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The killing of George Floyd by a white police officer may have taken place thousands of miles away, but his agonising cry I cant breathe reverberated in the UK, too. In fact, it became the catalyst for the largest wave of anti-racist protests in British history, taking place in more than 260 towns and cities last summer.

These protests were very much rooted in the British experience. Demonstrators carried handmade placards with the names of black Britons killed by the British police; they demanded justice for members of the Windrush generation threatened with deportation and the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire; they decried the high Covid-19 death rate among communities of colour. Statues were toppled, streets renamed and venerable British institutions such as the Bank of England were forced to reckon with their ties to the slave trade. A year later, Black British Lives Matter, edited by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder, takes time to reflect on this extraordinary movement.

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The book comprises essays from 19 prominent black figures, including the historian David Olusoga, the architect David Adjaye, the Labour MP Dawn Butler and Baroness Doreen Lawrence, the mother of murdered teenager Stephen. It is an effective primer for those keen to understand why Floyds death drove hundreds of thousands of people to the street. The essays offer a 360-degree portrait of the black British experience, taking in health, the criminal justice system, politics, art, journalism, business and education. They interweave the writers lived experiences with their expertise.

This is expressed most powerfully in Lawrences essay, Black British Mothers Matter. She writes about how the tragic events of 22 April 1993, when her 18-year-old son was murdered by a gang of racists, have defined her life since. She had just turned 40. I am aware that to many people I am ageless, she writes. I am ageless in the way that people in the public eye often are frozen in time by a single event I am also ageless because people dont always see me as human.

Her tireless battle to get justice for her son, and force the country to confront the reality of racism, has transformed her into a symbol, but this has also dehumanised her. And I need you to remember my essential humanness and the essential humanness of all Black mothers, she writes. This plea to recognise black Britons humanity recurs throughout the book, from Marverine Coles account of mental ill-health, which deconstructs the devastating consequences of the strong Black woman stereotype, to Ryders closing essay, which describes his own horrific encounters with the police.

So large is the political crisis to which the book is responding that some of the essays only manage to scratch the surface of their subject, while others at times feel repetitive. But what the collection occasionally lacks in depth, it makes up for in range. There is certainly enough variation in style and approach to keep the reader interested.

The essays are most effective when the authors use their experiences and expertise to address a specific problem. Butler laments the smattering of black and Asian representation in overwhelmingly white institutions such as parliament, arguing that, as a result, minorities can easily be pitted against each other. Too often there is one person of colour to argue for a policy that would deny their own parents entry into the UK versus another politician of colour arguing for policies that would benefit other people of colour. A critical mass of black politicians would avoid this.

It is clear, though, that the response to last summers Black Lives Matter protests must go beyond just representation. Protesters called for the dismantling of racism and vowed to weed it out of society. In Olusogas chapter, which is an interview conducted by Henry, the historian admits this surprised him. It never occurred to me that it was even possible. And maybe Im right and theyre wrong, or the other way around. The fact is I put limitations on what I thought was possible; I always presumed racism would always be here, that it was a given.

Perhaps that is what makes this moment critically important, and what makes the breadth of experience reflected in this collection justified: whereas we have become used to simply asking for space to breathe, our imagination has now been expanded. We see that not only is a new world possible, it is ours to win.

Black British Lives Matter is published by Faber (16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Black British Lives Matter edited by Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder review - The Guardian

Dr. Melina Abdullah is Professor of Pan-African Studies at Cal State LA and co-founder of Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles.

This last several days have been heavy and dispiriting. Last Thursday, we breathed a collective sigh of relief that was all too brief. Our days, weeks, months, and years of organizing was successful in having the life ofJulius Jonesbe spared from the death penalty in Oklahoma only hours before his scheduled execution. While the immediate theft of his life was blocked, Governor Stitts final hour clemency remanded Julius to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Julius has been on death row for more than 20 years for a crime that he was falsely accused of committing when he was a 19-year-old student at the University of Oklahoma. Just a day later,Kyle Rittenhouse, who at 17-years-old was driven by his mother across state lines and murdered two Black Lives Matter protestors and injured a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was acquitted on all charges. The criminal legal system protected this vigilante murderer, condoning the premeditatedkillngscommitted at his hands, and made him a hero among white supremacists. Supposed liberals in the establishment gave a nod to Rittenhouse and the system, withPresident Joe Biden affirming, I stand by what the jury has concluded. The jury system works.Here in Los Angeles, Deputy SheriffLuke Liu, the only cop to ever be charged under the tenure of ousted District Attorney Jackie Lacey of the 648 police killings on her watch, was acquitted in the murder of #FranciscoGarcia. This week we are bracing ourselves for the verdict in theMcMichaels v. Bryant case the murderers of #AhmaudArbery in Brunswick, Georgia, whereBlack pastorsand organizers supporting theArberyfamily at the trial have been cast as threats.

In the words of Paul Robeson, The battle front is everywhere. We are experiencing a full-on backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement-moment. Police violence is spiking in Los Angeles (with 61 people shot by LAPD so far this year) and across the country. Instead of defunding the police, police departments are proposing massive increases to their budgets, and elected officials, readying themselves for reelection or their next office, are falling in line. The erosion of Black political power through redistricting is happening everywhere fromGalveston, TXtoLos Angeles. Renewed attacks on ethnic studies in school districts around the country are gaining steam. Environmental racism is global and its effects are near permanent. Racist-misogynist-capitalistDavid Schwartzman was allowed to buy the Crenshaw Mall,despite the superior bid of Downtown Crenshaw. Gentrification is running rampant. Black folks are living in tentscomprising nearly 80% of the population on Skid Row and 40% of the unhoused city-wide and there is no plan to provide permanent-supportive housing. And we are witnessingsupport for Black Lives Matter wane among white folks. These hits can make it seem as if the system of white-supremacist-capitalism has won and is undefeatable.

Rather than retreat, however, now is when we must pause only long enough to restore ourselves and each other. Now is when we must assess the battles that we face and the war to be won. Now is when we must renew our commitment to struggle not simply against white-supremacist-capitalism, but towards imagining and building new visions for the world and for Black people.

Capitalism doesnt love Black people, says Jan Williams, core organizer of Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles and Downtown Crenshaw. Each of these struggles represent the convergence of white supremacy and a fundamentally exploitative economic system. White-supremacist-capitalism requires violent policing to protect it. Modern-day policing places the same targets on the backs of Black people throughLASER zones, hot spots,and racist policing as the system of chattel-slavery-era paddy rollers from which it hails. White-supremacist-capitalism profits from gentrification, labor exploitation, environmental degradation, prison labor and consumerism. White-supremacist-capitalism is embodied by Walmartinside which both#JohnCrawfordand#StevenTaylors lives were stolen by police. White-supremacist-capitalism says that an alleged petty theft is worth the lives of Black mothers#RedelJonesand#YuvetteHenderson.

When we think about the enormity of what we facethe thousands of lives stolen by police violence, each hashtag, police budgets in the billions, tens of thousands of our folks living unhoused, poisoned water, people confined to cages, centuries of miseducation, and the oppression embedded into every crevice of every system, it is too overwhelming to fight against. We must hold the line nonetheless. More than fighting against these structures that pummel us constantly, though, we must build new systems. We must dare to set our own agenda. Rather than merely resisting white-supremacist-capitalism, we must embrace and build cooperative economics (ujamaa).

For the last seven years, Black Lives Matter has been challenging people to dream of a Black Xmas, to intentionally use our resources to: #BuildBlack (invest in Black-led, Black-serving organizations), #BuyBlack (spend exclusively with Black-owned businesses from Black Friday through New Year), and #BankBlack (move our money from white corporate banks to Black-owned ones). In 2020, #BlackXmas expanded to a nationwide campaign, with a website,blackxmas.org, that provides a listing of organizations to support and businesses to shop. #BlackXmas is about not simply struggling against the systems that enable Rittenhouse,McMichaels, Schwartzman, Walmart, racist policing, violence, and exploitation, but fighting on our terms. #BlackXmas challenges us to shake off the chains of consumerism and step fully into our own collective power, to build new traditions, and run an offense as well as a defense. #BlackXmas is about being self-determined and felling existing structures by building new, and more viable, beneficial onesin the names of our mightiest and most righteous warrior Ancestors, in the names of those stolen by police violence, in honor of our community, and as a commitment to the generations to come.

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#BlackXmas: Visioning Beyond the Weight of the Moment - Lasentinel

Todays widely accepted narrative is that we live in historically divided times. Voters are routinely described as polarised, while analysts compete to identify the essential schism of the age, whether this is metropolitan versus traditionalist, people versus democracy or anywheres versus somewheres.

For a third year running, however, the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project supports a different interpretation: that extreme views are given greater visibility by social media, which in turn creates an especially dynamic climate of opinion in that, for example, it can change quickly but one whose underlying forces are defined more by cohesion than division. Released annually by the Guardian, the Globalism Project is an international survey and the largest of its kind on the public relationship with globalisation, produced by YouGov in partnership with academics at Cambridge University. Its findings have consistently challenged popular stereotypes of public opinion in this so-called polarised age.

It turns out, for instance, that there is no deep divide between the mindsets of open versus closed societies. In fact, few voters support radically open or closed societies, while most tend to favour varying degrees of continued integration with the wider world. Academic theorists of authoritarian populism may perceive a new, mass disdain for liberal pluralism, but we found little evidence of this in public sentiment. Instead, majorities around the world maintain a determined belief in the superiority of democracy, with little partisan difference on the issue.

Nor has modern society been overwhelmed by demographic schisms. When we compared those who feel generally more permissive or restrictive towards net migration, for example, we found some discernible patterns on average between younger and older, metropolitan and provincial, graduates and school-leavers but hardly to the extent of rival demographic blocs, or splintering, parallel societies.

This is not to doubt that many countries have experienced an intensifying atmosphere of partisanship over the past decade. Strange as it might sound, however, partisanship and substantial division on policy can be two quite different things, as the Guardian recently reported. For example, in Britain, most respondents who described themselves as either leftwing or rightwing said they dislike others for identifying with the opposite camp (87% and 73% respectively). The same kind of partisan divide extended to other labels of political identity: a majority of leftwingers considered themselves feminist (62%) while a majority of the right did not (70%); or on the subject of Black Lives Matter, most of the left were favourable (70%) while most of the right felt the opposite (69%).

Yet when it comes to opinions on underlying issues, a different picture emerges. The same respondents were next shown a list of three jobs cleaner, nurse and politician and asked if each one was more suited to either women or men, or equally suited to all genders. This time, overwhelming portions of the left and right agreed, answering equally suited for every job (94% and 89% for cleaner; 90% and 74% for nurse; 88% and 83% for politician). Majorities on both sides also shared the view that it is unacceptable for a man to whistle at a woman he doesnt know in the street (85%, 58%), and that promoting equality for women should take some level of priority in modern society (98%, 88%). A similar pattern was evident for other progressive objectives of combating racism of all kinds and moving the economy away from carbon-intensive industries towards greener alternatives.

In other words, when we compare these groups by their attitudes to specific issues, rather than by markers of identity, we find a considerable amount of common ground, rather than polarised clusters of opinion or clashing visions of what contemporary society should look like. In political science, this is being increasingly recognised as the gap between issue-based versus affective polarisation, and supports a thesis that the latter is decidedly more prevalent than the former in numerous western publics.

Indeed, the study finds comparable patterns outside the UK, where notable levels of partisan antipathy coexist with significant overlap in views on gender and race equality and decarbonising the economy. This was found to be true among the rival voting camps of: Joe Biden versus Donald Trump in the United States; Emmanuel Macron versus Marine Le Pen in France; the Greens versus Alternative for Deutschland in Germany; the Left versus the Law and Justice party in Poland; Vox versus Podemos in Spain; and New Democracy versus Syriza in Greece.

This all hints at perhaps the most surprising but also reassuring finding of our research into populism and globalisation over recent years: that in countless areas of life, far from being poles apart, people tend to cluster somewhere in between that is, they fall on a generally moderate bell curve. In fact, this newspaper spotted a similar pattern when it first unveiled the Globalism Project in 2019, namely that the study was remarkable for how most respondents seemed so, well, normal. Large-scale studies of IQ and personality tell a similar story of a bell-curve distribution in which most of us are unexceptional, statistically speaking, and often share our strongest traits with the majority.

Social science researchers can be understandably keen to focus on what divides populations, or what marks out one type of person as being at odds with another. What is more striking is how much people tend to have in common, when you scratch beneath the surface of political labels and loyalties. Social media may be amplifying the role of identity markers in politics, but people are much more likely to agree than disagree on the underlying trends of what is acceptable behaviour, and what our priorities should be.

Stephan Shakespeare is CEO and co-founder of YouGov. Joel Rogers de Waal is academic director at YouGov

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Be reassured: the world is not as divided as we might think - The Guardian

A

n independent body set up by the NHS to tacklehealthinequalitieshas formally committed to neveruseblanketacronyms such asBAME after feedbackthat they are not representative.

The NHS Race and Health Observatory launched a four-week consultation with the public in July on how best to collectively refer to people from black, Asian and minority ethnic groups.

The Observatory said it has become the norm in public policy to use initialisms to refer to a hugely diverse group of people, but that renewed scrutiny has been spurred on by the Black Lives Matter movement.

It said terminology that crudely conflates different groups does not just erase identities; it can also lead to broad brush policy decisions that fail to appreciate the nuance of ethnic inequality in the UK.

Generic collective terms such as BAME, BME and ethnic minority are not representative or universally popular,the Observatory said after receiving responses from 5,104 people.

This is not the end of the conversation as we remain open to revisit preferences over time

It found no single, collective umbrella term to describe ethnic groups was agreed bythe majority ofrespondents.

The body had previously said it was committed to avoiding the use of acronyms and initialisms, but has now formalised this as one of five key principles it is adopting in its communications.

Where possible it will be specific about the ethnic groups it is referring to, but where collective terminology is necessary it will always be guided by context and not adopt a blanket term.

It said it will remain adaptable and open to changing its approach to language.

Dr Habib Naqvi, director of the Observatory, said:The communities we engage and work with needed to be at thecentreof these broad conversations before the Observatory took a final decision on its own approach towards terminology use.

We hope that the proposed principles will help others to reflect on their own approaches to language use.

This is not the end of the conversationas we remain open to revisit preferences over time.

The survey found ethnic minority was the least unpopular collective term, with equal proportions feeling unhappy and happy with it (37.9%).

Some 30% of respondents were happy with the term BAME.

White British people made up the largest group of respondents (38.2% of the total), but their responses were not counted when questions were asked about feeling comfortable about collective terms for non-White British groups.

This was followed by Asian Indian (11.2%), and black African (8.8%) respondents.

The Observatory also held five focus groups with around 100 participants over September and October.

Annette Hay, chairwoman of Coventry University Race Equality Council, said the discussion had been very timely and much needed.

She said:I found the discussion very dynamic and engaging because, like many others, it is something that I have personally battled with and against for a long time now.

There were some very compelling arguments for and against the use of various phrases, acronyms and terminology, most of which seemed to reinforce the need for more conversations and consultations, so that we might find new and more nuanced ways of referencing, describing andanalysing, typicallymarginalisedandminoritisedgroups.

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NHS race body commits to avoiding blanket terms such as BAME - Evening Standard

The Black Lives Matter movement, which came to national prominence in the wake of the 2014 police shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri, continues to gain attention following other incidents involving the deaths of black Americans during encounters with the police. A recent Pew Research Center survey conducted Feb. 29-May 8, 2016, found that general awareness of Black Lives Matter is widespread among black and white U.S. adults, but attitudes about the movement vary considerably between groups.

Here are some key findings about Americans views of the Black Lives Matter movement:

1Roughly four-in-ten Americans support the Black Lives Matter movement. All told, 43% support the movement, including 18% who strongly support it. About one-in-five Americans (22%) oppose the movement, and a sizable share (30%) said they have not heard anything about the Black Lives Matter movement or did not offer an opinion.

Support for Black Lives Matter is particularly high among blacks: 65% support the movement, including 41% who strongly support it; 12% of blacks say that they oppose the movement. Among whites, 40% express support, while 28% say they oppose Black Lives Matter.

2Among whites, Democrats and those younger than 30 are particularly supportive of Black Lives Matter. White Democrats are about as likely as blacks to express at least some support for the Black Lives Matter movement about two-thirds (64%) do, compared with 42% of white independents and 20% of white Republicans.

Among white adults younger than 30, six-in-ten say they support the Black Lives Matter movement at least somewhat. About half (46%) of whites ages 30 to 49, and even fewer among those ages 50 to 64 (37%) and those 65 and older (26%), express support for the movement. It is worth noting, however, that about three-in-ten whites ages 50 and older (28%) say they havent heard anything at all about Black Lives Matter.

3About a third of Americans familiar with Black Lives Matter say they dont understand the goals of the movement. Roughly two-thirds (64%) of those who have heard at least a little about Black Lives Matter say they understand the movements goals very or fairly well. Still, about a third (36%) of those who have heard about Black Lives Matter say they dont understand its goals too well or at all. Blacks who have heard at least a little about Black Lives Matter are far more likely than whites who have some general awareness of the movement to say they understand its goals very well (42% vs. 16%). About four-in-ten whites who have heard of Black Lives Matter (38%) say they dont understand the movements goals particularly well.

4Blacks are more likely than whites to say the Black Lives Matter movement will be effective in the long run. About six-in-ten blacks (59%) believe that Black Lives Matter will ultimately be effective in bringing about racial equality. Whites are about evenly divided: 34% say the Black Lives Matter movement will be effective in helping blacks achieve equality, while 39% say the movement wont be effective; another 26% either werent familiar with the movement or didnt provide an opinion. Among blacks, skepticism about the effectiveness of Black Lives Matter may reflect broader skepticism about the future of racial equality in the U.S. Our survey found that fully 43% of blacks doubt that the U.S. will ever make the changes needed for blacks to have equal rights with whites. Some 11% of whites feel this way.

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How Americans view the Black Lives Matter movement | Pew ...