Black Lives First, Culture Wars Later
I spent much of the afternoon of Saturday June 13th laughing at the irony on my twitter timeline. The most honourable of patriots, rallied by the cry of their prophet Tommy Robinson, arrived in Central London rowdy and ready to protect the beloved statues. By the time the sun had reached its highest point in the sky, facists were attacking police, completely unprovoked. Meanwhile, the peaceful BLM protest was happening in Hyde Park and the disparity in civility between the two gatherings was clear for all to see. The police had expected clashes between BLM demonstrators and ‘anti anti-racist protesters’ but instead found themselves as the lightning rod the hooligans would use to outlet their pent up racist angst. Prior to Saturday’s BLM demonstration, champion of Britain’s black, brown and BAME Priti Patel passed a law that would see protesters potentially fast-tracked to jail within 24 hours of arrest. No doubt that she had expected to speak out against ‘troublesome’ Black Lives Matter crowds on Saturday but instead she ended up tweeting in condemnation a picture of a bloke urinating next to a police officer’s memorial. In their idiocy and with better effect than any protest they were supposedly countering, that mob of hooligans had put in public view the UK’s racist underbelly. The irony of it all tickled me. And it felt like something of a win. It felt similar to a week before when I first saw the video of Bristolians sending the statue of slaver Edward Colston for a swim in the same waters that facilitated the building of his wealth. In this moment, many of the black voices discussing race ring with the sound of vindication in the sentiment of “I want to hear from the ‘The UK is not racist’ crew, they’re awfully quiet right now!’, and many are holding conversations about whether statues of controversial figures should come down. In fact at the time of writing MP David Lammy telling Andrew Marr that he wouldn’t support the removal of Churchill’s statue.
Once I’d stopped laughing at how Saturday had played out I spent some time thinking on where we find ourselves in this movement which is aimed towards bettering the lives of black people, and I wondered how consequential these moments that felt like victories really were. In the US, where George Floyd was savagely murdered by police, huge sustained protests denouncing police brutality and systemic racism have led to actual, tangible change. The Minneapolis City Council have unanimously voted to abolish its police force. Los Angeles, New York and around 15 other cities have commited to reducing their police department budget and congress have proposed a bill aimed at reforming the police institution at large. The tragedy of George Floyd is catalyst for the paradigm shift currently happening stateside, a shift that is taking place in the collective consciousness of the American people that’s evidenced by the reform that is taking place at a systemic level. This reform is yet to come into effect so we can’t judge its effectiveness, but nonetheless historic progress is being made. Over here, protests have been strong in number and in spirit but have lacked the clear message and specific focus needed to set off a chain of events that would lead to palpable change.
The reason for the protests and the crux of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK has to be clear and evident: the aim to highlight forms of persecution and to seek to destroy the establishment of systemic racism. Police brutality is one of the more violent and more visible forms of the system’s antipathy for black people. This system that stop and searches, arrests and prosecutes at a far higher rate if you are black. The same system that, for the same crimes in the same circumstances, hands longer sentences for black people than white. It’s the same system in which we are grossly overrepresented within the prison population, yet hugely underrepresented in positions of power and authority, even in the industries where we form a high percentage of the talent or workforce. This is the same system that excludes/expels our children from school at a rate higher than any other racial group. The same again that has our black women several times more likely to die during childbirth than white mothers. The system in which somehow 94% of all doctors to have died from battling covid-19 on the frontlines are BAME. These are the issues that are in urgent need of address and it’s up to us to ensure that they’re importance is recognised.
When we rally at demonstrations, take to social media or write to our MPs we have to ensure that our voice is coherent in highlighting how society fails to acknowledge the self-evident truth of black lives mattering. Take another look across the pond and we see that ever-raging arguments about flags and monuments ‘honouring’ the confederacy haven’t had nearly the effect that recent protests have. In the UK the entire scope of the conversation has shifted ever since Colston’s statue was made to take a bath, shifted towards Britain’s abhorrent colonial history and away from the initial issue of the racist policing system. As much as it pains me to say, the UK has it’s own list of ‘George Floyd’s’, black people injured and killed because of the institutional racism of the police force. Black people make up 3% of the population yet account for 8% of deaths in police custody and are twice as likely to die while in police custody relative to white people. Through our protests we ought to be forcing the names of those that make up this wretched statistic -the likes of Rashan Charles, Sean Rigg, Christopher Alder and many more- into the conversations being had right now, but regrettably it’s names like Winston Churchill, Edward Colston and Cecil Rhodes that are dominating the space. Another point that further demonstrates what I’m getting at; Saturday June 13th saw thousands take to the streets of Paris to protest police brutality with the name of Adama Traore, a 24 year old killed while being detained by police in 2016, written on their placards and roaring from their throats. Their roars were heard across the English channel; that same day news anchors on the BBC were telling the name and story of Adama Troare to the UK masses, while the the likes of Rashan, Sean and Christopher have remained absent from the news even throughout the last couple weeks.
Of all that I’ve seen, and I don’t claim to have seen it all, the most comprehensive coverage in the mainstream news domain of the racist and brutal conduct of the British police was when George The Poet was interviewed on Newsnight. The interviewer opened by asking if Black Lives Matter was having its own #MeToo moment. There is so much to unpack from the view that such a baseless comparison could be useful in understanding BLM right now, but what was more crucial here is George’s succint detailing of the ugly resemblance between the US and British policing and judicial systems, and his mention of names like Sarah Reed, Nuno Cardoso and Julian Cole (he’d known the latter personally) might have been the only uttering of their names in the mainstream media throughout the last week or two. George managed to navigate the line of questioning which reeked of the typical British ignorance about race to explain the structural and institutional issues we face.
In case there’s any confusion at all, let me be clear that David Lammy and I are not boys. If Churchill’s statue were to ever come down I would want to be there in person to hear its metal connect with the concrete with my own ears. But in this pivotal moment, we have to consider the most effective way to use the energy we’ve garnered. In that regard at the least, the official UK Black Lives Matter organisation has been caught totally off-guard. As the only body of its kind, their leadership is needed to make sure that beyond mobilising, we mobillise effectively. As of now, they’re supposedly working on the best way to become a transparent body, apparently taking the time needed to decide how to distribute funds they’ve amassed from the recent influx of donations and only just working on a website. Hopefully the name of Simeon Francis, a black man who died in police custody on 20th May 2020 (five days before George Floyd) will be in bold, one of the first things visible on the site. Hopefully the website will inform and encourage the support of The United Families & Friends Campaign (UFFC), a coalition of those affected by deaths in police, prison and psychiatric custody. UFFC are currently calling for the abolition of the Independent Office for Police Conduct because in the last 50 years there has been only one police officer convicted over a death in police custody. Just one.
So let’s make sure the drunkards in London on Saturday or the statues of Churchill or anyone else don’t detract from the matter at hand. We have to make sure that the conversations are had on our terms and are always about what matters most to us: black lives.
