Nonfiction
How the
George Floyd Protests Changed America, for Better and Worse
In
“Summer of Our Discontent,” the journalist Thomas Chatterton Williams argues
that Floyd’s murder in 2020 upended American racial politics — with lasting,
often adverse effects.
By Justin
Driver
Justin
Driver teaches at Yale Law School. He is the author of “The Fall of Affirmative
Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education,” which
will be published in September.
Published
Aug. 3, 2025
Updated
Sept. 3, 2025
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SUMMER OF
OUR DISCONTENT: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, by Thomas
Chatterton Williams
Over the
last several decades, the United States has occasionally experienced dramatic
transformations during compressed stretches of time. In 1968, the twin
assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, separated by
merely two months, yielded broad disillusionment. Six years later, as the
simmering Watergate scandal boiled over and prompted President Nixon’s
resignation, many Americans adopted a posture of deep distrust toward elected
officials. And, of course, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, inaugurated
an enduring era of anxiety over safety and security. In these critical periods,
an existing American order declined and a new paradigm ascended.
In
“Summer of Our Discontent,” Thomas Chatterton Williams argues that the United
States witnessed another such epoch-defining moment five years ago. The
inflection point, he contends, arrived on May 25, 2020, when Derek Chauvin
slowly extinguished George Floyd’s life outside the Cup Foods convenience store
in Minneapolis.
The
ensuing indignation over Floyd’s murder, alongside the then-raging pandemic and
extensive lockdown orders, fused to generate the largest protest movement in
our country’s history. That activism at once marked and marred the American
psyche, Williams insists, as “the residues of the normative revolution of 2020
have lingered.” In his view, a grave shift in mores and attitudes fomented a
racialized “wokeness” on the left that, in turn, generated a ferocious backlash
on the right, bequeathing our current, anguished hour.
Williams
is right that the last several years have brought unusually intense ferment to
American racial politics, and that the turmoil packed into what we might call
the Long George Floyd Moment — beginning in the Obama years and stretching into
Joe Biden’s presidency — deserves rigorous scrutiny.
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A staff
writer at The Atlantic and prominent commentator on race and identity, Williams
would seem well suited to explore how these recent seismic shifts have jolted
American society. Amid a sea of intellectual orthodoxy, he admirably stands out
for his willingness to pursue independent lines of thought, no small feat given
his combustible topic. Much of his recent journalism can be construed as a
broad-gauged expansion of the project initiated in his last book,
“Self-Portrait in Black and White” (2019), which denounced what he viewed as
America’s pathological fixation on race and racial categories.
In
“Summer of Our Discontent,” he continues that critique, dissecting the fallout
from “the racial reckoning of the summer of 2020,” and positioning himself as a
defender of traditional liberal values against the illiberal elements that he
believes have captured progressives and conservatives alike. He styles himself
as casting a plague on both American political houses, bemoaning “the
ill-conceived identity politics of the left” and “the spiteful populism of the
right.” In fact, though, he fixates on mere blemishes dotting the house to his
left and too often neglects the unmistakable stench of decay emanating from the
house to his right. He portrays the reactionary mood in our politics as arising
largely in response to the left’s supposed excesses, rather than also
endeavoring to probe its independent animating forces.
His
reductive analysis reaches its nadir when he suggests that the Jan. 6, 2021,
assault on the Capitol can helpfully be viewed as, in effect, the left’s
chickens coming home to roost. Following in the wake of the post-Floyd
protests, the Jan. 6 insurrection represented “a gross apotheosis of a kind of
increasingly common tendency, visible on the social justice left for years now,
to make the country’s politics in the street whenever feeling sufficiently
unheard,” he maintains. Never mind that the thousands of post-Floyd protests
were overwhelmingly nonviolent and that the protesters included among their
number such notorious firebrands as Mitt Romney.
In short,
Williams’s analysis lacks proportion. He does not seem to grasp that the left’s
illiberalism occupies a marginal position in mainstream Democratic politics and
the right’s illiberalism possesses a stranglehold on the Republican Party.
Today, many Americans justifiably fear rising authoritarianism and worry that
the nation might not withstand sustained attacks on our core democratic
institutions. But Williams manages to contort himself into asserting that the
American left somehow poses significant threats along both these dimensions.
When
recounting some liberals’ all-too-credulous Twitter responses to the actor
Jussie Smollett’s 2019 hate-crime hoax, for example, Williams overplays his
hand, glimpsing in the reflexive expressions of outrage a “manipulative
rhetorical tactic that is a common feature of authoritarian ideological systems
and movements.” (Smollett, after alleging he had been attacked in downtown
Chicago by noose-wielding men who spewed racist and homophobic invective, was
convicted of filing a false police report in 2021, though his conviction was
later overturned on technical grounds.) Similarly, Williams derides The New
York Times’s unvarnished coverage of the first Trump administration in
bizarrely hyperbolic terms, asserting it posed “something like a crisis of
democracy.”
In
passing, Williams labels President Trump “juvenile and polarizing,” and notes
that he exhibits “meanness and mendacity,” among other drive-by opprobria. But
he does not summon the energy to treat Trump with the sustained attention that
the dominant political figure of our age demands. A book that purports to
examine the last decade of racial politics but refuses to confront fully
Trump’s political ascent and career cannot help providing a myopic vision of
our era. The neo-nativist, racialized conceptions of American citizenship
central to Trump’s worldview have assumed new prominence during his second
administration. But they were blatant from his initial forays into electoral
politics, when he doubted Barack Obama’s eligibility for the presidency and declared
an Indiana-born federal judge biased because he was “Mexican.”
Williams’s
book is impaired by slapdash prose. His writing abounds with interminable,
convoluted sentences that teem with digressions and then awkwardly limp toward
disorienting conclusions. Here is one from the prologue:
For
non-whites, even though the mixed-race population has become the
fastest-growing segment of the American demos and, in real terms, a
disproportionate but statistically small and decreasing number of unarmed Black
civilians were killed by police annually (typically between 15 and 25 per year
from a population exceeding 40 million, according to The Washington Post’s
“Fatal Force” database) — and indeed other quality-of-life markers have been
equalizing for significant numbers of Black people since the civil rights
movement — the death of [Trayvon] Martin followed by [Michael] Brown
(regardless of the specific contingencies of that case), and a high-profile
slate of videotaped police and vigilante killings that converged with the
proliferation of camera-equipped smartphones and the pervasiveness of social
media, thwarted any self-congratulatory sense of the inevitability of social
progress still alive in the first half of Obama’s second administration.
Huh? In
addition to such passages, “Summer of Our Discontent” includes many distended
excerpts — some spanning three pages — from not-so-obscure sources, including
The Times.
Midway
through the book, Williams chides another writer on the race beat for
propounding “an excruciatingly simplistic tale, fueled by a powerful
unwillingness and incapacity to grapple with contemporary American racial and
social complexity.” Regrettably, I know the feeling.
SUMMER OF
OUR DISCONTENT: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse | By Thomas
Chatterton Williams | Knopf | 245 pp. | $30
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