Moss Side to Kingston

A pandemic that killed Black Britons at twice the rate of white Britons, and a murder in Minneapolis that brought thousands into the streets: the first half of 2020 demanded more than the diaspora had been asked to carry in decades

Briefing

• COVID-19 kills Black Britons at double the rate of white Britons.
• George Floyd murdered by Minneapolis police on 25 May 2020.
• BLM protests sweep UK; Colston statue toppled in Bristol on 7 June.
• Jamaica closes borders; diaspora-family visits suspended for first time in decades.
• Windrush second anniversary passes as compensation scheme stalls.

By the end of June 2020, the first half of the year had delivered two events of historic magnitude to the Jamaican and Caribbean community in Britain, in North America and across the diaspora world. The COVID-19 pandemic had arrived with particular ferocity in Black communities. And George Floyd had been murdered in Minneapolis, his death filmed and circulated, and the world had responded with a reckoning that was still unfolding. To live through both, simultaneously, in the bodies and the communities most directly affected by both, was an experience that resisted simple description.

In Moss Side, the Jamaican and Caribbean neighbourhood of Manchester that had its own long and painful relationship with British policing and with the racial politics of the city, the spring of 2020 was unlike any other in living memory. The lockdown, announced on 23 March, had emptied the streets. The community organisations that sustained the neighbourhood — the youth clubs, the churches, the advice centres — pivoted to remote and distanced support with remarkable speed. And then, in late May, the screens filled with the video of George Floyd’s death, and the streets that had been emptied by the pandemic began to fill again.

The Racial Pandemic

The data that emerged through April and May 2020 on the racial disparity in COVID-19 deaths was not surprising to those who had been warning for decades about structural inequality in health outcomes, housing quality, employment conditions and access to care. But its stark form — Black and Asian people were dying at roughly double the rate of white people in England; Black men were dying at three and a half times the rate of white men — gave advocates a set of numbers that demanded a response from institutions that had previously found it comfortable to speak of equality in principle while delivering inequality in practice.

The reasons for the disparity were structural: overcrowded housing that made isolation difficult; essential worker roles — in the NHS, in transport, in care homes — that meant greater exposure; underlying health conditions that were themselves products of inequality; and, in some communities, delayed healthcare-seeking rooted in historic experiences of poor treatment by medical institutions. Public Health England produced a report in June 2020 documenting the disparities and, in a conclusion that drew widespread criticism, omitted the word “racism” from its analysis of causes. The omission was read, by those most affected, as entirely consistent with the institutions they had been navigating for decades.

George Floyd and the British Reckoning

The murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 did not come from nowhere. The Black Lives Matter movement had been active in the United States since 2013, and had produced significant protests in 2014 and 2016. But the combination of the footage’s circulation during a period of lockdown, when hundreds of millions of people were at home with nowhere to go and nothing to do but watch, and the accumulation of pandemic grief and rage, produced a response unlike anything that had come before. Within days, protests were happening in cities across the world — including in Britain, in defiance of COVID restrictions that had made gatherings of more than two people technically illegal.

On 7 June 2020, a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston was toppled by protesters in Bristol and rolled into the harbour. Colston had made his fortune transporting enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, and his statue had stood in the centre of Bristol for 125 years despite repeated calls for its removal. The toppling was immediately controversial — celebrated by many as a long-overdue act of historical reckoning, condemned by others as vandalism and the rewriting of history — but its image circulated globally. In Jamaica, in communities across the Caribbean diaspora, the Bristol moment was understood as part of the same conversation about who is memorialised, whose history is told, and whose suffering is acknowledged, that had been central to the reparations debate for years.

Jamaica: Borders Closed, Connections Strained

Jamaica had moved quickly in March 2020 to close its borders to international visitors, implementing one of the strictest border regimes in the Caribbean. The decision was economically costly but epidemiologically defensible. For the diaspora, it meant that the annual patterns of connection — Easter visits, summer holidays, the ongoing traffic of people and goods and money and love that sustained the relationship between yard and foreign — were suspended. Families who had visited Jamaica every year, who had been watching properties being built or maintained, who had elderly parents they were accustomed to seeing several times annually, found themselves suddenly cut off in a way that no amount of WhatsApp or Zoom fully addressed.

Remittances, as in every crisis, showed the diaspora’s fundamental commitment to Jamaica’s wellbeing. Despite the economic shock of the pandemic — which had put some diaspora Jamaicans out of work, particularly those in hospitality and retail — the flow of money to the island remained substantial. The pandemic had clarified, again, what the diaspora already knew: that the connection was not a sentiment or a cultural preference but an economic and social necessity, woven into the fabric of Jamaican life at every level.

Windrush: The Second Anniversary

April 2020 marked two years since the Windrush scandal had broken publicly, since the revelations about British citizens who had been wrongly deported, denied healthcare and stripped of their livelihoods had caused a government crisis and the resignation of a Home Secretary. Two years on, the Wendy Williams review had concluded in March 2020 that the Home Office was institutionally racist and had failed the Windrush generation through a culture of disbelief and hostile intent. The compensation scheme was operational but underperforming. And the pandemic had ensured that the anniversary passed with less public attention than it deserved.

For community organisations working with Windrush claimants, the lockdown had added practical obstacles to an already inadequate process. Elderly victims who needed support completing complex claim forms could not receive face-to-face help. Legal clinics had moved online, creating access problems for those without reliable internet or the digital literacy to use it. The Home Office had not paused the scheme but had not adapted it adequately to the pandemic conditions either. For the Jamaican diaspora watching the Windrush process from Kingston or from Chapeltown or from Flatbush, the pattern was recognisable: a crisis that demanded urgency, met with institutional processes that moved at their own pace regardless of the human consequences.

The first half of 2020 ended with the community changed. The BLM moment had opened conversations that would not close again. The pandemic had demonstrated structural inequality with statistical precision. The Windrush anniversary had come and gone without resolution. And Jamaica, like the rest of the world, was navigating a crisis whose full dimensions were not yet clear. From Moss Side to Kingston, the diaspora had arrived at a moment of reckoning that was both very new and very old.

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