George Floyd’s death started a fire, but the kindling had been piling up for years
It was all supposed to blow over in a few days. Thomas Jefferson once said of Black Americans that “their griefs are transient”. These were people who lived life with a more muted emotional palette than everybody else. As their pain was fickle and their depths of feeling shallow, their lives were more expendable than others’. An unemployed Black American in his mid-40s with a criminal record, George Floyd’s life wasn’t supposed to add up to much, especially in our age of mass distraction. Perhaps his name would trend on Twitter for a while. Perhaps there would be a handful of marches. But inevitably, we would soon all move on to more important matters. We always do.
After all, it is difficult to imagine a more mundane police encounter than the one facing the officers who confronted Floyd for apparently buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill a year ago. This is not a scenario that should produce a world-changing event. And it wouldn’t have done, had things unfolded a little differently. With last month’s conviction of Derek Chauvin leading commentators to argue that, in the end, the system does work, it is worth remembering the direction that this case was taking before it sparked a global movement.
On 26 May 2020, a Minneapolis police spokesman, John Elder, issued a press release headlined: “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction”. It stated that this man had “physically resisted officers” who were eventually able “to get the suspect into handcuffs” before they “noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress”. They called for an ambulance. The suspect went to the hospital. He died. The end.
No mention of “I can’t breathe”. No mention of Floyd calling for his “mama” as he pleaded for his life. No mention of an officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck for over nine excruciating minutes. Had the 17-year-old bystander Darnella Frazier not recorded a video of the incident on her phone, had that video not spread across the internet like wildfire and had masses of angry protesters not spilled on to the streets across the world, it is very possible that Chauvin would still be patrolling the streets of Minneapolis right now.
Does this mean that, but for a twist of fate, we might have never seen the mass demonstrations for racial justice that have marked the past year? In truth, the death of George Floyd caused last summer’s worldwide Black Lives Matter protests in the same way that the death of Franz Ferdinand caused the outbreak of the first world war. This was the spark, but the kindling had been piling up for years. If it hadn’t been Floyd, it might have been Breonna Taylor. Or Ahmaud Arbery. Or Daunte Wright. Here was the fire next time that James Baldwin had prophesied.
In its wake came a remarkable change in atmosphere, even on the distant island of Great Britain. There was a rush to at least be seen to be doing the right thing. Suddenly, “taking the knee” in protest against racial injustice, an action that cost the American footballer Colin Kaepernick his career just a few years ago, became the standard way to begin all Premier League and English Football League matches. Establishment bodies such as the BBC and the National Trust faced the wrath of government ministers, high-profile journalists and even some of their own supporters by publicly taking steps to reckon with their racial legacy. Eventually even the most enduring of institutions, the monarchy, faced charges of racism from members of its own family.
The government had to respond. It launched yet another commission to look at racial disparity in the UK. A curious step, considering multiple reviews had already been conducted into the issue over the past few years, and the recommendations from these investigations were still being ignored. However, once the figures who would lead the commission were announced, questions were raised. The prime minister’s policy adviser Munira Mirza, famous for arguing that institutional racism was “a perception more than a reality”, was tasked with running the commission and Tony Sewell, who spent years questioning the idea of institutional racism, was appointed as its chair.
So, when what has become known as the Sewell report was delivered and the commission stated that it “was especially concerned with the way the term ‘institutional racism’ is being applied in current discourse”, few readers were surprised. The Black Lives Matter protests had begun, for many, to expand the common understanding of what constituted racism. That was dangerous, and needed shutting down.
Institutional racism was a phrase coined in the 1960s by civil rights organiser Stokely Carmichael (also known as Kwame Ture)to illustrate how racism was more about institutional power than individual prejudice. Carmichael stated that “if a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem.” Racism was not about what you wanted to do, but about what you could do and who you could do it to. What will the institutions of society – the police, the courts, the prison system – allow particular classes of people to endure? Racism was a question of which lives mattered to the state.
Half a century later, this question was still being asked by those looking at the aftermath of the Windrush scandal and the Grenfell Tower fire. Would Windrush have occurred if the people involved had been from Canada rather than the Caribbean? If Grenfell Tower had been home to some of the richer residents of Kensington and Chelsea rather than poor immigrant families, might their pleas for fire-resistant cladding have been heeded? As much as the Sewell report claimed that perceptions of racism today rested on the memory of “historical incidents”, a social system 500 years in the making did not crumble into dust with the passing of a few pieces of equality legislation in the late 20th century.
Yet despite government opposition and a wider cultural backlash against the movement, Black Lives Matter retains a broad appeal in the UK. By October last year, over half of the British public continued to support Black Lives Matter, with that number rising to seven in 10 for young people.
At the heart of criticism of the movement is the presumption that the increased focus on questions of race makes innocent white people feel bad about themselves. It leads to a spiral of guilt and self-recrimination that is no good to anybody. In reality, much of the response to Floyd’s murder and the movement that followed was not about laying blame and making people feel guilty. It was about making people, from all backgrounds, feel angry at things as they are. It was an outburst of anger at institutions that continue to carry the violence of the past into the present day. It was a justified, constructive anger, which resonated not only in London and Birmingham and Manchester but also in Buckinghamshire, St Ives and the Shetland Islands. And it is this wave of feeling – set into motion by one man in Minneapolis – that is perhaps most concerning for those invested in preserving the status quo.
Dr Kojo Koram teaches at the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London, and writes on issues of law, race and empire