The racism that killed George Floyd was built in Britain
JVL Introduction
Guardian columnist Afua Hirsch doesn’t pull her punches: “What black people are experiencing the world over is a system that finds their bodies expendable, by design.”
In an impassioned account she highlights why Black people have had enough: “Our reaction to George Floyd’s death as black British people is our expression of generations of lifelong, profound, unravelling pain.”
She points to Britain’s prominent role in the invention of anti-black racism in the British colonies in America, its industrialisation of black enslavement in the Caribbean, its systems of apartheid throughout Africa, its appropriation of black land, resources and labour to fight its world wars and to reconstruct its peace.
And she calls for an end of a system in which “you send all children out into the world to be actively educated into racism, taught a white supremacist version of history, literature and art”.
This article was originally published by the Guardian on Wed 3 Jun 2020. Read the original here.
The racism that killed George Floyd was built in Britain
This is not just ‘horrible stuff that happens in America’. Black people know we need to dismantle the same system here
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Brilliant article. Thanks.
An excellent article. I am currently reading Afua’s book: BRIT-ish. A riveting eye opener of a book. Who knew about the Royal African Company? Set up in 1672, this was King Charles 2nd’s establishment of Britain’s first slave trading corporation. It formalised the relationship between the monarchy and slavery which was to continue until George 3rd.