Dr Seb Rumsby makes connections between racist violence and deadly border regimes, Black Lives Matter and the Essex 39 tragedy.
“I can’t breathe” has become an evocative slogan of anti-racist and police abolition movements which gained international attention in 2020, after the shocking murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. However, exactly five years ago the same phrase “I can’t breathe” was used in a very different context: by 26-year-old Phạm Thị Trà My, trapped in the back of a refrigerated lorry container crossing the English Channel. As she slowly suffocated along with 38 other Vietnamese irregular migrants, Trà My sent the haunting final text messages to her mother: “So sorry mum and dad. The route abroad didn't succeed… I am dying because I can't breathe.” By the time the lorry reached Essex on 23rd October 2019, 14 hours after the victims had stowed into the lorry in Belgium, there were none left alive.
These seemingly unrelated deaths have more in common than might be immediately apparent. Both are routed in historic racism, global inequalities, systemic violence and world economics, which continue to choke large sections of the world’s inhabitants – metaphorically or literally.
The first question we need to ask is: how did the “I can’t breathe” victims end up in such a socially marginal position that their lives could be so easily extinguished? To answer this, we must go back in history to appreciate how racialised inequalities were established on a global scale.
The transatlantic slave trade violently displaced Black Africans to the Americas and forced their descendants into brutal labour exploitation, their very lives in the hands of their profiteering white masters. Abolition did not undo the monumental socio-economic inequalities between white landowners, enriched by slave labour over generations, and Black Americans inheriting nothing but contempt and discrimination as they entered the bottom of the wage labour market.
In 1863, Black Americans owned 0.5% of the national wealth. In 2019, it was a little over 1.5%, with the average white family owning ten times more wealth than the typical Black family.
Not incidentally, the wealth accumulated by transatlantic slave traders helped bankroll the industrial revolution which, in turn, fuelled major expansions in colonial dispossession by powerful European states and trading companies. These global powers either invaded, seized control of, or forcibly traded with vast swathes of Asia and Africa in the relentless pursuit of profit. In Vietnam, French colonial enterprises exploited natural resources and native workers. As with American slavery, such brutality was justified by racist ideologies of white supremacy and the devaluation of other lives.
The second question is why have these historical inequalities persisted to the present day? Can we really attribute today’s problems to events that happened hundreds of years ago? Yes we can, because in a capitalist economy where the rate of return on capital outstrips the rate of growth, inherited wealth grows faster than earned wealth. So, the legacy of historical theft and extortion of labour and resources – from slave to trader/master and colony to metropole – is persistent in racialised and international inequalities.
In the USA, emancipated black Americans were denied access to credit to get on the property market, forcing them to stay in exploitative renting conditions in disadvantaged neighbourhoods – the ghettos. In 1863, black Americans owned 0.5% percent of the national wealth. In 2019, it was a little over 1.5%, with the average white family owning ten times more wealth than the typical black family.
At a global level, over the 20th century former colonies like Vietnam declared independence – though not without having to fight French and American imperialists, at the cost of countless lives. By 1975 the reunified Vietnamese government inherited an economy battered by thirty years of war and over a hundred years of colonial extraction. At that point, France’s GDP/capita was around 8000% higher than Vietnam’s. And that’s just measuring income, not the actual wealth accumulated in Europe from colonial business over centuries.
Since then, the pattern of wealth transfer from the Global South to North has mutated. These days it is no longer French colonial officers but transnational corporations like Apple, Nike and Samsung which build factories in Vietnam, make vast profits from cheap, overworked local labour and pay out to foreign shareholders. The international lines of rich and poor have been slightly redrawn (with Japan and South Korea swapping sides), but by and large the places and people that were being invaded and exploited in the colonial era remain at the bottom of today’s economic hierarchy.
The final question: why does this unequal system need to be maintained with such lethal force? Historically, a primary role of policing has been to protect the assets and interests of the wealthy and powerful – often at the expense of the have-nots. The US police suppressed slave revolts, caught runaways, enforced segregation, and repressed the civil rights movement.
Black American victims of police brutality and Vietnamese irregular migrants are both groups that find themselves on the wrong side of historical inequalities initiated by white-Western colonial dispossession, perpetuated by capitalist economics and imposed by lethal state force.
Following a similar rationale, we see how nation-state borders function to restrict the have-nots from taking advantage of our interconnected, globalised world. For those hailing from Vietnam, migrating to Western Europe comes with the prospect of earning up to 10 times more than they could earn back home – what would you do if you were offered a tenfold salary increase? It would be a no-brainer. In response, wealthy nations restrict visas, erect walls, patrol borders and make it increasingly dangerous for certain people to migrate – while simultaneously allowing for privileged citizens and capital investment to cross borders freely.
The infrastructure, employment, health-care, welfare, safety and opportunity found in places like are UK are, in part, built on the incredible wealth extracted from the colonies. In this case, depriving formerly colonised populations of the right to move to the metropole deprives them of access to the legacy of stolen colonial wealth. It could be argued that migration is a matter of economic justice.
So, here is the answer to our questions. Black American victims of police brutality and Vietnamese irregular migrants are both groups that find themselves on the wrong side of historical inequalities initiated by white-Western colonial dispossession, perpetuated by capitalist economics and imposed by lethal state force. And that’s why any attempt to confront racism, support free movement, or imagine a world where we can all breathe, must also be anti-capitalist.
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Seb Rumsby is an Early Career Fellow for the School of Social Policy at the University of Birmingham
