THERE IS NEVER A GOOD TIME TO PROTEST!
Throughout last year the only other subject to crop up in the media anywhere near as much as Brexit was Climate Change Protestors; not so much about climate change but more about the protestors themselves.
The daily wailing and gnashing of teeth surrounding every report on why we had not left the European Union yet, was punctuated by presenters proclaiming how their, and everyone else’s, inalienable right to get to work without delay was being harmed by thoughtless protesters, blocking roads and spreading their paranoid delusions about environmental disaster. Having seen the statistics on pollution since lockdown it would appear that the climate naysayers main defence -man’s impact on the environment through pollution- has frankly been left in tatters with evidence to the contrary arriving post-hoc.
But this is not a post about climate change protest, nor is it about the usual subject on here - art, It is about the Black Lives Matter protests.
The day that I started writing this post the riots across the USA, protesting the death of George Floyd at the hands of Police in Minneapolis, had already been raging on for a couple of days. By the time that I returned to my desk to continue the piece, the story had taken a turn for the . . . . well I don’t know what actually! Of course, despite President Number 45’s assertions that ‘this is a great day for him [George Floyd] a great day for everybody, a great great day’, there are no more good days for George Floyd he is after all still dead, and I am sure he would rather not be.
A week has passed and many of the things that I was going to write about George Floyd and the protests have gone from my head, supplanted instead by the images from Bristol that dominated the media on Sunday afternoon. These events in the UK sparked by the death of Floyd in the US prompted me to think . . .
When is it the right time to protest and what does it achieve?
Many people have complained bitterly about the idea of thousands of people gathering together under the Black Lives Matter banner to protest over the course of the last week. Having seen the liberal approach to lockdown rules over what have been the sunniest days of the year so far, one would be forgiven for not knowing what the rules are. I guess the only way to find out officially is to ask Dominic Cummings. But that is a whole other matter. With beaches packed to bursting point over the May Bank Holidays, and parks continuing to be hotspots for people meeting without social distancing, the call for protests not to occur during lockdown seem somewhat churlish, if not a deliberate calculation. It is true that people are dying due to the Covid-19 virus and that it is essential that it is brought under control. But there is, I believe, a thought that remains unspoken amidst the most vociferous exhortations of people that they should ‘not be selfish’, ‘stay at home’, ‘wait until the pandemic is over’ etc . . . and that is that this virus does not see a person as black or white. It kills indiscriminately, unlike any existing human systems, all of which thrive on discrimination. All of a sudden white people are now afraid of the consequences of interaction in a way that POC have been for hundreds of years.
Ironically statistics have shown that it is the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) community that have been disproportionately affected by this pandemic. Another indisputable truth is that economics is part of that effect with a large number of the members of that community being employed in low wage jobs, often mistakenly referred to as ‘low skilled jobs’ by the media and politicians alike. In such jobs contact with the public and / or unsanitary conditions is constant and largely unavoidable; bus drivers, cleaners, security guards, hospital porters, taxi drivers and such like. Many of whom have been vindicated over the last two months as being the backbone of this country’s health and service industries. Many of the people doing such jobs, are also the people that have been victims of this country’s ‘Hostile Environment’. This environment has always existed but it is now explicit in government policy rather than implicit. Since the Brexit vote, racist viewpoints have become overt and part of the mainstream narrative, much going unchallenged. Many people in the ‘go home’ camp would site such arguments as ‘we [Britain] are full up, there’s no room’, ‘our NHS is crumbling under the weight of immigrants’, ‘coming over here taking our jobs’ and other such lines. But, in reality the existence of Slavery and the colonising and Empire building instincts of the British establishment means that such arguments are null and void. The British establishment and all of those who would support its past, now have to wake up to the fact that the situation we find ourselves in, here in the 21st Century, is a direct result of our colonial history and there is a bill that will always be due!
Colston: The Power of Life and Death
Bronze: The Power of Life and Death was an exhibition several years ago at the Henry Moore Institute. It looked at how the immortality of powerful people through statuary was never quite as immortal as they imagined it would be. As regimes change so too do the monumental sculptures. Old leader’s ousted would be torn down, used as scrap to make new likenesses of the current regime, often melted down to facilitate the production of new weapons used in future regime changes.
Edward Colston was a slave trader who, during his lifetime, was responsible for the transportation of thousands of slaves around the globe into a life of violence, misery and servitude to the white man. Hundreds of years later we can still see the values of that society being upheld now in it’s unwillingness to address the past. Statues Are Monuments, and whether we like it or not the psychology of the viewer is such that a monument to an individual will always perceived to be a glorification of someone who is worthy. History is not taught through statues, it is taught through text books, films, music, poetry, the arts. The details of this side of our history, as in the case of empire and colonialism in relation to morals and ethics, are not taught as part of the mainstream education system of the UK. Colston held in his hands the power of life and death over thousands of enslaved people, at least 19000 of whom died en route and were consigned to a watery mass grave, to which his monument has in recent days been added. Many social media commentators have made an argument that pulling down Colston’s statue is somehow like bulldozing Auschwitz. This of course is nonsense as Auschwitz stands as a memorial to those who died, and memory of the awful deeds that occurred there are kept alive by the dedication of survivors, unlike Colston whose statue stands as a celebration of the wealth he generated from the enslavement of thousands of others. Despite Hitler’s improvements to the German economy between 1933 and 1937 you will, rightly, find no public monuments to him. Germany has in this respect been able to confront its past and understand that any economic gains were heavily outweighed by his other actions, so this is a false equivalent.
The Colston statue has been a sore point for Bristol for many years. It is the kind of debate that I was only peripherally aware of up until now, that kind of information rarely being reported on at anything more than a local level in the media. I have never seen any national news about this particular statue before. This action has brought to the forefront a long standing feud between those who support the presence of this statue, and many others like it, and those who do not. It has also brought out of the shadows the real meaning of the statue, not the confected history of civic leaders wishing to thank such people for building the wealth of their city, albeit on the stolen and violently enforced labour of those kidnapped and removed from their own land and people. It is worth noting that there are many people on town councils that are against this sort of hagiographic veneration through such statues. The Black Lives Matter protests did in a few hours what years and years of arguing has not achieved. As James Baldwin puts it "how long must we wait for your progress".
I Guess This Is About Art, a bit!
The more nuanced story of the history of the world and its cultures come through the wider aperture of the arts: films, music, poetry, visual art etc . . . Once again returning to the words of James Baldwin in ‘Nobody Knows My Name’ “Any political and social regime which destroys the self-determination of a people also destroys the creative power of that people.” When this has happened the culture of that people has been destroyed. And it is simply not true that the colonizers bring to the colonized a new culture to replace the old one, a culture not being something given to a people, but, on the contrary and by definition, something that they make themselves.” Statuary tells the story that the victorious want to tell which is not the story that the oppressed want or need to hear from now until forever. Regime change is necessary, if we have progressed at all as a species, we should be able to accept the voices of those that we are still oppressing hundreds of years later, and confront our rotten history. The cultures of the world tell the real story through lived experience. The life of Colston is seen by many as one of philanthropic gestures that set the city of Bristol afloat financially. But, it is always easy to be generous with money when it is not yours to give away in the first place. For the 24000 Africans that Colston transported around the world the story was not one of riches, memorials and eternal thanks, but one of misery, suffering and death probably not unlike the horrific story of Kunta Kinte, his descendants and the numerous others documented in Alex Haley’s ‘Roots’.
Peace at any price or By Any Means Necessary
Such is the desperation to avoid our own history, the subject of the Barbary Corsairs has even been brought up in some quarters in the past week. The Barbary Corsairs were basically pirates of North African extraction who travelled through the Mediterranean and into the North Atlantic plundering trade ships, of all nations not just European, and taking many white slaves in the process. If you haven’t heard of these people it is unsurprising as they operated from around 710CE but their activities had almost completely died out by the end of the 17th Century, apart from occasional skirmishes with America that resulted in two Barbary Wars. The only reference I can find to statuary mentioning the Barbary Corsairs is a monument in Annapolis, Maryland dedicated to Somers, Caldwell, Decatur, Wadsworth, Dorsey and Israel. These were American soldiers who died in the first Barbary War and to whom the inscription reads “The children of Columbia admire, And commerce laments their fall”. This is not a celebration of the Corsairs but an exhortation to the American people to admire those who died trying to save American trading goods from piracy. So, it seems evident, as if evidence where needed, that the regions from which these pirates hailed do not feel the need to shout loud from the rooftops about the success of their trade in white slaves. Yet, visiting countries that have been a part of the British Empire, hundreds of years later, you will find streets and buildings named after their captors and monuments declaring their great benevolence. So to conflate these two events in world history would be, as in many racist arguments, once again a false equivalency.
This brings me to the subject of Winston Churchill, whose monument was graffitied during the BLM demonstration in London, and the conversation around whether such a man is worthy of a statue due to “his success” in leading us out of World War II.
After Neville Chamberlain’s disastrous entry into World War II (via the Norwegian Campaign) a vote of no confidence saw his National Government (1937-1939) ejected from office and replaced with another National Government, this time headed by Winston Churchill. The Government was made up of members of all major political parties at the time: Conservative (Winston Churchill), Labour (Clement Attlee), National Labour Party, Liberal and National Liberal Party. Winston Churchill was elected for his military expertise but essentially every British political party of the time was responsible for steering the country through the war to victory. Churchill though became the poster boy for patriotism, the face associated with every aspect of military might and his ability to make people rally behind him as he threw his v-signs and chomped on his cigars. This is not to denigrate his success in World War II but to point out that the victory belonged to everybody: all political parties and, even more importantly all of the people whether British, or conscripted from across the continents, to help his vision of how we might win the war. Many people talk of the famine in East Bengal as part of Churchill’s racism, which it wasn’t directly, but I do believe that it was probably rooted in his racist mindset about those “beastly people and their beastly religion”. Four million people died during the famine of East Bengal as a result of Churchill redeploying food to the military fighting on the Japanese front that had been intended for the starving in India. In relation to this he stated that it was their fault for “breeding like rabbits”. Churchill was the hired gun, who I suspect was known for his ability to be brutal when considering how to deal with those that threaten British interests, and was someone who would not think twice when making sacrifices of others to do so. Of course many British people were sacrificed by Churchill in his single minded pursuit of victory against Germany and the scourge of Nazism, of which no one can fault him for wanting to do, but 4m starving Indian people were not going to get in the way of that either. Churchill was after all known for his racist views of the indigenous people of most other continents not least the Sub-continent of India.
It is this aspect that I suspect leads to the kind of false patriotism that we are seeing writ large at the moment. On the weekend following the Black Lives Matters demonstrations in the UK, a second London demonstration was scheduled to happen. In response to this a counter-protest was called by members of the English Defence League and other such Far-Right Groups, to defend the capitals statuary and monuments. By the end of the week Black Lives Matters had cancelled their demonstration. Despite this the Far-Right descended upon London on Saturday morning and proceeded to wear their patriotic hearts on their sleeves; drinking to excess, fighting, urinating beside a memorial to PC Keith Palmer, who died on the streets of London in 2017 confronting a terrorist, and many other patriotic acts. When participants in this ‘counter-protest’ were asked what monuments they were there to defend many could not name a single one. As the protest moved through the streets it passed through parks where they harassed and spat at people who were picnicking. At the monument to Churchill, which had been boxed in to avoid damage, a large group of gathered patriots showed their patriotism by . . . wait for it . . . throwing Nazi salutes. This is how loose the British grasp on history is. Fragile souls frightened of difference in a changing world, lashing out at everyone around them as they try to find the nearest solid object to grasp a hold of as their world spins out of control. For those who would deny the existence of systemic racism or who would play the ‘but we are not as bad as America card I would say, get a grip! We cannot measure such an issue by degrees saying that we do not have an issue because our racism is somehow measured to be lower than another country, if racist ideas have any traction in mainstream thought then the country is racist. Also if we are debating the worth of statues of slave owners over the lives of the actual humans that they affected then we do have structural racism. It is worth remembering that it was only 2015 when the government stopped paying, through the UK taxpayer, damages to former slave owners for the loss of earnings incurred due to the abolition of slavery.
Just one day after the Black Lives Matter protests around the country the UK re-opened for business. After three months of lockdown, social distancing quickly became but a distant memory for all of those who cried out for people not to be selfish by protesting, as many of them queued around ten blocks to make sure that they could return to the shops without delay, just desperate ‘to get back to normal’.
Of course the debate about monuments somewhat masks the real issue that sparked what has so far been two weeks of unrest, and that is the very clear and present danger that POC face every day of their lives. A list has been drawn up of statues whose futures are up for discussion due to their subjects nefarious pasts. One can only hope that the Colston issue has been enough of a jolt to galvanise the spirits and the actions of those who are in a position to make a difference; not just in terms of statuary but in terms of race relations and how we as a society value other human beings. And that last point is on us all!
Of course mine is a white voice in this conversation so to create a bit of balance within this post I will link you here to an article in The Guardian (15th June 2020) in which Lanre Bakare talks to Angela Davis - an absolute icon of social justice for the last half century.
Much has been made of the past life of George Floyd over the last two weeks with people digging up old rap sheets, as always happens in such cases as his. ‘But he was no angel’ many commentators would race to point out. Indeed, but none of us are! Some of these reports were true whilst there were others that were not, but in the context of these events and this piece of writing all are utterly irrelevant. Instead let me leave you with this reference to a creative side of George Floyd’s past and his work as Big Floyd with DJ Screw
In Memoriam
Rest in Peace
George Floyd 25th May 2020 (Minneapolis)
Malcolm Harsch 2nd June 2020? (California)
David McAtee 1st June 2020 (Kentucky)
Oluwatoyin Salau 10th June 2020? (Tallahassee)
Robert Fuller 10th June 2020? (California)
Rayshard Brookes 14th June 2020 (Atlanta)
Bruce Davies | 15th June 2020
Reading Recommendations
James Baldwin The Fire Next Time / Nobody Knows My Name / Go Tell It On The Mountain / Notes of A Native Son
Eldridge Cleaver Soul on Ice
Alex Haley Roots
Frank Kofsky John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960’s
Roger Robinson A Portable Paradise
Richard Wright Native Son
Gil Scott Heron The Last Holiday / The Vulture / The N****r Factory