by Fraser Myers, spiked
Five years ago, Western elites fell to a reactionary racial ideology.
Five years ago today, on 25 May 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer kneeling on his neck. His killing, and his muffled cry of ‘I can’t breathe’, were caught on video and shared around the world. The Black Lives Matter movement, which began with the 2012 killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin, was supercharged, sparking months of mass protests and rioting in both the US and across the world.
BLM had pretensions of radicalism. Activists believed they were railing against not one brutal, shocking police killing, but against ‘the system’ itself. A system they viewed as inherently racist, corrupted by ‘whiteness’ and forever tainted by the original sins of slavery and colonialism. So why, then, was this movement embraced, almost immediately, by just about every establishment institution under the Sun? From big banks to the tech oligarchs, from politicians to philanthropists, from Oxford University to the British royal family, Western elites all took the knee before the BLM juggernaut.
In many cases, the knee-taking was literal. High-ranking Democrats, led by Nancy Pelosi, gathered at the Capitol, swathed in kente-cloth stoles, to kneel for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the same amount of time that Floyd’s neck was knelt on. UK prime minister-in-waiting Keir Starmer also posed for a photo on one knee. Premier League footballers suddenly began taking a knee before every match.
Also from spiked: The poisonous legacy of BLM Britain by Inaya Folarin Iman
How George Floyd dragged America to the right by Wilfred Reilly