Professor Tommy J Curry on Scotland's problems with race

On May 25, 2020, Mr George Floyd Jr was detained by police and accused of fraud. After being handcuffed and beaten in the back of a police vehicle, Mr Floyd was wrestled to the ground where Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. Mr Floyd became unresponsive and died because of the actions of Derek Chauvin.

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Since the murder of George Floyd Jr, there have been marches, protests and riots to bring attention to the injustice that black men and women face throughout America’s society. Far too often, black peoples’ demands for racial justice are not merely calls for equality, but demonstrations responding to the brutal killings of innocent black men and women by police. In 2020, Black Americans are marching for the most basic of rights: that America lets Black people live.

The pronouncements of the United States as an open and free democratic society seems more of a farce than an apt description of US society and government. Black Americans experience the United States as a police state. Police officers and white citizens are deputised to enforce a racial order that punishes black people for not staying in their place. Any infraction or offence to a white person can be punishable by death. A black man jogging, selling cigarettes, or legally owning a gun during a traffic stop can be a death sentence in the United States.

Police killings are a leading cause of death for black men in the United States. They are almost 20 times more likely to be killed by police than their female counterpart. According to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “among all groups, black men and boys face the highest lifetime risk of being killed by police”. “Black men are about two-and-a-half times more likely to be killed by police over the life course than are white men. Black women are about 1.4 times more likely to be killed by police than are white women.”

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The killing of black men, black boys, black women, black girls, black trans-peoples has presented no major contradiction to American democracy. As the historian AJ Williams-Myers explained in his book Destructive Impulses, “white violence … was part and parcel of the socioeconomic and political structure of the American democratic process”.

It is a mistake to think that the killings of black men in America could not happen in Scotland. Sheku Bayoh’s murder still haunts Scotland.

The phrase Black Lives Matter is an attempt to reclaim the lives of black people lost to the delusion of white supremacy. Black people are dehumanised as mere things in the United States – treated as sub-humans whose fate can be decided by any white person at any time. While the world celebrates BLM as the mantra of resistance within the US there are serious debates and contestations over the strategies and bodies represented by the movement.

While working class black men are roughly 90% of the black people killed by police, some chapters of BLM argue that it is black women and black queer and trans-bodies that should be centred. Working class activists in Ferguson have repeatedly accused BLM of being a movement more concerned with gaining funding and fame from white liberals that cares very little for actually achieving change in poor black communities or decreasing police violence.

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Despite the visible black female and queer leadership of the organisation, it is working class black men who have been mysteriously killed for participating in the movement. Racism in America makes corpses of black men, and black people are demanding that their shouts for justice do not become their last breaths. Black people are telling the world that in America anti-black racism and death has remained a pillar of democracy since the end of slavery.

I have been identified as not being from Scotland by a white taxi driver because as he said: “[You] look far too confident to be a black man from Scotland. Black men from Scotland are much meeker and hold their heads down.”

Racism is necessary to understand the history and political organization of the US, but Scotland remains very much in denial about its racist heritage and colonial legacy. Over the last year, I have seen very little difference in how anti-blackness presents itself here versus the United States. Upon my appointment to the University of Edinburgh, I was still welcomed by white supremacist hate mail and harassment. Though, importantly, the university did not side with the racist hate groups this time. I have been identified as not being from Scotland by a white taxi driver because as he said: “[You] look far too confident to be a black man from Scotland. Black men from Scotland are much meeker and hold their heads down.”

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It is a mistake to think that the killings of black men in America could not happen in Scotland. Sheku Bayoh’s murder still haunts Scotland. Black and ethnic minorities are more likely to die in custody and by police force than whites in the UK.

Because the population of blacks are so low in Scotland, there has not been a need for mass violence against these groups. This is however not evidence that Scotland is without racism. It simply means that while the US uses mass incarceration, segregation, and lethal force to decrease Black populations, the UK uses hostile immigration policies and now Brexit to keep the whole of the UK white. This is a moment for Scotland to become aware of the racism in its society and hopefully avoid the fate of America.

TOMMY J Curry is a professor of philosophy and holds a personal chair of Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press 2017), which won the 2018 American Book Award.

He is the author of Another White Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest For A Philosophy Of Racial Empire (SUNY Press 2018), which recently won the 2020 Josiah Royce Prize in American Idealist Thought. His research explores anti-black racism, sexual violence and the rise of white ethnonationalism in Western societies.