Global Black Lives Matter

The global Black Lives Matter uprisings against police violence prompted by George Floyd's murder were connected to a longer history of transnational Black struggles. Decades of antiracist, anticolonial struggle provided the foundation for the massive, prolonged uprisings of 2020, involving more than two thousand demonstrations worldwide and some twenty-six million people, arguably the largest protest movement in history.¹

The global racial justice protests reflect the legacies and continuing harms of US racism and colonialism. The Black Lives Matter protests that surged across the US highlighted the unfinished business of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s: not only the systemic racism of the failure to hold police officers accountable for extrajudicial killings, but also the scourge of poverty and economic inequality.

Less than a lifetime since the era of decolonization, the descendants of African and Asian former colonial subjects, and their allies in Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, and other former colonial powers, are demanding a reckoning with the historical and ongoing harms of colonialism, racism, violence, and discrimination. Since the late twentieth century, activists in European capitals, and in the Caribbean and throughout Africa, have sought policies of historical redress, including reparations for historical crimes against humanity that include the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, slavery, genocide, and colonialism.² In the Pacific region, anticolonial and antinuclear activists protested France's resumption in 1995 of its underground nuclear tests in Moruroa, after years of atmospheric and underground tests in its colonial Polynesian atolls that had turned the region into a nuclear waste dump. Local residents of the atolls joined a militant international campaign, including a peace flotilla sponsored by the New Zealand government and Greenpeace.³

Within two weeks of George Floyd's murder, solidarity protests spread to fifty countries. Many of the protests decried local problems of racially motivated police violence, which many linked to histories of colonial racism and violence. Tens of thousands marched in protests in London and other UK cities, in Paris and throughout France, and in Berlin, Madrid, and Rome. In Belgium, protesters demanded the removal of street names and public squares named after King Leopold II, who presided over colonial atrocities in the Congo so barbaric that they resulted in an international protest movement in the early twentieth century. In the country's capital, Brussels, and in other cities, protesters burned and defaced statues of Leopold. Ethiopian Israelis protested their disproportionate arrest and the June 2019 killing of Solomon Teka, a teenager shot by an off-duty police officer. In Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa, protesters demanded justice for Floyd and for Iyad Halek, a Palestinian man with autism killed by Israeli police on May 30. In Bethlehem, protesters chanted "Black Lives Matter, Palestinian Lives Matter." In Australia, tens of thousands of demonstrators in Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra condemned the mistreatment of Indigenous Australians, subjected to disproportionate arrest and incarceration. Since 1991, four hundred and thirty-four Indigenous people in that country have died in police custody. Protesters in Jakarta denounced color prejudices in Indonesia and state violence against people from the province of Papua. In Bangkok, protesters scrawled "I can't breathe" over placards of Wanchalearm Satsaksit, a prodemocracy activist who fled to Cambodia after the 2014 military coup in Thailand and who had just been abducted by gunmen in Phnom Penh on June 4. Marchers carried pictures of Floyd at a demonstration in Istanbul against police brutality.

In Kenya, where police had recently killed fifteen people on the pretext of enforcing COVID restrictions, a protester, Juliet Wanjira, told a journalist that "the poor people of Mathare [a neighborhood in Nairobi] stand in solidarity with the poor people in America. We want them to know that this struggle is one."⁴ Nigerians also protested Floyd's death and police brutality in that country, including the death of Tina Ezekwe, aged seventeen, mortally wounded on May 26 in Lagos when two police officers inexplicably fired into a crowd. In 2020, the globalization of Black freedom struggles, in the US and abroad, was much in evidence.

As protests spread from the intersection of East Thirty-Eighth Street and Chicago...