Backlash: The Murder of George Floyd, review: the white middle-class guilt over Black Lives Matter

Telegraph

21-05-2025

Why did the death of George Floyd spark a global protest movement? The LA riots didn't spread across the world after the beating of Rodney King. The fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin didn't cause much of a ripple outside the US. Yet the killing of Floyd outside a convenience store in Minneapolis was the catalyst for Edward Colston's statue, 4,000 miles away in Bristol, being torn down and dumped into the harbour, while celebrities and organisations fell over themselves to voice public support for Black Lives Matter. Backlash: The Murder of George Floyd (BBC Two) makes an attempt to answer the question, but its analysis only goes so far.
The feature-length documentary speaks to people in the US involved in the case – the Minneapolis chief of police, a community leader who helped to organise the first protests – and to random British contributors. I say 'random', because while the likes of Adele and Harry Styles tweeted pro-BLM messages to their millions of supporters at the time, and Star Wars actor John Boyega risked blowing up his career by making an impassioned speech in Hyde Park, the contributors here are Great British Menu presenter Andi Oliver, her daughter, Miquita, and comedian Munya Chawawa.
It begins with footage of Floyd's arrest in May 2020. His dying moments – an officer with his knee on Floyd's neck, and Floyd protesting, 'I can't breathe' – are played later. The footage went viral. Floyd's uncle, Selwyn Jones, watched it before realising the man on the ground was his nephew. 'That was the day the world changed. That video played every second of the day, all over the world,' he said.
Viral video in the age of social media explains why everyone knew about George Floyd, but why did that translate into protests on British streets? The documentary highlighted incidents in the UK involving black men and the police, including the shocking – and under-reported – case of Julian Cole, left paralysed and brain damaged after an arrest outside a nightclub. Nathalie Emmanuel, an actor and BLM protester, said the uncertainty of the pandemic had contributed to a sense of hopelessness, while scenes viewed on mobile phones took on a new intensity because they were our only connection to the outside world.
In the Forest of Dean, a young woman named Khady Gueye, who has a white English mother and a black Senegalese father, was prompted to confront the horrible racism she had faced at school. She pulled out her school leavers' shirt, signed by friends – friends, not enemies – with messages calling her racist names. The murder of George Floyd, Gueye said, suddenly felt 'like a really powerful moment to make change'.
All of this made sense, and was difficult to hear. But beyond the personal stories, the documentary didn't stand back far enough to assess whether the changes have been lasting, or if corporations were cynically jumping on the BLM bandwagon. And in assessing the backlash to BLM, it gives us only Donald Trump telling voters that 'our country will be woke no longer', plus ex-GB News journalist Inaya Folarin-Iman speaking of the embarrassment she felt at watching middle-class white people tearing down the Colston statue.
One of the most surreal bits of footage is of what also looks like a bunch of middle-class white people kneeling for eight minutes and 46 seconds – the time it took George Floyd to die – on the high street in Totnes. They're all taking it very seriously. But how many of those people give black lives much of a thought today?