The “racial reckoning” of 2020 set off an entirely new kind of backlash

It took less than a day for the world to start rallying for George Floyd in late May 2020. The events that led to Floyd’s murder unfolded over hours, but a viral 10-minute video recording of the deadly encounter with Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was enough to send floods of people nationwide into the streets for months.

In the weeks after Floyd’s killing, the number of Americans who said they believe racial discrimination is a big problem and that they support the Black Lives Matter movement spiked. As books about racial injustice flew off of bookstore shelves, corporate leaders, politicians, and celebrities pledged to fight racism. The events of 2020 disturbed America’s collective conscience, and the movement for justice captivated millions. Until it didn’t.

In retrospect, there were signs of brewing right-wing resistance all along. While many peacefully protested, others called for their defeat. Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton demanded that the US military be brought in to fight “insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.” As police officers used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse crowds across the country, President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard to “dominate the streets” and defend “life and property,” sending thousands of troops and federal law enforcement officers to control protesters in Washington, DC; Portland, Oregon; and other cities.

Some Americans who wanted to stamp out the unrest took it upon themselves to practice vigilantism. One of them, Kyle Rittenhouse, fatally shot two unarmed men and wounded another when he brought an AR-15-style rifle to protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (Rittenhouse was later acquitted of all homicide charges.)

Though the mass mobilization of 2020 brought hope, it’s clear today that it also marked a turning point for backlash as the mirage of progress morphed into seemingly impenetrable resistance. Historically, backlash has embodied a white rejection of racial progress. Over the past few years, the GOP has built on that precedent and expanded its reach.

The right watched progressives rally for change and immediately fought back with the “Big Lie” of a stolen election. In many of the states that Biden flipped in 2020, Republicans rushed to ban ballot drop boxes, absentee ballots, and mobile voting units, the methods that allowed more people to vote. Since then, we’ve seen the passage of dozens of regressive laws, including anti-protest laws, anti-LGBTQ laws, and anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion laws. In state after state, these bans were coupled with incursions against reproductive rights, as some conservatives announced plans to take over every American institution from the courts to the schools to root out liberalism and progress.

“[The backlash] came like a multi-front war on democracy, a multi-front war on liberalism, a multi-front war on a multicultural democracy,” said historian Carol Anderson, who has examined backlash in books such as White Rage and We Are Not Yet Equal. “It knocked some folks back on their heels.”

Backlash politics have long defined the country. The term “backlash” gained popularity in politics after John F. Kennedy proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1963. “Transferred to the world of politics, the white backlash aptly describes the resentment of many white Americans to the speed of the great Negro revolution, which has been gathering momentum since the first rash of sit-ins in early 1960,” said a 1964 article in Look magazine.

The phenomenon, however, goes back to Reconstruction beginning in the 1860s, when white lawmakers claimed that equality for freed Black Americans threatened them, according to Larry B. Glickman, a historian at Cornell University who is writing a book about backlash since Reconstruction. Lawmakers instituted literacy tests and taxes at the polls while white agitators used violence and intimidation, all to prevent Black Americans from participating as full citizens.

“There’s a backlash impulse in American politics,” Glickman said. “I think 2020 is important because it gets at another part of backlash, which is the fear that social movements for equality and justice might set off a stronger counter-reaction.”

The protests of 2020 did. And though race is still at the core of the post-George Floyd backlash, many Republicans have gone to new lengths to conceal this element.

"One of the things that the civil rights movement accomplished was to make being overtly racist untenable,” said Anderson. “Today they say, ‘I can do racist stuff, but don't call me racist.’” For Anderson, backlash is about instituting state-level policies that undermine African Americans’ advancement toward their citizenship rights.

By early 2021, alongside the effort to “stop the steal,” legislation that would limit or block voting access, give police protection, and control the teaching of concepts such as racial injustice began spreading across Republican-controlled state legislatures — all in the name of protecting America.

“They cover [voter suppression] with the fig leaf of election integrity, with the fig leaf of trying to protect democracy, and with the fig leaf of stopping massive rampant voter fraud,” Anderson said. And, she said, laws banning the teaching of history get covered “with the fig leaf of stopping indoctrination.”

That coordinated legislation was a direct response to potential racial gains for Black Americans and other marginalized groups. “After the death of George Floyd in 2020, it seemed like all of our institutions suddenly shifted overnight,” conservative activist Christopher Rufo said in a 2022 interview. Rufo’s answer was to release a series of reports about diversity training programs in the federal government and critical race theory, which, he argued, “set off a massive response, or really, revolt amongst parents nationwide.”

“Race is key,” said Glickman. “When the term backlash was popularized, it was often called the ‘white backlash.’ It was very clear that it was understood as resentment. The campaign for Black equality was moving too fast and going too far. I still think that's at the root of many backlash movements.”

That racial resentment has since taken on a particularly acrid temperament since Floyd's death. At the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump, facing a litany of criminal and civil charges, stood on stage and told the audience, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Trump’s words summarized the political discourse that has spread since the killing of George Floyd and highlighted the absence of a formal Republican policy agenda. “[What he said was] not policy,” said historian John Huntington, author of the book Far Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism. “It was just vengeance for some sort of perceived wrongs.” He added, “policy has taken a backseat to cultural grievances.”

What Huntington calls out as “endless harangues against very nebulous topics like critical race theory or wokeness or whatever the current catchphrase is right now” are an important marker of this new era. “A key element of the current backlash we’re seeing is a politics of grievance,” he says. “‘I have been wronged somehow by the liberals or whoever, and Trump is going to help me get even with these people that I don’t like.’”

Glickman calls this backlash tactic an “inversion” or “elite victimization”: “It’s a reversal that happens in backlash language where privileged white people take the historical position of oppressed people — often African Americans but sometimes other oppressed groups — and they speak from that vantage point.”

To be sure, Republicans have passed dozens of laws through state legislatures to do everything from restricting voting to banning trans athletes from participating in sports. But for Huntington, these reactionary laws don’t amount to legitimate policy. “It's very difficult to convince people to build a society rather than trying to tear down something that's already existing,” he said. “Critiquing is easy. Building is hard.” Nationally, Republicans only passed 27 laws despite holding 724 votes in 2023.

Though other backlash movements in history, such as the response to desegregation or the Confederacy, have involved violence, today’s backlash also features a greater embrace of it from the Republican Party as a whole, according to Huntington.

“But nowadays, the GOP, having moored themselves to Trump, have very much kind of implicitly embraced this politics of violence,” Huntington said.

The January 6 insurrection, and how Trump and other Republicans have expressed a desire to pardon insurrectionists, is emblematic of how the party has aligned itself with a much more radical idea of how to gain and keep power.

“If you’re embracing the politics of violence in order to gain power,” said Huntington, “that illustrates a dark turn in American politics.”

Still, no backlash is forever. The events of 2020 triggered a particularly virulent right-wing response, but many such movements have failed, including various stages of this one.

“Backlashes have been very effective at mobilizing opposition to movements for equality, but I don't think that they’re necessarily successful,” said Glickman. “I would say the jury’s still out.”

They “are often seen as automatic and inevitable and sort of mechanistic and unstoppable. But I don’t think that,” he added. “Backlashes are political movements made up of human beings who were asserting their agency, and sometimes they’re successful and sometimes they’re not successful. I think we’ve blown up the backlash sometimes as this all-powerful phenomenon.”

This current backlash certainly isn't achieving all of its goals. Trump lost in 2020, and the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has prompted a backlash to the backlash, with voters in several states choosing to protect abortion rights through constitutional amendments.

With all their force and fire, backlashes can fail to anticipate pushback from people committed to democratic values. “The mobilization is really quiet,” Anderson said. “We are so focused on the flames that we miss the kindling … we miss the folks who are quietly, doggedly going about the work of democracy.”