another CDA tool: the Reflecting on Peace Practice (RPP) Matrix. The RPP Matrix, which explores how different types of programs can complement each other, is based on two critical questions:
Arranging those two dimensions in rows and columns forms a four-quadrant matrix (adapted from Reflecting on Peace Practice (RPP) Basics. CDA, 2016, p.41).
Most bridgebuilding programs fall into the “personal change for more people” quadrant. That’s not a flaw—but it is a limitation. Research from the RPP project shows that no single quadrant is sufficient on its own to drive systemic impact. What’s needed is either strategic expansion or partnerships that connect bridgebuilding to civic engagement, policy change, or institutional reform.
Initiatives like the Needham Resilience Network and Better Together America show how these connections can be built. They bring bridging work into community problem-solving, democratic deliberation, and local coalition-building—amplifying its reach and effectiveness.
We have suggested here that bridgebuilding alone will not suffice to repair the American social fabric—but we do believe that bridgebuilding makes a vital contribution to pro-democracy efforts. To best support this work, funders can:
If funders and bridgers integrate these considerations, we believe this will strengthen bridgebuilding’s important contribution to our essential civic infrastructure: trust, empathy, and willingness to act in pro-social ways for the common good.
This article is an abridgment of a three-part series of blogs posted on the Cohesion Strategy and Ripple Peace websites.
Allison K. Ralph is a Senior Research Fellow at Kaufman Interfaith Institute at Grand Valley State University and the principal of Cohesion Strategy LLC.
Michelle Garred is the Founder and Principal at Ripple Peace Research & Consulting LLC.
