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How should we Remember the Death of George Floyd?
Next Tuesday, 25thMay, will mark a year since the death of George Floyd. It will be marked in several ways by the churches in this country:
· Churches Together in England are inviting people to light a Candle for Justice on 25thMay at noon.
· They are also holding a National Service of Reflection on the Anniversary of the Murder of George Floyd, with a list of high-profile participants, which will be broadcast on You Tube this Sunday at 7pm, and also on BBC radio.
· Tear Fund are sponsoring an online event Road to Racial Justice on 25thMay at 8pm, again with several church leaders taking part.
What issues does remembring his death raise for us?
1. Grief
We can too easily de-personalise George Floyd and make him a symbol, even a weapon, and fail to encounter emotionally the grievous, heart-wrenching tragedy of his death. Here was a man whose life had been marked by constant struggles, yet who was finally emerging onto a more level place of peace and stability through faith in Christ, through prayer and scripture, through a settled relationship with a woman – all of it abruptly terminated by violent, hate-filled brutality. Floyd’s death rightly brings to the forefront of our minds all the disregarded people across a world-wide variety of contexts whose hope and potential is snuffed out by violence, hatred and injustice. But we need to feel the tragedy of personal, individual stories, and sorrow at the death of George Floyd.
2. There’s a big Journey ahead.
Floyd’s death resonated because it picked up on the sense of injustice felt by black people, and recognition of that by a wide section of the overall population. How do we categorise that?
a) Unjust practices.
The Henry Jackson Society report identified the large proportion of black people (39%) who experienced discrimination because of their race over the preceding twelve months (see my blog 17). The Sewell Report, despite wrong allegations that it ignored institutional racism, made important proposals in this respect pertaining to the crucial areas of health and employment; recommending both an Office of Health Disparities, and increased powers for the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
b) Disaffected young people, particularly males.
Referring to Sewell again, two widely recognised areas of concern were picked up – school exclusions, and the use of stop and search by the police. Getting the authorities in education and particularly in the police, to improve their delivery is part of the response, but nothing like enough to get us near a solution. There are inter-locking domestic, cultural, social and economic issues that will need sustained involvement by both social agencies and the black Caribbean community itself to bring about change; in particular affirming the non-disposable essential of close and loving fathering.
c) Microaggressions.
I remember a young black woman in an on-line debate saying (I had the impression she only realised it whilst she was speaking) that the heart of her discontent was the negative comments, slurs, misperceptions (that is, microaggressions) at a personal level that aggrieved her, rather than anything systemic or structural in the way society operates. We are dealing substantially with a white behavioural issue. The Henry Jackson Society report on ‘BLM: A Voice for Black Britons’ gave contrasting information – 59% had a favourable perception of white British people, yet 40% perceived UK race relations as being bad. Perhaps what is indicated here is a hard to identify discontent, partly fuelled by direct experiences of discrimination, but more widely by a feeling of not being fully accepted or understood through occasional incidents.
d) Suffering of the poor.
Shamefully, we live in a society where many people need to go to food banks to make ends meet – a gross injustice that was unthinkable forty years ago. Housing costs have risen to consume an ever-larger part of people’s income, so that for many renting is painful, buying virtually impossible. Unemployment or zero-hours contracts turn the screw. This is by no means an exclusively, or even largely, black problem, but black people are affected by it disproportionately. Sewell’s argument that therefore many of black people’s problems are the result of being poor rather than the working out of any racist agency has been criticised as being circular: in fact, the reason that some black people are poor is simply the result of the discrimination they experience by being black. But racism in this society is not so monolithic that it crushes any possibility for improvement. And Sewell’s basic point is good – if black people are disproportionately poor, so general measures to alleviate poverty also benefit them disproportionately.
3. Beware of Wrong Turns.
Some of the wrong turns in response to the unsettlement following George Floyd’s death are by taking -
the by-roads:unnecessary and irritating initiatives that don’t get you anywhere, like the Rugby Union dropping the title Saxons for the England B team to be ‘inclusive’, or see my earlier blog on ‘The Strange Case of Edinson Cavani’ (Blog 07/01/2021).
the old roads:too often we are fighting yesterday’s battles. It is wearisome when church leaders attack ‘racism’. We now publicly and rightly lament the graceless lack of welcome too often experienced by the Windrush generation, but that time is well past. It is not at all a current issue. Everyone is in principle against racism, how else could every other tv advert now feature black people. Conservatives are quite happy with Indians as Chancellor and Home Secretary, plus several other senior offices. The public really has moved on.
the easy roads: even Donald Trump disowned George Floyd’s killer, Derek Chauvin. We are not the USA, and attacking the overt the racism that led to George Floyd’s death is just picking the low hanging fruit. I sense that many people, both black and white, want us to see ‘race’ in American terms. It is more dramatic, and easier to moralise about. But racism in Britain is more complex and subtle and that is what we need to engage with.
the ‘high’ roads:it is easy to take the high moral ground, and all the above roads offer the satisfactions of virtue signalling but get us nowhere. Does taking the knee have any real value in our society nowadays? Is it not now an empty routine (perhaps a little like compulsory school worship) that creates weariness rather than commitment? If too much evangelism in nineteenth century America created ‘burned over’ districts where people had become inured to the gospel, we now run the danger that too much talk with too little effective action can lead to a ’burned over’ jadedness about race.
4. So which Ways ahead.
If the volume of gestures, apologies, laments and public statements following the death of George Floyd were sufficient to remove racism from British society then our goal would have been well achieved by now. But it has not. To that extent, over-reference to the death of George Floyd can be harmful and misleading. We don’t have the situation here that led to his death there (notwithstanding what looks like the appalling actions of police officers in the death of Dalian Atkinson). It is right to both lament over his personal tragedy, and to take it as a call for a serious analysis of the injustices and racisms in our own society, but that analysis needs to focus on the particularity of British society and what will bring change here.
a) White people need to up their game.
If I am right in thinking that the cumulative effect of a myriad of microaggressions is a cause of widespread black disaffection with our society, then the way ahead is the person by person changing of white attitudes and responses. In this sense the Black Lives Matter theme that ‘enough is enough’ was a salutary wake up call to us. Whilst it can create white over-nervousness in relating in free and confident ways with ethnic minorities, and lead to a stiltedness and artificiality which is deadening, nonetheless if there is a desire to relate, the readiness to make mistakes and to own them, and to seek personal change then the overall quality of cross-cultural relationships will become more free, open and fair.
b) Face the pain.
George Floyd’s life was damaged well before his death. The Washington Post did an illuminating series on his life, identifying failings in the educational, housing, mental health and legal systems that constantly dogged his progress; though the relentlessly progressive Post passed over without comment or development the first tragedy of his life, his father leaving his home when he was two. The level of brokenness in many areas, not only of families, but also of educational failure, mental illness, despair will not easily disappear. Whilst not meeting such a tragic end, and smaller in numbers than in the USA, nonetheless too many men are living lives not that dissimilar to that of George Floyd.
c) Levelling up.
It is a long haul from this to move from a political slogan to an economic reality. It means change in taxation policies, land use, local authority funding, education and employment opportunities. But actually implementing the Recommendations of the Sewell Report would make real progress. As we come out of lockdown the damage to the prospects of the low paid or unemployed will become more apparent. It will take considerable political will to reign in the scandalous disparities of wealth in our society. Without that, whilst we may not see anything like the scandalous brutality of George Floyd’s murder, but we could well see the tragic consequences of cost-cutting amongst the poor that led to the Grenfell Tower tragedy
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Add-ons
Bob Dylan’s 80thbirthday next Monday is an occasion I simply can not let pass unnoticed. His ‘Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ (1964) identified not only brutal personal racism, but especially institutional racism three years before the term was actually coined. Meanwhile all of us, and especially those who are his contemporaries, should meditate on one of his great lines: ‘time is an ocean, but it ends at the shore’.