Sheku was a victim of police brutality & racism and it happened here in Scotland

Partner of death in custody dad hits out

WHEN Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in November 2016, the Daily Record foresaw a beautiful country heading for a generational reckoning.

Civil unrest, a terrorist attack or “a contentious police shooting”, we wrote, would soon test America and its new leader. We stated: “The task of bringing the nation together will fall on Trump. We can only imagine how that will end.”

Events have unfolded with the certainty of a calendar. So the 45th president reacted to outrage over the death of an unarmed black man at the hands of the Minnesota police – not with the equanimity of a true leader, but with the posturing bravado of an autocrat.

Because he is so easy to read and because the pattern of racism and injustice in the US is so ingrained, our prediction was, tragically, not hard to get right.

Trump won in 2016 on the dogwhistle of white supremacy, selling a racist’s fantasy of “making America great again”.

But America was founded on the twin cardinal sins of genocide of the native population and the enslavement of the black population. That means racial inequality will continue to be a critical, unstable element in the country until it is acknowledged and atoned for.

Until then, the anger and injustice will remain. The truth of what inequality means will be laid bare again and again, just as it has been by the death of George Floyd and the disproportionate effect of coronavirus on ethnic minorities.

We do not share the same slave inheritance as the US but our minority communities suffer many of the same consequences. Scots of African, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin do not have any special genetic material in common.

But they are likely to share experiences of poverty, low pay, poor housing and frontline public service - the very factors that make them more susceptible to coronavirus.

So when we open our eyes to racism, we have to open them to inequality, too.

Scotland, preoccupied for so many long years in ignoring religious sectarianism, has only slowly woken up to acknowledging racism.

Our problems with accusations of institutional racism, articulated by the widow of Sheku Bayoh in today’s Daily Record, or the casual racism caught in the macabre online images posted in recent days, show we are only at the beginning of a long road to equality.

Minority communities in Scotland are under-represented in our public life, in our media and in our sporting culture.

We are a country that unconsciously excludes black and ethnic minorities while making gestures of solidarity when black lives are in the spotlight.

Yet it is what we do as a society when there is no virtue or reward that is a better test of who we are.

When we learn to make way in Scotland, when we accept and make space for minorities at the tables of power and influence, that is when we can really start to address race and inequality.