For a few weeks, black lives mattered. Now what?

"One way in which this time was not different was the haste to change the subject: couldn’t we talk about something other than statues and empire and history? Wasn’t all this just the distant past? And so, after a few days of protests, black people were once again put on the stand to answer for all this talk about toppling monuments to slave traders, removing old TV programmes out of rotation on streaming services, renaming venerable pancake syrup brands.

Some of this is simply the way our media is set up to host “debates” about whether it’s true that some lives matter more than others. But it is also the way that complaints of racial injustice have always been invalidated. They are turned into matters of opinion, removed from the realm of moral justice and placed in the realm of competing cultural values. This is how movements for racial equality are easily framed as unprovoked assaults on our cherished culture, which is perpetually under threat of being vandalised by race vigilantes. This is the dog-whistle frequency that was heard by those groups of white men who arrived, without being asked, to “defend” statues across England.

That frequency is amplified by the media’s treatment of race as a spectacle rather than a serious subject, which has contributed so much to the climate of trivialising racism that triggered the Black Lives Matter protests in the first place."

read article by Nesrine Malik

For a few weeks, black lives mattered. Now what? | Nesrine Malik | Opinion | The Guardian