Time to stand alongside our black friends and neighbours

This incident, horrific though it is, does not come in isolation. In February, jogger Ahmaud Arbery was killed in Georgia by two white vigilantes, who thought that since he was black and running, he must have been fleeing a crime-scene. In March, health worker Breonna Taylor was shot by police at her home in Kentucky.

According to studies, black people in America are around 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white people.

Add to this the disproportionate number of black people – many of them doctors and nurses – dying of coronavirus on both sides of the Atlantic and it is understandable why so many black people are scared and demanding change.

In our home we feel this perhaps more intensely, because my wife Frances is black. While she is British, not American, some of these incidents are so random, that this could just as easily have been our cousins in the USA.

And British society, while inoculated from the sheer number of deaths by virtue of our gun control laws, is far from immune from this prejudice.

In the UK, BAME people die disproportionately as a result of force of restraint by the police and, according to government statistics, between April 2018 and March 2019, black people were almost ten times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than white people.

In March, the government had to apologise to the Windrush generation after it wrongly deported 83 Caribbean people, and wrongly detained, threatened with deportation or denied legal rights to many others who had been invited to come and rebuild this country after the Second World War.

Recent figures show black people are twice as likely as white people to be unemployed. Even when it comes to medical care, black people face inequality. Between 2014 and 2016, Oxford University researchers found black women were five times more likely to die in pregnancy than white women.

In our own community, we still have a way to go. Disparaging comments and jokes about “schwartzers” are all too commonplace. From experience with my wife, I can say that black visitors to synagogues often have uncomfortable experiences with security, and once inside face stares and probing questions.

Martin Luther King said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Being anti-racist is an active and not a passive stance.

At the Board of Deputies we have been consulting partners in black communities over the last few weeks and are looking to find opportunities to fight this evil together.

But this is a responsibility for all of us as individuals, too. We should be speaking out, on social media and elsewhere to show black people that we see what is happening and that we will not remain silent.

In our own lives, we should stop people when they start a racist joke or comment and urge respect. And we should be building bridges with black communities and offering our solidarity.

With the current pain being felt, now is not too soon to start.

Phil Rosenberg is the Director of Public Affairs at the Board of Deputies of British Jews