Political Party Committee

Five years is a blink in American history—a nation built on contradiction, striving, and unfinished business. It was five years ago that a Minneapolis police officer extinguished the life of George Floyd, and the world has felt the tremors. I watched, powerless, as the video looped and looped on screens large and small. Still, I recall the discomfort felt within, that familiar ache of recognition—here was one more Black life, one more neighbor, one more "I can't breathe." Funny how anniversaries, especially those marked by tragedy, ask us to remember and reckon. To ask: what has changed? What lingers? What have we learned, and what do we still refuse to see?

In the days following George Floyd's murder, the streets of Minneapolis filled with cries for justice. Then, the streets of cities and towns across the country—and the world—echoed those cries. I marched and prayed alongside young people, elders, clergy, and the unaffiliated. There was grief, but there was also an unmistakable sense of possibility. Something was shifting. The pandemic had forced us all to slow down, to sit with ourselves, and in that forced silence, we could not look away from the violence of the state, the violence of racialized indifference.