Over the last few days thousands of people have been out marching and protesting all over Britain in response to the murder of George Floyd. Some may struggle to understand why a violent race crime thousands of miles away in Minneapolis is seen as having such resonance here. The reasons are complex, but for many people the horror provoked by yet another incident of police brutality in the US has its historical origins (and contemporary parallels) in the UK. After all, Britain is arguably the birthplace of much that is so broken about American race relations.

When the nascent United States finally booted us out in 1783, we Brits didn’t just leave behind our toxic legacy of colonialism, slavery and race hatred. We brought it all back home and then sought to sublimate it into myths around abolition that absolved ourselves of guilt.

As the Trinidadian historian and prime minster Eric Williams once wryly noted, if we took Britain’s own assessment of its role in slavery at face value, we should believe that Britain was so blameless that it only set up the slave trade in the first place for the sole purpose of abolishing it.

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