The toppling of the statue of the British enslaver Edward Colston, five years ago today, felt like a historic moment. Bringing down this one statue and symbolically hurling it into Bristol harbour, protesters – predominantly white – drew international attention to the barbarity of African enslavement, its generated wealth that turbocharged the UK’s global power and the legacy of slavery, whose long historical tail had led to the murder of George Floyd less than two weeks before.
Five years on, however, it seems fanciful that out of those protests a global reset on race could occur. Back then, structural race inequities were also laid bare by the Covid-19 virus. We watched our TV screens with dread as the kaleidoscope of Black and Asian doctors, nurses and other health workers were dying disproportionately. Those same minoritised communities were also more likely to be in precarious jobs, forced to travel to work as cleaners, care workers and security guards, and were thereby more exposed to the deadly disease.
