It has been a year and a day since the murder of George Floyd by former police officer Derek Chauvin, who has since been found guilty on all charges for this crime. We wait to see whether the sentence fits the crime. On May 25 2020, the world watch as Floyd was brutally restrained by Chauvin with his knee on his neck and for 8 minutes and 46 seconds we watched as the life drained from his body as he repeated "I can't breathe!".
George Floyd's death sparked a global uprising and sparked the fuse that led to the Black Lives Matter movement gaining international prominence. The video of George Floyd's death is haunting and I was horrified watching it and it is still a painful watch. George is not the only black man to die at the hands of America's police but it was captured on a smartphone and shared widely and showed the world the brutal, racist and inhuman way many black men and woman are treated by the police and how they lose their lives when they come into contact with the police.
So, a year on from George Floyd's murder what has really changed? The answer is very little! A global conversation was initiated about the prevalence and consequences of racism, disproportionately, discrimination and the treatment of black people not just in America but around the world including in the UK. Many large corporates have pledged to do better to reflect diversity within their organisations and to donate to black charities but unless this change is evident in the membership of the boardroom the real decision making body of any organisation it will be a hollow promise.
One of the events that signified the palpable feeling of the black anger towards racism and its legacy was the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol. Colston was a slave trader and merchant whose name adorns many buildings in the city. Other statues have been removed such as that of eighteenth century slave owner Robert Milligan from London Docklands. But removal of statues forcefully or not cannot be seen as true progress. That has to come through strong commitment to racial equality, political and government policy and legislative change.
On the former the government set up Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities chaired by the now controversial Tony Sewell to investigate the real problems faced by black and minority ethnic groups of racism and discrimination. However what the commission found and published was contrary to the lived experiences of black people, controversial by declaring institutional racism was not the cause of discrimination and pitted communities against each other. The Sewell Report has been universally panned and was not worth the time effort and misused data and contributions it claimed to have used. We provided comments on the report and its finding in an article to the French language online journal Lepetitjournal.com which you can read here - Cachez ce racism institutionnel que je ne saurais voir - (use chrome for English translation). The report is a result of the denial of this government to accept institutional racism or any form of state based biased and instead gaslight those who say it still exists and is prevalent. But even the government can see the bad press from this and have distanced themselves from it. Yet evidence shows that at the heart of Whitehall Black civil servants face a number of challenges to progress in their careers, based on perceived expectations of who they are and their background. If that is not a structural problem I don't know what is.
Data published last week, 18 May 2021, by Bloomberg in an article about the London housing market showed that homeownership for Black people was at 30% and the transfer of wealth through property was at an all time low for Black Britons, with the median transfer of wealth for Black African and Black Caribbean groups being zero! Depressing doesn't sum it up.
With so many challenges and struggles being faced by our community, many years in the making, what is and will be the legacy of George Floyd's muder and the protests that followed? On current evidence very little has changed but we persevere despite what seems like insurmountable odds.
To end, there is no silver lining but the grinding and often crushing fight for equality, acceptance of systemic and structural racism and the need to overturn it and build a better system that is based on fairness, merit and diversity. There are no easy solutions and no ready answers. We have to continue to organise, mobilise and raise our voices. Social media, the Black Lives Matter movement, ordinary members of the public coming out with fists clenched showed us that the issues we face are real and are not going away but they can and should be tackled - the question we must contend with is how and when?
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