In many respects, the furor around police shootings in the United States is and will remain a uniquely American story.
Few major Western nations suffer the epidemic of gun violence that exists in the United States. Few major Western nations contend with the entrenched history of systemic racism that exists in the United States. Few major Western nations cope with the number of killings by — and of — cops that exists here.
Yet as events in recent days show, the language and politics of the Black Lives Matter movement have tremendous global echoes. Solidarity protests took place in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada.
On Sunday in London, The Washington Post noted, “crowds packed Oxford Street, Brixton High Street and Westminster, holding signs that read ‘I do this for my brother’ and ‘No racist police.’ ”
The reasons for such sympathy across an ocean may not be readily apparent. As The Washington Post’s London bureau chief Griff Witte observed a year ago, police in Britain had only shot two people fatally in the preceding three years.
“That’s less than the average number of people shot and killed by police every day in the United States over the first five months of 2015, according to a Washington Post analysis,” he wrote.
“Black Lives Matter is not the only political or social movement that’s given rise to this kind of faux crying foul,” writes Jeffrey Kluger, Time magazine editor-at-large. “It’s in the howls over an imaginary war on Christmas every time a department store — accommodating the reality of America’s multi-culti, multi-faith makeup — tells its employees to wish customers a generic happy holiday, so that everyone feels included. It’s in the charges of reverse sexism when schools and community groups try to lure more girls into STEM courses and Little League.”
Those may be particularly domestic American examples, but they fall along a universal theme: a reactionary backlash to movements that highlight the marginalization and victimization of minorities and seek their greater recognition and inclusion.
Ever since the Black Lives Matter movement took off in the United States in the past few years, it has found support overseas. Student activists in South Africa recently marched on a U.S. consulate in Cape Town.
And WorldViews followed the connections last year between Black Lives Matter protesters and those challenging the Israeli state:
“Activists on either side of the world began connecting. As the Ferguson protests intensified, Palestinians reached out to those on the streets of the troubled St. Louis suburb. Some even offered advice over how to deal with tear gas.”
The echoes are hard to suppress. Over the weekend, a now iconic image of a peaceful, female protester in Baton Rouge getting seized by police garnered global coverage and headlines.
“Some likened her to a modern-day Statue of Liberty, guiding a bitterly divided country back toward the proper path,” The Post’s Michael E. Miller wrote. Others likened the episode to the stoic refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat on the bus.
But, Miller wrote, it also led to comparisons of the famous “tank man” of Beijing, 1989, “facing down war machines in Tiananmen Square.”