Realising I can no longer do nothing
George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. ŠCNN
Iâm tired, just as much as every other Black person is, of seeing nothing change. Nothing has changed. We might like to think things have, and it might make us feel better to think things have, or that we donât have the same problems here in the UK as there are in the US. In the UK we like to silence Black people bemoaning police brutality and institutional racism by talking about Black-on-Black violence, of knife crime and of Black music that appears to glorify intra-racial murder, even bringing up that old âAfricans sold their fellow men as slaves to white peopleâ chestnut without mention of any of the socio-economic, socio-environmental issues and nuances within those issues that result in things being the way they are in the present day. We donât want, as British people, to be confronted with the idea that we have to change, that what we are doing is wrong; we like to turn a blind eye, as long as we are not the worst. We will do anything not to have to confront the idea that we are the worst, a fact most amply illustrated by the recent tabloid treatment of Dr Neil Ferguson on the day Britain became the country in Europe with the worst mortality rate due to Covid-19: anything to deflect from the fact that we, Britain, once leader of a great Empire, have sunk to the bottom, down there with the slime. We can look at whatâs going on over in America and sleep soundly in the assumption that we donât treat people that way or that âourâ Blacks have it better. But to do so is to be complicit in the culture of a new Jim Crow, a global pandemic in itself, the epicentre of which is in the United States, of course, but one that we cannot afford to assume we are immune from or that isnât already affecting us in any way.
This, in some ways, has been the most beautiful Spring of my lifetime. Iâve enjoyed the publication of my debut novel, and the response to it; the London I live in is looking its natural best. The sun shines every day. Itâs warm; roses, azaleas and peonies are superabundant in deliciously saturated colours. But, otherwise, itâs also the ugliest Spring. Never before has it been more starkly presented to me, in measurable facts, the depth of inequality and injustice Black people are suffering here in the UK. Not only are we statistically more likely to be economically disadvantaged, with fewer opportunities for physical distancing and greater danger for exposure due to our likelier frontline jobs, we are seeing, in 2020, black men being stopped in their cars by police at a disproportionately high rate, and a ridiculously high mortality rate compared to other ethnic descriptions â this when, according to research published by the World Health Organisation, Africa is the least-affected region globally by Coronavirus (so far), flying in the face of any rabid eugenicistâs brainwave associating higher Black mortality rates in the global west with genetics. Not only do we have to wake up to a new morning and read about yet another person of our skin colour who has been brutally murdered by police or by a white supremacist father-son team sicced like dogs by their president to sniff out and kill Black people on sight, we also have to read about the memory of a Black woman, Belly Mujinga, being served the indignity of a closed case in favour of the person who caused her death. Which Black person would get off scot-free having spat at a white person, boldly claiming their fluids were positive for Covid-19? Which white personâs death would be shown on TV stations all over the world, their neck crushed for eight whole minutes under the knee of a Black cop? Simple role-reversals are just that â simple. They do not take into account the intersections from which Black and minority-ethnic and/or queer people have to negotiate their everyday lives in a structurally-racist world (which bell hooks has described as an imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy). No Black cop would ever rest his knee on the neck of even the most dangerous white suspect, because of the respect inculcated in us for even the evilest of white souls (remember the gentle way Dylann Roof, perpetrator of the Charleston massacre, was walked into custody?). Black people are allowed to be lynched for all the world to see; white cops think theyâre doing the world a favour. And white people are not standing up for us. They are turning their heads away, as if racism is not their problem. Well, it is.
I get it. When I wake up, look at Twitter or Instagram and see another one of these stories come through, my immediate instinct is to turn away; nobody wants the politicised death of a stranger to be the first thing that confronts them, daubing over their waking dreams with thick, red graffiti. Part of this might be my own socialised British âout of sight, out of mindâ mentality. But the greater part of it, I think, is a refusal to believe that this could be happening, in such a way, again, so soon after the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor; news came through the next day of the death of Tony McDade, a black trans man killed by a police officer in Florida. But I first became aware of George Floydâs death scrolling through Instagram with my coffee in bed. Ms Tina Lawson, mother of BeyoncĂŠ and Solange â two artists who have put their careers on the line to do their duty to protect their fellow citizens and draw attention to the issues they face â is usually one of the first public figures in my feeds to denounce and rally against police brutalities, posting strongly-worded statements, beatified pictures of the deceased, phone numbers to lobby the sheriff and mayoral offices most local to the killing, calling for a change of mentality and an end to racist violence. Ms Lawson shared George Floydâs portrait, regrammed from Viola Davisâs earlier post; so soon after waking, I didnât quite understand the context, and to my shame, I scrolled on. But I kept seeing this picture more and more, shared by African American celebrities, and other pictures of a cop kneeling down â the apparently-righteous kind of kneeling, as opposed to Colin Kaepernickâs apparently-radical kind of kneeling â but I didnât understand. I didnât get the picture. Because of its composition, and the expressive manner of its majority subject, a white cop, looking at the camera, straight backed, hand-on-hip, ageing but lantern-jawed like an everyday superhero just doing his job enforcing the law, I didnât understand what was going on, and how this image connected to that of the large, friendly-looking black man Ms Tina Lawson had shared earlier. It wasnât until later that I saw that there was a head beneath this white copâs knee. Captions put words in his mouth redolent of the last of Eric Garner: âI canât breatheâ. Then it emerged there was a video. I refused to watch it. I did not want to see someone lose their life. I did not want to see someone pinned down, struggling, fighting, unable to free himself from beneath the grown man resting his entire body weight on their neck, losing breath, losing voice, losing consciousness, being disestablished from whatever threat they were deemed to be, being murdered. I did not want to see a Black person go through that, for all to see; what was once a sycamore tree, now a knee; what was once a gathered crowd of white nationalists attending a lynching for sport, now millions of people all over the world gawping at their smartphones. Again. If I see it happen to another Black person, in my mind, itâs happening to me. It drips poison into my ear, makes me think of all the ways I might be punished if I leave the house, while Black, travel while Black. Every microaggression leads to my unjust death, a life lived in vain. I am not alone in declaring murders of unarmed Black people to be deleterious to my mental health.
I successfully avoided watching George Floyd die, or entering into the outrage about his death, but then the video â which I today learned was shot by a seventeen-year-old Black girl of uncertain relationship to Floyd, and God knows what trauma she must be going through now â was shown on BBC News that night, uncensored. We watched an American man die on the news â an African-American man. Does that desensitise us? Does it not feed into the suspected narrative that Black people in death donât deserve the same dignity as white people? This compounds the feared belief that I, a Black man, am less worthy than a white person. That I do not matter. That my body can be choked of life by someone trained to recognise me as a threat to life â whether I have a weapon or not â and paraded around the world. The outcry, by both Black and some white people, has been strong. But beyond a few moments of contemplation in the aftermaths of these deaths, nothing changes. The slaps in Black faces become increasingly insidious.
White supremacy is here to stay, whether its supreme leader gets four more years or not. This is a wave whose power and intention is not yet clear. I want to write a lot more about this. But to all the Black people and our allies suffering pain and anxiety today, I can only say this: stay strong. We are wonderful and amazing. We are a miracle. We are great. For all the hundreds of years of the Atlantic slave trade, when our ancestors had no rights, no self-ownership, no means of telling their own stories, were bred like cattle for best cotton-picking/cane-harvesting characteristics â the fact that we are alive and so many of us are thriving, winning, despite the obstacles in our path other ethnicities donât have and/or put in place, is a miracle, and we deserve to take all strength and belief from that. We walked the earth first and will always. But we have to keep fighting. Dr Cornell West quoted Samuel Beckett when he urged us to âtry again, fail again, fail betterâ. We can not let any death, any injustice, any microaggression go unchallenged. It is exhausting, and we have to keep questioning what we want equality with (this capitalist agenda? Really?). Iâm not the cleverest, Iâm not the bravest. But I have a voice, and I shall do my best.
bell hooks | We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (Routledge, 2004)
Dr Cornel West in conversation with Anderson Cooper on CNN:Â https://twitter.com/AC360/status/1266532710266425345?s=20
Killer Mikeâs address to protesters in Atlanta and other US cities:Â https://twitter.com/KingJames/status/1266630475709177856?s=20
