Last week, a little girl called Gianna declared: “Daddy changed the world!”
She’s right. And that’s why we’re here, as men and women of conscience to say that George Floyd should not have died. The police officer shouldn’t have knelt on his neck like he wasn’t even human. And his colleagues should not have stood by and let it happen.
This is a moment that has been a long time coming.
We’re also here because what happened to George Floyd is part of a pattern. There are more names. Names like Breonna Taylor. Rayshard Brooks. Mike Brown. And in the UK, we also have our own names: Rashan Charles. Sheku Bayoh. Sarah Reed. Joy Gardner.
The exact circumstances differ, but there is a common thread uniting these deaths: racism.
We are here because Black Lives Matter. And when we say that we don’t just mean staying alive. We’re also talking about quality of those lives. Structural racism.
The prime minister and other government ministers keep repeating that racism isn’t as big a problem as it once was, that the UK should be proud of its record.
It is not enough to say that things aren’t as bad as they were or are better than they could be. It sounds like complacency to me. You also don’t get a prize for doing the bare minimum. We have a higher bar than simply not getting regularly beaten up – though that still happens – or doing better in school – but getting paid less at the end of it.
Structural racism isn’t just an individual thing. You can be a good person and work in a system that has racism outcomes. And it is the outcomes that tell on those who say that everything is fine.
In England and Wales, black people are 9.7 times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than white people. Black people are over-represented in police use-of-force statistics. Average custodial sentences are ten months longer if you are black. Black people are more than twice as likely to die in police custody.
Black people are criminalised early on. Nearly half of imprisoned children are from black and other ethnic minority communities. And when they enter the youth justice system, they are more likely to be strip searched, put into segregation or restrained.
Tackling racism is not just a matter of being “nice”, it’s a matter of life or death. A common thread from George Floyd there, to Windrush here and COVID on both sides of the Atlantic, is racism.
Monday is the 72nd anniversary of the Windrush arriving here. The Lessons Learned Review into the Windrush scandal draws a stark conclusion: that the UK’s treatment of the Windrush generation, and approach to immigration more broadly, was caused by institutional failures to understand race and racism. Their failures conform to certain aspects of Lord Macpherson’s definition of institutional racism, enshrined in the Macpherson report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, published in 1999.
Macpherson defined institutional racism as: “The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”
The answer we got from the government so far is…yet another review. I’ve given you two roll calls already and here’s a third: The reviews.
There are 35 recommendations in the Lammy Review into outcomes for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals in the criminal justice system.
110 recommendations in the Angiolini Review into deaths and serious incidents in police custody.
30 recommendations in the Windrush Lessons Learned Review.
26 recommendations in Baroness McGregor-Smith’s Review into Race in the Workplace.
We have plenty reviews. What we don’t have is any implementation of the laundry list of recommendations.
The whole point of a review is to get recommendations that make sure that you can change course, stop something, do something different.
We don’t need another review to tell us what we already know. As BLM started, we had a review into the disproportionate deaths of ethnic minorities in COVID-19. But they out cut the recommendations which identified racism, among other factors, as an issue.
Racism is an underlying condition that is costing black lives.
Black Lives Matter. They need to matter every day from cradle to grave. All those outcomes I listed are some of the points of a life.
We need a race equality strategy that will work on several fronts to tackle some of the outcomes I’ve mentioned here.
We also need an inclusive curriculum. In Hillingdon that includes Black History Month. By refusing to take it seriously and instead focusing on “celebrating diversity for all” you do lose an important part of history.
We need more history, not less. Celebration can be done at any time, but a deliberate, hard look at history, taking lessons, understanding how it informs the present – we mustn’t lose that.
I’ve talked a lot about data points in life, but what isn’t captured in these figures is love.
The fact that every person is connected. Every name I mentioned is linked to someone, loved by someone, mourned by someone. In Floyd’s case, his partner Roxie, daughter Gianna and brother who spoke to the UN.
They are also mourned by people that they don’t know. That’s why it’s so important that you are here, right now, bearing witness to this moment in history. We have their attention now. And we have to keep pushing until we move in this country from endless reviews to a proper race equality strategy that tackles inequality wherever it presents in black lives.
This has to be the moment that we demand an end to black deaths at the hands of police in America, and an end to the disproportionate use of force towards black people.
This has to be the moment that we say that it’s not enough for things to be a bit more tolerant or better than it was before. We do not have a different yardstick to everyone else. You either have human dignity or you don’t. There are no half measures.
The pandemic has shown that if we have the political will, anything is possible. And I’m here to say that it is not a crazy idea or too high a bar to simply demand that Black lives – the fullness, the potential, the dignity of Black Lives – Matter. That our citizenship is equal to everyone else’s.
We will accept nothing less.
madomasi 