How the killing of George has brought down the totems of slavery and raised millions for anarchy
The asphyxiation of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a policeman, has set off a new ‘war’ for racial equality. It has also created anarchy, street battles – and fund-raising worth millions.
The killing of George and the following international wave of protests has, in a matter of weeks, gone a long way to rebuilding the financial landscape of black political activism.
Money has come in so fast that some groups are said to be redirecting donors elsewhere.
And as social media has gone mad with its fake news, vicious misrepresentations of what is actually happening and the glorification Trumpian dystopia, the sale of traditional books about racism has gone mad too.
This is amazing when you remember it is all happening in a pandemic that has driven millions people from their jobs and left many on hard times.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former president of Liberia and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, says protests are “an expression of solidarity with our diaspora in the US and recognition of what we went through after the slave trade, colonisation and the extraction of our resources.”
Black Lives Matter is not a registered charity but they say the new funds will go towards a number of aims including advocacy to effect changes in the law, developing and distributing educational resources, healing practices in black communities.
They will also use the money for police monitoring, strategies for the abolition of the police and supporting the United Family and Friends Campaign to help friends and loved ones of people killed by British police to access justice.
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The British arm of the organisation, BLMUK, was created in 2016, and its cause has been given renewed attention following the US police killing of George Floyd.
And in an article for the Voice, Boris Johnson recognised the “incontrovertible, undeniable feeling of injustice, a feeling that people from black and minority ethnic groups do face discrimination: in education, in employment, in the application of the criminal law.
“And we who lead and who govern simply can’t ignore those feelings because in too many cases, I am afraid, they will be founded on a cold reality.”
There has however, been criticism that Johnson did not go far enough in addressing the grievances of the BLMUK.
Simon Woolley, the director of Operation Black Vote and chair of the Downing Street race disparity unit’s advisory group, said: “Whilst an acknowledgement of racism within our society is to be welcomed, the real deal is having a plan to effectively deal with it – and that was missing.”
In Britain, the dumping of the statue of slave-trader Edward Colston into the river in Bristol has divided opinion between those who abhorred “mob justice” and those who saw it as a fitting end for a man who participated in a trade in which many Africans were deliberately drowned so that owners could collect insurance.
Oxford’s Oriel College bowed to long-standing pressure to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes, a British imperialist accused by activists of laying the foundations of apartheid in South Africa.
In Australia, where the hashtag #aboriginallivesmatter has been trending, the focus of protests has been on the treatment of an indigenous population that has been subjected to mass killings, eviction and incarceration since the arrival of white settlers in the 18th century.
Poland has seen discussions about the use of Murzyn, a term for black people that has its roots in the same word as the English “moor”, which many Poles consider neutral but others regard as offensive.
In one Warsaw protest, a young black girl walked with a placard proclaiming: “Stop calling me Murzyn.”
But then Black Lives Matter UK put this on their GoFundMe page …
“We’re guided by a commitment to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white-supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people in Britain and around the world. We build deep relationships across the diaspora and strategise to challenge the rise of the authoritarian right-wing across the world, from Brazil to Britain.”
Yes, we are living in a world of new anarchy and yet, here, where millions of pounds are being donated for change, nobody seems to be able to say what this change will be and when it’s gonna come.
#BLM #livesmatter #georgefloyd #USA #trump #dystopia #slavery #coston #riots #blacknwhite
The main image in this article is based on a sketch of police victim George Floyd which was sent to the preservation society by the family of Karin, aged 13, who lives in Stropkov, Slovakia.
Karin was watching TV when a news broadcast high-lighted what had happened to Floyd. “It made her very sad,” a family member said.
i”She was thinking about this guy for a few days and wanted to do something so people don’t forget about him.
“She is angry about situation in USA and about racism. She is very young, but understands so much.”
