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Black Lives Matter isn't about statues or TV shows. It's about real lives being ruined

<span>Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

In the past six weeks, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been contacted about police brutality in Britain. As a reporter, I’ve been sent photos of a black child picked up and thrown to the ground by an officer on Hampstead Heath. I’ve witnessed a dozen officers chase and aggressively pin an unarmed black 14-year-old boy on to his belly in a Tottenham park. I’ve been emailed a video of black teenagers cuffed, harassed and searched by officers while their white friend can only watch. Another of young black men physically shaking after being manhandled by police for walking a dog. I can promise you there’s so much more. It’s not even hard to find – social media is flooded with proof. You simply have to open your eyes and look.

These are desperate and enraging stories. Many are barely investigated and rarely reported. It’s difficult to hold the police to account on every individual case when details are lost – the officer’s badge number, or the phone number of a witness – when the victims are traumatised and worn down. Basically, when they’re real people with real lives that don’t fit the script of what makes a newsworthy victim.

It’s harder still when there is an institutional denial that something is wrong, even when the stats tells us otherwise: in London black men aged 15 to 24 were stopped and searched more than 20,000 times during lockdown, a figure that equates to 30% of young black men in the capital, although some may have been searched more than once. More than 80% of these cases led to no further action. Now, an inquiry into “possible racial bias” has been mooted by the Independent Office for Police Conduct. But this is an office that, it’s worth noting, earlier this month concluded that reasonable police force was used in repeatedly clubbing a disabled black man over the head.

It’s still worth being reminded that this is why people are protesting. Despite where media attention has landed, they are not in fact protesting against long lost TV shows that few were either talking about or watching. They are not on the streets to topple every monument in the country. Seeing more mixed race couples in TV adverts is not what is being fought for. These are trivial distractions, a debate designed to antagonise rather than explain; why advocate for meaningful action when you can sneer at students earnestly seeking social justice?

The angry avalanche of column inches and angrier radio talkshows about the Black Lives Matter movement are a destructive hijacking of the real conversation. They do little to help us understand how our history shapes our present and, unwittingly or not, they are a way to ridicule and undermine one of the most important civil rights movements in modern times. Put simply, “the national debate” is a disgrace.

Every Black Lives Matter event I’ve been to in recent weeks has felt political and urgent. Black, white, brown people and more are marching for equality in jobs, housing and health. Black male graduates, for instance, are paid on average 17% less than their white counterparts; the ethnic pay gap for men and women across industries is wide and it is pronounced. This is the change people are asking for.

They want justice for black police victims, for refugees, for trans people, for Grenfell. They want protection for frontline workers dying at alarming rates from Covid-19 who, because of the way society sifts and sorts itself, disproportionately come from ethnic minorities. They are refusing to shut up and just accept small progressive gains made decade by decade. This should be inspiring for all of us; it shouldn’t be repackaged as a national threat. Black British people are 40 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than their white peers. A black British man is three times as likely to die of Covid-19. Yet, across newspapers and daily news shows, it is claimed that “the woke youth” are susceptible to feeling and not facts.

The social justice movement is mocked for stopping “difficult discussion” from happening, making certain subjects and views taboo. But difficult discussions – ones that then lead to action rather than the expulsion of hot air – are exactly what is being demanded. Protesters want taboos to be jettisoned: they are seeking decolonised curriculum that brings home the full truth of empire, Commonwealth and British history, rather than papering over it.

The real struggle isn’t about token gestures. Whether that’s a multinational food conglomerate, glossing over its institutional failings with a coffee advert featuring brown faces, or a record label grappling with a name change rather than the music industry’s exploitation of black talent. By all means, take part in #BlackOutTuesday, but what have you actually done to change things?

Often these superficial acts are choices made by white decision-makers anticipating problems, centring their own guilt. Of course, you can find people who will be angry and offended about those things. But they shouldn’t define the bigger picture.

If you simply want a better, more equal world, where justice is real and not simply a slogan, it’s worth attending a Black Lives Matter rally. If you can go to a protest, do. Bear witness to what is genuinely being fought for. Black Lives Matter isn’t just a viral brand. It isn’t a political party. It shouldn’t be defined by its quickest and loudest critics. As a movement, it draws in everyone, and everyone should see that they have a stake in it. Ultimately, it’s about changing all our futures for the better.

• Nosheen Iqbal is an Observer news reporter