This racist violence we experience is an active race?making project serving the interests of capital
Kojo
Black Lives Matter UK was founded by activists who had worked together on previous deaths in police custody, both in the US and Britain.
In the US, it had started as a love letter to Black people in the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s acquittal – who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012 for the crime of carrying Skittles while Black in a gated community.
In Britain our martyr was Mark Duggan, killed by the Met in 2011. We not only remember the anti-Black propaganda about his criminality, how even some radical leftists argued he needed to die, how the army needed to be brought in to control rioters. We remember the public disregard of his and Black life in general. We live with the reality of State harassment and violence in terms of stop and search, legal sexual assault in terms of strip searches. State racist violence is not only structural, it structures the British economy and State legitimacy.
Today, which is worse than in 2011, almost one in two Black children do not get three meals a day. Ethnically Black African children do better than white British children in GCSEs, but are less likely to get a paid job. All of this motivates us because it is our lived reality.
“I can’t breathe” was said 11 times by Eric Garner, a father of four, who was strangled to death, on camera, by a New York cop in 2014. His death sparked the second iteration of Black Lives Matter protests across the US, and in Britain that became the 2014 Westfield protest.
Sean Rigg, who died in police custody at Brixton Station in 2008, Roger Sylvester in Tottenham in 1999. Jimmy Mubenga in 2010. Those names were with us as we decided to form Black Lives Matter UK.
The US has always been used as a way to paint Britain as moderate, because “we’re not like America.” British policing is seen as sensible. We don’t have guns.
So part of the struggle was not only to continue the fight for accountability, but also about how to make these struggles more visible. How do we honour the lives that have been lost, which continue to be discarded by the State? The thing about Mark Duggan’s death wasn’t just that the police were seen as heroic, they were seen as doing what needed to be done. What that says is when you are stopped and searched, or your home is raided on spurious grounds, when children are asked to be undressed in front of police officials, this is for the public good. You deserve this.
And we wanted a politics of refusal.
We came from different traditions. We weren’t all from one Trotskyist group, some were more liberal, I’m from a more anarchist strand. These tensions played out in asking who do we appeal to? In 2016, all of us came to a conclusion on the day after the Brexit referendum, when we saw on the front page of The Sun newspaper, actual neo-Nazis wearing Vote Leave T-shirts celebrating their victory. For us that was indicative of what was to come. A new revived form of White supremacy. Ten years on, you can judge for yourselves if that’s accurate.
So we agreed to protest on the fifth anniversary of the police killing of Mark Duggan. On Friday August 5th 2016, to the soundtrack of Skepta’s Shutdown, we were going to shut down Heathrow Airport, Birmingham Airport, Nottingham Central. With the motivation of Brexit and police State violence. The impunity with which the police could kill and be told it’s good.
We did disrupt these things. We had people ready to go to the media to explain Britain is not innocent. That Britain’s imperial legacy is framed to perpetuate its present, where Black people are systematically discriminated against. Not only in the criminal punishment system but in education, employment, housing, health outcomes. Every facet of life.
The liberal framework
The liberal arguments that we normally hear are around unconscious bias, unintended consequences, the lag of the State to modernise in a multi-racial democracy and as a result, that policies designed to benefit all people have a disproportionate effect on minoritised groups who live mostly in deprived areas – i.e. State violence towards the working class is normal, it just happens to particularly affect Black and Asian people.
We reject this. While it is true that Black and Asian people live in more deprived areas. It’s not happenstance. The way the economy is structured means there are people classified as disposable. This is how the global economy works. The capitalist economy demands child slaves in DR Congo to dig radioactive coltan with their bare hands, which is then used to power our mobile phones. That violence is absolutely normal.
And the global imperial white supremacist perspective is also how Britain governs internal populations, “naturally”, according to that logic.
But it is not just the outflow of racial capitalism into Britain, these are active decisions by policy makers to remake race, and racism, in new forms. We see this in the Prevent program. A lot of Black people are Muslim, and the racialising logic of Prevent trains NHS workers, teachers, social workers etc. to see racialised Muslims as a threat. Which means six-year-old Muslim kids in the north of England misspell the word “cucumber”, and it’s read as “cook bomb”.
This racist violence we experience and tolerate is not a legacy of the past or unintended consequence. It is an active race-making project serving the interests of capital, but more broadly It offers a psychic wage. It’s a way of buying off the white working class with small benefits.
The 2020s
Today BLM UK is made up of radical leftists from social democrats to Black anarchists. We do not have very strong political lines, other than that we organise towards Black liberation. And that we believe Black liberation is bound up with that of the working class as a whole. We don’t think you can create a Black, liberated island in a sea of white supremacy, or a world of racial capitalism. These things go together, and have to be destroyed together. But we believe Black autonomy is crucial.
So, that sets the stage of how we’ve operated and organised.
In 2020, unexpectedly, BLM UK raised £1.2 million through a crowdfunder. We had no expectation we would be anywhere near that – previously we’d raised about £8,000. It was raised by 36,000 small donations, primarily individuals and small groups.
When we received it, we decided that it wasn’t ours. That we had, surprisingly, been entrusted with this large amount of money, and we needed to actually redistribute 50% to organisations that were fighting oppression, racism, and so on. We funded organisations that had a large Black presence, but weren’t always Black-led, like the UVW and IWGB unions. We actually also funded organisations that were Black-led, and we thought that was where the majority of the funds should go, like the United Families and Friends Coalition Against Deaths in Custody (UFFC), who we worked with at the Westfield shutdown.
So we’ve redistributed more than half a million pounds to lots of groups that were working towards Black liberation in a multitude of ways, not just trade unions, but domestic violence support, groups that actually were just organising Black people to ramble in the countryside without fear of racist harassment.
Onward strategy
Once we’d redistributed half of the money, the second task was that we not only needed to redistribute funds, we needed to create an organisation that would actually defend Black people.
We were mindful that there wasn’t an organisation with the single focus of Black liberation. And we thought it was incumbent on us to try. Not to be the sole repository of that struggle, but to work with communities in a non-hierarchical way.
So BLM started to be an organisation that was more focused on building power. Not State power, but class power – to regularly disrupt the flow of capital. Power to not only force concessions, but build a greater form of full autonomy and build up people’s ability to develop liberation wherever we are. And again, seeing that as being linked with the liberation for our class more generally.
What we’ve done is build campaigns, work with communities from Roma resisting State racism, to the Windrush scandal, which is a form of citizenship stripping, but also, more perniciously, an aspect of the hostile environment. We want to identify that the violence the State reserves for undocumented migrants is not illegitimate because it targets the wrong people, but because the State does not and should not have the right to impose such violence.
We are trying to build up support and allies, but we’re also conducting political education on the State, and the illegitimacy of its violence. We run Project Timbuktu where we are really wanting to understand the nature of the State. Our concern is this pushing or orientating of it towards racist violence. The fear of dawn raids, of people being snatched away. What we’ve seen with ICE raids and confrontations in the US has happened on smaller scales across Britain. Under Reform we will see that renewed, in fact we’ve already seen this under Starmer’s Labour, it has deported more children than any other administration on record. We organise not only to interrupt and disrupt their ability to do that, but to build power to ensure it can never happen again.
Photos: G. Miessi. This article was originally published in the May 2026 issue of Freedom anarchist journal.
Reflections on a decade of UK Black Lives Matter
From Freedom News (09/08/2026)
This racist violence we experience is an active race?making project serving the interests of capital
Kojo
Black Lives Matter UK was founded by activists who had worked together on previous deaths in police custody, both in the US and Britain.
In the US, it had started as a love letter to Black people in the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s acquittal – who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012 for the crime of carrying Skittles while Black in a gated community.
In Britain our martyr was Mark Duggan, killed by the Met in 2011. We not only remember the anti-Black propaganda about his criminality, how even some radical leftists argued he needed to die, how the army needed to be brought in to control rioters. We remember the public disregard of his and Black life in general. We live with the reality of State harassment and violence in terms of stop and search, legal sexual assault in terms of strip searches. State racist violence is not only structural, it structures the British economy and State legitimacy.
Today, which is worse than in 2011, almost one in two Black children do not get three meals a day. Ethnically Black African children do better than white British children in GCSEs, but are less likely to get a paid job. All of this motivates us because it is our lived reality.
“I can’t breathe” was said 11 times by Eric Garner, a father of four, who was strangled to death, on camera, by a New York cop in 2014. His death sparked the second iteration of Black Lives Matter protests across the US, and in Britain that became the 2014 Westfield protest.
Sean Rigg, who died in police custody at Brixton Station in 2008, Roger Sylvester in Tottenham in 1999. Jimmy Mubenga in 2010. Those names were with us as we decided to form Black Lives Matter UK.
The US has always been used as a way to paint Britain as moderate, because “we’re not like America.” British policing is seen as sensible. We don’t have guns.
So part of the struggle was not only to continue the fight for accountability, but also about how to make these struggles more visible. How do we honour the lives that have been lost, which continue to be discarded by the State? The thing about Mark Duggan’s death wasn’t just that the police were seen as heroic, they were seen as doing what needed to be done. What that says is when you are stopped and searched, or your home is raided on spurious grounds, when children are asked to be undressed in front of police officials, this is for the public good. You deserve this.
And we wanted a politics of refusal.
We came from different traditions. We weren’t all from one Trotskyist group, some were more liberal, I’m from a more anarchist strand. These tensions played out in asking who do we appeal to? In 2016, all of us came to a conclusion on the day after the Brexit referendum, when we saw on the front page of The Sun newspaper, actual neo-Nazis wearing Vote Leave T-shirts celebrating their victory. For us that was indicative of what was to come. A new revived form of White supremacy. Ten years on, you can judge for yourselves if that’s accurate.
So we agreed to protest on the fifth anniversary of the police killing of Mark Duggan. On Friday August 5th 2016, to the soundtrack of Skepta’s Shutdown, we were going to shut down Heathrow Airport, Birmingham Airport, Nottingham Central. With the motivation of Brexit and police State violence. The impunity with which the police could kill and be told it’s good.
We did disrupt these things. We had people ready to go to the media to explain Britain is not innocent. That Britain’s imperial legacy is framed to perpetuate its present, where Black people are systematically discriminated against. Not only in the criminal punishment system but in education, employment, housing, health outcomes. Every facet of life.
The liberal framework
The liberal arguments that we normally hear are around unconscious bias, unintended consequences, the lag of the State to modernise in a multi-racial democracy and as a result, that policies designed to benefit all people have a disproportionate effect on minoritised groups who live mostly in deprived areas – i.e. State violence towards the working class is normal, it just happens to particularly affect Black and Asian people.
We reject this. While it is true that Black and Asian people live in more deprived areas. It’s not happenstance. The way the economy is structured means there are people classified as disposable. This is how the global economy works. The capitalist economy demands child slaves in DR Congo to dig radioactive coltan with their bare hands, which is then used to power our mobile phones. That violence is absolutely normal.
And the global imperial white supremacist perspective is also how Britain governs internal populations, “naturally”, according to that logic.
But it is not just the outflow of racial capitalism into Britain, these are active decisions by policy makers to remake race, and racism, in new forms. We see this in the Prevent program. A lot of Black people are Muslim, and the racialising logic of Prevent trains NHS workers, teachers, social workers etc. to see racialised Muslims as a threat. Which means six-year-old Muslim kids in the north of England misspell the word “cucumber”, and it’s read as “cook bomb”.
This racist violence we experience and tolerate is not a legacy of the past or unintended consequence. It is an active race-making project serving the interests of capital, but more broadly It offers a psychic wage. It’s a way of buying off the white working class with small benefits.
The 2020s
Today BLM UK is made up of radical leftists from social democrats to Black anarchists. We do not have very strong political lines, other than that we organise towards Black liberation. And that we believe Black liberation is bound up with that of the working class as a whole. We don’t think you can create a Black, liberated island in a sea of white supremacy, or a world of racial capitalism. These things go together, and have to be destroyed together. But we believe Black autonomy is crucial.
So, that sets the stage of how we’ve operated and organised.
In 2020, unexpectedly, BLM UK raised £1.2 million through a crowdfunder. We had no expectation we would be anywhere near that – previously we’d raised about £8,000. It was raised by 36,000 small donations, primarily individuals and small groups.
When we received it, we decided that it wasn’t ours. That we had, surprisingly, been entrusted with this large amount of money, and we needed to actually redistribute 50% to organisations that were fighting oppression, racism, and so on. We funded organisations that had a large Black presence, but weren’t always Black-led, like the UVW and IWGB unions. We actually also funded organisations that were Black-led, and we thought that was where the majority of the funds should go, like the United Families and Friends Coalition Against Deaths in Custody (UFFC), who we worked with at the Westfield shutdown.
So we’ve redistributed more than half a million pounds to lots of groups that were working towards Black liberation in a multitude of ways, not just trade unions, but domestic violence support, groups that actually were just organising Black people to ramble in the countryside without fear of racist harassment.
Onward strategy
Once we’d redistributed half of the money, the second task was that we not only needed to redistribute funds, we needed to create an organisation that would actually defend Black people.
We were mindful that there wasn’t an organisation with the single focus of Black liberation. And we thought it was incumbent on us to try. Not to be the sole repository of that struggle, but to work with communities in a non-hierarchical way.
So BLM started to be an organisation that was more focused on building power. Not State power, but class power – to regularly disrupt the flow of capital. Power to not only force concessions, but build a greater form of full autonomy and build up people’s ability to develop liberation wherever we are. And again, seeing that as being linked with the liberation for our class more generally.
What we’ve done is build campaigns, work with communities from Roma resisting State racism, to the Windrush scandal, which is a form of citizenship stripping, but also, more perniciously, an aspect of the hostile environment. We want to identify that the violence the State reserves for undocumented migrants is not illegitimate because it targets the wrong people, but because the State does not and should not have the right to impose such violence.
We are trying to build up support and allies, but we’re also conducting political education on the State, and the illegitimacy of its violence. We run Project Timbuktu where we are really wanting to understand the nature of the State. Our concern is this pushing or orientating of it towards racist violence. The fear of dawn raids, of people being snatched away. What we’ve seen with ICE raids and confrontations in the US has happened on smaller scales across Britain. Under Reform we will see that renewed, in fact we’ve already seen this under Starmer’s Labour, it has deported more children than any other administration on record. We organise not only to interrupt and disrupt their ability to do that, but to build power to ensure it can never happen again.
Photos: G. Miessi. This article was originally published in the May 2026 issue of Freedom anarchist journal.