Henry Nowak: How Anti-Racism Gave You Racism - Konstantin Kisin
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What events led to the anti-racism reckoning in Britain?
Henry Novak, how anti-racism gave you racism. Cast your mind back exactly six years. It's the summer of 2020 and Britain is undergoing what its commentator breathlessly describes as a reckoning. The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sent hundreds of thousands of British people into the streets. Statues were toppled. Corporations issued groveling statements. Police officers, British police officers in British cities policing British people, took a knee before the protesters. The message, repeated endlessly by politicians, journalists, and institutions of every kind, was unambiguous. Racism kills, and we will do whatever it takes to make sure it never happens again.
Six years later, an 18-year-old student named Henry Novak was stabbed five times on a Southampton street.
As he lay bleeding, he told the police officers who arrived at the scene exactly what had happened. He had been stabbed by Vikram Digwa, who was standing nearby. Digwa, for his part, told the officers something else, that he had been the victim of a racist attack. The officers believed Digwa and handcuffed Novak. As he lost consciousness, he could be heard on body cam footage repeating the words, I can't breathe. The same four words that six years earlier had become the defining phrase of a political movement. They were stenciled on murals, chanted at marches, printed on T-shirts. They were spoken on the floor of the United States Congress and quoted in parliamentary debates in Westminster. When British police officers knelt in the streets of London, it was those words they were kneeling for.
Henry Novak's last words, captured on body cam footage released by Hampshire police in the small hours of a Tuesday morning, the middle of the night when the fewest people would see it, were the same, I can't breathe. He said them while handcuffed on the pavement, bleeding from five stab wounds, to officers who had decided that the man who put those wounds in him was the real victim. You will not see Henry's words stenciled on a mural. No politicians will quote them in the Commons. No corporation will change its logo. The same establishment that made four words immortal when spoken by a black man in Minneapolis has met the same four words spoken by a white boy dying on a street in Southampton with what can only be described as a determined institutional silence.
That silence is not neutral. It is a statement. It tells you exactly whose suffering the system has decided counts and whose does not. And it was produced not by the old racism, not by skinheads and yobs, but by the people who spent six years telling you they had abolished it. Digwa was convicted of murder last week and sentenced to life imprisonment. Hampshire police issued a public apology, the IOPC launched an investigation, and a country that had spent the better part of a decade being lectured about the unique and unforgivable evil of racism was left to contemplate what its anti-racism had actually produced. The answer, if you're willing to look at it honestly, is this, a new form of racism, a bureaucratic racism, an actually institutionalized racism.
A racism so thoroughly laundered through the language of progress and inclusion that the people enforcing it genuinely believe they're on the right side of history. What else do you call a system in which a dying teenager's word counts for less than his killers because of the color of his skin? To understand how we got here, you have to understand what the post-Floyd reckoning actually did to British institutions. especially the police. The response to Floyd's death wasn't merely emotional. It was ideological and it was systematic. Forces across the country underwent mandatory diversity and anti-racism training. The principle drilled into offices explicitly or implicitly was that accusations of racism must be taken with the utmost seriousness, that the historic failure of institutions to believe minority victims of racism was the original sin and it needed atoning for.
Racism is bad.
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