America is not alone – now is the time to look at our own problems with race

Editorial: European nations need not try to appear superior about the situation in the US

America’s cities are burning. Her sacred national monuments are defaced. The president has been sent to a bunker.

Not for more than half a century has racial tension erupted in such a widespread and violent fashion, and the unrest, provoked by a moment of realisation and awakening in Minneapolis, shows little sign of abating. This is not least because of Donald Trump’s childish bating of the rioters on social media. For every childish tweet he sends out, he is met with another challenge to his own authority, and even his safety.

There have already been too many fires, too many injured people and too much damage to lives, businesses and property. Much of America is wounded and overcome with anger, and there is now a riptide of straight criminality – looting and arson. As so many responsible leaders have pleaded, this is no way to honour George Floyd. They can tear down every famous lump of granite and marble in the National Mall, but it will be in vain, especially if it offends Americans themselves. Such actions will not, to make the point, do anything in themselves to stop President Trump being re-elected in November. In some ways, it might even help Mr Trump. If so, then black lives will continue to be blighted and lost for years to come.

So almost 60 years after Martin Luther King spoke so movingly of his dream to a huge and peaceful rally at the Lincoln Memorial, this monument to the dream of equality is graffitied with “Y’all not tired yet?” The Second World War memorial has similar – “Do black vets count?”

This is not mindless vandalism but a political message. If a policeman hadn’t knelt on Mr Floyd’s neck in a Minneapolis street for nine minutes last week none of this would be happening. In the 1960s, after the civil rights legislation restored the vote to Americans of colour, and after the riots of 1968 provoked by the assassination of Dr King, some in America at least hoped for a fairer future. Since then, black Americans have grown in prominence and are in some walks of life represented properly. On 2008 and 2012 the nation gave Barack Obama his mandates. Yet here we are.

European nations need not be superior about America. Britain had its own share of disorder in the summer of 2011 and the poorer suburbs of Paris are readily combustible. Institutionalised, state-sanctioned racism has spread across Europe, with the rise of fascistic parties. America, if it ever was, is not alone in facing such problems.

Yet America has its own culture and history, and its own deep-seated structural and cultural forces, dating back to the earliest decades of the republic and the age of slavery. Racism has permeated American society so thoroughly and oftentimes so subconsciously that its persistence has been consistently underestimated. That is another source of frustration and anger, that feeling that passing laws and electing people of colour to power can make so little difference. But burning down neighbourhoods will make even less positive difference to black lives.

The problem is vast in a nation of 300 million people and more, but not beyond treatment, if disaggregated. A particular issue is self-evidently policing. As periodic outrages against human dignity have provoked national riots, there has been inadequate attention paid to reforming America’s many police forces, even as they were desegregated and black people found careers and promotion. In the 1990s in London confidence in the Metropolitan Police had reached such a low ebb it was labelled “institutionally racist”, and matters improved, at least to a degree.

Today America’s local police enjoy too many immunities from the law, too few penalties for doing the wrong thing, and the culture of many forces untouched by a certain quality of respect for the entirety of the public that they exist to protect and serve. America’s states and cities will need to clean up some bad attitudes among their forces of law and order. Maybe the president should send out a tweet about that.