‘The UK is not innocent’: the very British racism we have to confront

On May 25, George Perry Floyd was killed by police officer Derek Chauvin, who kneeled on his neck for over nine minutes. This clip of a black man being murdered on tape in Minneapolis, Minnesota, reverberated around the world. Protests have raged across the US, and now the rest of the world – still, a pervasive attitude that this kind of overt racism and supremacy lives across the pond, and not on our very streets and doorsteps in the UK, hangs in the air.

There seems to be a prevailing view among British elites that what is happening in America has no relation to the UK, that the thousands of people protesting in London and Manchester, and planning to protest in Leicester, Belfast, Liverpool, and Bristol, are just “virtue signalling”, “woke” “lefty”, “disrespectful” idiots. While some Labour MPs and the Labour leader Keir Starmer have come out in support of demonstrations, Conservatives Sajid Javid, Kevin Hollinrake, and Ben Bradley have condemned them. Indeed, on this week’s Newsnight it was put to popular black British poet George Mpanga by Emily Maitlis that one cannot put “America and Britain on the same footing… our police aren’t armed, they don’t have guns, the legacy of slavery is not the same.”

To that, I point to some of the striking placards held and chants yelled in British solidarity protests this week: “The UK Is Not Innocent”; a list of names of those Black people who have died in police custody in the UK: Sheku Bayoh, Kingsley Burrell, Rashan Charles, Mzee Mohammed, Leon Briggs, Joy Gardner, Sarah Reed, Oluseni Lewis, and many more. Why are Black British people not allowed to draw parallels between a white man smirking while kneeling on an African-American man’s neck, with the white police officers who laughed and made monkey chants as Christopher Alder lay choking on his own blood in their custody? Yes, America and Britain have different histories, but their violent histories are interconnected. 

It was English people who brought the first enslaved Africans to the Virginia Colony in 1619.

Africans in America were only granted emancipation in 1865, and full civil rights in 1964. In comparison, the British were involved in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade from the 1500s onwards, abolishing the trade in 1807 and the practice in 1833, borrowing money to compensate slave owners which was not paid off until 2015 (which British taxpayers contributed to, including the descendants of the enslaved). Then, from the 19th century to the mid-20th, the British were extensively involved in the colonisation of Africa, believing in their cultural and societal superiority. When people from the former colonies came to Britain in increasing numbers from the 50s onwards, they continued to experience brutal racism and discrimination from public institutions, hotels and restaurants, employers, the criminal justice system, and “colour-bar” immigration laws.

For the past 400 years worldwide, Black people have been dehumanised and disregarded due to white supremacist ideologies that germinated in Europe in the 1500s and were subsequently spread around the world for centuries after. Britain was integral to this, and Black people continue to experience inequality and discrimination because of it. 

“Why are Black British people not allowed to draw parallels between a white man smirking while kneeling on an African-American man’s neck, with the white police officers who laughed and made monkey chants as Christopher Alder lay choking on his own blood in their custody?”

There are timely, urgent parallels with the US – Sandra Bland’s death in police custody in Texas darkly mirrors cirumstances around Sarah Reed’s in London. In the UK, Black people are disproportionately stopped and searched by the police and are over three times as likely to be arrested than white people. London’s Metropolitan Police are four times as likely to use force against black people than white people. Author Claudia Rankine’s words ring true – “there is only one guy who is always fitting the description”. Black people are more disproportionately imprisoned in the UK than in the US, and BAME people are overrepresented in deaths in police custody. It is also worth emphasising that since 1990, over 1,700 people have been killed in police custody and no one has been charged with their deaths. Black and Brown people make up over half of the young offenders in the prison population. In a period in which the prison population has fallen by over two-thirds in 13 years – the proportion of Black offenders has doubled, while White offenders have halved. 

The attitudes of some within our police force has long been sinister – in Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge delves into some anonymous police recruits’ disturbing views from the 1980s: “Blacks in Britain are a pest... sponging off the state... They are by nature unintelligent.”  “They must fall into line under white British dictators.”  “Can a shotgun blast a black man at 12 yards?” “Do Black people burn better with oil or petrol?”

Racism in the British police force has, like the US, long festered since even by the 1999 MacPherson report finding of “institutional racism” within the Metropolitan Police. The National Black Police Association, a group of BAME police staff, this week condemned the killing of George Floyd, and drew comparisons with the killings of Sean Rigg and Christopher Alder, while lamenting “decades of structural and institutional racism” in the UK. Our criminal justice and immigration systems are the most galling – from the ongoing Windrush scandal to the deportations of those descended from former colonial subjects who grew up on British soil. 

The British government is more than aware of our present racial inequalities – reportedly, the government was to delay the release of an inquiry into how COVID-19 has affected BAME people, because of fears the racial inequality it exposes will stoke tensions from the “too close proximity” to the BLM protests. Relenting to pressure, the report’s release highlights death rates from COVID-19 in England have been higher among Black and Asian people than any other ethnic group. The government will surely continue digging in its heels, as society reckons with systematic racism – so what can we do?

“The subsequent events in America and the ongoing pandemic, in tandem, have highlighted the world’s most striking inequalities, race above all, and peaceful protest is vital to continue its exposure”

Education, particularly in the UK is another long-term commitment for a nation wanting to defy its racism – Black British history is woefully absent from the British school curriculum. The reality of racial inequality is alive in books like Natives by Akala, Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Renni Eddo-Lodge, Afropean by Johnny Pitts, Black and British by David Olusoga, There Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack by Paul Gilroy and Heart of the Race by Stella Dadzie, Beverly Bryan, and Suzanne Scafe. But our school systems are a space to create radical new futures.

Our MPs are there to represent us, but it often seems as though it’s just the same few MPs who are speaking up about anti-black racism in this country. We must ask our representatives to speak now more than ever to address issues of anti-black racism, from the Windrush Scandal to COVID-19.

The subsequent events in America and the ongoing pandemic, in tandem, have highlighted the world’s most striking inequalities, race above all, and peaceful protest is vital to continue its exposure. Never forget that at one point Nelson Mandela was called a “terrorist” by Margaret Thatcher and that in 1967 66 per cent of Americans viewed Martin Luther King Jr “unfavourably”. As our media continues to focus on the rioters and looters in America rather than the protesters, cutting through their narrative is what is needed to create change. Derek Chauvin, George Floyd’s killer, was only arrested once protests began. As the UK gears up for more solidarity gathering, and demos that confront our own issues with racism, peaceful protest is how we aggravate change. “The UK is not innocent” is a protest refrain we must shout louder.