When Black Lives Matter colonised the world

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.

While it was hardly a surprise to see university students take to the streets in the name of BLM, less expected at the time was the extent to which university leaders, even at our most ancient institutions, jumped on the BLM bandwagon. Oxford University’s then vice-chancellor wrote an open letter to students, stating that the oldest university in the English-speaking world now ‘wholly [identifies] with the vision of Black Lives Matter’. Curricula in universities and schools were redrawn, history was rewritten and even hard-science subjects were forcibly ‘decolonised’. The experts, academics and scientists who had pushed heavily for lockdowns during the still raging Covid-19 pandemic suddenly insisted that the health harms of ‘systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus’, and that mass gatherings were now essential to public health.

Corporations were especially keen to advertise their fealty. Eight minutes of silence for Floyd were held at the New York Stock Exchange. Every major brand took part in the #BlackOutTuesday hashtag campaign on 2 June 2020, just over a week after his murder. McDonald’s changed its name across all its social-media channels to ‘Amplifying Black Voices’. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream – owned by Unilever, one of the world’s largest consumer-goods producers – made a solemn promise to ‘dismantle white supremacy’. Apple – the world’s wealthiest tech company – replaced all of the radio stations on its music app with a single stream playing NWA’s ‘Fuck Tha Police’ on repeat. Lego – the world’s largest toy company – pulled advertising for its police-related toys.

Perhaps the defining image of the corporate embrace of BLM was of Jamie Dimon, the billionaire CEO of JPMorgan Chase, taking the knee in front of an open bank vault. Whether intentional or not, it signalled that there was serious money to be made from the Black Lives Matter moment. Prophetically, the stock market jumped by 3.4 per cent just after Floyd’s killing. At the time, before the anti-woke boycott of Bud Light and the ‘vibe shift’ that coincided with Trump’s re-election, ‘taking a stand’ of some sort was seen by businesses as a cost-free way to polish their brands’ reputations and push their wares. Nike was the model here. When it launched an advertising campaign with NFL player Colin Kaepernick in 2018 – who had been ousted for taking the knee – its sales were boosted by billions.

However, it would be wrong to suggest that big businesses’ reaction to BLM was merely surface-level ‘wokewashing’. Diversity, equity and inclusion, already an $8 billion industry in the US before the BLM protests, became far more widespread and more firmly institutionalised across the corporate and public sectors. DEI initiatives seemed to give the business elites a sense of purpose that they had previously been lacking. The corporate suits at, say, Peloton were no longer mere salesmen of overpriced gym equipment. They could suddenly pose as warriors ‘fighting racial injustice’, ‘driving meaningful change’ and ‘doing the work of anti-racism’. It turns out those BLM protesters setting fire to police stations were not radical revolutionaries, after all – they were more like the militant wing of the HR department.

The racial politics espoused by BLM was also only ever likely to benefit the elites. The Coca-Colas and the Nikes of the world are very keen on highlighting the racial differences between working people at every opportunity. Foregrounding differences and pitting the ‘privileged’ against the ‘oppressed’ end up downplaying people’s common interests as workers. A manager who makes it his mission to tackle racism in the workplace will find he suddenly has much more authority to monitor workers’ interpersonal relationships, and even their private lives and political activities, particularly on social media. Race has always been relied on by elites to divide and manage people. But where they once drew on racist tropes, BLM gave them licence to use ‘anti-racism’ for the same ends.

Another driver behind the spread of BLM was a pressure to conform. The very few institutions and companies that didn’t jump on the bandwagon were loudly denounced and heads were made to roll. Questioning any aspect of the movement was simply out of the question. Anyone drawing attention to the holes in the ‘systemic racism’ narrative or even objected to riots being waged in BLM’s name – the most expensive and destructive in US history – could be ruthlessly cancelled.

Mainstream media were especially reluctant to acknowledge the rioting. In a now infamous CNN report, a news anchor stood in front of a burning building in Kenosha, Wisconsin and described the scenes as ‘fiery, but mostly peaceful’. Facebook and Twitter censored stories that were unfavourable to prominent BLM activists. Google added content warnings to articles – including one by spiked’s Tom Slater – that challenged Black Lives Matter’s narrative.

Tellingly, one story that was frequently censored on social media concerned the purchase of several mansions by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, who created the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag and co-founded the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF), one of the main beneficiaries of BLM-related donations. In December 2020, The Economist reported that a whopping $10.6 billion had been pledged to causes and organisations affiliated with BLM. Yet there seems to have been staggeringly little interest or oversight in how that money was spent. As well as millions ploughed into high-end real estate (BLMGNF claims this was necessary for creating ‘content’), a staggering amount of Black Lives Matter donations somehow found their way to transgender-advocacy groups. At one point, Google, Apple and Microsoft almost donated millions to an entity called the Black Lives Matter Foundation, which, confusingly, had nothing to do with Khan-Cullors’s ‘official’ outfit, such was their eagerness to be seen as doing something for BLM.

You could hardly ask for a clearer indication that BLM’s biggest backers were never invested in a cause, as such, or interested in radical change to any ‘system’. Some will have been swept up in the collective hysteria, some eager to ride the wave for attention and profit, some keen to stake out new racial dividing lines, while others were no doubt terrified of the consequences of failing to join the herd.

Five years on from George Floyd’s tragic murder, we can all see BLM for the reactionary, elite crusade it always was.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.