It appears that the corner the United States supposedly turned in 2020 in recognising and addressing its systemic racism was just another dead end – an illusion that provided the nation with a brief feel-good moment and nothing more. For all the promises to tackle discrimination in education, employment, housing and law enforcement made in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter mass protests, and a particularly contentious presidential election in 2020, very little has actually been achieved in bridging the deep racial fissures in American society.

It would seem that all the promises American leaders made four years ago were only meant to stall for time. “We can deliver racial justice,” President Joe Biden said after his election in 2020, but his promise was clearly a hollow one. Biden hoped that the national conversation would shift, the US would return to business as usual, and its massive racism problem would be swept back under the proverbial rug.

That all the ambitious antiracism promises have been abandoned in just a short few years is not surprising, as the same has happened many times before in American history.

Just months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in December 1964, for example, Malcolm X told a crowd at the University of Oxford that he did not expect the bill to bring meaningful change.

“[T]he same things are happening to us in 1964 that happened in 1954, 1924 and 1884…No matter how many bills pass, [Black people’s] lives are not worth two cents.”

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