With an eye on the United States, children of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean are bringing race into the French public discourse. Today, many of the Black people living in France emigrated from those colonies. In 1960, 17 sub-Saharan African nations, including 14 former French colonies, gained independence from their former European colonists. In France, protesters rallied against their nation's own history of racial injustice and police brutality, which has very different roots from the U.S. But George Floyd’s death last summer moved Black activists to speak up about problems they say the country is “in complete denial” about. New Zealand has a global reputation for peace and tolerance. One protest in Wellington drew more than 20,000 people. But the protests brought Black protesters together with Indigenous Māori and Pacific Islanders, creating a movement for racial progress unlike anything the country had seen for years. People of African descent compromise less than 1% of New Zealand's population. The government announced days after the first protests that it would scrap plans to arm police, though it did not credit the protests for influencing that decision. "Because we don't want to end up like the United States." "We addressed the prime minister directly and the government and we said, 'We're not gonna stand for this, and we oppose this,'" said Mazou Q, a rapper who helped organize protests in Auckland. But Black and Indigenous populations worried that armed police would only put them in danger. The experiment was a response to the 2019 mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, which were committed by a white supremacist. Protests coincided with New Zealand conducting a trial run of arming its police officers - something not routinely done there. "Imagine you are Black, but you're not allowed to be Black. "New Zealand's probably one of the most difficult places to be Black in this world," Guled Mire, an organizer for the protesters in the capital city, Wellington, told CBS News. George Floyd finally started those conversations. But Black Lives Matter protesters there say that comes from a reluctance to speak directly about race and discrimination. Activists say England has more covert racism than the United States - but they are still fighting many of the same issues. THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF GEORGE FLOYD: This time last year, the United Kingdom saw the largest #BlackLivesMatter protests in the world outside of the U.S. "We have taken one step forward and about five steps back since the BLM movement in the U.K.," Ayton said. Ironically, it inspired a new round of protests with the rallying cry "Kill The Bill," that also called attention to the problem of violence against women. That same month, Parliament introduced a bill that would give police greater power to restrict protests. "Too often 'racism' is the catch-all explanation, and can be simply implicitly accepted rather than explicitly examined." "Put simply we no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities," the report from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities said. But its release in March 2021 stunned activists because it simply rejected their claims of systemic problems. Months after the protests, the government commissioned a report examining institutional racism in the U.K. Protesters march through London towards Parliament Square in support of the Black Lives Matter movement on July 5, 2020, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in police custody in the U.S. Celebrities joined, including Madonna and John Boyega, who gave an impassioned address to protesters. embassy to more than 20,000 people flooding the streets. Within days, London's protests exploded from about 20 people outside the U.S. A statue of Winston Churchill in London's Parliament Square was spray-painted with a message calling him a "racist." Some protesters tore down and vandalized statues of slave traders and political leaders - even some who were considered national heroes. Protesters and police clashed at some of the demonstrations.
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