AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
It was five years ago today that George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by a white Minneapolis police officer. A video of that killing went viral and propelled Black Lives Matter into arguably the largest movement in U.S. history.
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: Say his name.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: George Floyd.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: Who'd they kill?
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: George Floyd.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: Who'd they kill?
RASCOE: But now, five years later, the country is deeply divided on issues of race and policing. NPR's domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef is here to talk about how such a dramatic change has happened. Odette, good morning.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: Good morning.
RASCOE: It's kind of amazing to think about where we are now and that Floyd was killed five years ago. When you look back, how do you see that time?
YOUSEF: It's interesting, Ayesha, because, you know, the size of the protest, the reach into places across the country, I think it felt like a rare moment of broad consensus. You know, at that time, the Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of U.S. adults supported the Black Lives Matter movement. They found that almost 70% of Americans were talking about racial justice issues with their families and friends, and 70% were recognizing general tensions between police and Black Americans. But what - I think what we didn't see clearly at that time was that deeply radicalizing forces were also organizing, and in many respects, I think it's fair to say that they won.
RASCOE: Well, say more about that. What was brewing at that time that you say helped lead to the divisions that we see today?
YOUSEF: Well, the pandemic - you know, I was in Minneapolis about six months ago meeting with a local named Kimmy Hull. One morning, Kimmy and I were at what's now called George Floyd Square, where he died. And she said she thinks the movement wouldn't have launched if the country hadn't been sheltering in place.
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KIMMY HULL: Everybody's at home, and then this happens in your community, and it's like, you know what? We got nothing to do. We're going to protest 'cause we're sick of this. We're in quarantine, and you're still killing us.
YOUSEF: The thing that gets Kimmy and many others is the earliest days of protest were peaceful. But two days after Floyd's death, there was a change.
BOBBY HULL: The community was safe until they started coming in here.
YOUSEF: Kimmy's uncle, Bobby Hull, lives down the street and around the corner.
B HULL: Until all these racist Ku Klux Klans and Aryan Nations and Proud Boys - whatever you want to call them - they're racist people that don't belong here.
YOUSEF: One of the gaping holes that remains five years after Floyd's murder is the AutoZone auto parts store arson. This was the very first structure in the area to burn. It's been cited as the trigger event that turned peaceful protests into lawlessness. The police named a suspect from a suburb of Minneapolis. An arson investigator's affidavit identified him as an affiliate of organized white supremacist groups, including the Hell's Angels and a prison gang called the Aryan Cowboys.
To this day, there has been no arrest. The details of it all have faded for some locals. What hasn't faded is the conviction nurtured among many Americans that summer that actually the violence came only from the left - the side that, in this case, did not set off the chaos.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The memory of George Floyd is being dishonored by rioters, looters and anarchists. The violence and vandalism is being led by antifa and other radical left-wing groups.
YOUSEF: Data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project find that at least 27 people were killed during the demonstrations across the nation. Of those where the perpetrators had an identifiable ideology, only one was a self-identified antifascist. Six, by comparison, were far-right actors. Still, an internal report from the Department of Homeland Security suggests top officials were interested in a single predetermined narrative. Focusing on the drawn-out rioting in Portland, Oregon, the head of intelligence gathering, quote, "stated that the violent protesters in Portland were connected to or motivated by antifa." This, even though his analysts had no evidence of that. But it wasn't just Trump and some administration officials who manipulated public perceptions of the unrest that summer.
PETE SIMI: There was a lot of talk on places like Telegram, where some of the more far-right, extreme fringe were talking about the protests as a real opportunity to radicalize the MAGA folks.
YOUSEF: Pete Simi is a sociology professor at Chapman University. He says extremists did what they always do. They clocked the high level of uncertainty among the public and swooped in. Simi says the movement for racial justice also created its own problems in retrospect. The Defund the Police slogan ultimately wasn't helpful. And experiments with so-called autonomous zones - areas with no police - produced troubling stories, including a 16-year-old fatally shot in Seattle.
SIMI: You know, it was something else the right could point to and say, look, this is ultimately - when they talk about police reform, what they really mean is, you know, having this kind of lawless, no control. They really mean something far more darker, sinister.
YOUSEF: And that, the argument that these protesters were part of a larger sinister plot, has endured.
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JOE KENT: We need to treat antifa and BLM like terrorist organizations.
YOUSEF: The claim that Black Lives Matter is a Marxist or terrorist organization is now common on the right. It was expressed in a podcast three years ago by Joe Kent, a man who is now Trump's pick to direct the National Counterterrorism Center.
RASCOE: Odette, we've also heard from the Trump administration and others who feel like the fixation on diversity, equity and inclusion was divisive in and of itself and that if Americans focus less on issues like the country's history of slavery and Jim Crow, that people would relate better to each other.
YOUSEF: Yes, and survey numbers suggest that many Americans may agree. You know, a Pew survey this month finds that support for the Black Lives Matter movement has fallen 15 percentage points from where it was five years ago. And on policing, the pendulum has swung as well. You know, just last week, the Department of Justice announced that it was ending consent decrees and investigations of police misconduct in multiple cities, including Minneapolis. But this assertion that maybe racism will go away if we stop talking about race - you know, it could be very dangerous.
RASCOE: Well, talk to me about that.
YOUSEF: People see social inequity. You know, people observe the differences that we live with with health outcomes, educational opportunities, income attainment. And if we're not talking about the history and current factors, Pete Simi says that this just leaves explanations that are pseudoscientific, disproven and racist.
SIMI: Well, wait a second. Maybe there's something biologically that's different about different racial groups. Maybe they have certain kind of cultural traits that make them more prone to criminality.
YOUSEF: And this isn't just a theoretical concern, Ayesha. We've seen the White House issue an executive order aimed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that posits race is not a social construct but a biological reality. This is the stuff of eugenics, and it goes against decades of scientific consensus.
RASCOE: That's NPR's Odette Yousef. Thank you so much for joining us.
YOUSEF: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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