Please note that this video was filmed in late July 2020, and so the conversation does not acknowledge recent events.
Unfiltered: Is this moment in the Black Lives Matter movement truly a turning point?
We asked two experts to discuss this topic over coffee…
Nick, it's great to talk with you about this,
to have the opportunity to chat and, I know obviously it's a huge issue...
It is a big issue and I feel it personally,
and I think it's being felt across the globe, and I can't remember a time when
there was this kind of unity of opinion.
The George Floyd video somehow was so powerful
was so disruptive also - police brutality is nothing new,
there have been hundreds of people, especially black
people have been affected, black males in particular
but what really very much touched me was that this time it was
very polished and neat - this was a technique,
this is a technique that police men and police women learn in their academy.
There was a knee there, the person was just
basically almost chatting with his friend while at the same time was
immobilising a person by putting pressure on their on their neck.
I remember the first time I watched the
video and actually I had the video sent to me by a friend on WhatsApp,
and I was just stunned and transfixed on what was unfolding and there was a
moment at which he realised that he was going to die and
there was a moment which I realised there was no helping this man,
this human being, and I was crushed, I felt all those
conflicting emotions, I felt anger I felt sadness,
I felt powerless, and, you know, it broke my heart.
But to a certain degree, afterwards, my first thought was 'that
could have been me' and I think what's different on this occasion is
that people from white groups, other ethnic groups as well -
asian people etc, are coming out together as a community and saying
'no' on behalf of black people in such numbers - that's what's made it
different for me. Personally I've been stopped
by the police before, my father had a BMW in the 1980s
and every time we went out, we just got accustomed to it,
there was a certain spot in the centre of Birmingham where we expected to be
pulled over, and we usually were. The boot and the glove compartment was
searched, my dad had to get out of the car
on a regular basis, I had a police officer trying to get me into a squad
car right outside my house in the past, and
these are things that black people can relate to,
every black person knows somebody who has been through this
overt racism, but what we're actually talking about now goes beyond that,
it goes beyond that to systemic racism, to racism
that really has no name, and that's the difference now,
is the micro-racisms that people go through
are really coming to the fore and with the power of social media, with the power
of interconnectedness that we now have,
people are saying 'speak to me tell, me your truth' and people are sharing their
truths other people are saying 'yeah, that happened to me',
so the glue is a lot stickier, it goes a lot deeper now than it has done before.
I was thinking - you were talking about the movement, this
movement which has been very national, we
saw in the US, demonstrations in most cities, then
it's become a global one and it's interesting because on one hand as you suggested,
there was a lot of solidarity - solidarity with
the racism against black people in particular,
on the other hand there has also been an attempt to
to a different kind of solidarity, so there was, for some, a movement called
Migrants Lives Matter, so in each country in a sense, they tried really to
understand or interpret it in the national context.
I'm Italian and in Italy there has been a lot of people thinking about what
happened to African migrants, where they were
trying to cross the Mediterranean and the boats, European boats were
not rescuing them - letting them die in the sea. So there is
another form of state violence, the broader
violence applied in a different way, and I found
that is a very important because in a sense, it's a movement but also
articulated in many different ways in different countries, with the different actors.
All the layers of political racism that are applied to those things,
the xenophobia and the way that populist movements
are created around the sphere of the other, the sphere of invasion,
but by the same token you have other people who are not
just trying to make sense of it in their own terms
but are then using that same vernacular to belittle, to dismantle the
movement and say 'well, you're saying black lives matter,
you must mean only black lives matter, well white lives matter',
but this is a moment, we're talking about a black man who died,
and we're talking about black people not being safe.
At the centre of racism is power, and the constructs within which that
power is realised and I think this is
something which we're getting our heads around, people
are trying to understand for themselves, but the big question is:
to what extent am I going to be part of the problem,
to what extent am I going to be part of the solution?
Can I be courageous enough to recognise within myself those implicit
biases that have contributed to this guy
feeling empowered enough to basically slowly strangle this
black man in broad daylight, in full view of the world.
I think you're right, in many ways there are a few things, I think that are
really important - on one hand there have been a lot of
public displays of solidarity with the the plight of black
people in America, so it's very clear, you know, we have
solidarity with the people over there and then there's
people a little bit struggling to see also in your
institutions, in your cities, in your place if you are not
based in the US, and so there is been an attempt from some activists and
social movements to also say, well, the situation is not
that much different here in in UK for example, if you look at the
track record of the police, maybe you don't see the same numbers because
the police don't have the guns - it's a different arrangement,
that makes a difference, but there are plenty of episodes,
cases of failed judicial review, we've got our problems aplenty I would say, but I think
in a sense it goes to a big node here - on one hand obviously you have all
the right-wing, the conservatives, you know, the ones that declared
'I'm not feeling comfortable with the
kneeling because it's something like Game of Thrones', you've got all the
statements by the ministers in this country,
you've got the the White Life Matters
airplane flying on the coast, and then it's clear what they're
doing there - you're playing with identity politics but the other way around, the alternative.
There are people that also say we are actually
experiencing racism ourselves, in a sense, we want to
bring our our plight into the conversation, so I think it's substantially
different, what they're doing, it's not like saying
'I want to basically say, well, we are white supremacists and
we should think about us first' but they're trying to create a joint
alliance I think, in a sense, to create a movement which is wider.
Yes, and I think that alliance is welcome - I'm speaking as a black man,
and I am at the centre of this debate, when you ask me
why black lives matter, I can speak of my own personal
lived experience, but I feel that when the
time comes, I feel like I want to stand up and
have solidarity with other groups. We are nothing
if not together, we exist in our interactions, we exist
in what connects us as human beings, what we've evolved to do, which is to be
together, to be there for each other and to
respect each other, but I think in some in some ways what
we've been lacking here is a sense of empathy, which I think
has the possibility to emerge now. I think because of Black Lives Matter
we've reached the crossroads and in the future we can stand
side by side, and I think this will benefit
other groups that are experiencing challenges in society, for sure.
In the UK what we saw was rather than a focus on the police brutality
side, which is basically also the origins of the
Black Lives Matter in US initially,
the focus has gone much more, at least at the beginning, on the
statues. Now, there has been a lot of movement around the Rhodes Must Fall,
and up to that point, then, some of the statues
have fallen, but then, in a sense, the
solidarity seems to have lost some of the momentum because then
once you have dealt with the statues then what's next? What do you see as next?
Well, I think what I see is next is rooted in what I see as history, and not history.
David Olusoga, the historian and author and presenter said the other day -
I read something on twitter and I paraphrase -
saying 'a statue is not history, a statue is
an iconic representation of somebody.'
It's a celebration, but history is history,
and the thing about history is it's written by the victors,
even if it's purely in terms of perspective,
history is what what is given, it is received from somewhere else,
and the historians are custodians of that, and I think
we cannot allow this debate about whether statues should
stand or fall to become a follow-spot
that illuminates an issue which is not at the core of this debate.
I think we should expand the curriculum
to factor in all facets of what has occurred historically,
and I think those modules should be compulsory modules, the modules
that tell you the full span of political
and imperial history, and why these people were celebrated,
and these statues should go into a museum, which children should as a
mandatory part of their learning, go and visit
so they can say economically this person was successful at x, y and z, but at what
cost? What else did they do? I think we've got
to get into the grey now, and start to look at the full span, only
then can we understand history. I didn't learn anything,
I learnt about modern British history, 1815 to 1945, I'm still pretty
good on it, but I can count on the fingers of one hand
the stories, the non-white stories that I studied. I've learned that since -
black British history etc, you know, people like Bill Richmond,
Walter Tull, are towering figures, but
they were conveniently forgotten. So I think that's what we need to do,
A lot of people think that they are against the
statues and memorials being removed, in particular thinking about
the statues celebrating the Confederate
generals in the US, and people somehow think that those statues
have been there in place since the Civil War,
the American Civil War at the end of the 19th century - in reality most of
those statues were built and put in place
actually at the peak of the civil rights movement, and there are very interesting
studies showing when they appear, which is
something we should remember. I've done a lot of work, for example, in
former Yugoslavia, in Kosovo, and when I
used to be there, the names of the streets and the statues
were changing on a weekly basis, because it was a period of transition,
everyone created their heroes, they wanted to make a
point about who do we celebrate, and so this is a very important
and a contested debate that we need to have, but I
think the key point you were raising, it's about
who is allowed to talk - the voice in this debate and the fact is
you can have very radical and well-motivated good
meaning historians, that's great,
but you also need to have the plurality of voices and the
representation of the people whose stories you are recounting, which is fundamental.
That's right, absolutely right, spot on there, so I think what we need to do is we need
to have a long hard look at the way society is constructed
and we need to recognise talent, but we also need to make sure that education is
fulsome and rounded, so that people have a
perspective on the way the world actually is. Racism is here,
and power is here, power based in racism is here,
if we're going to address it, we need to take a long hard look at ourselves, at
our institutions and the way that we relate
to each other fundamentally, and we need to make some
positive steps. It's not just about throwing money around,
it's actually about creating new systems that are based on equality and equal representation.
Nick, we didn't mention, you touched on it
just tangentially, about the lockdown, the
pandemic, Covid, and probably post-Covid
will have a huge impact on black and other ethnic minorities,
probably even more than other groups because we know
history and we know what happens to the people that are
already in a position that is marginalised in society, what they
experience when there is this disruption.
The number of people that are dying, the fact that some groups are
much more affected, particularly in US, but we've seen it in Sweden, for example,
where the the Somali refugees or Swedish-Somali,
other minorities of colour have been dying
in much larger numbers than other groups and it makes it almost unbearable,
it's so evident that this inequality, this racism that is structured in society,
then you start to think about why is there a structure? Well, because basically, if you look at the people that
are not covered by the health care system in the US, there is a
very clear colour line - you can really identify who is
not covered, who is going to die first and so in a sense,
by making it unbearable, I think it really did an important job in
mobilising all these sort of things that were already there
obviously, but they've become more in your face, so that you cannot
look at it and not understand what was going on.
As you say it's a socio-cultural socio-political thing
a lot of people on the front line of Covid,
are people that don't have the luxury of isolating, they have to work
and people that live, many generations, under the same roof etc.
Im not saying that that's connected with
economics per se, but what I'm saying is that
it's a complex issue, with a lot of layers,
but again on the positive note, we've seen leaders emerge from our
communities, from our own ranks - our next door neighbours,
people that have stepped up in an incredible way
for vulnerable members of their community have stepped up in ways that they
couldn't have imagined before this happened.
This kind of community leadership, the
people that I most remember, remember most fondly, that I've been most impressed
with in this are not the sort of people you'd have
said I would have been before this started.
It's been great to have this conversation, Nick, and I think
it's true that when you have a critical moment, it really helps to untap
these energies, this potential and I think the job
now is to keep it going, to keep the momentum,
and so to build from it rather than allow
everyone to just move to the next issue in a week or two weeks time,
this is a job for every one of us in different ways, in different roles to work towards.
You know, we have here the opportunity to
not be talking about keeping this thing alive,
we have the opportunity here to deeply reflect
on our contribution to the positive and potentially to the negative
of this situation and I think then my hope is that when
we're able, all of us are able to ask and answer these tough questions
what we'll get to is the point where our reflection
creates action, and it's that, it's that empathy
with, in this instance, black lives and the black experience,
our understanding. When you take your ego out of the picture,
what you're left with is a focus on a goal and an objective, an objective
which suits all of us, which feeds our society and makes our
communities better, and at that point we'll no longer be
talking about keeping Black Lives Matter alive,
Black Lives Matter will be at the core, or it's principles, it's ethos,
will be at the core of what it means to be human,
and at that point, it'll keep itself alive.
Learn more at birmingham.ac.uk/unfiltered.