During the summer of 2020, when protests convulsed cities around the world, one of the most striking scenes took place outside a library in a wealthy Maryland suburb. Eight days after George Floyd was killed, hundreds of white people—masked yet packed together—assembled in Bethesda with banners that read I can’t breathe. Then they thrust their hands to the sky and prayed, vowing to renounce the “white privilege” that marked them like original sin.
The gathering was a microcosm of the quasi-religious fervor that spread across America five years ago. In Washington, D.C., Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer draped themselves in kente cloth and took a knee in the Capitol. In Texas, Floyd was buried in a gold-plated casket befitting a pharaoh.
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