May
25, 2026 marks six years since a cell phone camera captured what Black people
in America already knew: that our lives could be taken from us slowly,
publicly, and without consequence a knee pressed into a neck for nine agonizing
minutes while a man called out for his mother and told the world he could not
breathe.
I
had a hard time trying to articulate my feelings properly back then, and for
someone who writes, that's a hard place to be in. But I did muster up these
words, because my pain is visceral and deep, and so are the wounds and the pain
of Black America. The weaponization of our skin color leaves us perilously
dangling on the brink of our sanity.
George Floyd was 46 years old. He was a father. A friend. A human being. And the manner of his death forced a nation to watch something it had long looked away from.
What We Saw and What We Already Knew
Being Black in America has always come with a heavy toll. We as Black people are raised from a young age knowing that we are never fully safe. We are very rarely afforded the opportunity to rest in the sanctity of simply being human. We are perpetually on guard.
We can't go to Airbnb's without being accused of a crime. We can't barbecue in the park, let alone bird watch. We can't jog through certain neighborhoods. We can't even live in certain neighborhoods without fearing for our lives and safety. The overt aggression. The micro-aggression. The flat-out hatred and weaponization of our skin color puts us in harm's way every single day and yet we are expected to take it and rise above it. Be better than that. Ignore the hostility directed at you.
I'm tired.
Amy Cooper knew exactly what she was doing when she called the police on Christian Cooper a Black man who had simply asked her to leash her dog in a public park. She knew the weapon she was wielding. George Floyd's story is not different in kind, only in outcome. The weaponization of his very existence cost him his life, because Black people and Black men especially have been demonized in a very specific way in society simply for being who we are. Just as Black women are portrayed with maligned stereotypes that we constant but up against when we are in society at large.
The Names We Should Never Have Had to Learn
I shouldn't know who George Floyd is. I shouldn't know Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Oscar Grant, Walter Scott, Samuel DuBose, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, or Ahmaud Arbery. I shouldn't know Sandra Bland, Kayla Moore, Shelly Frey, Breonna Taylor, Tyre Nichols, Ralph Yarl or Sonya Massey.
Our real-life paths probably would have never crossed. But I know their names, and for every name I know, there are countless others I don't because no one witnessed their deaths, or there was no video. Our education level doesn't matter. Our accomplishments don't matter. How carefully we try to live within the lines of society doesn't matter. This issue is as old as time, and it continues on because our skin color has always been and is still being weaponized against us.
Six Years Later: What Has and Hasn't Changed
When Floyd died, something cracked open in the public conscience. Millions of people across the world poured into the streets. Corporations issued promises. Monuments came down. The phrase "Black Lives Matter" was painted in enormous yellow letters on a street near the White House in Washington, D.C.
This past March, government employees used a jackhammer and pickaxe to destroy that very mural. The words torn up from the concrete were a fitting symbol of how much of that urgency has been dismantled.
The Legislative Stalemate
At the federal level, the most significant proposed response to Floyd's murder was the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act sweeping legislation that would have banned chokeholds and no-knock warrants in drug cases, ended racial profiling, created a national registry of police misconduct, and curtailed the legal doctrine of qualified immunity, which shields individual officers from civil liability even when they violate constitutional rights.
The bill passed the House in 2021. It died in the Senate. It has been reintroduced multiple times since. As of this sixth anniversary, there is still no comprehensive federal police reform law bearing George Floyd's name. Battles over qualified immunity the legal protection that for years has allowed officers to go back to work, transfer departments, and face no civil accountability for the harm they cause remain largely unresolved.
"We're going to keep fighting
until we get it," Congressman Glenn Ivey, who re-introduced the
legislation in 2025, told reporters. The bill proposes shifting the
prosecutorial standard for police misconduct from willfulness to recklessness
a change that would make it meaningfully easier to hold officers accountable in
court.
Rollbacks
Under the Current Administration
The current political climate has not only stalled progress it has actively reversed it. The Trump administration revoked President Biden's 2022 executive directive on policing reform and eliminated the federal database that helped prevent officers with histories of serious misconduct from moving to other departments. The DOJ's civil rights division, which oversaw pattern-and-practice investigations into problematic police departments, has been dramatically scaled back, with more than $800 million in grants cut funding that supported both crime prevention and services for survivors.
What Polling Tells Us
Public opinion has not remained static. According to Gallup's polling, Black Americans' confidence in their local police now stands at 64% nine points above the low of 55% recorded in 2022, in the years immediately following Floyd's murder. Yet that figure remains significantly below the 77% confidence rate among white Americans. The gap persists. The distrust persists. The disparity persists.
Research has consistently shown that Black Americans do not want to defund or abolish police they want police who are accountable, transparent, and fair. They want to feel safe in the communities they call home.
The Weight on Black Mental Health
What is less often discussed is the cumulative psychological toll.
Black Americans are nearly three times as likely to be killed by police as white Americans. Black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to die at the hands of law enforcement over the course of their lifetime. Black Americans are five times more likely to be unarmed when killed by police.
These are not abstract statistics. They are the background noise of Black life in America.
Research published in The Lancet found that police killings of unarmed Black Americans create adverse mental health effects not just for the families directly impacted, but for the entire Black population who witnesses the violence even through a screen. The exposure to these killings can trigger acute stress responses. Depression, anxiety, PTSD, and feelings of hopelessness have been documented in Black communities following high-profile incidents of police brutality. For Black youth especially, racial profiling and police contact correlate with increased trauma and anxiety symptoms.
There is a term for what generations of Black Americans have been living: race-based traumatic stress. Researchers describe it as trauma that does not come from a single incident but from the accumulative weight of being Black in a country that consistently signals that your life is worth less than others. That trauma, some researchers note, can be passed down through generations carried in the body, in the hypervigilance, in the way Black parents must prepare their children for a world that may greet them with suspicion before it greets them with humanity.
Then there is what sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois called double consciousness, the exhausting experience of being forced to see yourself through the eyes of a society that dehumanizes you, while simultaneously showing up whole to workplaces, schools, and public spaces where your grief is unwelcome and your pain is politically inconvenient.
Still Here. Still Fighting.
The streets that filled with millions of protesters in the summer of 2020 are quiet now or rather they’ve been replaced with No Kings Protests. The battle over George Floyd's legacy has returned to courtrooms and Congressional chambers. But there are people who never stopped fighting; the attorneys, the organizers, the mothers of the movement, the community leaders they are still here.
Civil rights leaders warn that the country has grown dangerously comfortable believing that progress continues on its own, without sustained pressure. It does not.
My skin color is not a weapon for anyone's superiority complex, fear, ignorance, or hatred.
George Floyd shouldn't be a name I know. Breonna Taylor shouldn't be a name I know. Tamir Rice was twelve years old. He shouldn't be a name anyone knows the way we know it as a tragedy, as a hashtag, as proof of what this country is still willing to tolerate.
Until the weaponization of Black skin stops, there will always be another name added to the list. Another reason to grieve. Another reason to live with an unhealthy amount of fear riding your shoulder like a passenger you never invited.
Six years. The knee may have lifted. The weight has not.