<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/24/black-lives-matter-rebellion-2020-reasons-for-hope-edward-colston>
"It has been five years since George Floyd, a Black man who lived in
Minneapolis, was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer. The
killing, captured in a distressing 10-minute video that quickly flooded social
media timelines, sparked something that felt like an international revolution:
protests took place across the world, forcing countries and cities to reckon
with their present and historical treatment of Black people.
In Britain, protests reached fever pitch when activists in Bristol toppled a
statue of Edward Colston, the slave trader and deputy governor of the Royal
African Company, and hurled it into the harbour. Bristol, once a major
slave-trading port, had maintained a veneration of Colston that was
increasingly divisive. The statue in particular had been a key focus of
tensions: attempts to add a second plaque acknowledging Colston’s role in the
slave trade were frustrated in 2018. For many Bristolians, the direct action
provided a moment of long-overdue relief.
Colston now resides, supine, inside the city’s M Shed museum. Visiting earlier
this month, I felt that this had been a worthy outcome: he no longer towers
over Bristolians in a kind of psychological domination, yet nor has he simply
been made invisible. The statue has been historicised within that specific
moment in 2020 and contextualised against a timeline of Bristol’s connections
with transatlantic slavery. It is one of the key successes of the Black Lives
Matter (BLM) movement.
But five years on, the bigger questions still remain. What are the real, felt
consequences of that moment? Speaking to people visiting Colston, I asked a
70-year-old white man called David, who has lived in Bristol since 2011, if he
felt that the toppling and the Black Lives Matter movement had made a real
difference to the city. He told me that there is “a lot more to be done to
change the way people think”, and then informed me that, about half a mile
away, outside Colston’s former plinth, was a hard-right demonstration organised
by the UK Independence party. They were calling for mass deportations and
lamenting the supposed “destruction” of the city by “far-left thugs”. I went to
check it out."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
