Black Lives Matter: The Pandemic of Racism
The #BLM protests have dominated the headlines
#blm If you’ve been paying attention to the news recently, you’ll know that, alongside the global pandemic, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has dominated the headlines. In the current political climate, the pandemic of racism runs as rampant as the coronavirus. Last month, I spoke with Malcolm King, a highschool English teacher in West Lothian - originally from Sierra Leone - about his experiences of racism, and his thoughts on the BLM movement. On 25th May 2020, a Black man, George Floyd, was arrested and killed by four policemen in Minneapolis, for allegedly using a counterfeit bill. His death represents a cacophony of Black people who have died at the hands of state violence and police brutality. Yet something about his story sparked an unprecedented surge of activism for the BLM movement. Since his death, millions of people have flocked to the streets in protest, not just in the United States, but across the globe. Malcolm’s daughter attended one of these protests in Glasgow in June 2020. He told me: 8 | LIVINGSTON
“The whole movement is about trying to address an imbalance that exists and has existed for a long time.” After asking Malcolm to explain more about his experiences of this ‘imbalance’, he shared with me a deeply tragic story about his friend, Sheku Bayoh, who was killed by policemen in Kirkcaldy in 2015.
“When you get the phone call to say ‘Sheku Bayoh has been killed’. You sit there and say ‘what does that mean?’ I remember telling my friend from Sierra Leone that Sheku had been killed by the police, and you’re thinking, that doesn’t make any sense
because we live in Scotland. What does that mean?” Sheku Bayoh had allegedly taken drugs when he was arrested in Kirkcaldy. Nine police officers arrived on the scene , tackled him to the ground and restrained him. After falling unconscious, Sheku Bayoh was taken to hospital and pronounced dead - he had 23 injuries.
Malcolm described the shock and distress he felt, while his daughter sobbed in Sheku’s livingroom. “Even the night we got there, the article that was in the press about the killing, was so skewed. The narrative they pushed was how this extremely big, black
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