After George Floyd’s death, white liberals embrace ideas that once seemed radical

“Exploding pain,” replied Webb, who had seen the news and cried. “Can we talk outside in a little while?”

Theirs was a block of mostly white, liberal families, tucked inside cute bungalows with carefully tended gardens and century-old shade trees. The two women met on the sidewalk where their sons — ages 5 and 7 — had spent much of the last few weeks racing back and forth on their bikes and scooters.

On this morning, their conversation turned to the looting and fires that had unfolded just a few miles from their homes. To Garvey, 39, the destruction of the Target and surrounding stores was sad, but understandable, “a perfectly warranted and justified response . . . an expression of righteous rage.”

Webb, 33, wasn’t there yet, and she felt a little guilty about it. “I wasn’t sure what side I was supposed to be on,” she recalled. “It felt wrong to say we’re with you until you start looting.”

In Washington, President Trump has stoked fears of rampant lawlessness and issued calls to crack down on looting in an effort to solidify support from white voters. But among white liberals, the anger and unrest that followed Floyd’s death have provoked a far different reaction, leading them to embrace positions that only a few weeks ago might have seemed radical or unthinkable.

The response follows a pattern that has held for much of the past decade as white liberals have moved dramatically to the left on racial issues. In 2009, 50 percent of white Democrats said the country needed to do more to give blacks equal rights with whites, according to a survey of racial attitudes by the Pew Research Center. By late 2017, 80 percent of white Democrats said the country needed to do more to help blacks.

Starting in 2016, white liberals actually began to rate nonwhite groups more positively than whites, said Andrew Engelhardt, a postdoctoral research fellow at Brown University. “Usually, it’s the opposite,” he told NPR last year.

The change in white liberal attitudes, which one journalist described as a “Great Awokening,” has coincided with the rise of Trump’s brazenly racial politics as well as a series of police killings of black men caught on video, beginning with the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.

And it seems to mirror what has happened in recent weeks in Minneapolis, where throngs of white protesters, like Webb and Garvey, have taken to the streets to cheer on black speakers as they blast the city’s police force, attack its largely left-leaning leadership and decry systemic racism, which they believe contributed to Floyd’s death.

Webb said she turned to Garvey for solace in the wake of that first wave of looting and fires because she was sad, scared and needed to talk with someone in person.

“Where does this go next?” she worried. “Is our neighborhood going to burn?”

But she also knew her friend would be a “gut check.”

“I didn’t want to let myself default to the simplistic reaction of…