I'm Karen Grigsby-Bates and this is Code Switch from MPR.

You all remember 2020, right? Sometimes it feels like yesterday, sometimes it feels like it was a

million years ago. 2020 was the last year of Trump's presidency. The year that COVID was declared

a global pandemic and the year that you couldn't go five minutes or re-five sentences without

stumbling upon the phrase racial reckoning. The country, some said confidently, was having the

biggest racial reckoning since the Civil Rights Movement. But in the months and now more than a

year since the summer of 2020, the Code Switch team has been wondering, what was actually being

reckoned with and by whom and what would the backlash be? After all, it was almost exactly a year

ago, January 6th, 2021, that insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol. Many of them expressed fear of

an animus toward the Black Lives Matter Movement. So today on the pod, we're revisiting this episode,

hosted by Jean Demby and Chirin Marisol Maragi about how public support for racial justice issues

waxed and then waned. Here's Chirin. In June of 2020, the early days of the pandemic,

it seemed like most of the nation's attention was focused on the police killings of George Floyd

and Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor and Louisville. People took to the streets across the country

and outrage, even in cities and small towns that were almost entirely white. And around that same

time last June, a poll came out from the Pew Research Center that found that solid majorities

of Americans about two-thirds of all respondents across racial and ethnic groups and political

parties expressed support for the Black Lives Matter Movement. Oh, and corporate America wanted

in on the action too. Companies from Big Box retailers to the day manufacturers.

The NFL, too, of all people with NFO. Oh, yes. The NFL, they all released statements about

the moments or they pledged to give money to quote unquote racial justice, news story after

news story, essay after essay, sermon after sermon, called it a time of racial reckoning for the

...