Why are Black Brits (and our allies) protesting?

In the aftermath of events in Minneapolis and since writing my first blog on racism, we’ve seen varying amounts of support for the black lives matter movement and anger in response to the killing of George Floyd.

We’ve since had protests of our own all over the UK. As a result we’ve had the inevitable questions about whether the situation here is the same as it is in America. Are things as bad here as they are over there? Why are people marching over here? Is Britain racist?

Black people and British police

George the Poet’s interview with Emily Maitlis on Newsnight closed with Emily making the point that things here in Britain are not the same as they are in America.

Here are a few examples of black people dying in police custody:

• Sean Rigg (2008): https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/01/sean-rigg-five-officers-cleared-of-misconduct-over-death-in-custody
• Olaseni Lewis (2010): http://www.justiceforseni.com/
• Mark Duggan (2011): https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/29/mark-duggan-family-lose-appeal-against-lawful-killing-verdict
• Daley Atkinson (2016): https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/nov/14/dalian-atkinson-death-police-officers-suspended-charged:
• Nunu Cardoso 2017): https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-restraint-deaths-nuno-cardoso-oxford-black-man-young-law-student-lawyer-ruskin-college-a8121011.html
• Julian Cole (2018): https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/22/julian-cole-police-officers-face-dismissal-over-incident-in-which-student-was-paralysed

George reeled off a similar list of names of deaths of black people in police custody from recent memory. In Britain it often isn’t enough to justify the comparison and the list of names George shared along with their stories is often swatted away as anecdotal.

So here are a few statistics.

Black people are more likely to be stopped and searched by the police, 38 in 1000 (more than 9x) compared to 4 in 1000 for white people. After being stopped they are more likely to be arrested, with 35 in 1000 (more than 3x) arrests of black people made compared to 10 in 1000 for white people. After being arrested black people are nearly twice as likely to die in police custody.

According to charity Inquest there have been 1,741 deaths in police custody or otherwise following contact with the police since 1990. No police officer has ever been convicted in connection to those deaths. There is a system in place in Britain that has seen black people killed by the police and the police officers responsible go unpunished.

Two of the examples listed above relate to black people being restrained for Mental health reasons. Evidence shows that Black men are far more likely than others to be diagnosed with severe mental health problems and are also far more likely to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act. However, up until 11 years old, Black boys don’t have poorer mental health than others of their age.

As a young black man I was taught to be fearful of police from an early age. You would get warnings and stories from older friends and relatives, you would see friends get stopped and then eventually you would get stopped. The first time I got stopped and searched I was 14 years old. I was walking down the road I lived on to go to the shops for my mum. The police who searched me were investigating nothing. I just looked suspicious somehow.

Black people across the country will have similar early experiences and many will have experienced far worse. We all know someone who has been violated by the very people who are supposed to be protecting us. But our interactions with the police and the way we are treated aren’t the only things that need to change.

I do agree with Emily Maitlis, things have got better for black people since the McPherson report. Policing has got better. But there are still problems and every now and then it still feels like we live in 1980s Britain.

Black people and the media

Black people can’t switch on the TV or pick up the newspaper without seeing limited or unfair representations of themselves. In Film and TV for a long time this has meant black men being portrayed as hyper sexual and violent. While Black women ranged from, violent and angry, over sexualised or asexual older woman, with very little inbetween. This has influenced the way people assume black people to be, leading the men to feel like they need to reduce their stature in public/the workplace and women reduce their voice. It has further implications for personal relationships.

Things are much worse in the news media and have more far reaching consequences.

It wouldn’t be fair to call our media racist but they can often be responsible for maintaining the status quo and be complicit in allowing other parts of society to do the same. They do this by:

• Challenging calls of racism to uphold the status quo rather than listening.
• Framing debates to minimise criticism about Britain or the British empire rather than listen to the issues of the day.
• Shifting conversations from Britain’s problematics systems and institutions to ‘the British people’ and how they are or feel.
• Comparing today’s racism with racism from 30+ years ago to highlight and argue that we should be positive about progress rather than continue to speak up about continuing problems.
• Comparing us to other countries claiming to be more tolerant. Disingenuously claiming to have ‘ended slavery’ (without evidence). Also responsible for the first ‘anti’ anti-racism protest.

The precision with which parts the media sanitises emotion and experience is what Britain is truly great at.

While the media is not a monolith our media institutions can sometimes make collectively questionable calls on lead stories. Nine of our biggest media outlets gave the majority of their front page coverage to a new suspect in the Madeleine McCann mystery the day after one of the biggest global marches against racism in history.

They can also be responsible for creating or furthering misleading narratives black on black crime that suggest that:

• Most violent crime in Britain happens in London
• Most violent crime in London is committed by black people

Both of these are statistically false but are widely held beliefs that have led to special police operations such as Operation Trident and Stop and Search that have disproportionately targeted black men.

The way different figures within society are reported is also a cause for concern. Anyone following the lives of Meghan Markle and Raheem Sterling over the past few years may have noticed how differently they have been portrayed than Kate Middleton and Harry Kane.

Figures within the media have also been responsible for giving a platform and legitimising racism. The below encounter between Afua Hirsch and Nick Ferrari is a perfect example of this.

The question “Why do you stay in this country?” is a well articulated type of racism which is often used by racists (or ‘the far right’ as the media likes to call them) and is often translated as “Why don’t you go back to Africa” by their violent arm, the English Defence League.

The idea is that you should leave Britain the moment you begin to question British history and suggests our Britishness has always been conditional. Or that to be British you must be proud about every aspect of our history.

The rest of the clip is a painful watch as the rest of the panel pile in on Afua, telling her what they thought she said and arguing against that point.

The style of debate with one black person asked to come and speak for their race is common (see GMB with Piers Morgan). It’s this style that frames every situation in a way that makes it debatable. Challenging racism shouldn’t be a debate. We should all be doing it.

Whenever I see these debates I wonder if there are black people who work at these media organisations who just aren’t empowered to speak up and say “we’re taking the wrong approach with this one”. I also wonder if these issues would be talked about more evenly if there were more black presenters.

Everyday racism and denials

For a long time overt racism in the country has been in decline. Don’t get me wrong, people are still being abused in public. After the 2016 referendum instances of racism spiked hugely as people “got their country back”. But generally racially/religiously aggravated abuse had been on the decline for years (2003 to 2015) and likely the one statistic racism deniers could cling to in a wave of reports of personal experiences of racism.

These days there is a general belief that if you haven’t racially abused someone, you aren’t racist. This is the belief of people who don’t understand racism or haven’t read the definition of it.

Racism does still exist. Fewer people are verbally abusive, probably because it has been drummed in to them for so long that it is wrong to say it. So most avoid doing just that.

Racism today is more sophisticated.

My last blog explored the way Amy Cooper used the power granted to her by years of white supremacy and negative stereotypes about black men to challenge a man who called her out for breaking the rules. That encounter resonated with many black people as the more insidious forms of racism they see that affects them. Maybe not everyday. But in important places such as the workplace.

One of the other sophisticated methods of racism is microaggressions.

When we think about microaggressions we’re talking about racism we experience so often, we no longer complain when it happens. Microaggression is defined as; a subtle but inoffensive comment or action directed at a minority or non dominant that is often ‘unintentional’.

Examples include:

• Being followed around in shops by security
• “You don’t speak like a black person!”
• “Why are you being a stereotypical angry black man?”
• Women clutching their handbags in confined spaces
• Having to enter nightclubs two by two (see Noah’s Ark)

The individual microaggression doesn’t hurt so much but the frequency does. It has a cumulative effect that weighs us down over time.

Since the Black Lives Matter hashtag became part of the public lexicon in 2013 it’s often been countered with a retort that ‘All lives matter’. It’s a phrase that is genuinely baffling. Maybe I should say context matters. Or for the avoidance of doubt, share the definition of the word matter. Of course all lives matter. But we’re currently talking about the very specific issue of the disproportionate deaths of black people in police custody.

The black experience is always treated as anecdotal, if a young person lets you know they were touched inappropriately by an adult, we listen. If a woman says she’s been sexually assaulted, in the last few years we’ve started to listen. But if a black person talks about their lived experience, people want to deny it, shift the conversation towards statistics and swat it away.

Racism is systemic and structural. Everything we believe about black people we have been taught and is a legacy of the work started by our political class during the height of the British empire (the likely subject of my next blog). The prevalence of stereotypes about black people affects everything about the way we are perceived. The angry black woman or the violent black male remains permanent baggage for black people everywhere and sees us managing how we come across to almost anyone we aren’t close to.

As long as this can lead to deadly consequences or affects the way people treat us (see us), we need to fight/march/protest/give statues the middle passage treatment (like our brethren in Bristol).

This is my second blog discussing racism, read the first one on Racism in 2020