1/ You don’t need to watch video of George Floyd crying out ‘I can’t breathe’ as he is killed or Amy Cooper, a white woman calling the police on a black man in Central, to see the echoes of Eric Garner crying out ‘I can’t breathe’, or the Central Park 5 brutalised & imprisoned. 
2/ Frankly black people being killed on video - be it in Palestine, drowning in the Mediterranean, or on the streets of the US has become normalised. For every black person these images are utterly traumatising, the pain & anger is felt collectively as everyday it’s clear that
3/ our lives don’t matter. Just as they haven’t mattered in the past & won’t matter in the future unless we act. Even when these murders are captured on film for all to see - even then it still it hasn’t brought justice. Which is why the call ‘No Justice, No Peace’ has long been
4/ the call from the streets be it in the USA, the UK or globally. Yet so much commentary on call by the black community that #BlackLivesMatter & #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd continues to focus more on condemning the ‘riots’ & ‘looting’ than on the actual racism & violence of the State
5/ The question posed to oppressed people about their response to State violence is not new. It was posed to Malcolm, to the Panthers, to Mandela, to the Palestinians, & even to the black community here in the UK.
6/ Always demanding that we protest quietly for the right to live free from attack. Which of course means can you please just die quietly & stop disturbing us from business as usual. When Kaepernick took a knee or the Palestinians marched in Gaza for the right to return they were
7/ told it wasn’t the right sort of protest. They are only ever outraged when they see buildings are looted - never when lives are looted every day.
8/ As James Baldwin said ‘The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes... is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often.’
9/The preservation of ‘white supremacy’ is why Trumps response 2 armed white men storming State capitols b/c they wanted ‘lockdown to end’ was 2call them ‘very good people’ in contrast 2 calling unarmed black protestors who want right to live ‘thugs’ & for the ‘shooting to start’
10/ If you think this is just Trumps America - remember that the UK black community was demonised in exactly same way when it rose up in Brixton, Toxteth, Handsworth, Tottenham, Southall. & that former PM Margaret Thatcher wanted 2 deploy armed police against the black community
11/ The real question progressives should ask is ‘what will it take to stop the State using violence against Black people?’ & to support the right of black communities to defend themselves from this violence.’
12/ It was once a common refrain that ‘all oppressed people have the right to resist’. That is as true globally as it is in the streets of US cities today.
13/ As Martin Luther King Jr said ‘I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government’
14/ The question of violence of the State at home of course can’t be divorced from the violence of the State abroad, & how it dehumanises black/brown people to justify their killings & the looting of their countries. Be it in Iraq, Palestine, to the deliberate impoverishment of
15/ Africa, coups in Latin America to climate violence. The structural violence of our economic/political systems both home & abroad is rooted in a 500 year arc from Doctrine of Discovery to neoliberalism- that made racism a social construct to justify exploitation & inequality.
16/ It’s why today as in the past - our politics need to be rooted in a framework of race and class and internationalism. A black radicalism that goes beyond nationalism & reconnect peoples of colour & their struggles against racialised capitalism & oppression.
17/ As June Jordan wrote,
“I was born a Black woman / and now / I am become a Palestinian / against the relentless laughter of evil / there is less and less living room / and where are my loved ones / It is time to make our way home.”
“I was born a Black woman / and now / I am become a Palestinian / against the relentless laughter of evil / there is less and less living room / and where are my loved ones / It is time to make our way home.”
18/ We must remember words of James Baldwin “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” Our challenge is to fight the present, learn the lessons of the past, connect struggles & reimagine a different future.
