From

Freedom News

(

09/08/2026

)

This racist violence we experience is an active race?making project serving the interests of capital

Kojo

Black Lives Matter UK was founded by activists who had worked together on previous deaths in police custody, both in the US and Britain.

In the US, it had started as a love letter to Black people in the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s acquittal – who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012 for the crime of carrying Skittles while Black in a gated community.

In Britain our martyr was Mark Duggan, killed by the Met in 2011. We not only remember the anti-Black propaganda about his criminality, how even some radical leftists argued he needed to die, how the army needed to be brought in to control rioters. We remember the public disregard of his and Black life in general. We live with the reality of State harassment and violence in terms of stop and search, legal sexual assault in terms of strip searches. State racist violence is not only structural, it structures the British economy and State legitimacy.

Today, which is worse than in 2011, almost one in two Black children do not get three meals a day. Ethnically Black African children do better than white British children in GCSEs, but are less likely to get a paid job. All of this motivates us because it is our lived reality.

“I can’t breathe” was said 11 times by Eric Garner, a father of four, who was strangled to death, on camera, by a New York cop in 2014. His death sparked the second iteration of Black Lives Matter protests across the US, and in Britain that became the 2014 Westfield protest.

Sean Rigg, who died in police custody at Brixton Station in 2008, Roger Sylvester in Tottenham in 1999. Jimmy Mubenga in 2010. Those names were with us as we decided to form

Black Lives Matter UK

.

The US has always been used as a way to paint Britain as moderate, because “we’re not like America.” British policing is seen as sensible. We don’t have guns.

So part of the struggle was not only to continue the fight for accountability, but also about how to make these struggles more visible. How do we honour the lives that have been lost, which continue to be discarded by the State? The thing about Mark Duggan’s death wasn’t just that the police were seen as heroic, they were seen as doing what needed to be done. What that says is when you are stopped and searched, or your home is raided on spurious grounds, when children are asked to be undressed in front of police officials, this is for the public good. You deserve this.

And we wanted a politics of refusal.

We came from different traditions. We weren’t all from one Trotskyist group, some were more liberal, I’m from a more anarchist strand. These tensions played out in asking who do we appeal to? In 2016, all of us came to a conclusion on the day after the Brexit referendum, when we saw on the front page of The Sun newspaper, actual neo-Nazis wearing Vote Leave T-shirts celebrating their victory. For us that was indicative of what was to come. A new revived form of White supremacy. Ten years on, you can judge for yourselves if that’s accurate.

So we agreed to protest on the fifth anniversary of the police killing of Mark Duggan. On Friday August 5th 2016, to the soundtrack of Skepta’s Shutdown, we were going to shut down Heathrow Airport, Birmingham Airport, Nottingham Central. With the motivation of Brexit and police State violence. The impunity with which the police could kill and be told it’s good.

We did disrupt these things. We had people ready to go to the media to explain Britain is not innocent. That Britain’s imperial legacy is framed to perpetuate its present, where Black people are systematically discriminated against. Not only in the criminal punishment system but in education, employment, housing, health outcomes. Every facet of life.

The liberal framework

The liberal arguments that we normally hear are around unconscious bias, unintended consequences, the lag of the State to modernise in a multi-racial democracy and as a result, that policies designed to benefit all people have a disproportionate effect on minoritised groups who live mostly in deprived areas – i.e. State violence towards the working class is normal, it just happens to particularly affect Black and Asian people.

We reject this. While it is true that Black and Asian people live in more deprived areas. It’s not happenstance. The way the economy is structured means there …