It was the summer when the world stood still - because of a virus that crossed borders, and because of a video that no one could ever forget. On May 25, 2020, a white police officer pressed his knee for over nine minutes onto the neck of a handcuffed Black man. The man was George Floyd. And his last words - “I can’t breathe” - burned themselves into the collective soul of America like a cry for help from a country that had lost itself.
Five years later, much has happened. And yet much remains.
“He said - ‘I can’t breathe. They’re going to kill me.’ And they did it anyway., What began as a reaction to an allegedly counterfeit 20-dollar bill became an international indictment against a structurally racist security apparatus.
Journalist Noreen Nasir was in Minneapolis when the city exploded. “Anger, yes. But also grief, despair. That mixture was almost tangible,” she says. From an improvised memorial site, a place of remembrance grew within days - George Floyd Square, filled with flowers, candles, voices, tears.
And then there were those who protested. Some for the first time in their lives. Young Black people, white mothers, queer activists, immigrants. People who said - We are tired of the system. People who shouted - Enough is enough.
But there was also fear. The Somali shopkeepers in the neighborhood - Black themselves, marginalized themselves - taped signs to their destroyed windows - “Minority owned.” A silent plea - Please spare us. We are not the target. We are part of the same story.
And then came the trial. The video recording was the pivotal point - the sentence of the prosecution - “Believe your eyes” became the moral guideline. It was the 17-year-old Darnella Frazier whose courage documented the truth. And it was Prosecutor Jerry Blackwell who said in his closing argument - “George Floyd did not die because his heart was too big. But because Derek Chauvin’s heart was too small.”
In the end, a mixed jury found Chauvin guilty on all counts. A moment of justice? Maybe. A moment of relief? Yes. But no healing.
So what remains?
“It was like someone had thrown a match into an already flammable country,” says Nasir. “Everyone was at home, locked in, angry - and suddenly there was this video. Everyone saw it. No one could look away.”
And so George Floyd became not just a victim, but a turning point. His name now stands alongside Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner. But his death changed more. All around the world, countries began to take a new look at their police, their history, their violence. It was a global cry for justice.
Five years after the murder of George Floyd, much has happened. And yet much remains. In truth - it has gotten worse. Because while the world was shouting “Black Lives Matter” in the summer of 2020, the echo has since become quieter. Reform laws failed. Federal agencies like the Department of Justice ended reform agreements initiated under the new Trump administration. And right-wing voices are now even calling for a pardon for Derek Chauvin - as if the truth of back then were only a mistake of today. With the return of Donald Trump to the White House in January 2025, a new phase of political darkening has begun - an era of selective truth, calculated humiliation, systematic disenfranchisement. The world asks itself in astonishment - or in horror - how a country that once saw itself as a moral beacon could again hand the keys to power to a man like Trump. A man who does not see people as equal, but as usable. A man who, within four months, has made the United States into a country that flees instead of offering refuge. A place where facts no longer count if they do not fit the ideological grid.
Especially revealing was his recent appearance with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. In a bizarre moment of political tastelessness, Trump tried to gain international attention with a new lie - he claimed that a “genocide of white farmers” was taking place in South Africa - and supported this claim with photos of murdered people that in reality came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This crude manipulation was not a misunderstanding, but a deliberate strategy - a staging to fuel global “White Power” movements, to normalize right-wing hate, to make racist narratives socially acceptable again. The numbers clearly refute him - in 2024, over 26,000 people were murdered in South Africa - twelve of them were white farmers. The main victims of the violence are young, poor, Black men. But Trump ignores this reality - because it cannot be instrumentalized.
Ramaphosa himself met this grotesque provocation with a dignity that stood in sharp contrast to Trump’s hyped self-dramatization. The South African president remained objective, calm, statesmanlike - and reminded that dignity and truth still count, even when they are not in power. Trump’s behavior, on the other hand, was nothing but an attempt to misuse international tensions for domestic political purposes - on the back of the truth, on the backs of the dead.
What is revealed here is not an exception, but a system. A system that does not lie by accident, but because it understands the lie as a tool. A system that spreads racist fairy tales in order to distort reality and to use fear as an instrument of rule. The question that remains is no longer - How could it come to this? But - How many truths still have to be sacrificed before the world realizes that Trump does not represent America - but its most dangerous distortion?
But Floyds echo lives on. In every demonstration. In every camera that remains focused on police violence. In every person who says - I’ve had enough. I want to breathe.
English 
German 
