The poisonous legacy of BLM Britain

The killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis five years ago sparked a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. That summer, millions took to the streets in the name of racial justice as BLM protests spread from the US to Western Europe.

In Britain, the BLM movement promised to confront Britain’s colonial legacy, expose deep-rooted structural racism and address everyday racial injustices, from microaggressions to unconscious bias. It was described by its advocates as a necessary and long overdue ‘racial reckoning’. Five years on, it is time to ask what it actually achieved.

The evidence is not encouraging. All the slogans, protests and agitation did little more than spread grievance and distort the truth. The damage left behind by the BLM movement in the UK will take years to overcome.

Part of the problem is that the BLM narrative was imported wholesale from the US and imposed on Britain. Despite the profound differences between the UK and US in policing, demographics and history, British BLM supporters assumed that the social and political forces that created the conditions in which George Floyd was killed are alive and well in the UK. Britain, we were told, is a society that was built on systemic racism, with violence, discrimination and bias woven into the very fabric of daily life.

The lived experiences of many ethnic minorities simply do not support this narrative. Nor do the data. Take the 2021 report from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED), which was chaired by Dr Tony Sewell and launched in the aftermath of the BLM protests. It conducted a comprehensive review of outcomes across education, health, criminal justice and employment. It concluded that, while there are racial disparities, there is no evidence that Britain is deliberately and racially rigged against ethnic minorities.

On the contrary, it found that in many areas, from education to employment, certain ethnic-minority groups are outperforming the white majority. Black African pupils, for example, consistently outperform white British pupils at GCSEs, as do students of Indian and Chinese heritage.

The report did not downplay racial inequality, but it challenged the idea that such disparities are caused by racism, systemic or otherwise. It highlighted the other, more significant factors at play, such as family structure, geography and socio-economic background.

For challenging the BLM narrative that then gripped the minds of Britain’s political and cultural elites, Sewell and fellow CRED members were attacked. They were branded racism apologists. The report was accused of ‘gaslighting’ minorities and ‘normalising white supremacy’.

The hysterical response to the Sewell report was not a surprise. After all, one of the most significant consequences of the BLM moment was the rapid institutionalisation of the very racial identity politics that the Sewell report challenged. After the protests erupted from the end of May 2020 onwards, organisations and businesses across the UK scrambled to ‘do the work’. They hired diversity consultants, introduced anti-racism training and turned dubious concepts like ‘unconscious bias’, ‘white privilege’ and ‘microaggressions’ into gospel-like truths.

Highly paid diversity managers proliferated across the civil service. Race-equality frameworks were introduced in the NHS to encourage staff to champion ‘anti-racism’, whatever that meant. The Welsh government introduced a plan to make Wales an ‘anti-racist nation’ by 2030, despite the 2021 Census showing that 94 per cent of Wales’ population identifies as white, and there being no evidence that racism is widespread in Wales.

These initiatives and others like them rested on unproven or contested ideas. Research on unconscious-bias training has found that it leads to no measurable behavioural improvements. Some experts have warned that it could even entrench racial stereotypes or provoke resentment. This could apply to the whole BLM narrative. Indeed, as I warned in 2020, the incessant racial grievance politics of BLM has effectively fuelled the rise of an often deeply troubling white-identity politics.

Not that any of this has bothered the UK’s cultural elites. Wealthy and largely white, they have thoroughly embraced the racial-grievance politics of BLM. Museums and galleries have reinterpreted their collections through the lens of colonial oppression. BLM narratives, symbols and gestures have been thoroughly appropriated by publishing, TV and sport. Academia has smeared hitherto canonical thinkers, playwrights and novelists as little more than white, colonialist ideologues. The overall effect of all this has been to demonise Britain’s history and cultural heritage, reducing it to little more than a tale of racist, imperial exploitation.

BLM has also attracted a lot of money. In the US, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation raised over $90million in 2020. But virtually none of this cash has benefitted the black communities in whose name it was raised. Investigations by New York magazine and others revealed serious financial mismanagement on the part of BLM in the US. There was little financial reporting on how the money was being used, and it has since been revealed that senior figures spent millions on real estate, such as a $6million properties in Los Angeles.

In the UK, millions were also raised by BLM-affiliated groups, but, again, few could explain where the money went. It certainly hasn’t been used to help address the issues disproportionately affecting black Britons, particularly youth violence and knife crime. BLM advocates rarely seemed interested in such issues, preferring instead to grandstand over statues and street names.

Ultimately, the most charitable thing one can say about BLM is that many of those who spilled out on to the streets in the summer of 2020 were motivated by good intentions. Millions were rightly horrified by the murder of George Floyd and wanted to do something. But their good intentions have started to pave the way to a racial-identitarian hell. BLM used the vocabulary of ‘equality’ to demand preferential treatment, invoked ‘freedom’ to justify censorship and talked up its ‘anti-racism’ while pitting racial-identity groups against each other.

Five years on, the verdict is in. Black Lives Matter was not the civil-rights movement of our time. It was a zealous crusade built on specious assumptions, and it has divided society and made it more racially anxious. In 2020, BLM promised a reckoning. In 2025, we need to reckon with the poisonous legacy of BLM.

Inaya Folarin Iman is a spiked columnist and founder of the Equiano Project.