“ I know what I see when I see George Floyd. What about you?”

A dumb SOB whose poor decisions led to his demise. His murder happened because of a lifetime of poor decisions that led him to spend his adulthood as a criminal. He did not deserve to be murdered but like so many others who were involved in a life of crime his killing was predictable. If not from Derek Chauvin then from some rival gang member or during a drug deal gone bad.

His death had absolutely nothing to do with Portland (or Seattle) and there was no reason to spend the summer of 2020 lighting Portland.

….lighting Portland on fire.

@1 no, a "lifetime of bad decisions" is what led you to be posting this ignorant bullshit

So many fucking racists in the Slog comments these days.

Two things caused the 2020 protests to sputter out:

When the protests changed from opposing police violence to suggesting that we spend less money on police, white liberals decided that was too far and stopped showing up.
White liberals decided it was more important to stop Trump's reelection than anything else. So a lot of that energy went into electing Biden, who arguably would not have won without the energy from the protests that he was able to co-opt.

And Biden did not support shifting money from police to more effective programs. So we're now worse off. And while we got 4 years without Trump, the 2020 loss catalyzed the turn to a more explicitly fascist Trump campaign. So even on the electoral front, we are worse off.

I'm not sure if there any practical lessons here. Not treating protest and voting as exclusive choices would be good, but if white liberals will always defect the moment steps are taken that might actually change things rather than vent about how fucked we are, there's simply not a winning coalition in the streets or at the ballot box.