What's changed?

George Floyd - 5 years on

Credit: BILDBYRÅN

What’s changed?

I’ve been asked this question from puppy-eyed white folk, without fail, every year, since George Floyd was murdered by a police office in broad daylight.

I no longer hide my agitation at being asked - because even the inquiry suggests change is not something they - as fellow citizens of the world - are also responsible for.

I was asked this question, again during an interview for BBC woman’s hour this week.

When the news broke 5 years ago, I remember it well…

It was the horror in my husband’s face that let me know something horrendous had happened. He began watching the killing on his phone, when he called me into the kitchen to aide him. Then it was hearing BBC radio presenter, Clara Amfo breakdown in tears live on air.

And even though I chose not to watch the video and still haven’t seen it - it didn’t stop 12” of my own hair falling out.

Over a decade working in mental health taught me, that despite having never met George - I was having a trauma response. I knew historical trauma was more than an academic theory and how you can experience vicarious trauma by just witnessing, or hearing about a traumatic event.

In May 2020 - I’d already raked up 14 years experience working with mental health and 7 years in anti-racism / inclusion. So it meant I had existing anti-racism services available at the time. So much so, I received an absolutely outrageous increase in business enquiries. But these were not usual business enquires, they felt parasitical.

My inbox took a pummelling. I couldn’t understand why my website kept crashing at the time, until I looked at my statistics a month later and saw I had 40,000 visitors to my website, almost overnight. To contextualise - prior to this, the average was around 800 hits a month.

Every major brand you could think of was in my inbox. From record labels, to wellness and designer brands, to global corporations. All wanting to pick my brain, or have me give a tick-box-exercise workshop to show staff, that despite the unaddressed in-house institutionalised racism, they “stand for Black lives”. (My answer to tick-box requests was and still is no)

Literary agents were emailing to pitch me anti-racism book ideas - not knowing that, at that point, I already had a literary agent for two years trying to sell the book that we’d continuously been told, there was “no market for”.

Expired relationships suddenly rose from the dead - my phone ringing off the hook day and night. People were treating me like a priest at confession hour, to tell me about incidents of racism they enabled.

It was the beginning of the haemorrhaging of friendships.

White women were the worst offenders - many in the wellness world signing up for my anti-racism course, taking screenshots and sharing on their social media to virtue signal that they had signed up and NEVER logging onto it.

Some, who were total strangers wanted me to give them parenting tips on how to raise THEIR biracial kids in my DM’s.

It was astonishing and that’s without sharing about the onslaught of abuse that followed, which now means I have to have my local police force and online hate crime contact on speed dial.

The urgency of white supremacy was rampant - anti-racism career hustlers and plagiarism was on steroids. Many folks were undermining and ignoring my boundaries, sending emails then following up with social media messages- and some with no shame - even resorted to messaging mutual colleagues to try to get access to me.

It was like nothing I had ever experienced.

I wasn’t sleeping for days.

I was re-traumatised.

12” of hair was coming out - in clumps.

The sense of entitlement over me and other Black women was ferocious.

Reflecting back is a painful reminder, that instead of being seen as human and provided with care in that moment - we - Black women - were expected to be mammy’s of the world.

I also remember the guilt and almost repulsion of receiving abundance in my business like I’d never seen before - seemingly off of the back of another Black life taken in the most cruel way, only deepening my complex relationship with worthiness and money. Are folks really that morally bankrupt to only now be interested in this life saving work because it’s trending? The only salve was being in a position to give to George Floyds family and other grassroots orgs on the ground and seeing other colleagues, like Reni Eddo Lodge, who at the time became the first Black British author to hit the best-seller list, grappling with the same predicaments.

So back to the title of this piece. Aside from urgency moving to apathy, an active divestment from DEI, Black talent and Black business owners, the banning of anti-racism books and the publishing industry being less accessible to Black authors since before 2020, very little has changed.

Some stayed the course, but many fell away. History has shown us the majority of people don’t actually want to intentionally and consistently do all that is required of them to bring forth change in the world - they just want to be absolved of guilt.

Disrupting racism and infrastructures of white supremacy is inconvenient.

Most don’t want to be inconvenienced and just want to carry on in the dysfunction and illusion of a ‘normal’ that continues to harm all of us.

25.05.2020. Another date forcefully etched into the diary of my mind.

It’s unquestionable - George Floyd’s death rocked humanity and for a powerful moment in history, turned the world on its axis.

But perhaps a truer marker of what’s changed 5 years on - is to ask, how have you changed since the 25th May 2020?

Because as history keeps repeatedly showing us, the world won’t miraculously change - until we do.

George Floyd - may your soul rest in peace and may your death not be in vain.

The work continues.

Much love

Nova x

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Nova Reid is a writer, mental health advocate, TED Speaker and Producer. She is author of The Good Ally and host and executive producer of Hidden Histories with Nova Reid. You can find out more about her work on www.novareid.com