CLiME Founding Director Examines Collapse of Post-George Floyd Racial Reckoning in New Book
What happened to the national racial reckoning that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020? David Dante Troutt, founding director of the Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity (CLiME), tackles a question that has gone largely unexamined in his new book, Reckoning the Racial Reckoning: From Backlash to Accountability after George Floyd (Cambridge University Press).
Troutt, Distinguished Professor of Law and Derrick A. Bell Scholar at Rutgers Law School, argues that the moment ended without definition or scrutiny—and without any serious attempt to revive it—even as the disparities in wealth, health, and policing that provoked it went substantially unaddressed.
The book is organized around what Troutt calls the “what,” “so what,” and “now what” of a period when much of the United States, amid a pandemic, turned its attention to racial inequality. Troutt examines how legal doctrine has privileged colorblindness over the measurement and remedy of inequality; how government policy has produced what he terms “segregated zones of racial bargaining” in health and wealth; why prevailing policing rules are structurally deterrence-proof; and what diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts did—and did not—deliver.
Troutt concludes with an argument, not a diagnosis. Democratic struggle over local resources—budgets, land, schools, housing, and policing—is, he contends, the durable path to justice and well-being for Black American communities and the broader metropolitan regions those communities anchor.
“The reckoning didn’t fail because people stopped caring,” said Troutt. “It failed because awareness was never converted into accountability—and accountability lives in the unglamorous places: local budgets, zoning boards, police contracts. That’s where the next chapter has to be written.”
The book extends more than a decade of work at CLiME, which Troutt founded at Rutgers Law School in Newark to apply legal and interdisciplinary analysis to structural inequality in American metropolitan areas. CLiME’s research on housing affordability, segregation, and regional equity in New Jersey has informed state and municipal policy debates. Reckoning the Racial Reckoning places that local work within the national reckoning that briefly made these issues urgent to a much wider audience.
Reckoning the Racial Reckoning is Troutt’s fifth book. He is also the author of The Price of Paradise: The Costs of Inequality and a Vision for a More Equitable America (NYU Press), The Monkey Suit: Short Fiction on African Americans and Justice (The New Press), After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina (The New Press), and the novel The Importance of Being Dangerous.