2020 called for a racial reckoning. 2022 is proof of its failure.

Oh, look, Penn State is suddenly unsure about whether it will be able to pay for its planned Center for Racial Justice, one of the university’s key commitments after a series of campus-wide demonstrations over equity issues in 2020.

Call it yet another empty, institutional promise made after the murder of George Floyd. It joins a string of others — remember the mass police reform effort or the pledge to further diversify newsrooms? — on the scrap heap of half-hearted attempts at social justice and racial reconciliation.

The Penn State center, which was to be based on the main campus in University Park, Pa., was supposed to demonstrate the school’s dedication to promoting racial justice, but it looks like money — the university operated with a $127 million deficit last fiscal year — may be an issue. (Though, there are apparently no issues paying and platforming a Proud Boy at the university.)

» READ MORE: Penn State wavers on funding for Center for Racial Justice, a key commitment after 2020 protests

Isn’t it amazing how efforts fostering diversity, inclusion, and social justice always seem to be the first thing on the chopping block when the money gets tight?

But then, what’s the rush, right? Racial justice is so 2020, when countless institutions were tripping over themselves to pledge their allegiance to anti-racism, when individuals of all backgrounds were throwing their fists in the air and filling up their social media feeds with righteous hashtags.

Racial justice achieved!

Racism eradicated!

All good.

Except, of course, it’s not. We are a nation rotting from within because of our failure to fully and adequately address issues of racial justice. And with so many people trying to ignore — or erase — our ugly past, we are hastening our demise by sidestepping our shameless present.

There isn’t a day that passes where some white politicians aren’t flying their racist flags — often at a Donald Trump rally.

» READ MORE: ‘Gag orders’ for U.S. teachers are becoming our new McCarthyism | Will Bunch

During one such gathering in Nevada last Saturday, Tommy Tuberville, a white senator from Alabama, told a mostly white audience that Democrats “want reparations” for slavery “because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.”

The next day, during another Trump rally in Arizona, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene declared, “Joe Biden’s five million illegal aliens are on the verge of replacing you …”

But these two clowns are hardly the only ones.

Rapper Kanye West, who’s African American, declared his intention to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” while apologists tried to minimize and excuse hateful words that he’s long weaponized to target others in the past, including friends and family.

Supporters often attribute those kinds of attacks by West (who now goes by the mononym “Ye”) to a mental health condition. But mental illness does not make someone racist. Racism makes someone racist.

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Out in Los Angeles, Latino members of the City Council were found to have made a series of nauseating anti-Black and anti-Indigenous remarks that were secretly recorded during a private meeting. On the recording, Nury Martinez, the council president, disparaged people from the Oaxaca region of Mexico as “little short dark people” (Martinez herself is Mexican American) and called a Black child a “monkey” in need of a “beatdown.”

After an uproar, Martinez stepped down. Her remorseless letter of resignation read in part:

“… to all little Latina girls across this city — I hope I’ve inspired you to dream beyond that which you can see.”

What they see, lady, is a racist. Period. And what I hope you’ve inspired is for Latinos to fight anti-Blackness within our own communities.

Closer to home, a surveillance video obtained by The Inquirer through New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act showed two men laughing as another wrote a racial slur on the dorm room door of a Black student at Rowan University in South Jersey last month.

I counted three racists in the video. But officials apparently didn’t see any because no one involved was charged with a bias crime. Instead, Danny D’Agostino, 20, of Deptford, N.J., and Dominic Hull, 18, of Mullica Hill, N.J., were given trespassing warnings, and Alston Willis, 19, of Wenonah, N.J., who wrote the slur, was charged with harassment, a disorderly offense.

The men, none of whom is a student at the university, did not know the race of the person who lived in the room, according to a police report. Willis told investigators that he identified as African American.

“It’s ironic that he’s Black, too,” Hull told police, referring to Willis. “It’s funnier.”

» READ MORE: Can parents opt-out students from curriculum? Pa. and N.J. school districts are seeing more attempts.

No, it’s pathetic. So was the feeble comment by a university spokesperson, saying the school — where Black students are 10% of the student population — would continue to offer programs and services to increase diversity because it was important to “raise awareness.”

Now that is some vintage 2020 sentiment right there.

More than two years after much-hyped reckonings, awareness should have long ago turned into action and accountability. Instead, on most days, the radical transformation necessary for racial equality in this country feels like a distant dream.

If you hadn’t noticed, our failure to deal with race isn’t the only crisis on our hands. As I was finishing this column, the Jan. 6 committee was wrapping up its final meeting before the Nov. 8 election.

The committee showed a series of videos in which one Trump ally after another pleaded the Fifth.

And then the committee took a historic, unanimous vote to subpoena a former president, demanding that he testify about his failed plot to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.

Said Rep. Bennie Thompson, cochair of the House select committee investigating the insurrection, “This is a question of accountability to the American people.”

It is, but believing a dishonorable man would honor a subpoena calls for more faith than I have.

Whether it’s about racial equity or meting out justice, it’s almost always a question of accountability — and almost always, the American people are left waiting.