ABSTRACT
This chapter further develops the analysis of the white racist backlash that met the unprecedented international protests for race equality, inspired by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the murder of George Floyd (an unarmed Black man killed by a serving white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020). These events were met with a vicious and well-funded misinformation campaign that painted BLM, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and antiracism, in general, as threats to white people and to a safe and orderly society. The chapter begins with a detailed timeline of the main events, highlighting the speed and volume of attacks on CRT and race equity. These events are then analysed, using core ideas from CRT, to identify three vital aspects to of the anti-equity campaigns. First, the coordinated-ordinated and self-referential nature of the transatlantic-Atlantic attacks on antiracism. Second, the vital role played by a small but significant number of Black conservatives, who act as public advocates for anti-antiracism and mobilize their own minoritized identity in a claim to authenticity. Third, the events are analysed in relation to the CRT concept of the C-D-R cycle, i.e., a period of apparent interest-convergence soon gives way to divergence and then reclamation, whereby old inequities are legitimized and even extended. By the end of 2022, state-wide anti-CRT measures had been formally adopted in 28 US states, and BLM had been designated as a ‘partisan political movement’ in England (its materials banned from use in schools). It is highly significant that the timeline begins and ends with the murder of Black people at the hands of white men,; from George Floyd’s death to a racist mass -shooting in a Buffalo store in 2022.
