BBC Radio 4: Thought for The Day - 25 May 2021

Transcript of my Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on the first anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. Listen to the audio here on BBC Sounds.

Today, people all over the world will engage in acts of remembrance to mark a year since the murder of George Floyd; lighting candles, saying prayers, kneeling and sitting in silence for the length of time in which Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck.

We know what happened next – the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement and a reckoning with racial justice across our institutions. I heard someone recently describe now dividing time between ‘before George Floyd’ and ‘after George Floyd’.

There was a sense – at least in the weeks that followed – that we could never be the same again.

Last week, I spoke at an event with Patrick Ngwolo – George Floyd’s pastor – and asked how he felt about the legacy of his friend’s death. He broke down as he remembered again the cruelty of watching Floyd’s execution – a prolonged and agonising death, while crying out for his mother.

Remembrance is important, but it can also be painful. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that life would be more joyful for all if we engaged in “active forgetting”.

It would be easy for me here to recast George Floyd as a Christ-like figure, whose death and sacrifice is ultimately for the good of us all. To show that black death demonstrates that where the world has been a place of injustice, oppression and violence for black people, there will be justice and peace in the world to come.

But why shouldn’t justice begin now? Why can’t there be life in all its fullness before death?

George Floyd was not a martyr who willingly laid down his life, but a victim of a pervasive system of oppression, centuries-long in the making, that sees black people as lesser.

Christians believe Christ died once and for all people. But black people have seen the brutalisation of the bodies of those who look like them time and time again. Today we remember George Floyd, but the annual calendar is marked with too many memorials to slain black men and women. We keep remembering. Because we have to.

Collective memory – memorials, statues, commemorations – help us make sense of today. We look back so we can move forward. The ritual of remembrance is an important space through which we can engage in transformation.

In the Last Supper, Jesus instructs his followers to continue to eat the bread and wine in remembrance of him. This act is not an empty gesture; but intended to be a place of remembering, before rebirth and then renewal. Through remembrance, transformation is possible. This transformation happens not in isolation, but in community.

As many light candles today to remember George Floyd, let’s remember to “fight racism with solidarity”.