They got their scalp. The great Saint George Floyd has been vindicated. The man who personified all that is evil about White men and the police has been found “guilty”. Celebrities wept with joy, blacks put on a huge show of how euphoric they were that justice has been done. My wife and I were eating at a local restaurant last night and they had a TV on ESPN and of course they were getting hot takes from sports figures. Even though it was on mute, at one point a room full of blacks could be seen reacting to the guilty verdict by rolling around on the floor, capering about with eyes full of tears and generally acting like something really great had happened.
So now what?
It is the day after the guilty verdict and what has really changed? Are black lives somehow demonstrably better?
Of course not and no one thought they would be. That isn’t what this is about. It isn’t what the “activists” are concerned with. The way to keep the money flowing is to keep the outrage and anger at a fever pitch at all times. You don’t get enough cash to buy four houses if you encourage people to calm down.
Blacks tend to be very emotional and those emotions are easy to manipulate. We saw this on display for the last year since the death of George Floyd. The average black person really seems to believe that cops are hunting them down and shooting them by the thousands for no reason and that White people are actively trying to keep them down when in fact we mostly want to stay clear of them.
So what changed? Nothing.
Nothing will get better in the black community because of this verdict and in virtually every respect things are getting much worse. Compounding the problem is that these worsening conditions in the black community are almost entirely self-inflicted and the loudest voices claiming to advocate for the black community are the ones making things worse. When you are afraid to have an honest conversation within your own group, things will never get better.
The race hustlers are already looking for a new George Floyd to stoke the fires of resentment. This will never end until the black community tells people like Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters to take a hike. That won’t happen in my lifetime or yours.
George Floyd will be forgotten, Chauvin will be locked up for many years unless his appeal is successful and things will keep getting worse in the black community.
Nothing changes.