It’s been four years since a video of a white police officer placing his left knee on a Black man’s neck for nine minutes suffocating him and ignoring his cries of “I can’t breathe” more than 20 times. It’s been four years since the video of Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd – sending shockwaves across the world and reigniting the Black Lives Matter movement.
I say reignited and not sparked, as the BLM movement began back in 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida. Outrage began on social media when Zimmerman was found not guilty of murder, but the Facebook post by Alicia Garza was the first to contain the rallying cry “Black Lives Matter”.
Floyd’s murder was the catalyst for summer protests across the USA that quickly gained traction across the western world. The summer of 2020 felt like real change. Not the sort of ‘change’ that is promised by our politicians with their short-termism and empty soundbites; this was real change. There was a true sense that white people finally could grasp the racism we Black people are subject to. A shame it took visual aid like a white on Black murder for that grasp of structural and institutional racism to finally take hold.
I recall protesting with a mask on, willing to catch the coronavirus if it meant that I and every other Black person living in this white world were not just heard but understood.
But with 2020 firmly in our rearview mirror, alongside the summer of BLM marches that were furiously exciting and somewhat promising – was it merely a moment rather than a movement?
Has anything changed?
All the social media infographics seem to have disappeared, the protests stopped, I can’t remember the last time I saw an athlete take the knee. No more statues coming down. And it has been tricky to find a BLM-related article post 2021. So I find myself asking: has anything changed for Black people in the last four years?
Structurally, nothing has changed. How can it within such a short amount of time? The book Racism and Ethnic Inequality in a Time of Crisis, published in 2023, included the results of the most extensive survey of racial inequality since before the turn of the millennium. As reported in the Guardian, this research found that “more than a third of people from ethnic and religious minorities have experienced racially motivated physical or verbal abuse”. More than a fifth of all minorities reported experience of discrimination from the police, though this rose to 43% of Black Caribbean groups.
Some 51% of Black children live below the poverty line. Black pupils scored lower than the average GCSE score for England. According to figures from the Office of National Statistics, “employees from Black, African, Caribbean, or Black British backgrounds were consistently earning less than their white counterparts” between 2012 and 2022. Black employees who were born in the UK took home 5.6% less than their UK-born white colleagues; and Black employees who were born outside the UK were paid 12% less than their white colleagues.
As representation grows – sadly so does racism
Statistics aside, in the representation of Black British individuals in TV, film and mass media, I, like many others, feel more seen than in 2020. Ncuti Gatwa is the new Doctor in Doctor Who, for example. A Black actor taking the lead role of a beloved British series must be a positive, right? Unfortunately, portions of the fandom have spouted racist and homophobic hate towards him, with the hashtag #RIPDoctorWho quickly popping up on social media, rejecting the mere notion of a Black man being the Doctor.
Similarly, actress Francesca Amewudah-Rivers was recently targeted online and hit with a barrage of racist and misogynistic hate after being cast as the female lead in the new production of Romeo and Juliet. In response, over 800 Black actors signed an open letter in solidarity with Amewudah-Rivers, and the Jamie Lloyd theatre company released a statement condemning the “barrage of deplorable racial abuse” that had been directed at the actor. I don’t know how much an open letter achieves – I don’t think it punishes those creating the hate, but it raises awareness and it tells victims of these offences that they are not alone.
True equality
For us Black folk, racism is not an ugly word, or a hard word to say. It is a word we are taught from our primary days. It is part of our early vocabulary. We know we will all experience it in our lives; to encounter it face-on is almost a rite of passage amongst Black and British Asian communities.
Generations of Black activists and liberation movements have fought to achieve equal rights. But as hard as we’ve tried to articulate why we should be treated the same way as those who have less melanin than ourselves, true equality has yet to come. True equality is more than just a change in the law. It’s not enough to know that racist acts are wrong and punishable by law. It is not a tickbox exercise – avoid being a racist to avoid a fine or jail time. That is not enough. As a society we must strive towards becoming actively anti-racist. We must become a society where all citizens of all ethnicities understand that we all deserve to be treated equally, despite physical characteristics like skin colour. Racism is simply an abuse towards fellow humans.
It seems to me that the key difference in 2024 is our awareness of inequality and racism. It’s no longer something that people can ignore, or pretend doesn’t matter, or argue is only relevant to the past. White oppression and racism are still happening now. White people know that racism is wrong, and they can now recognise what it looks like. They know they shouldn’t take part in it.
But I wonder if some of them care … as if it is not their fight to take on.
A sense of exhaustion
I think the video of George Floyd being murdered by a white police officer was so shocking that it put us as a society into a tailspin. How could a police officer, a man of authority, murder a fellow human in broad daylight? He did it because he could; he believed he could get away with it, as others had before him. And this blatant racism and abuse ignited an anger in all of us.
But that anger could perhaps only be sustained for so long. It’s probably basic psychology that I’m not privy to, but I think the reason why there are fewer rallying cries now than in 2020, fewer anti-racism articles than in 2020, is because we can only be angry for so long or so much.
There is a sense of compassion fatigue after the pandemic and the BLM protests. I think we were all exhausted and have now become almost numb to the political ideas and movements that fight for social change. Have we disengaged? Have we become desensitised to violence and injustice? Are we too full of the horror we witness each day on the news, on Instagram on TikTok to get angry anymore?
Floyd’s death fuelled a global movement confronting historical and systemic racism. But did it also ultimately diminish the power of our outrage? I wonder what would happen if we watched another video like that now, another murder of an innocent Black person at the hands of white power. Would we just turn the other way?
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