George Floyd Murder Gave Us Hope Things Would Change – But They’ve Changed for the Worse
Five years on from a death that shocked the world, Runnymede Trust CEO Shabna Begum explains how political denial and repressive legislation have made things worse for people of colour in the UK.
Five years ago, an 8 minute 46 second video evidenced the public police execution of a Black man while he pleaded for his life, uttering the now achingly familiar cry, ‘I can’t breathe’. Despite what I recognise as our collective duty to bear witness, I could not watch George Floyd’s murder then, and still can’t now.
At the time, I was a politics teacher at a sixth form in Hackney, east London. It was lockdown, and all my students had seen the clip. They had an ability to digest violence in a way that is perhaps the refrain of youth, but for many – especially the Black boys – there was a more proximate and personal familiarity with police harassment that made the violence register as both spectacular and predictable.
Many at the time claimed that Black Lives Matter (BLM) was importing US issues into UK spaces, and that our policing history was entirely separate from the US experience, ignoring that the seeds of empire have a deep, perennial quality, and the US’ racism problem is one we shaped.
‘A painful reminder’
The 2020 protests may have been prompted by a US based murder, but the causes it spoke to were distinctly domestic and home-grown.
The deaths of Chris Kaba and Oladeji Omishore, who died within three months of one another in 2022 at the hands of London’s Metropolitan Police, are a painful reminder of this truth. So too are the countless statistics that highlight how disproportionately Black people are policed in this country, whether deaths in police custody, stop and search, or strip searches on young children like Child Q, who as a student in Hackney, could easily have been a student of mine.
The Casey Review in 2023 followed a trend of government reports which found the police to be institutionally racist, and homophobic and misogynistic, which the Met’s commissioner accepted minus the term ‘institutional’.
It also marked 30 years since Stephen Lawrence was murdered, after which UK policing was first labelled institutionally racist. BBC reports at the time highlighted the levels of police corruption involved in convicting his killers, most of whom still walk freely. I attended the memorial service to mark the 30th anniversary, alongside the Met commissioner, who still denies the institutional nature of racism within UK policing.
‘Confidence in UK policing has reached an all time low’
It is not a stretch to say that confidence in UK policing has reached an all time low. Sarah Everard’s murder and the treatment of Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry by police officers caused widespread mistrust amongst British people.
While conversations on defunding the police are smeared as ‘woke’ and associated with unhinged radicals, upcoming Runnymede Trust work shows that actually, a large proportion of British people support community based, policing alternatives – when they aren’t asked these questions in sensationalist ways.
There are alternative paths that can be taken, but in the past five years, successive governments have remained in a stale and repressive political space; they have imposed the most dangerous legislative agenda for people of colour in generations.
‘Decades of increasingly hostile immigration policies’
Taken together, legislation including the 2022 Police Crime Sentencing and Courts, Public Order Elections, and Nationality and Borders Acts, were introduced, which increase police powers and protections, reduce peoples’ right to protest, make it harder to vote, and threaten the security of peoples’ citizenship – all of which will impact people of colour disproportionately.
This trajectory shows no sign of slowing, as the Border and Security and Crime and Policing Bills goes through parliament. In May, our Prime Minister, who took the knee symbolically when in opposition in 2020, evoked Powellite rhetoric as he imagined an ‘island of strangers’ which he used to legitimise the continuation of decades of increasingly hostile immigration policies that target people of colour.
But it is important to remember that it is not just the spectacular forms of state violence that we need to challenge; in a horrible twist of fate, the ‘I can’t breathe’ plea chimed with the alarmingly disproportionate way in which people of colour died from Covid in the UK during that first wave.
‘Covid was exposing deep racialised structural inequalities’
The ‘genetic predisposition’ explainer quickly gave way to the realisation that Covid was exposing deep racialised structural inequalities that meant certain people were dying at far greater rates because they worked frontline, ill-protected jobs and lived in overcrowded housing.
These facts were so startling, the mortal impacts of those inequalities so brutally clear, that it seemed there was no way to go back to ‘normal’ without some urgent redress of those inequalities.
As we stated in a recent health report, for many people of colour, the jobs that we do, the houses we live in and the wider environment we occupy are literally killing us. And yet, we have discovered that when it comes to addressing racial inequalities, we are remarkably adept at forgetting.
‘Silent, dignified and peaceful protests’
When Floyd was killed, I was also homeschooling my two young children – who thankfully didn’t have their own phones yet – and so while they accompanied me to local socially distanced protests, they only understood that they were asserting the basic principle that racist state violence is wrong.
What they couldn’t understand was why those silent, dignified and peaceful protests they attended were denounced, or why public figures who took the knee were trashed for apparently polluting so-called neutral, ‘non-political’ spaces, with the politics of racism.
A government-sponsored report, published less than a year after Floyd was killed, denied the existence of institutional racism in the UK and, five years later, it is seemingly this narrative that has prevailed.
And while I may have taken the privilege of sparing myself and my children the footage of Floyd’s murder five years ago, the violence in Gaza has been so incredibly sustained that no amount of protection could shield them from it.
‘The intensification of Islamophobia’
Now as teenagers, my children’s phones have become an insight into a world that is incongruous with any sense of justice, and I cannot explain the catastrophic failure to intervene and oppose the violence in any terms that are morally legible.
The dehumanisation of Palestinian life that has been the pumped through the mainstream political and media diet we have been fed, has created the conditions for the genocide we are witnessing and contributed to the intensification of Islamophobia we have experienced in the UK.
Like the demonisation of BLM protests of five years ago, claims that the millions of people who have marched for peace over the past 20 months are ‘Islamist extremists’, bullying and intimidating British MPs, is a familiar tactic.
Islamophobia was prime currency during the general election and so it was no surprise that, just after the election, we saw racist mobs take to the streets screaming familiar chants of ‘we want our country back’ and ‘stop the boats’ as they burned hotels with people seeking asylum inside and attacked mosques, Muslim cemeteries and people of colour.
Yet the government stuttered to find words that might name the racism and Islamophobia that animated this violence.
‘Floyd’s murder re-energised a vision of a society liberated from state violence’
But that silence was frantically filled with debates about ‘two-tier’ policing and, in recent months, claims of so-called ‘reverse racism’ given steroid level enhancement; whether in Donald Trump’s rolling back of DEI initiatives, or the government’s capitulation to the argument that the Sentencing Councils new guidance ‘are racist to white people’.
We have seen an increasing reluctance of the government to have any association with anything that might have the whiff of addressing racial justice for fear of offending potential Reform voters. And of course, the rise of the far right is never represented as a product of decades of economic failure and politically engineered, racist scapegoating.
Floyd’s murder re-energised a vision of a society liberated from state violence, one where we are all afforded the resources to thrive and experience joy. It challenged the status quo by exposing deep structural realities in mainstream spaces.
As Keir Starmer tries to steal Nigel Farage’s clothes and wear them proudly, and as political narratives that demonise people of colour take hold both at home and globally, it is a vision we need to remember. It offers the possibility of an alternative society, not of competitive victimhood but liberation for all.
Addressing structural racism is also a redistribution of wealth, power and resources; it’s not too late for our government to start telling this story if they want any hope of winning a second term.
This is an edited version of an article that was originally published by Byline Times.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Runnymede Trust.
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Photo: Lorie Shaull/Flickr
