"The Inevitable Whitelash Against Racial Justice Has Started."

I suspect the Jeopardy! category would be "Most Unsurprising Things in American History."

There are no grounds for argument in anything Mystal says, and that's depressing.

The Inevitable Whitelash Against Racial Justice Has Started, by Elie Mystal (The Nation)

As Black people fight for our lives, white supremacists reach for their guns—and white allies go soft.

 ... And so here we are, barely three months after George Floyd was choked to death, and already white allyship is waning. Derek Chauvin stared right into a camera phone and forced white America to look at itself in a mirror, and for a few minutes, white people were horrified with what they saw.

But that moment has passed now. White people could only look at themselves for so long before looking away. A majority of white folks could only contemplate the system of brutality and oppression they tacitly support for a brief time before concluding, as they always do, that Black people deserve it, that killing Black people is self-defense, that even a paralyzed Black man is still a threat who needs to be shackled.

Essentially, the months after Floyd’s murder have been a summer fling for a majority of white people. It’s like they went on safari in Ghana, saw some lions, had sex with a Black person who works there, and learned a lot about the transatlantic slave trade. But now playtime’s over, and the white majority has to get back to the serious work of enforcing white supremacy and privilege and reelecting a bigoted president.

If you thought Floyd’s murder was going to lead to structural change, then you don’t know white people as well as I do.