Here's a delicate question. To what extent was the Black Lives Matter movement a product of the lockdown? How much did the statue-smashing and looting owe to anti-racism, and how much to the fact that people had been cooped up at home for months?
I say “a delicate question” because, although lots of people have been asking it privately, politicians and commentators are reluctant to air it in public. In the demented atmosphere that has prevailed since last summer, any statement short of full support for the protesters risks being misconstrued. Corporations, sports leagues, celebrities, police chiefs — all have dropped to their knees before BLM, sometimes literally. Even to wonder aloud whether keeping people off work and out of school might have incubated a hysterical mood is to invite the accusation that you are somehow trivializing the monstrous death of George Floyd.
For what it’s worth, though, I am increasingly convinced that the violence and intensity of the BLM protests, if not the fact of them taking place, were direct consequences of the lockdown. What has convinced me is watching the same dynamic play out again in the United Kingdom, albeit this time on a different issue and a smaller scale.
In both cases, the spark was a death that grabbed every observer in the stomach. In Minneapolis, we saw a man slowly asphyxiated. In London, a woman was abducted and murdered on her way home. In both instances, the crime was seized on as a symbol of institutionalized violence against, respectively, black people and women.
It is worth asking what was unusual about these particular horrors. After all, in neither case was there any controversy about what had happened, in the sense that no one tried to excuse the killers’ actions. The officer who killed Floyd was immediately charged, and those who had accompanied him were sacked. Similarly, the whole of Britain reacted with revulsion to the death in London of Sarah Everard.
In both cases, campaigners immediately declared that lessons must be learned. But it is worth noting that the accused killers (police officers in both cases) are in custody facing hefty penalties. So, the most obvious lesson to be learned is, “If you kill someone, we’ll find you and put you behind bars.”
Again, even to write the above paragraph is to risk being called callous. I don’t for a moment deny that there are wider problems. A country in which citizens feel unsafe because of the color of their skin has a big problem — a problem for all its citizens, whatever their ethnicity. So does a country in which women see a measure of harassment, even the possibility of sexual assault, as a quotidian hazard. If you are male and you doubt me, find a moment to talk to your mother or another woman you feel close to about her experiences. You might be surprised.
The trouble is that, over the past 12 months, reason and perspective have given way to raw feelings. It is not enough to propose proportionate solutions to racial inequalities or violence against women. You have to accept the idea that there is a continuum that leads directly from, say, a colonialist school curriculum to the abomination in Minneapolis, or from a sexist joke to the murder in Clapham. Again, I suspect most people know that there is no such continuum. Murders are extraordinarily rare and are not correlated to social attitudes. But few want to say so.
Neither does anyone like to challenge the manifestly false idea that things are getting worse. On any measure — public attitudes, the end of lynching and segregation, the rise in the number of mixed marriages and multiethnic neighborhoods — race relations are improving. Similarly, there has never been an era in which women are longer lived, better or more equally paid, or less likely to suffer from physical violence. The phrase “rape culture” would have applied aptly to many societies over the past 10,000 years, but it does not apply to the modern West, where rape is uniformly regarded as an atrocious crime.
Say these things, though, and people will affect to misunderstand you: “Oh, so you’re claiming that everything’s fine?” But getting the policy right depends on getting the analysis right. If things really were deteriorating, then a very different approach might be merited. But if we are dealing with exceptional abuses, abuses that shock us precisely because they are exceptional, then perhaps the existing system is not so bad.
It is very unsatisfying, after a year of intermittent restrictions, to be told that, while crimes and abuses are part of our corrupted nature, things are broadly getting better. So few dare say it. But it is true for all that.
