Black Lives Matter in Europe – EJWS special open forum: Introduction

George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was killed in May 2020 when a White police officer knelt on his neck for more than 8 minutes as he was being arrested. The violent death of yet another Black man at the hands of the police in the United States triggered protests that soon spread from Minneapolis where the killing took place, to towns and cities all over the country.

Protesters took to the streets – in the midst of a global pandemic and with infections of the SARS-CoV-2 virus increasing in alarming rates in some parts of the country – to insist, once again, that Black lives do and must matter in the United States.

This statement was first taken up as a rallying cry in 2013, when George Zimmerman – a White man – was acquitted for the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager who was walking to a friend’s house when Zimmerman shot him. A campaign organised around the statement ‘Black lives matter’ was founded by three Black women – Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi – in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin, and to protest generalised police brutality against Black people in the United States. The campaign picked up pace between 2014 and 2016; with each new killing of Black men by police – among others, Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014; Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and Meagan Hockaday in 2015; Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in 2016 – #BlackLivesMatter was used by protesters as the main mobilising and organising demand for justice on social media and in street protests. By 2018, 5 years after #BlackLivesMatter first emerged, it was beginning to be recognised as a movement. Founder Patrice Cullors commented that ‘[#BlackLivesMatter] has popularised civil disobedience and the need to put our bodies on the line’. ¹

When a video recording of George Floyd’s death circulated on social media platforms and reached a global audience in May 2020, solidarity street protests began to take place in towns and cities outside of the United States and spread like wildfire all over the world. From Accra, Amsterdam and Auckland, to Bogota, Buenos Aires and Cardiff; from Paris, Palermo and Pretoria, to Tel Aviv, Zurich and Zagreb. It soon became clear, however, that protesters outside of the United States were not taking to the streets merely in an act of solidarity. Many – especially in Europe – took to the streets to protest police violence against Black and Brown bodies and against institutional racism in their own countries. As Gary Younge, UK professor of sociology, stated, ‘What happened in America sparked protests and a culture of resistance that did exist here in Europe but was in need of regeneration’. ²

According to the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), an estimated 15 million people of African descent and Black Europeans live in Europe, making them one of Europe’s largest marginalised communities. ³ ENAR’s research shows that discrimination against Black people in employment, in the health care sector and in the private rental market is prevalent in European contexts, and Black people are disproportionately exposed to police violence, racial profiling, as well as generalised racist violence and abuse. Black students experience racist bullying in schools and other educational institutions and face bias within teaching materials and practice. ⁴

It should come as no surprise, then, that #BlackLivesMatter resonated so strongly on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

It should also come as no surprise that even though Black Lives Matter was a campaign initiated by three Black women who intended it to apply to the lives of all Black people in the United States, as the campaign became a Twitter hashtag, gathered pace and made headlines all over the world, the experiences of Black women became conspicuous by their absence. There are long and well-documented histories of the erasure of women’s experiences and contributions to and within revolutions, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, civil and social justice movements in all corners of the world. #BlackLivesMatter has not been exceptional in this regard.

Professor Kimberle Crenshaw was quick to shed light on this. Through the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS), she launched #SayHerName in 2014 to raise awareness about Black women and girls who have also been victims of police violence in disproportionate numbers in the United States, but whose names have seldom become as well-known as their male counterparts, nor ignited public outrage to the same extent.

As stated on the #SayHerName website,

Knowing their names is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for lifting up their stories which in turn provides a much clearer view of the wide-ranging circumstances that make Black women’s bodies disproportionately subject to police violence. To lift up their stories, and illuminate police violence against Black women, we need to know who they are, how they lived, and why they suffered at the hands of police. ⁵

The killing of Breonna Taylor by police in Kentucky in March 2020 did not receive widespread public attention until the start of summer, by which time #BlackLivesMatter protests in response to George Floyd’s death had reached a global audience. #SayHerName also then became more visible in the US protests, and to a lesser extent in protests in other countries.

There was a similar lack of intersectionality in the #BlackLivesMatter protests in European countries, although Black women were the protest leaders in some countries (Adama Traore in France) or became the symbol of protests (Jen Reid in the United Kingdom). As Professor Crenshaw has argued, in order to ‘foreground and challenge the many gendered dimensions of anti-Black racism’, campaigns, protests and movements – such as, but not only #BlackLivesMatter – must work to ensure ‘that all Black women are fully centered in every effort to dismantle the barriers to Black freedom’. ⁶

As the number of protests and countries in which they were taking place increased during the spring and summer of 2020, EJWS invited submissions from students, academics and activists from a number of European countries on what was happening around #BlackLivesMatter in their surroundings. We thank all of them for taking time – often in the midst of organising or participating in various Black Lives Matter activities – to write down their reflections. Our special thanks also go to Ann Phoenix for linking us to the UK contributors.