Racism & White Privilege’s Special Relationship
The Battle Against Racism in the UK & US
This post is not political; it should read as a reality check to those who think this movement is otherwise. Racism exists regardless of your political opinion. White privilege is real. We live it every day, whether we know it or not, by precisely the absence of not having to think about race in everyday situations. We can run, walk, shop, drive, wear whatever clothes we choose, all without fearing how others will see or judge us. The same cannot be said for people of colour in British and American societies.
The killing of George Floyd was nothing short of a public lynching. A policeman held his knee down on another human being’s neck for 9 minutes and, with the eyes of members of the public on him and camera phones recording, it didn’t once dawn on him that he was using excessive force or that what he was doing was wrong. That’s a problem. It has awakened the global consciousness to injustices that have been prevalent in American society since its formation and the wider, western world for as long as history can remember. This post is aimed at giving a short — but no means complete — background into the recent history behind the movement and protests today followed by my own opinions of what we need to do to see progressive changes in our society.
Some History
In 1992, there were riots throughout Los Angeles in response to the acquittal of the four police officers who beat Rodney King in a clear assault. The unrest that followed in LA killed 63 people over five days and the military were deployed to dispel the protestors. The riots in LA were a cry for help. They were a result of economic inequality in the City of Angels. The acquittal of the officers was the tipping point that drove the people over the edge showing frustration the only way they felt like they could.
Following the riots, the city was forced to look at its police department and an independent commission was tasked with doing this. This resulted in the Christopher Commission Report. This report recommended that boosting multiculturalism so that the officers would better reflect the communities that they protect. This has led to more community policing vs militarised police. However, the changes did not do enough to close the divide in a city that has a massive wealth gap between the rich and the poor which is often further accentuated by race. Additionally, this was in a period without social media which means this uprising did not have the exposure or ease of access that the protests of today have. The riots did not do enough to change the system at the time, leading to further ramifications today.
The Rise of Black Lives Matter
The killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012 and acquittal of his killer, a “neighbourhood watch” member named George Zimmerman, sparked the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement. Zimmerman shot Martin, a Black seventeen-year-old, after seeing him in his neighbourhood walking alone, hoody up, eating a pack of skittles that he’d just purchased from a 7-Eleven but somehow, he looked “suspicious”. In America, being black is merely enough to arouse suspicion. Zimmerman was acquitted at trial due to nobody being able to dispute his self-defence claim and has since shown no remorse, selling his gun and suing the Martin family for “damages” stemming from the trial.
Following Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner’s killing in New York in 2014, protests began that projected Black Lives Matter into the national mainstream. Eric Garner’s killing struck now familiar tones when his final words included, “I can’t breathe.” NFL players of the St Louis Rams adopted the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture before a game and the protests garnered national attention, but still nothing was done in terms of criminal justice form and policy changes to reduce police brutality.
Six years later in 2020, the killings of Ahmaud Arbery in February and Breonna Taylor in March inflamed tensions that have always been present in American society, but only felt by those who are hurt by them most. The killers of Arbery were only charged in May once the video of the killing made it into mainstream media and the pressure was too much for the investigating police force. There was a gap of three months between the murder and the accused being charged. The police had the video for that entire time but still, no justice was served. Instead, there were multiple recusals from the case, due to one of the murderers being a former policeman.
In March, Breonna Taylor was killed in her own home in Louisville, Kentucky, when she was woken up by police searching for someone who didn’t live in her apartment (or even in her apartment complex) and was, in fact, in police custody already. The police were enforcing a “no-knock search warrant.” When Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, grabbed his gun (that he was legally allowed to own thanks to his second amendment rights) perceiving it to be a robbery, he fired a shot at the door. The police’s response to his understandable action of self-defence was to fire more than 20 times. Incredibly, Walker survived, but Taylor was hit by eight bullets and killed. Walker was arrested for attempted murder of a police officer.
Due to the Arbery case, the momentum for justice for Breonna Taylor also gained traction in the American media. As a result of the released video of Arbery’s shooting, the calls for justice for Taylor and scrutiny into her killing was heightened. This has drawn national figures to demand an investigation into the police’s actions from Senators and the Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. At this time, Breonna Taylor’s murderers are still free.
The killing of George Floyd has become the tip of the iceberg in terms of this breaking into worldwide mainstream media. The images of the killing are too graphic and too explicit to deny to even attempt to falsely justify the killing. There is no “running” or “resisting arrest” argument for people to turn to. During the entire interaction, he is handcuffed and restrained on the ground. There is no way a handcuffed man lying on his front can be considered a threat to any individuals around him. Even the most ardent defenders of the police recognise that this killing is indefensible.
Seven years ago, Black Lives Matter formed and its message is now heard across the world. Black Lives Matter is proclaimed on signs in every corner of the globe at protests held across the world both in solidarity with the US movement and in protest at their own countries’ injustices.
Some people may ask, “Why now?”. While I agree with the question, I’d explain that these global uprisings proclaiming that black lives do matter are long overdue and not that they’re appearing “just not the time” for protests. It’s time to educate ourselves and build on the lessons that the past few weeks of protests have given us and also utilise this momentum to call for meaningful change in our society.
Racism in the UK
In the United States, here in the United Kingdom, and across the globe, people are waking up to the injustices that are ingrained in our society. Injustices that are so ingrained that we may not notice them as they’ve been there our whole lifetimes, some overtly so but we do not challenge them because they do not impact our day to day lives.
Liverpool, for example, has a very racist past. I was aware that Liverpool was one of the world’s major slaving ports but I did not know that this resulted in Liverpool selling ships to the Confederacy during the US Civil War. Additionally, I did not know that there is a plaque commemorating the soldiers who fought in the confederacy at Romford Place, Liverpool.
You can learn more about this via the Liverpool Museums site and the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative. There are walking tours for Liverpool’s slaver history that can be found on Facebook group “Liverpool and Slavery”. There is also the International Slavery Museum on Liverpool waterfront which, when open, should be on everyone’s to-do list following the COVID-19 pandemic. The museum is free but accepts donations.
Liverpool’s troubled relationship with race did not stop in the 19th century either. Only 15 years ago, Anthony Walker was killed in a senseless racially motivated murder. His killers hurled racial insults and harassed him prior to driving an axe into his skull. While Walker’s killers were convicted, this is a sobering case that demonstrates racial hatred still exists in modern society and is not too distant in our own city.
A mere five years ago, in 2015, the UK taxpayers finished paying off the debt in which the British government incurred to compensate slave owners after the abolition of slavery in 1833. No money or reparations have ever been given to those who were enslaved. Not only that, it means that throughout British history since 1865, descendants of those enslaved have been paying taxes to compensate those who used their family as slaves. While the British government had abolished slavery three decades before the United States, our government continued to treat those who were previously enslaved as second-class citizens and essentially charged a freedom tax on their descendants until only five years ago.
Two years on from that, in 2017, the Windrush scandal began to come to public consciousness where the UK’s hard-line immigration stance impacted British people who had spent their entire life in the UK but were now “undocumented immigrants” despite some arriving here as young children. The Home Office had placed the burden onto the Windrush generation to prove they had lived in the UK, sometimes even making it impossible to prove. This threatened people’s livelihoods and greatly infringed on their rights as British citizens.
There is so much racism ingrained into our systems and into our societies that it shows in sinister ways that some of us don’t even see or appreciate. The history of racism is so extensive that you would run out of time trying to read about it all whether that be the slave trade or colonialism, right down to the civil rights movement. There are still hate crimes to this day when racism rears its ugly head to the media.
So, what now?
There are ways in which we can use this movement to build a better world for now and for the future. Today’s protests and the larger global movement are being organised at a grassroots level using an expanded social media platform that didn’t exist in 1992 and has grown since 2014. The movement has spread globally due to this and the speed in which the protests have grown have also been inspired by many grassroots efforts in numerous cities across the world.
The protests should aim to move the Overton window on important policies, meaning that the policies that may once have been considered radical are now considered mainstream and valued legislative responses to the turmoil faced in our society. For example, we should look to education reform policies to educate students on the darker parts of British history as opposed to glorifying it. We are taught that the British Empire is this “great” era of British history when it should be the opposite. Colonialisation, the destruction of cultures, and our participation in the slave trade should be openly discussed as shameful aspects of Britain’s past.
We also need to work in educating ourselves outside of the education system. There are so many ways in which we can do this, whether that be reading books, listening to audiobooks or podcasts, documentaries across the internet or reading articles online. In a separate post, I will add my own list of recommendations to how we can improve ourselves and our mindsets to train the biases that are ingrained into ourselves and our societies. We can use education to challenge perceptions that exist and may be subvert in their meaning and intentions.
In the US, police brutality has never been addressed with police reform or action. Some changes that people should look to see from politicians or leaders are as follows addressed in twitter thread from @samswey:
· A stricter use of force policy in police departments. See Use of Force Project.
· Demilitarisation of the police which reduces police violence. See here.
This thread details with evidence multiple changes that can be made to rapidly decrease police violence and killings.
There needs to be accountability on the police department. In the UK, we have the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), formerly the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) that is responsible for handling complaints against the police force. Studies show that having some form of national oversight over police departments with investigations into those police departments and use of force, leads to lower police shootings. This oversight can be data driven and using correct analytics can predict ‘bad’ officers in the police force. This can be done on a federal level and departments do not need to be warned when they are going to be investigated. Accountability is a necessity for there to be a decline in this problem in America.
On top of this, this article by Business Insider is a data heavy analysis that demonstrates the differences between Black experiences and white experiences of systematic racism and that racism is still a problem in America.
All in all, I believe this movement is different and has more momentum already than the protests from 1992 and 2014 discussed earlier. We have seen the largest protests since the civil rights movement in the 1960’s and this sustained push in a US election year can mean that it becomes a central policy discussion in how to best move forward. The protests have seen a surge in support for police reform and also the Black Lives Matter movement, shown by the graph of data from New York Times on 15th June. Together, people who believe in a more equitable world in which black lives truly do matter in the movement need to push forward, educate, listen, talk to one another about what can be done.
It may be uncomfortable but we as white people need to educate ourselves and others around us to check our privilege. There is no doubt that we have benefitted from the white supremacy that exists in our society. That is not to say that you or I are an active white supremacist but that we have benefitted from societies built in ways that systematically discriminate against people who are not white.
This also means we should question media platforms and the way things are reported. For example, ask yourself how many times is religion or skin colour the first descriptor on a front page when a non-white person commits a crime? If the perpetrator is white, that is not mentioned.
Following this document, I will be posting a separate link at a later date to a list of recommendations of materials I have found useful or have been recommended to me. It’s important that we spread knowledge and tools to learn so that others can also broaden their horizons. It’s vital that we don’t stay in our own bubbles moving forward.
You can also help by donating, if financially feasible, to organisations in the UK and in the US tackling racism and police brutality. It’s also worth noting that different charities and organisations have different aims and methods to establish justice and helping people. This list is not exhaustive but it is intended to provide choices so that you can read through different movements and decide which one you personally believe in:
UK
Anthony Walker Foundation (Merseyside based)
A List of Black-Owned Independents, Causes, Charities and Platforms You Should Support in Liverpool
The 4Front Project
United Families & Friends Campaign (UFFC)
Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI)
Inquest
US
Black Lives Matter
Campaign Zero
Bail Project — Along with any local Bail funds in the US (there are tonnes).
NAACP
Equal Justice Initiative (EJI)
Color of Change
Minnesota Freedom Fund — This org has received an overwhelming number of donations and request that they are sent to other orgs, this link contains their recommendations.
This is a long process and we must try and endeavour every day to eradicate the biases that have been ingrained in us by our surroundings and upbringings. We must train ourselves and question our own thoughts. Make ourselves vulnerable and we will be able to open up and talk to people. Educate others around us to make this change a lasting one and our society a more just one.
