Forget about race - if we did that we’d all be a lot better off, says Nana Akua

A white officer knelt on his neck until he lost consciousness and died. His final words were I can’t breathe. The world went crazy.

George Floyd was black. BLM (Black Lives Matter), an organisation set up in US in the aftermath became the symbol of this huge injustice black people often face at the hands of the police in the states.

Now to be clear, I’m not saying that an unarmed man should be executed by police in this way, that is absolutely wrong. But what I am saying is what followed was off the scale. The movement went global.

Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors raised tens of millions in donations. We later learned she pocketed a lot of it and spent it on luxury items.

Taking the knee became the empty gesture that politicians and footballers alike ritualised to show their support for anti-racism.

DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) went into overdrive, and I suspect because it was during Covid, nobody had anything better to do.

In a world where at the time going out in groups was banned so you didn’t spread the virus, this was wavered if you donned a BLM T-shirt, and many took to the streets to do just that.

I can remember being heckled for daring to suggest using the term black lives matter was racist and divisive, and I argued that if you want equality it should be all lives matter. Remember the outrage when someone dared to say ‘white lives matter’?

Fast forward to now, and the murder of a wonderful young man Henry Nowak, killed by a Vickrum Digwa, a Sikh man carrying a knife. He stabbed Henry five times and then called the police claiming he had been racially abused.

When they arrived, despite a trail of blood leading to Henry, instead of taking him seriously when he told them he’d been stabbed, they put him in handcuffs. His last words were 'I can’t breathe'.

Henry was white and the officer was white. There was no fanfare when he died, no charity launched in his honour raising tens of millions for the injustice he faced.

The officer prioritised the accusation of racism, over someone who had been stabbed and obviously needed medical attention.

So here’s the problem, we’ve seen our police force deteriorate into an organisation riddled with DEI, rainbow police cars, pronoun lanyards, you name it, those things have taken priority over actual policing. We’ve have repeated accusations of structural and institutional racism, it’s no wonder the police officers don’t know where to turn.

You see, when colour is the first thing you see, you prioritise race over everything else, and common sense goes out of the window.

For too long now we have to be told by the liberal left, the be kind brigade, to make allowances or give special treatment to people with certain characteristics and that people of colour are victims.

Right now many children are being taught that black people cant be racist and that white people have a privilege. The Government is currently in the process of decolonising the curriculum, whatever that means.

This is what you get when you teach critical race theory in schools. This is what you get when you continue to call an institution racist rather than dealing with the individual racists.

Look, it really is simple. In the words of Martin Luther King, judge people by the content of their character, not by the colour of their skin. Forget about race. If we did that we’d all be a lot better off.