They can’t kill us all


The story of Black Lives Matter


Wesley Lowery, Penguin, 256 pages, £9.99


Wesley Lowery is a national reporter for the Washington Post. He was the paper’s lead reporter in Ferguson, covering the Black Lives Matter protest movement and was a member of the team awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of police shootings.


The treatment of black people within the US criminal justice system is the most extreme aspect of an overall experience of marginalisation and exclusion. 


African-Americans are more than twice as likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts; the net worth of white households is 13 times that of black households; and black life expectancy is four years lower than that of white Americans. In short, there has been a 25-year-long period of increasing inequality.


Since the election of Obama, there has been a real debate about the “black faces in high places” strategy that some argued was the way forward to address inequality and racism. However, that a movement called Black Lives Matter arises during the tenure of the America’s first black president perhaps speaks volumes about the failure of this approach.


Lowery has used his “messy notes” from his time covering the protests to tell the story of Ferguson and the people who came together to form a new movement. 


Reviews contributed by the Bookmarks socialist bookshop. 


Order online at https://bookmarksbookshop.co.uk