On Balance | George Floyd verdict a milestone in US shift to a more just society, but Republicans are chipping away at it

How close was America to a replay of the chaos that ripped through its cities a year ago in response to George Floyd’s death? 

With many riled up by similar incidents that occurred in the days leading up to and throughout the trial, including the police shootings of Duante Wright and Adam Toledo, it seemed all but assured that we would have been watching smoke rise from cities and towns across the country had Floyd’s killer, Derek Chauvin, been acquitted.

Confronted with graphic video evidence and damning testimony from the officer’s own colleagues, the jurors in the trial of the man who knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes delivered a verdict that prevented the tinderbox from igniting. And, with it, some of the racist underpinnings of the United States melted away like tonnes of granite subducting under a continental shelf.

The police killings of Floyd, and of Breonna Taylor just a few months before, set off the long-overdue tectonic shift in a way that the lynchings of many scores of African-Americans throughout the country’s history never managed to.

The verdict felt like another milestone in the course that the country has adopted since last year’s general election, when a majority of Americans rejected an administration that made division and discord its prime mode of governance.