What’s Really Orwellian About Our Global Black Lives Matter Moment - Priya Satia
Black Lives Matter is reverberating around the world, triggering a fresh reckoning with the racist global history of colonialism and slavery. While Confederate statues began to tumble across the American South, in Bristol, England, a diverse group felled a statue of a slave traderthat has long provoked offense. Statues of colonial conquerors of Africa and South Asia have followed, along with a robust discussion of the ways in which such actions make history rather than erase it. These movements abroad are not merely echoes of BLM; BLM itself is global.
The shared impetus is a common opposition to racism, of which anti-Black racism has been the most lethal and traumatic. But the history of policing also bridges them. No historical figure makes this clearer than George Orwell, whose name has been increasingly bandied about in recent weeks—by those fretting about the erasure of history as well as those calling out the euphemistic language around policing, such as the use of “nonlethal” bullets against protesters.
The right and left have long fought over Orwell, who identified as a socialist but authored what many consider the iconic literary critique of socialism, 1984. This is a man who showed us the moral evil of the totalitarian quest for mind control and a culture of denunciation but also compiled a list of untrustworthy leftists for the British Foreign Office; a critic of empire and believer in human equality who persisted in writing and thinking in blatantly racist ways. But his central beef was always with policing, whose tyrannical power he discovered through his own experiences as a colonial police officer.
Born Eric Blair, Orwell described himself with characteristic precision and irony as a member of the “lower-upper-middle class.” He went to Eton but on a scholarship. His family had status but not money. Through University College London’s Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, we know that the Blairs traced whatever status they still had in Orwell’s lifetime to earlier ownership of slaves. Orwell’s great-great-grandfather was a slave owner in Jamaica in a time in which slavery was part of a colonial system connecting Europe, West Africa, South Asia, and the Americas. The Blairs were among the 3,000 slave-owning families who received a total 20 million pounds in compensation (now worth more than $2 billion) when slavery was abolished in the British empire.