THE TRAGIC DEATH OF GEORGE Floyd in 2020 reignited and globalised the protest movement Black Lives Matter. It goes without saying that what happened was a terrible tragedy, but many in Britain, myself included, wondered why a police killing in Minneapolis, 4,000 miles away, would lead to my local bakery publishing a statement on its website.
Or, as Tomiwa Owolade points out in This Is Not America, why British anti-racist activists began talking urgently about “indigenous rights”, which mean something quite different in the UK than in America.
While it’s true that the pressure-cooker conditions of Lockdown — aided by the dizzying world of social media — created the perfect setting for a moral panic of sorts, our collective reaction posed important questions about the state of liberal societies and their attitudes towards ethnic minority populations.
This question of how we should understand the
