I ATTENDED as an older white male a Black Lives Matter protest in Skipton last weekend in the High Street.

Why did I do this – and why did the protestors, largely young Asian women - get so much overtly racist abuse from passing cars and pedestrians?

It was the “absolute brutality” of George Floyd’s death in the US and the fact it was caught on video which mobilised people all over the world to protest.

There have been protests all over Britain. So it is hardly surprising that people in Skipton were also moved to protest.

For there are many more similar events to George Floyd’s death in this country than many realise. Only last month Desmond Mombeyarara was tasered to death in Manchester in front of his five year son.

This was also caught on video! Just a week ago two Black sisters – Nicole Smallman, 27, and Bibaa Henry, 46, went missing in London.

They were the daughters of the pioneering Church of England’s first female archdeacon, Mina Smallman.

Relatives had to go and look for them. They were both found dead – murdered. When the police did then investigate two of them allegedly took photos of the dead women and posted them on a private Whats App group.

Those policemen have now been suspended. But can one imagine this happening to a white family? There many other such incidents. A young Somali woman was found drowned in a river in Bury last year.

There is considerable evidence that she was bullied at school and had a phobia of water. Yet Greater Manchester Police are still treating this as a suicide and not a murder enquiry. Think of the millions of pounds that were spent enquiring to Madeline McCann’s disappearance and compare it to this!

So I attended because it is clear to me there is still a very large amount of institutional racism in the UK.

There have been 1,743 deaths in police custody in England and Wales since 1990. Over half of these are Black people. Yet 86 per cent of the population is white! Equally, members of the BAME (Black and Minority Ethnic) community are dying at twice the rate of white people in the present Covid-19 crisis.

This is not accidental but due to deep rooted institutional racism that dates back to the days of slavery and treating Black people as quite literally “sub-human”.

Phil Lee

Elslack