No movement captured public attention more last year than Black Lives Matter as it resurged, not just in the USA but globally. Over a year since mass protests against systemic racism were reignited by the police murder of George Floyd, demands for change continue. Some progress has resulted and demands for stronger and deeper action to achieve racial justice are not going away.

The guilty verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin offered hope that the climate of impunity over police killings of Black people in the USA can be challenged. That verdict was celebrated across the world, and no more so than in George Floyd Square, the renamed site of the murder in Minneapolis, which for a year after the killing volunteers turned into a site of mourning and protest, and which thanks to their efforts will host a permanent memorial.

However, US police keep killing Black people, and the mass protests keep coming in response. When Ma’Khia Bryant was shot dead in Columbus, Ohio in April, hundreds of students marched on the state capitol to demand that Ohio State University sever its links with the police. In Minneapolis in June thousands demanded justice for the police shooting of Winston Smith Jr.

Colonial legacies in the everyday present

The grim reality is that many more examples could be offered. Recent shootings show just how far there is to go on the journey to eliminate systemic racism, in the USA and globally. But 2021 has seen some positive steps forward.

The global movement has called public attention to the means by which histories of racism and colonialism are commemorated and memorialised in ways that provide daily reminders of subjugation and exploitation. It has insisted on the need to interrogate how histories are told, and whose histories get to be heard, giving renewed impetus to long-running efforts to contest official histories.

One breakthrough came in July in Charlottesville, Virginia, when the statues of Confederate leaders Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson were removed, marking the culmination of a five-year campaign that began when then-16-year-old student Zyahna Bryant started a petition to remove the Lee statue. The moment offered symbolic hope for a better future in the place where, following a racist protest in 2017, a white supremacist killed activist Heather Heyer

US Black people also won another long-articulated demand in 2021. Juneteenth, 19 June, which commemorates the day that freedom for slaves was proclaimed in Texas, the last state to do so, was finally recognised as a federal holiday. This Juneteenth, people celebrated by marching along historical routes of struggles, while a George Floyd statue was unveiled in New York.

Emblems of history are also important in the UK, a perpetrator of extensive colonial crimes. In June the statue of slave trader Edward Colston, toppled by protesters the year before, was placed on display in a museum exhibition contextualising the history of Colston, the statue and the long-running campaign to remove it.

Such actions were not limited to global north countries. In Brazil in July, activists in São Paulo vandalised a statue of Borba Gato, a colonial figure linked with slavery and crimes against Indigenous people, and were harshly detained for their protest. The following month in Bolivia, on the National Day of Agrarian Revolution, protesters tried to bring down a statue of Christopher Columbus in La Paz.

In the UK and other former colonial powers, Belgium and Germany, long-running demands to hand back African cultural patrimony are coming to fruition. In July, Belgium promised to return loot stolen from its brutal colonisation of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its Africa Museum underwent a decolonisation process that identified up to 2,000 illegally acquired artefacts, resulting in the first systematic plan for the return of Belgium’s plunder.

Similarly in Germany, museums agreed a coordinated plan for the return of a significant number of Benin bronzes – metal sculptures from the pre-colonial kingdom in present-day Nigeria, stolen in their thousands by British forces and sold across Europe. The first returns are due in 2022 and there is a museum in Benin City, Nigeria waiting to receive them. Jesus College, Cambridge became the first UK institution to return a Benin bronze in October.

Another significant landmark in reckoning with colonial crimes came in May when the government of Germany agreed to pay Namibia a figure of circa US$1.3 billion as an act of reconciliation for its killing of Herero-Nama people under German rule in the early 20^th century. Germany now recognises this crime as genocide. While the agreement stops short of the kind of legally binding reparations many are demanding, it still represents a precedent that offers a point of advocacy towards other colonial powers.

The money is intended to be used for rural infrastructure, water and land reform to benefit communities whose enduring colonial legacy is deep poverty, and it will be essential that civil society is able to exercise oversight to ensure that the money is spent well.

Meanwhile Black Lives Matter UK, a campaigning group that is part of the broader global movement, showed how practical solidarity can lead to material investment by committing around US$840,000 gathered through online donations for grants to grassroots groups in the UK, Spain and South Africa, including those working with Black LGBTQI+ people and refugees, and on issues such as deaths in police custody and police monitoring.

At the international level, in June the United Nations Human Rights Council published its report on racial justice. The report was called for by states following the murder of George Floyd. Analysing deaths in 190 countries around the world, including Brazil, Colombia, France, UK and USA, it concluded that the police are rarely held responsible for the killing of Black people; there is a refusal to investigate deaths properly and more broadly to acknowledge systemic racism. The report offered vital high-level recognition of the scale of the problem and further showed how police killings of Black people are not confined to the USA.

Backlash and culture wars

Of course none of these steps forward, no matter how small, has been left uncontested by those who continue to deny the reality of systemic racism. When the George Colston display opened in the UK, right-wing groups reportedly tried to book out exhibition slots with the aim of leaving the museum empty.

Groups that deny racism are in lockstep with the UK government, which in March published a whitewashing report in which a handpicked commission somehow concluded that there is no evidence of institutional racism in the UK, and indeed that the UK should be regarded as a model for other countries. Anti-racism campaigners reacted with astonishment to a conclusion that flies in the face of the evidence and the lived experience of Black British people. The prime minister’s race adviser quit in the wake of the report’s publication.

The UK’s ruling Conservative party seems addicted to its Brexit divide-and-rule tactic of stoking culture wars, which play well with socially conservative voters. When a diversity thinktank, the Runnymede Trust, criticised the report, several Conservative politicians complained to the Charity Commission, the key regulatory body, accusing it of pursuing a political agenda. Similar complaints were made about children’s charity Barnardo’s over a blog post on white supremacy: the UK’s right-wing groups are increasingly vilifying the social justice actions of charities as political interference. In October a ruling party politician even called for anyone using the term ‘white privilege’ to be reported to the government’s counter-terrorism programme.

As part of its culture war, the UK government has warned publicly funded museums against interrogating the UK’s racist history and insisted that no statues be removed. This meant that when London’s Museum of the Home reopened in June, the museum trustees felt compelled to retain their statue of slave trader Robert Geffrey, even though they wanted to remove it and public consultation supported removal.

Public consultation by Oxford’s Oriel College similarly supported the removal of its statue of arch-colonialist Cecil Rhodes – a key demand of the Rhodes Must Fall movement – but instead, a small, mealy mouthed plaque about colonialism has been installed at foot level, satisfying nobody.

The National Trust, the UK’s leading heritage conservation charity, has also experienced a sustained backlash campaign after it started to point out the connections between the historical properties it manages and colonialism and slavery.

In the USA part of the backlash has centred on the teaching of critical race theory – an educational approach that examines the institutional and social foundations of racism – in schools and universities. Right-wing groups have seized on the issue, mobilising parents against what is portrayed as unwarranted interference in their children’s education, spreading disinformation and stoking social media outrage that ripples through right-wing media.

The backlash has achieved startingly rapid impacts. In November, Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin caused an upset by winning the vote to become Governor of Virginia, after a culture war campaign based largely on opposition to critical race theory – even though it is not taught in Virginian schools. Six Republican-led US states have passed laws against the teaching of critical race theory and others are on their way to doing so. In response, in June, teachers and students protested in at least 22 cities to defend the teaching of critical race theory.

Among the six states is Oklahoma. In May the Governor of Oklahoma signed a bill prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory in its public schools. The timing seemed provocative, as global attention focused that very month on the 100^th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, when mobs of white residents destroyed a flourishing Black neighbourhood. That the story of the massacre is only now beginning to be told, and searches are only now underway for the mass graves of victims, spoke of the scale of denial and the need for a fresh approach to history.

The way backlash can enable violence was sadly shown during the protests that followed the killing of Winston Smith Jr, when activist Deona Knajdek was killed when a car was driven into protesting crowds. This was a chilling echo of the attack that killed Heather Heyer in 2017.

Tragedies such as this offer further pointers to the scale of the problem that must be addressed. Backlash comes at a heavy price and is inevitable – but there is no alternative to keeping up the pressure and pushing forward, even as losses must be mourned. Successes that have been achieved so far would not have happened without the mobilisation that also stirred backlash.

Asian Lives Matter

Another devastatingly tragic event sparked a further wave of protests challenging racism. In March, a man shot dead eight people, six of them Asian women, in an attack on three massage parlours and spas in Atlanta, Georgia. The killings brought to a head growing anger at longstanding discrimination against people of Asian heritage in the USA. This intensified during the pandemic as President Trump stoked anti-Chinese sentiment and people of Asian heritage were slurred as sources of infection. The Asian American Foundation recorded almost 500 incidents of anti-Asian discrimination in 2020 while another study reported that anti-Asian hate crimes doubled under the pandemic.

Protests had mobilised before the Atlanta killings, including in New York in February, but intensified in the aftermath of the shootings. People created memorials at the site of the killings in Atlanta, and held a vigil in Washington DC’s Chinatown district, with further protests taking place in other cities. A National Day of Action later that month saw thousands of people demand action. Seasoned protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement protested side by side with those standing against anti-Asian hatred.

That change is possible was shown in November, when Michelle Wu became the first Asian American, first person of colour and first woman to be elected mayor of Boston.

The problem of racism against Asian national minorities is not confined to the USA, and protests rose in other countries. Like the 2020 resurgence of Black Lives Matter, protests in the USA acted as a wellspring of inspiration for actions elsewhere, expressing solidarity and focusing on the specific challenges in their contexts.

Thousands marched in Montreal, Canada, in the wake of the Atlanta shootings, and also in Winnipeg and Vancouver, a city with a large Asian population. Proving that the problem was not limited to the USA, protesters pointed to the reported 1,100 hate incidents targeting Asian-Canadians since the pandemic began, and the disproportionate focus of hatred on Asian-Canadian women, with stereotyping and misogyny combining with overt racism.

Similar protests were seen in Auckland, New Zealand, expressing solidarity with Asian Americans and drawing attention to racism against people of Asian heritage in New Zealand: since the start of the pandemic, the highest reported levels of discrimination in New Zealand were against New Zealanders of Chinese heritage and the Indigenous Māori population.

The Atlanta shootings prompted a protest in Berlin, Germany, when Germans of Asian heritage protested by the Statue of Peace, and in the Netherlands, where protests were held in March and April. The Dutch protests were organised by the Pan-Asian Collective and Asian Raisins, civil society groups that work to promote the representation of Dutch people of Asian heritage and end discrimination. As in other countries, Dutch anti-discrimination services reported an increase in anti-Asian hate in 2020. In France, people protested outside a Paris court in March as five men were tried on charges of inciting hate and violence against people of Chinese descent.

The pattern seems clear: across the global north, people of Asian heritage experienced heightened threat during the pandemic. That experience was further proof that the pandemic did not affect everyone equally: it hit those already experiencing discrimination and hate much harder. But protests also showed that communities were not willing simply to accept hatred and violence. Rather they were prepared to raise their voices, while others wanted to show solidarity by protesting alongside them.

The Asian Lives Matter protests showed that the tested method of street mobilisation as a way of starting debate, asserting visibility and challenging the assumptions that underpin racism is here to stay, and that movements such as Black Lives Matter offer inspiration and tools that other groups under attack can use to challenge their systemic exclusion.

Different groups experiencing racism and xenophobia are finding common ground, developing new connections of solidarity and fighting back together. This struggle is not going away, and further mobilisation against white supremacy in all forms is inevitable – and protests are going to keep making impacts, even as they encounter backlash.