The parade started quietly on Wednesday June 3. From Hyde Park, thousands of young Londoners, often masked and struggling to keep their distance, slowly converged on Westminster, placards "Justice for George Floyd" and "Black lives matter" at arm's length, demonstrating against racism against blacks.
The Metropolitan Police posted a sympathetic message to their attention on social media in the early afternoon: “We stand by those horrified by the death of George Floyd. " Some officers even bent one knee, honoring the 46-year-old man who died on May 26, suffocated under the knee of a white Minneapolis policeman. However, the temperature rose at the end of the afternoon, with demonstrators targeting the police stationed outside the gates of Downing Street with plastic bottles.
In the United Kingdom, perhaps more than elsewhere in Europe, the murder of George Flyod arouses strong emotion and awakens tensions. In this country, whose elites like to demand openness and tolerance, the black and Asian minorities (around 14% of the English and Welsh population, including 3.3% of blacks) regularly denounce, like black Americans, "Institutional racism". Insidious but very real, she says, even though he is often denied by white Britons.
More risk of dying from Covid
The recent “Windrush” scandal is still fresh in their memories: from the 2000s, thousands of people from former British colonies, notably the Caribbean, who arrived in the United Kingdom in the 1950s to 1970s, were seen deny access to British nationality by the Home Office. These people have sometimes lost their jobs, their right to free health care at the British hospital, some have even been evicted. The ministry behaved in a manner "Careless and without understanding", and his “Failures correspond in part to what characterizes institutional racism”, concluded an independent report published on March 19. With little media coverage at the time, as the country was preparing to enter containment.
Bangladeshi Britons "twice as likely" to die from Covid-19 as whites
But the claims of "BAME" (for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) have gone up a notch in recent weeks, when it is now well established, thanks to the existence of ethnic statistics, that the Covid pandemic -19 touched them in shocking proportions. Almost two-thirds of the deaths among healthcare workers in the UK are of BAME origin. The National Statistics Office, ONS, calculated that in early May a black man or woman was twice as likely to die from Covid-19 as white people of the same age and socio-economic background. -economic.
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