Black lives have never mattered here as much as they should
THIS week, Sheku Bayoh’s sister asked a salient question of all those professing that black lives matter.
Kadi Johnston said: “I ask everyone, what happens tomorrow? What happens the day after? We, the family, are still here grieving, fighting for justice for our brother Sheku.”
She urged the fight to continue until change happens in Scotland and we establish the full truth of how her brother died in police custody and the role race played in his death.
Indeed, when #blacklivesmatter is no longer trending on social media, when the outrage subsides, will our apathy return with nothing changed?
Where do we go from here and how do we ensure this “movement” is a fixture not a fashion?
It should not have taken this long for the indignation the BAME community has always felt to filter through to society at large, to white people.
The message has not changed. It’s only that we are listening, for now at least.
White people are suddenly galvanised, their consciousness aroused, and that’s why there is widespread engagement.
The BAME community has grown hoarse over the centuries protesting racism in the white man’s world of Scotland but their words have landed on deaf ears – until a video of a black man being killed by white police officers in America trended on social media.
The anger of the BAME community in Scotland is derived from social experience and is compounded by the lie we project, of a couthy wee country where we are all Jock Tamson’s bairns.
In five years, Scotland has barely acknowledged the death of Sheku, a black man who died after being restrained by our police in our country, yet it took less than five days for us to rally against the injustice of George Floyd.
There is a hypocrisy inherent in Scotland which is nauseating and it is perpetuated in our overwhelmingly white newsrooms, judiciary, police force and parliament.
Glasgow showed its pugnacious edge by changing the address of the South African consulate to Nelson Mandela Place, as a protest against apartheid.
Yet our cities are tributes to slavery and colonialism, our squares populated by statues which lionise merchants whose fortunes were built on the backs of forced black labour.
And then there are the military “heroes”, idolatrised in bronze and stone, who are responsible for mass slaughters and genocide against the black subjects of the empire.
They stand without context, grotesque glorifications of men and wars where imperial might crushed and subjugated and enslaved nations.
Take the towering equestrian bronze of Earl Roberts, which overlooks Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow, which is inscribed with the pledge to “continue the greatness of the empire”. The memorial lists, with no context, the countries where Roberts oversaw slaughter, from India to Afghanistan to Burma and South Africa, “by virtue and courage”.
Scotland has had a succession of “progressive” governments and councils, yet there are no plaques beside the street names or statues to speak truth to their shameful history.
It would have cost nothing but would have marginally enriched our nation’s education.
Words of solidarity are not enough. It is time for Scotland to effect meaningful change to stem institutional racism, to face up to a history embedded in slavery.
The Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER) has been campaigning for a dedicated national Scottish Museum of Empire, Slavery, Colonialism and Migration in Glasgow.
The museum must happen, because we should never forget the exploitation of black people made Glasgow.
As the CRER states: “The museum would tell the full stories of Scotland’s ‘unvarnished’ history. A place that children as well as adults could go to deepen our understanding of the past.”
Scotland cannot shape a healthy future until it recognises the sickness of the past and dispenses with the lie that black lives have ever mattered here as much they should.