This powerful Guardian opinion piece by Afua Hirsh states: “What black people are experiencing the world over is a system that finds their bodies expendable, by design.” African Americans have been saying this time after time, death after death – Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, and so many more. And now, again. Here in the UK many black people have also been saying the same things because “many of us have been fighting for this all our lives.”
Instead of Dominic Raab’s wanting to see de-escalation of tension, the British government “could have had the humility to use this moment to acknowledge Britain’s experiences. It could have discussed how Britain helped invent anti-black racism, how today’s US traces its racist heritage to British colonies in America, and how it was Britain that industrialised black enslavement in the Caribbean, initiated systems of apartheid all over the African continent, using the appropriation of black land, resources and labour to fight both world wars and using it again to reconstruct the peace. And how, today, black people in Britain are still being dehumanised by the media, disproportionately imprisoned and dying in police custody, and now also dying disproportionately of Covid-19.”
Instead it used George Floy’s death as an excuse to delay the report into the disparity in ethnic minority deaths from Covid-19. Even when it appear, a key section, containing information on the potential role of discrimination, was removed before publication.
Black People “have taken what we inherited and had no choice but to make sense of it. We have studied, read, written and understood the destructive power of race. And we are telling you that race is a system that Britain built here. We are also telling you that as long as you send all children out into the world to be actively educated into racism, taught a white supremacist version of history, literature and art, then you are setting up a future generation to perpetuate the same violence on which that system of power depends. We are telling you that we need to dismantle, not to de-escalate.”
Read the full article here.
