SENTAMU ON: CHALLENGING RACISM
DR JOHN Sentamu says “peaceful protest” is the only way to confront the “deep, deep-seated racism” in America – and protests which have followed the death of George Floyd while in police custody.
There have been days of civil unrest after a police officer was filmed kneeling on the 46-year-old’s neck for at least eight minutes while arresting him for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 note in a Minnesota shop.
The victim’s desperate ‘I can’t breathe’ plea has shocked the world as the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement gathers momentum on both sides of the Atlantic.
“What has gone on is beyond protesting. Burning buildings and looting things, I don’t think that’s protesting,” said the Archbishop who was integral to the family of Stephen Lawrence’s fight for justice when Bishop of Stepney.
“Martin Luther King junior had a wonderful phrase: ‘Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars’.
“When people protest and the police are brutal, and people have lost their trust in the police, how do they express it? I hope not by creating the kind of mayhem that’s been around. Deep down within me, violence is not protesting. Violence is violence. Protesting, people should have that right. That’s a liberty you can’t take away.”
When Dr Sentamu and his wife Margaret travelled to New Zealand, Fiji and Samoa earlier this year, they deliberately took a longer route to avoid a stopover in the United States after a brush with the airport authorities on a previous trip four years ago.
Changing flights in Chicago, the Archbishop said his wife was “detained” for two hours because of an alleged discrepancy with her travel documents – and that they nearly missed their flight home.
Dr Sentamu says that he was warned that he would be detained, too, if the couple did not comply with airport officials. “They were so rude. There was no need for it. And to be threatened. I had my dog collar on by the way,” he went on. “I don’t think it is a country that is at ease with itself. I don’t know how they are going to put out the fire.”
Refraining from naming President Donald Trump, he added that he would need “real reasons” to return to the USA because “I don’t think the likes of me, the likes of Margaret, are respected”.
He said that the USA can no longer be called “the land of the free” when it fails to acknowledge the devastating impact of Covid-19 on BAME communities. “And no apology,” he added.