Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 10 June 2020
What a privilege it is to follow such an emotional and powerful speech from Brian Whittle. I commend him for it. It is entirely right that the Parliament is taking time to discuss what is happening in the context of race relations in America and the wider world.
There are few times in human history where something captured on film is so incendiary that one immediately recognises it for the defining moment it is set to become. The sight of George Floyd choking out the words, “I can’t breathe,” under the knee of a white police officer shortly before he died, was one such moment.
Those words struck a terrible but resounding chord in a country where any one of over 100,000 people lost to Covid-19 might have uttered that same, desperate sentence in an emergency room or care home. They capture the sense of helplessness that the American people must feel as, from a state of effective house arrest, they watch their livelihoods collapse. They also capture a sense of helplessness at history repeating itself again and again.
Police brutality and racism are stitched through the fabric of American history. From the days of lynching to the police attack on a peaceful civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, and from the riots that followed police brutality in Watts to those that followed the on-camera beating of Rodney King, the United States is stained with racial outrage. What makes the Floyd murder different is the response from the White House.
In 1965, in the days after local law enforcement turned on civil rights leaders in Selma, Lyndon Johnson sent in the National Guard to protect activists from local police officers and Ku Klux Klan members, allowing them to march again. Last week, Donald Trump sent in the National Guard to crush the activities of protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets. Taking to Twitter, Trump warned those protesting in their tens of thousands, in dozens of cities across America:
“when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Aside from violating Twitter’s rules on incitement to violence, that phrase resonates with America’s racist past. In 1967, Miami’s chief of police, Walter Headley, said exactly those words in the context of the civil rights movement that was on the verge of explosion in Florida, ordering his officers to control any violence with shotguns and live ammunition. Headley said:
“We don’t mind being accused of police brutality.”
Trump knew exactly what he was doing when he typed those words, and who he was speaking to. He can read opinion polls like anybody else, and he can see that he is losing ground to Joe Biden. He has mishandled the American response to Covid-19, and any credit that he had built up for stimulating economic growth has all but turned to ash. He sees all of that, so he is seeding division in an attempt to mask his failings on so many other issues. All this while he reaches for the comfort blanket of his base in the far right. Remember, this is a President who describes white supremacists as “very fine people.” For all the nightmares that 2020 has thrown against humanity, I hope that the coming US election gives us hope for lasting change.
As other members have said, this is not a uniquely American problem. Racism exists in modern Scotland, whether in the unconscious bias of Scottish boardrooms or in the excessive use of force that led to the killing of Sheku Bayoh on a street in Kirkcaldy. It is also evident in the heartbreaking reality that a range of structural factors in our society have left people of colour more and disproportionately exposed to the Covid-19 threat.
Our history and our national wealth are steeped in the blood of the slave trade. The rage that was felt by protesters towards the public memorialisation of a slave trader, Edward Colston, in Bristol, might just as easily have been felt here in Edinburgh towards Henry Dundas. Dundas is commemorated by monuments in our nation’s capital, but he used his influence to delay the abolition of the slave trade by 15 years and more. It should not surprise us to learn about racism in our past but, more often than not, it does. Our schools teach Scottish history, but they speak only of its heroes—of Wallace and Bruce; we never learn about Scots plantation owners such as Dalzel or MacQueen.
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, I have been contacted by constituents of all backgrounds, asking that we change the curriculum to better reflect the history of race and of racism in this country. I support that. In 2019, BEMIS called for a new expert group to be instigated to respond directly to the recommendation from the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination that challenges Scotland to integrate learning material on British colonialism and imperialism and its impact, both internationally and domestically, into our curriculum for excellence. I support that call whole-heartedly, and I ask whoever is speaking for the Government, in their closing remarks, to commit to establishing such a group. I also call on the Government to consider the establishment of a museum of empire, so that we can provide a learning point for all age groups among our communities in Scotland. Breaking down systemic racism can happen only when we teach our children to understand what it looks like in the first place.
I return to my remarks on America. What happened to George Floyd two weeks ago was by no means the first such incident of racial brutality in the States and, I dare say, it will not be the last. Speaking in Indianapolis on the night when Martin Luther King was assassinated, Bobby Kennedy spoke these words to a largely African American crowd, and his words prevented any violence there like that which was seen in other cities that night. He said:
“the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”
That gentleness will be forever beyond our reach while we fail to value the lives and the contribution made by people of colour in this country and around the world.
15:49