Hate to say it but #StephenLawrenceDay yesterday was awful. There have been so many police departments tweeting about how Stephen Lawrence’s case is a legacy for British policing, and how it’s encouraged them to think about “diversity” in the workforce & it’s frankly disgusting

The problem with cases of extreme racial violence being the state’s central understanding of how racism functions is that it allows a kind of revisionist institutional memory which locates street violence as the only frontier of racial warfare and terror in this country.

Not only have police departments been filling the #BecauseOfStephen hashtag, but there was even an announcement of a policing award for black people. The fact is more Black Britons fear violence & harassment from the police than from some random white yobs https://twitter.com/nbpauk/status/1252875741475135488?s=21 https://twitter.com/nbpauk/status/1252875741475135488

The legacy of Stephen Lawrence is another victim of neoliberalism. The New Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett refused to accept the conclusions of the MacPherson Inquiry into Lawrence’s death which found the Met Police institutionally racist. Two decades later we have this: https://twitter.com/derbyspolice/status/1252841326707539968

The social consequences of Stephen Lawrence’s Murder are not about “fairness”, they are not about “representation and diversity”, they are about the regimes of anti-blackness which strip black people of humanity, whether expressed through deportations or brutal murders