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The first word, Black, was designed by Tijay Mohammed, a Ghanaian-born artist, and used vibrant Kente fabric design and Adinkra symbols, which represent concepts like royalty, unity and legacy.

Sophia Dawson, a Brooklyn-based visual artist, took the second word, lives. The L contains the faces of the mothers who have lost their children to police killings. The I uses imagery inspired by Emory Douglas, an artist for the Black Panther Party; the V highlights the culture of the African diaspora; the E contains faces of Black Panther Party members who are currently in prison; and the S carries a passage from the Bible.

The street painting at Foley Square resembles many that have been done around the country in its word choice and placement, but part of what has been lost in the national debate over the art and the political statements they make is the logistical care, intentional placement and artistry that went into the creation of many of them.

While some like those at Trump Tower and near the White House are primarily stencil work in the blazing yellow paint typically used for road markings, and are known largely for their challenging placement, others have been fully realized works of art that went through rigorous processes of design and planning.

This month, the Foley Square street art in Lower Manhattan and the one in Harlem were unveiled, with the multicolored letters of Black Lives Matter replete with imagery related to Black people who were killed by the police, as well as vibrant symbols of freedom, hope and joy.

In Cincinnati, the art appears in the red, black and green of the Pan-African flag, with silhouettes, phrases and textured designs filling the letters. In Jackson, Mich., it was designed it in a graffiti-style font. In Portland, Ore., the letters contained a timeline of historical injustices in the state.

The purpose of the Fifth Avenue project at Trump Tower was clear: to rile up the president, who called it a symbol of hate. The street painting was intended to get the message up quickly; the stenciling and outlining was done by the Department of Transportation, and roughly 60 volunteers helped lay down 100 gallons of traffic paint.

The other artworks in Manhattan were intended not as a political statement meant for President Trump to see but as an opportunity for local artists, community togetherness and discussions about race and policing. The outlines of the enlarged Black Lives Matter letters are filled with intentionally placed symbols and colors.

I wanted the design to embody our experience as a whole as a Black community and what we strive for, said Patrice Payne, one of the artists involved with the work at Foley Square.

Justin Garrett Moore, the executive director of the citys Public Design Commission, said that there is a clear difference between the street paintings borne from mayoral decision making, which serve as an acknowledgment that public officials have heard the calls of racial justice protesters, and the community-driven murals, where theres a deeper connection to the space and the message.

These are Black communities that are really wanting to have an expression for this historic moment that were in, he said.

It happened to be a work near the White House, spearheaded by the mayor of Washington, Muriel E. Bowser, that set the groundwork for the countrywide spilling of paint on the ground.

After the Washington painting made the news, an organization representing small business owners in Harlem, called Harlem Park to Park, started discussing what their version of a Black Lives Matter artwork would look like.

There was a certain expectation that Harlem, known as the epicenter of Black culture, needed to take the trend a level up, said Nikoa Evans-Hendricks, the groups executive director. The result was two sprawling sets of words on either side of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, between 125th and 127th Streets. On the northbound side, eight artists had creative control over two letters each. The southbound side was painted red, black and green by a collection of community groups.

We wanted to make sure the mural didnt just represent words on the street but embodied the Harlem community, Ms. Evans-Hendricks said.

The artists were chosen by LeRone Wilson, the artworks curator, who also designed the first two letters. The B that he designed depicts the Ancient Kemetic goddess Maat, with feathered wings reaching across the curves of the letter, and the bird deity Heru, welcoming the spirits of those who have died at the hands of police into the universe.

Within the L, he painted the names of 24 Black people killed by the police, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown and Amadou Diallo.

Within the outlines of several other letters, the artists painted images associated with the outrage over the treatment of Black people by the police: The faces of Ms. Taylor and Sandra Bland and Mr. Floyds daughter occupy the two Ts in the word matter. The I in lives contains the badge numbers of the four police officers charged in connection with Mr. Floyds death.

The artists received advice from the citys Department of Transportation on what materials to use on the asphalt. They took the agencys recommendation of using road line paint used for markings on streets and sidewalks, which many artists right now are doing to make the street art more durable.

The act of painting the work in Harlem was designed as a community event, with catering from local restaurants and help painting from the Boys and Girls Club of Harlem and Harlem Little League.

Every day we were out there, hundreds of people wanted to be involved, Mr. Wilson said.

And after the unveiling, the space became a gathering place for people, as well as a space to appreciate art at a time when museums are shut because of the pandemic.

The creators are hoping that the city agrees to a request to keep the street closed to traffic until the end of the summer, as the city did with a street painting in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, which was created with the yellow traffic paint and contains the names of Black people killed by the police.

The location for the Harlem work was chosen because it was at the heart of a Black community. In Lower Manhattan at Foley Square, it was because of a nearby cherished national monument: It draws meaning from its proximity to the African Burial Ground, which contains the remains of New York Citys colonial African-American community.

Amina Hassen, an urban planner with WXY, an architectural and urban design firm that worked on the project, said that the location along Centre Street, near the state and federal court buildings, was also significant because of its connection to the policing and incarceration of Black people.

As with the Harlem work, the artists of the Foley Square project had control over the designs within the outline of the Black Lives Matter letters, but the city still had to review the designs to make sure they complied with safety standards. (This time the artists were chosen by the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the project was shepherded by Gale A. Brewer, Manhattan borough president, and Black Lives Matter of Greater New York.)

They first blocked out the artwork in 3-D software, carefully avoiding any street features that the Department of Transportation said they couldnt paint over, said Jhordan Channer, the architectural designer for the project. When it came time to install the 600-foot-long painting, they first painted a white canvas and a drop shadow to make sure the letters stood out. Tats Cru, a group of professional muralists in the city, executed the artists designs with heavy-duty traffic paint, exterior-grade enamel paint and spray paint. They were assisted by youth from Thrive Collective, an arts mentoring program that works with New York public schools.

For the last word, matters, Ms. Payne started in the M with the image of a Black woman as an ancestral figure and nurturer. The design progresses to images of broken shackles, a raised fist, a sun peeking out behind storm clouds, with a tattered American flag at the forefront.

Since the first street painting was unveiled in Washington, some segments of the Black Lives Matter movement have criticized them as being purely symbolic gestures from politicians at a time when activists are calling for the defunding of police departments.

The artists and designers behind the community-driven works say that there are important uses for this symbolism, like education and providing meaningful public art commissions by Black artists.

Ms. Evans-Hendricks remembers seeing a mother walking her son down the letters of the Harlem street art, which run between 14 and 16 feet wide, and explaining the meaning of each word.

It has come alive in a way that the community really needed, she said.

But they also recognize the limits of the works and hope that the solidarity coming from politicians goes beyond paint on the street.

Im very interested in the art going up and taking my child to visit it and discuss it, Ms. Dawson said. But Im more interested in the tangible change that must come from this.

See original here:
The Black Lives Matter Street Art That Contain Multitudes - The New York Times

Advertisings unique ability to persuade by creating the appearance of change through rhetoric, symbols and events has helped corporations and existing power structures conceal and protect white gains and Black losses behind the scenes for generations.

So as Black Lives Matter gained mainstream acceptance in June, brands eager to stay on trend turned to ad agencies to help them join the movement through woke messaging. And though we'd seen similar efforts backfire before Pepsis infamous protest ad with Kendall Jenner in the midst of protests against police shootings in 2017 come to mind long-standing public pressure campaigns to end commercial monuments to white supremacy (ranging from corporate mascots of happy Black servitude to racist NFL trademarks) were, in fact, finally successful this time.

While these hard-won victories are worth savoring, they are still largely symbolic because it's hard to ascribe them to any true change of attitude; the people spoke, but it was really that money talked. So, when Proctor & Gamble tells its consumers that Now is the time to be Anti-Racist, one has to wonder whether the companies and the agencies that produced the ad got the memo, too.

Because, when it comes to feigning change while continuing to marginalize Black lives and maintain white power, advertising has a long record as a repeat offender. And nothing demonstrates that more clearly than the ongoing, striking lack of diversity in the advertising industry itself.

In 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics surveyed advertising and promotion managers in the United States, and found that less than one percent (0.7 percent) were Black a stark contrast to the 13.4 percent of the U.S. population that is Black. Perhaps more troubling, the number had actually gotten worse: In 2010, the percentage was 0.8 percent.

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To find out why, I conducted field work through internship programs at three major New York City advertising agencies. I found three related problems that likely contribute to the problematic, and ongoing, lack of Black advertising managers.

First, white nepotism runs rampant: At the agencies I studied, all 24 of the interns referred to as "must-hires" (which means interns with family connections) were white. In most cases, must-hires are a well-kept but open secret at an organization; their connections are subject to an implicit don't ask, don't tell policy. (Except, this time, I did ask and my anonymous sources told.) And since they are white, their race conceals them like a cloaking device they aren't subject to questions about whether they got their jobs due to "affirmative action" policies even though "must hire" policies are exactly that.

Second, the qualifications for entry-level positions in advertising can be loose and subjective; it comes down to whether a candidate feels like a "culture fit" rather than objective skills or experiences. As one human resources manager told me, the interview process for such positions feels more like rushing for a fraternity or sorority than interviewing for a firmly conceived job. As a result, colorblind whites cant (or choose not to) see that they are consistently hiring people that look like or come from the same backgrounds, because those are the people with whom they feel the most comfortable.

Third, advertising employees often refer their friends for open positions, which may save the agency the expense of a headhunter and provide the added bonus of a familiar officemate, but also makes for a racially homogenous workplace. Sociologists have long documented how the powerful and well-connected use this kind of opportunity hoarding as a means to conserve power within familial (and thus racial) lines.

All of which puts Black applicants in a tough spot. While Latinos and Asians are also underrepresented in advertising, Blacks stand out in an agency setting as one of the interns in my study put it like "freckles." This presents serious obstacles to mentoring and makes Black employees particularly vulnerable to white backlash.

For instance, over half of the white "must-hires" in my study opposed affirmative action, even though they got their own spots through just such a program; these white hires nevertheless complained that Black interns got in "only because" of their race. (Meanwhile, though a smattering of diversity initiatives offered competitive scholarships for minority interns, the must-hires in my study still outnumbered them by a ratio of more than 2 to 1.)

My research only begins to scratch the surface of a deeply entrenched problem but don't take my word for it. Watch Travis Wood's short SXSW film "Affurmative Action," which mocks how creative companies Meet the Team pages often feature plenty of dogs ... but no Black people. Or read this open letter from 600 & Rising, a coalition of 600+ Black advertising professionals calling for urgent action from agency leadership the most important of which being "transparency on diversity data.

In order to dismantle white supremacy inside advertising, more data is needed to hold ad agencies accountable and yet, despite decades of problems and numerous requests, as of last year neither major industry group not the 4A's nor the American Advertising Federation even bothered to track diversity statistics in their industry.

The Pledge for 13 has, in fact, offered to establish a a hub that tracks the performance and progress of agencies throughout the industry on diversity goals and instructing participating agencies to commit to achieving 13 percent African American leadership by 2023.

The pressure seems to be working: On the eve of Juneteenth, June 19, 600 & Rising announced that 30 agencies agreed to publicly share their internal diversity data on an annual basis, broken down by gender identity, race/ethnicity, seniority and department. The 4As signed on as a co-sponsor and agreed, for the first time, to conduct an annual diversity survey to create industry benchmarks.

But, of course, weve been here before.

In 2009, the NAACP launched the Madison Avenue Project and released a damning (if not surprising) report exposing the widespread and systematic under-hiring, under-utilization, and under-payment of Black people across the advertising industry. Not only was racial discrimination 38 percent worse in the advertising industry than in the overall U.S. labor market, but the discrimination divide had gotten twice as bad as it had been 30 years before. Months after the reports release, Adland's own Dan Wieden who coined Nike's catch phrase "Just Do It" criticized his own agency for hiring white kids to sell Black culture, asking a room of industry insiders, "How many Black faces do you see here?"

All this pressure didnt stop the 2011 CLIO Awards advertising's Oscars from their tone-deaf promotion campaign featuring a bunch of white guys dressed up like characters from AMC's "Mad Men." (The show seemed more aware of the problems within the industry than the industry: The fifth season of AMCs award-winning drama, premiering in 2012, opened with three white ad men hurling insults and water bombs onto the heads of Black civil rights protesters an event that actually happened at Young & Rubicam.)

Meanwhile as protests continue and brands jump on the bandwagon majority-white advertising agencies, among the hipster trappings of a progressive workspace, are still hiring predominately white people on the basis of favors, "fit" and friendship. And they're all working to convince us how "woke" our favorite brands are, so that we don't look too hard behind the curtain at how white the people in control of those brands and the messaging around them remain.

Read more from the original source:
Corporate ads said Black Lives Matter. But the industry creating them is nearly all white. - NBC News

During the first half of 2020, the disproportionate spread of COVID-19 in communities of color and the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police have drawn into sharp focus the systemic racism present in the United Statesincluding in our food system.

While Civil Eats has long reported on the issue of food justice, we have focused especially this year on topics related to racial justice in food and agriculture, and how the coronavirus pandemic has compounded the issues that communities and individuals of color have faced for many years.

From how historically redlined and segregated neighborhoods affect residents diets, health, and well-being today to the ways that Black communities are building on their generations of self-reliance and mutual aid to meet even greater needs today, 2020 has brought an entirely new level of challenges for people of color to face.

In the past few months, weve reported on the role food apartheid has played in the spread of coronavirus in Black communities, farm countrys reaction to the racial reckoning following Floyds death, and the evolution of the Black food sovereignty movement over the years, among many other issues.

In acknowledgment of todays Strike for Black Lives(#StrikeForBlackLives)during which tens of thousands of workers are expected to walk off the job in at least 25 cities to protest systemic racism, white supremacy, and police brutality against Black peoplewe are sharing some of our recent reporting on Black lives and the food system.

For more of our in-depth reporting, you can visit our archives of coverage of food justice and the coronavirus.

People of Color are at Greater Risk of COVID-19. Systemic Racism in the Food System Plays a Role.

Food apartheid and economic inequality are among the factors leading to high rates of infections and deaths of Black and brown Americans.

Black Leaders Discuss How the Food Sovereignty Conversation Has Shifted

Nearly two dozen Black farmers, chefs, and advocates took part in an online Juneteenth event to share stories of resistance, resilience, and the fight for land access.

Op-ed: The Farm Bureau Says it Wants to Fight Racism. Heres Where to Start.

Addressing systemic racism in U.S. agriculture has to begin with the USDA.

Reckoning with Racial Justice in Farm Country

Rural communities and agriculture groups are divided over George Floyds death and the resulting protests. As some stay silent, others express solidarity or hold rallies in support.

Want to See Food and Land Justice for Black Americans? Support These Groups.

Food justice is racial justice. As the nation rises up to protest atrocities against Black people, here are some organizations working to advance Black food sovereignty.

Op-ed: How Urban Agriculture Can Fight Racism in the Food System

Growing food in cities offers a powerful way to reclaim communities and change the dynamics so that people of color have wealth and power.

How Black Communities Are Bridging the Food Access Gap

Amid the pandemic and racial-justice uprisings, Black organizers nationwide are getting fresh, healthy food and groceries to those who need it most.

The Doctor-Botanist Couple Healing a Community in the Rural South

In Alabamas Black Belt, where COVID rates are high and hospitals are understaffed, Dr. Marlo Paul and her plant biologist husband, Anthony, are making house calls and providing free herbal remedies from their own farm.

See the article here:
Black Lives Matter in the Food System - Civil Eats

Over the past several weeks, eight large-scale murals have been painted directly onto streets in all five boroughs of New York City, all of them borne from creative undertakings as disparate and complex as the communities where theyre found.

One, splayed in front of 725 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in bright yellow road paint, was spearheadedits location highly conspicuous and increasingly vandalism-pronein part by the office of Mayor Bill de Blasio. Before that, on Fulton Street in Brooklyns historic Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, came a community-led mural with a crucial assist from the Department of Transportation. On Adam Clayton Boulevard in Harlem, another mural came to fruition as an artist- and community-led effort, also with city support. Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island have them too, all organized and executed in different ways with different players.

Its really a mix, Justin Garrett Moore, executive director of the citys Public Design Commission, told AN with regard to how the eight murals came to be and who oversaw their creation. Yet despite their differences, all eight works of street art have the same, resounding three-word message spelled out in chunky, Paul Bunyan-sized lettering: Black Lives Matter.

However, one Black Lives Matter mural in New York City, at Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, is markedly different from the rest.

The size of the Foley Square mural, which stretches across three blocks of Centre Street from the New York Supreme Court House to the Manhattan Municipal Building, is roughly comparable with the others, albeit perhaps a bit grander in scale at 600 feet long. It also eschews the straightforward, monochrome execution of some of, but not all of, the citys Black Lives Matter murals in favor or 16 individual letters that are kaleidoscopic in nature. A veritable bonanza of colors, shapes, and designs, each letter can be viewed as a distinct, standalone work of art. In fact, three different artistsTijay Mohammed (Black), Sophia Dawson (Lives), and Patrice Payne (Matter)created each mammoth word.

Located in the civic heart of New York City adjacent to the historic site of the citys African Burial Ground, the Black Lives Matter mural at Foley Square is the only one thats creation was led byand was largely funded in part byarchitects, designers, and urban planners.

Like the other Black Lives Matter murals in New York, the mural at Foley Square follows in the oversized footsteps of the inaugural Black Lives Matter mural unveiled on June 5 just steps from the White House Lawn along 16th Street in Washington, D.C. The creation of that mural, led by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, was spurred in the early days of the ongoing, Black Lives Matter-led movementthe largest and most enduring civil rights protest of its kind in decadesagainst social injustice, police brutality, and institutionalized racism. The movement was galvanized by the May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis along with the deaths of other Black Americans at the hands of law enforcement.

Similar to NYCs other Black Lives Murals, the Foley Square mural involved the participation of city agencies and officials. A key player was Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, who, working in partnership with Black Lives Matter of Greater NY, was instrumental in selecting and securing the site. The 11-member Public Design Commission, which was involved more directly in the Foley Square mural than the others, is also a city agency and, as such, Moore served as a logistics-oriented choreographer of sorts, helping to coordinate between the impressive multitude of factions that contributed, artistically and financially to the mural. Despite all the bad impressions people have about government, there were good people from multiple agencies working to make this happen, he said. Theres a lot of stuff that it takes to get stuff like this done.

But as Moore clarified, the Foley Square mural was, in the end, largely an independent effort, working between private and grassroots organizations.

Moore went on to call the project an unusual combination of people from the architecture, design, and built environment community that were motivated to really connect the mural idea to public space explicitly, and the idea to a civic center more explicitly.

Working in concert with youth arts nonprofit Thrive Collective and technical artist support-providing TATS CRU, a Bronx-based collective of graffiti artists-turned muralists, on the planning/logistical front was WXY Architecture + Urban Design.

Amina Hassen, an associate and urban planner, and architect Jhordan Channer served as the firms project leads.

For a long time, in both urban planning and in architecture, there has been a refusal to acknowledge how political our work really is, said Hassen. For me, personally, it feels very important at this point in time to acknowledge that as creators who are in positions to help shape the public realm that we come to it with our values and our political standingsbecause the places that we are involved in creating are not neutral spaces.

Referring to WXY as true allies with the agency and resources and connections that absolutely helped make this happen, Moore noted that the firm was also crucial in orchestrating a peer network of design firms, most of them based downtown, that leant financial support to the project. Firms that contributed were, among others, Snhetta, COOKFOX, Rogers Partners, SCAPE, ODA, FXCollaborative, SHoP Architects, and Ken Smith Workshop. (A complete list can be found here.)

Janovic Paint & Decorating Center in SoHo and Benjamin Moore donated the 180 gallons of paint used to realize the mural, a work of public art that Channer referred to as counter-narrative to the racist, colonial symbols in our public spaces.

With so many players contributing artistically, technically, and fiscally, the mural at Foley Square took a bit longer to conceive and complete than its counterparts. (It was originally slated to be unveiled on Juneteenth but was completed July 3). This more deliberate pace, however, was largely by design as explained by Moore.

It was really important that it was a broader effort; it took us more time to do it but it was important that how we did it really mattered, he said. The fact that we had so many participants and players was a part of that process.

Moore also stressed the importance of a vetting process that was put in place to ensure that all donations and logistical support were aligned with what Black Lives Matters is aligned with broadly. It took time to do that vetting and find the right partners to ensure that is was a coalition of people that were fully committed to the work, he explained.

The involvement of Percent for Art, a program of the Department of Cultural Affairs, was also crucial in seeking out emerging artists in lieu of established ones with existing platforms and large followings. It was a very intentional process, said Moore. People who arent normally given a platform and agency to do this kind of work were brought in.

And as Moore added, the diversity of the statementBlack Lives Matteris reflected in the artists themselves, who are of different religious backgrounds, genders, and sexual orientations. Providing a platform for the artists to give this statement in their own voices was really important, he said.

As for the Foley Square murals positioning amidst some of the citys most powerful bureaucratic edifices, it was just as intentional as all other aspects of its creation.

Noting the proximity of the federal courthouse, New York City Police Department headquarters, and the African Burial Ground, Channer explained: Conceptually, its an attempt to create a space on the street where people of color can exist [] its sort of labeled for them.

Both Hassen and Channer were quick to emphasize the significance of their involvement in the mural as professional shapers of the built environmentan urban planner and an architect, respectively, both of colorwho have direct hands in making public spaces more accessible and more equitable to all. It was important that we became a part of this and really defined for ourselves what our streets look like and what those places we inhabit look like, said Channer.

Urbanists and architects have a lot of work to do to make Black Lives Matter in how we create and improve our public realm, Hassen added. By participating in this mural, its really just a statement of a start to rethinking our ways of working.

Excerpt from:
Foley Square's Black Lives Matter mural is a designer-led transformation of public space - The Architect's Newspaper

The answer is clear. It is because BLM feeds into the same wretched culture of victimhood and oppression that has been cynically championed by the left for decades. By continually caricaturing black people as perpetual victims of systemic white racism it infantilises them by depicting us as stupid, helpless and impotent cultural punchbags, forever crushed beneath externalised discriminatory forces beyond our control.

It is a grotesque form of reanimated cultural imperialism that envisages a world in which every black action can only ever be a reaction to white provocation, as if we were little more than flaccid puppet minstrels forever tied to the string of white mastermind omnipotence. In so doing, black people are absolved of our need to take responsibility for our own actions and futures and must instead await salvation by accepting that our own freedom and empowerment are not ours to claim but a white establishments to give.

Oddly, it is a cult enthusiastically energised by successful black personalities, with the likes of John Boyega, Afua Hirsch and Stormzy absurdly claiming that the society in which they gained their own success is somehow systemically inclined to withhold it from all their black peers. And thiscult is founded on a toxic crucible: slavery. Martin Luther King talked of freedom far more than he talked of slavery. Yet now the civil rights lexicon has been reversed and slavery is now the historical deadweight from which BLM and its liberal enablers refuse to let black people escape.

Yes, the Atlantic slave trade was a horrendous evil. But to claim that a 400-year-old event that adapted barbarous Arab and African practices that had already been in place for thousands of years is responsible for unilaterally framing the life choices and experiences of black people today is as preposterous as suggesting that cruise ship bookings are still hampered by the Titanic. It is also a claim that might attain more integrity were it accompanied by even a scintilla of concern for the estimated 40 million people worldwide trapped in slavery today.

BLMs twisted narratives have been underscored by a liberal establishment and mainstream media that deploys identity politics to objectify and homogenise black people. In so doing it offensively lumps all black people into a vast cultural tick-box in which, by magical virtue of our pigmentation, we have all been gifted with the telepathic ability to think, eat, act and talk exactly the same way.

Yet by ignorantly conflating the richness and diversity of the black experience into a single diminished entity, patronising, reductionist terms like the black and dreaded BAME community invariably flow and perpetuate an embattled sense of otherness that merely succeeds in further separating and marginalising black people from mainstream society.

And, like all good liberal pogroms, this homogenisation is specifically designed to disenfranchise individuality, sever the links between black people and our brothers and sisters in other racial groups and, most importantly, to achieve the hallowed liberal goal of glorifying difference. And glorifying difference is exactly what BLM and the Marxist junta it seeks to establish is all about.

True integration - where character matters more than colour and George Floyd could just as easily have become a cardiologist as a criminal - was the utopian vision on which Martin Luther King based his dream, and it should be the goal of all mature Western democracies. But celebratingdifference is intolerable to a guilt-ridden liberal elite groggy on the opiate of multiculturalism. Instead it embraced the tyranny of diversity to obscure integration and emphasise what divides us rather than what unites us.

We now see this tyranny being prosecuted in a McCarthyan culture war that seeks to expunge white post-imperialist liberal guilt and self-loathing by unilaterally imposing its revisionist, puritanical values on society and toppling all ideological dissenters from Gone With the Wind to historical statues. But make no mistake, this nave identinarian purge could not just incite the odious far right but sow enough resentment and division to set backrace relations by years.

Racism is real and horrific and must be rooted out wherever it is found. But the UK, and England in particular, has offered sanctuary and prosperity to generations of immigrants who in turn have helped to transform it into one of the most welcoming and inclusive societies in the world. Moreover the way to defeat racism is to not throughthe divisive rhetoric and crass militancy of a movement that seeks to commoditise black suffering to perpetuate the divisive, defeatist myth of white privilege.

The answer is for black people not to define ourselves by how others may define us but to realise that we and we alone are the key to empowering our lives and claiming the freedom that is everyones right. Yes, of course the lives of George Floyd and all black people matter. But so too did the life of Tony Timpa. And the life of the innocent unborn black baby Floyd threatened to execute in its mothers womb.

Until black people take responsibility for their role in ending and oppressing the lives of other black people and until the regressive liberal elite realises that sowing division and resentment will lead to genuinesystemic inequality, then black lives will only continue to matter on the rare occasions when white people take them.

Ike Ijeh is an architect and critic

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Why does Black Lives Matter only care about black lives when white people are threatening them? - Telegraph.co.uk