There’s a real infantile resistance to anything that came before, out of the conviction that the youth will save us, the savior is always the next generation. And so there’s an amnesia about the fact that these claims have been made before, and there’s a real dedication to saying, “OK, the next generation is going to be the one that does it.” During the post–financial crisis era, the Occupy Era, some people had a slogan which made me wince so hard; it was called No Dads, which was supposed to be the statement that we don’t have any older authority figures over us. We’re doing our own thing. When you’ve created these conditions where you are constantly valorizing the youth and saying that the new will always be better than the old, then you’re telling people, “Hey, there’s no reason to research what was happening in the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s because that’s the past. That’s the Dads.”

An activist asks why so little has changed since the George Floyd protests.