A couple of months ago I agreed to be part of a documentary called Backlash: The Murder of George Floyd. It goes out on iPlayer and BBC 2 today. While it takes the horrific footage of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police as its starting point, and the ensuing events in the US, the film makes its way to the UK, and focuses on the cases of Dalian Atkinson and Julian Cole, the latter of whom tragically died during filming.
I eventually agreed to be part of the film because I wanted to emphasise that the UK is not innocent. I wanted to push for a focus on police violence rather than what I worried might be the general amorphous black square / more Black people in boardrooms / on banknotes discourse that permeated that time in 2020 – something that I think the film ultimately lands well. I also wanted to draw the links between UK police violence and harm faced by racialised working-class people more broadly – such as the death of Awaab Ishaak following mould exposure, or of Mazeedat Adeoya who died in part because her mother could not access public funds; such as Grenfell, and Windrush, and the 51% of Black children who grow up below the poverty line. Points that were in the end, I think, too broad for the final cut.
The UK BLM movement successfully reasserted the ongoing and intolerable unnevenness of police violence and pushed it into mainstream consciousness. Without the uprisings of 2020, would it really have become widely understood that in the 10 years to 2020, Black people were twice as likely to die in police custody than other ethnic groups? I don’t think so. The movement also correlates with tangible impacts on police violence. Black people make up 4% of the population. In 2020, we represented 16% of police uses of force. That is now 12%. Hardly revelatory, but progress.
Much has been made of bits of polling that say that people don’t like the slogan “defund the police”, and indeed of the - predictable, to anyone who’s done anti-racism for a long time - backlash both from white supremacists and from some in the media. But let’s not be naive. The slogan was not the reason for the backlash. Backlash against campaigns to curtail police powers in the interests of human rights, however liberal, however well-evidenced, however moderate, is routine. (And don’t make me tap the sign about the fact that the majority of Americans disapproved at the time of the civil rights movements and its goals, as well as its now quasi-canonised spokesperson, Martin Luther King.)
Moreover, I’d argue that if you look from the Blair administration’s campaign against asylum seekers, to Nigel Farage in front of the Brexit ‘breaking point’ poster, to the people who made an effigy of Grenfell Tower and filmed it burning for fun, it was a frontlash – the racialised violence was already there, deep and entrenched, and it’s that to which BLM was responding.
Backlash, frontlash, whatever: a movement is not a slogan, and in this instance, it was not a movement led by a professional cadre of activists mobilising with all of the NGO-ish machinery and resource and interminable message-testing that that usually connotes, even if that’s who now dominates the commentary. These were predominantly young people, many of whom were in the streets for the first time, who had dealt with and witnessed racist violence, and who were there to voice their refusal to accept such conditions and to demand something different for themselves and for society.
When a campaign is at a stage when success is contingent on some majoritarian measure, such as a referendum, then yes, that’s when you need the anodyne, well-tested message that will mobilise the majority to get you over the line – and I still remember years ago listening to an amazing organiser who was part of the successful abortion rights campaign in Ireland who detailed doing exactly this. But that’s not where BLM was in the UK in 2020. It was a grassroots movement of Black people trying to get someone to hear the fact that we couldn’t breathe.
Would some of the people now lecturing us on how to do anti-racism properly even have admitted that racism was still an urgent and enduring problem without the movement? Probably not. Would anyone have even bothered debating the resources that are devoted to policing and whether they could be spent otherwise without that slogan? Also unlikely. Sometimes a slogan is about catapulting an idea into the realm of political possibility – establishing something as an option when it wasn’t before, even if people’s first response is to say that they hate it. (A tactic that the Right deploys to great effect, by the way.)
Anyway, for me, the enduring power of what happened during those mobilisations was a fracturing in the public consciousness of the continuity between policing and safety. That couldn’t have happened without the enormous police overreaches of the pandemic (banned Easter eggs anyone? drones flying over walkers on the Peak District?), which were of course themselves racialised, as I predicted they would be in this Guardian piece from 2020. The first person arrested under the Coronavirus Act was a Black woman, and Black people were 54% more likely to be fined than white people under the lockdown rules.
I will never forget in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder the advice that if police made us feel unsafe we should “flag down a passing bus.” Just briefly, we saw the emperor without his clothes.
If you understand one of the many aims of BLM not as a narrow slogan around defunding policing, but as broad demands that we reorient what we understand as safety, and respond critically to expanded police powers as a result, then public support is in fact there – or at least it has been in recent years. Polled by Liberty in 2022, 68% of people said govt should focus on root causes of crime rather than expanding police powers. 73% said that police should not use tools and tactics which discriminate against people of colour. There are a whole host of boring, sensible, policy measures that could be pursued by organisations without them being tarred as radical. Repeal of suspicionless stop and search powers, reform of s.163 Road Traffic Act, constraints on the deployment of electro-shock weapons, spit hoods, and strip-searches on minors – the list goes on. And even more expansive visions have been proposed by young people at risk of violence, who could do with resources and support to make them a reality. See for example the Holding Our Own campaign that I initiated at Liberty when I was in post as Director.
There’s a lot more I could say about what the events of 2020 meant for me personally – what it meant to be promoted to positions of leadership. And then subjected to Faragist talking points from my own Board. And expected to suppress documents detailing organisational racism. To be required to save organisations that had done precisely nothing on racism, without any money, or support – just with my magical-Black-womanness, I guess? Thanks but no. BLM for me was a very welcome wakeup call to do more with my life than yell about racism at a government intent on gaslighting me, from within institutions that do not care. And as I write this from a residency where I’m surrounded by hummingbirds and inca doves, with an almost-finished manuscript, it’s a wakeup call for which I will always be grateful.
But to come back to Backlash. And to come back to George Floyd. I didn’t watch the footage in 2020. And I closed my eyes when it came on at the documentary premiere. For me, the most powerful part of the film, from which we must not avert our eyes, are the words of George Floyd’s uncle and the photos of him that he shared. In an act of enormous generosity, he lets us understand a little of who George Floyd was in life and in joy, rather than in his dying. And he helps us see how George Floyd was seen through the eyes of those who knew and loved him, and in that, the magnitude of what was taken.
There have been more than enough exculpatory lists written by people of all hues on what we should do about racism. We all have Google and I have other things to write. But watch the film. See what you see. Maybe pick up a book by Ruth Wilson Gilmore. And if nothing else, support INQUEST, who whatever the anti-racist flavour of the day, have been there for decades for families in the UK hurt by police and state violence, and with your support, can continue to be.
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