A year-long series looking back on the most significant moments of the past 25 years, how they changed our world, and how they will continue to shape the next 25.

Christina Sharpe is a writer, professor and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University.

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was brutally murdered by police in Minneapolis, Minn. I won’t name the cop(s) who killed Mr. Floyd. I won’t recount the harrowing details of his tortuous death. Such details would be another iteration of the brutal accounting that determines who is worthy of life and who isn’t. By now George Floyd’s name, his death, and the uprising it instantiated resonate all over the world.

I will say this: George Floyd had lived in the city of Minneapolis-Saint Paul for about four years. On the day of his death, Mr. Floyd was living his life – moving through his day when that life was taken from him.

George Floyd.Offices of Ben Crump Law/Offices of Ben Crump Law via The New York Times

According to several accounts, he had recently lost his job as a bouncer – laid off because of the closures and shutdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. His life ended at the conjunction of a global pandemic and anti-Blackness. And here I use the present tense: His murder is specific and horrific and it meets a series of other events unfolding in 2020 and beyond, in which, if we are paying attention to history, we come to know intimately, again (and again) that there are sets of people (Black, Palestinian, Indigenous, Trans, unhoused, without papers) to whom seemingly anything can be done with impunity.

Perhaps the extended, excruciating murder of George Floyd, and the passivity on the policeman’s face (“placid as a country lake” writes Dawn Lundy Martin) against the cries from Mr. Floyd for his mother, for breath, for relief; perhaps the busyness, the bureaucracy by the other policemen around the murder-in-progress, the ordinariness of the setting, the lack of a confrontation – simply a murder unfolding in nine common minutes; perhaps the ubiquity of cellphone recordings, enough to make the event petrifying and ordinary – perhaps this explosive conjunction of the banal and the shocking activated the realities of all the coterminous and accumulated injustices that were being lived, perhaps this murder exposed momentarily the fundamental rot at the centre of capital and Western social life.

A protester carries a U.S. flag upside down as he walks past a burning building in Minneapolis on May 28, 2020, during a protest over the death of Mr. Floyd.Julio Cortez/The Associated Press

Mr. Floyd’s murder by police was a ghastly and singular event. It was also the latest in the ongoing series of quotidian and spectacular murders of Black people by police and what Frank Wilderson calls their deputized agents. Black people were grieving before May 25, 2020, and Black people continue to grieve.

If Western so-called liberal democracy had boasted the emergence of a “post racial” society, if it claimed that it was “law and order” that held back the worst of its racist, fascist instincts instead of activating them, the brutal killing of George Floyd undid that claim. His murder exposed those claims as false to a public usually unaffected by that undergirding system that, in fact, kept those forces vigorous. For some, the “publicness” of Mr. Floyd’s killing exposed the barely hidden liberal fallacies.

To witness these deaths is to witness the gaping hole in liberal democratic discourse around policing and so-called public safety. George Floyd’s voice and its extinguishing echoed around the world. It entered and met the others who were similarly placed in capital’s social and economic ecosystem. Those at the bottom. Those who are disposable.

That video of his murder, a video that I still refuse to watch because if I were to watch it, I know that it would undo me, but which I could not avoid hearing described in its terrible minutiae, identified the forces arrayed against living, and the people dying as a necessary result. This video was not the video of a war in progress, but it was the video of a war in progress. It was the video of an ongoing attack in which the police officer was familiar to the audience as a messenger and agent, a symbol of the state, and Mr. Floyd was familiar as the person being killed in that war, by that state.

The murder of George Floyd was both singular and cumulative.

A shock wave went through us. Not because we had not seen and experienced such violence before. But there was the extremity of it. The utter brutality of the white man who killed the Black man. The commitment of the white man, expressed in those interminable nine minutes and 29 seconds, to doing his “job.” The utter waste of life and the commitment to waste of life. There were condemnations after the fact. There were meetings scheduled with “leaders” who were not leaders. Then there were the dismissals of forms of protest deemed unreasonable. Then the calls for protesters to be “peaceful.” All in the language that values property over people; that values property over the people who were once property.

All these things we heard; all of these things we had heard before:

After the killing of

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