Before I moved to the US, I knew their names: Rodney King. Michael Stewart. Trayvon Martin. Vonderrit Myers Jr. Kajieme Powell. I committed them to memory like Stephen Lawrence and Anthony Walker – young black men killed or violently beaten by police or vigilantes, black people killed in a system designed to hold them back, keep them down and then brazenly deny that was ever the intention.

Watching the aftermath of those deaths from the distance of the UK was one thing: as a black British man I identified with it, yet I never felt it. But being in America, it’s more infuriating, more frightening – and more personal, because now I walk these streets. It’s a reality. Not just something that happens in a country thousands of miles away. I have begun to understand what James Baldwin meant when he wrote: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Spike Lee’s contrast of Eric Garner’s death, and that of Radio Raheem in Do The Right Thing.

On Wednesday, when a grand jury here in New York failed to find a reason to even send to trial a white police officer who choked the life out of a black man, I finally got it. As I sat on the subway to my new home in Brooklyn, the image of Eric Garner stumbling after six cops dragged him to the ground – the sound of him wheezing “I can’t breathe” – would not leave me. I got home and watched his widow and his mother talk about the lack of humanity in the man who killed him. I thought about Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, about Radio Raheem and how it was disgusting that a movie based on another killing – one that took place more than more than 20 years ago – could play out, almost frame for frame, in 2014.

I’ve been in New York for less than a month. In that time I’ve seen protests follow a grand jury’s failure to indict the police officer who shot an unarmed Michael Brown in Missouri. I’ve watched the video of the police shooting a toy-carrying 12-year-old, Tamir Rice, on a playground in Ohio. I’ve read about the police shooting of the unarmed Akai Gurley in a stairwell in Brooklyn. And then there was Wednesday’s non-indictment in the case of Eric Garner, unarmed and choked to death on a Staten Island street, not a mile from my new home.

From Britain, it’s easy to look at America and President Barack Obama and think that black people here have achieved the kind of progress we’ll never have at home: a black man in the most powerful position in the country. But when you get here, it’s not the progress but the lack of it for black Americans that’s staggering.

Black men account for nearly half America’s prison population despite African Americans making up only around 12% of the population. I know that has its roots in drug sentencing disparities, and that five times as many white Americans are using drugs while black people are sent to prison at ten times the rate. There was no surprise when I discovered that the chokehold was banned by the NYPD in 1993, yet there have been thousands of complaints about its use over the last 21 years.

It’s one thing to know that at a distance. It’s another thing to potentially see myself in those statistics – or my father, or my friends.

Ta Nehisi Coates, eloquent as ever, summed up why it’s not an option to do anything but resist: “As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought despite not seeing victories in their lifetime, or even their children’s lifetimes, or even in their grandchildren’s lifetimes. So, fatalism is not an option.”

Talking to Americans, there can be a numbness. A seen-it-all-before, nothing’s-going-to-change kind of attitude. I understand that. In Britain, we’ve had cases of police violence or neglect in black communities that have shocked us, separated us, broken down relationships between the police and black communities. Perhaps racism in the UK is just as prevalent – Muslims have been demonised over the past decade, and the rates of stop-and-search remain shocking – but that racism doesn’t usually result in another dead black man.

The first time I saw the Rodney King tape I was shocked something that could happen, anywhere – but it was in America, thousands of miles away. Then I moved here and it was in St Louis and then in Cleveland and then it was in the same city – in the case of Akai Gurley, the same borough, just up the road. Then I found out that a black man is killed by the police every 28 hours.

In America, the death of black men at the hands of the police is a near-daily reality. I’ve only been here a few weeks and it is exhausting to read, watch and think about this on a daily basis. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have known nothing but that climate.

I can’t breathe.