(credit: wikipedia /  Fibonacci Blue) Minneapolis, Minnesota November 15, 2015, 2015  BLM protest after Jamar Clark was shot by Minneapolis Police. Neighbors said that Jamar was handcuffed while shot and that the police threatened residents to leave the scene immediately after the incident. Protesters met at the site of the shooting and marched to the 4th police precinct building.

By Gary Raynaldo      DIPLOMATIC  TIMES

All around the world, Africans,  Afro-Latinos, Afro-Caribbean folk  have historically looked to their Black American brothers and sisters for inspiration in their own struggles for social equality.  But for Europeans, the image of Black America has had many meanings, many textures. Does it show the gulf between American aspirations and American achievements? Does it fuel and empower European traditions of solidarity and anti-racism, or is it a diversion from Europe’s own colonial past, its racist present, and its own history of exporting racism around the world?  These questions are growing in importance as the number of Europeans of color rises, as do levels of incarceration, deprivation and poverty, and as struggles for racial justice intertwine on both sides of the Atlantic. Recently, the Wilson Center’s Black at Wilson program held  discussion to tackle these and  more pressing questions European-Black American solidarity in the struggle for social justice in the wake of the global BLACK LIVES MATTER movement.  Entitled:  “What Black America Means for Europe”.   The Wilson program  discussion was held last week right around Martin Luther King Day on the significance of the struggle for racial justice on both sides of the Atlantic. The Wilson program made note that “more than a half century ago, Martin Luther King Jr. visited the divided Cold War city of Berlin, passing through the barbed-wire walls that separated Germany, Europe and the world to speak about the need to overcome humanity’s divisions.  King’s visit was emblematic of a European tradition of political identification with black America, particularly during times of political crisis and social upheaval. That tradition came to life again last year, when crowds gathered across Europe to express their solidarity with Americans protesting the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.”   

Moderated by Spencer R. Crew, Professor of History at George Mason University; former Interim Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. On the distinguished panel were Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, United Kingdom,  and  Khary O. Polk, Associate Professor of Black Studies at Amherst College, United States.

“If you’re black in Britain, you are three times more likely to be killed by the police under suspicious circumstances. The difference is, the police don’t kill many people in the UK, they don’t carry guns. In many European countries the police aren’t armed.”

-Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, England

7 August 2011 ( Credit: Wikipedia:  Alan Stanton )  London, England  Firefighters at High Road Tottenham & Lansdowne Road aftermath of  protests, riots  following the death of Mark Duggan, a local Afro-Caribbean man who was shot dead by police on 4 August.

Andrews stated that what the world saw last summer recorded on video around  the world the death of George Floyd was not a new thing for him and other people of color living in the UK.   Andrews said there have been similar unjustified police killings of Afro-Caribbean men in England during the past decade and longer. “We have a much more international understanding of Blackness in the  UK because of our African Caribbean history,” Andrews said.

“America provides a kind of extreme-America is like Europe on steroids. There is no control of whiteness in the U.S. from the beginning. These (white Americans) are Europeans who went to migrate to the U.S. But in the U.K. we did not have Jim Crow and lynching as in the U.S.  But with George Floyd, we have seen the same in the U.K. Blacks get killed by the police much more than non-Blacks in the U.K.  And Blacks are 3 percent  of the U.K . population, but make up 14 percent of the prison population.  We have similarities with the mass incarceration of Black people in the U.S.”

-Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, England

Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, United Kingdom  (Wilson Center)

Andrews  added:  “One of the biggest damages that Trump will do to the discussion on racism because he’s so obviously racist and his policies are obviously terrible and you have people who stormed the Capitol, is [to think]: you have these racist people that need to either be removed or educated and then you solve it. That’s never been what racism has been about. Racism is deeply embedded in the structure of what the society is. This isn’t about individuals. This isn’t about teaching people to be nice. This is about a world which is built on the premise of white supremacy and if you want to address it you actually have to address the structural issues.  African Americans have had to articulate the white oppression, racism much more longer than us in the U.K.  So, of course, it is going to resonate within us. Black America is like a beacon for us internationally.”

“Here in Europe, there is a big denial that racism exists here.  Even though there are language barriers, there is no language barrier when it comes to racism.” 

-Kehinde Andrews

Meanwhile,  Khary O. Polk  observed:  “Even as we attempt to define the meaning of Black America for black Europeans, we must foreground the unique struggles of people of African descent who also identify as European. Not only for the struggles of today, but to situate them historically within longer genealogies of political and cultural activism.”

Black American Raised in London England Offers Perspective

Khary O. Polk, Associate Professor of Black Studies at Amherst College, United States. (Wilson Center)

Polk spent 8 years as a child in the U.K. because his father was a member of the U.S. military stationed in England.

 “I was shocked to see the massive mobilization of Europeans after George Floyd death.  It’s just the idea of us being able to film the police, to have those images circulate within this broader social mediated sphere, has made me rethink some of my reservations, or frustrations, with our new social mediated age and to really think about the political value of the new screen world that we’re a part of.  But it remains to be seen if this will be a sustained movement of anti-racist solidarity between Black America and Europe. Many Europeans are asking how could this (George Floyd murder) happen in the U.S. Well, they need to look in their own backyard to find answers due to the history of racism in Europe and the recent surge in Far-Right Nationalism along with Brexit.”

 -Khary  O.  Polk.