If 2020 was the year that Black Lives Matter went mainstream, 2024 was the year it died. Quietly, without even the customary whimper, the trappings of diversity so frantically sought and flamboyantly brandished after those protests four years ago are being discarded.

Like so many of the promises and pledges of the pandemic era, those of its accompanying racial equality movement have been swallowed whole by reality. But it’s worth remembering how large, how global, how fashionable it all was at the time. There were big, iconic moments, such as the removal of statues in Europe and the US, that triggered soul-searching about our history, and which opened up productive avenues of reappraisal. And there were others that four years later you cringe to remember: the black squares on social media, Nancy Pelosi taking the knee wearing kente cloth, Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner also taking the knee while looking soberly into the camera.

When it came to institutions and corporations, this mass movement was translated – or, rather, flattened – into a question of representation; of quickly incorporating more Black people, rather than any kind of root-and-branch reform. A movement that had been triggered by police brutality, and whose main demand was reforming policing and the safety of marginalised Black communities, spread across the world and resulted in more Black faces on the cover of Vogue magazine.

In a way, it could only have ever been thus. If you are to measure the success of the movement through its most high-profile adoptions, then the initiatives that came out of this period, those that emphasised diversity, equity and inclusion in the workforce, were already stillborn. Bringing more people of colour into pre-existing structures is far too narrow a route to systemic racial equalisation – it could only ever, at best, replicate those systems in a broader palette.

At worst, it was exploitation for reputation-management purposes. Take the BBC’s former........

© The Guardian