He’s using the moment as a time stamp, not rendering commentary on it per se. Floyd was arguably the peak of legitimacy and acceptance of what we (and he) now calls woke culture. (I’d set the time a little later, around the ‘22 midterms, but we’re in the same ballpark.)
It was just not until social media where minorities could get around the press and media filter.
And it happened, to a degree. Then it got overplayed, in part because the prigs Graham criticises were less concerned with police violence than they were with arguing online about it.
That in turn not only animated a pro-police backlash on the right, it also sapped the police/sentencing reform movement of the legitimacy it would need to survive mistakes, e.g. Chesa.
I think a key tenant to wokeness in this framework is the emphasis on awareness/alertness relative to solutions.
This is so well known that during the protest in 2021, there were “white shields” where White people would stand in front of Black protestors because everyone knows that police would not beat White people because there would be consequences.
https://www.blackenterprise.com/white-protesters-form-human-...
Sure. That doesn’t mean it’s a given that the disinterested middle will be swayed by them.