Like many cities around the world, Belfast’s George Floyd mural — an unflinching piece of narrative art relaying the story of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officers and drawing a direct line between police agencies, white supremacism, and Trumpism — was vandalised. Under cover of darkness an unknown assailant took quiet aim before launching a tin of white paint at the mural’s heart. Evidently a corrective act, like hastily applied white-out over a typo. Community artists swiftly redacted the defaced mural behind an obliterating layer of black paint adorned only with the message #BLM and ‘back soon…’.

It was meant to be a temporary fix. But Belfast’s sanitised placeholder mural became permanent. (The original mural was never restored, and the placeholder mural was only recently replaced with a ‘No Profit on Pandemic’ mural.) Walls, as noted Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano observed, are ‘the publishers of the poor’. Public spaces upon which disempowered people and communities can not only tell their stories but parley. So, we might ask, what was this troubled painted wall, this graphic dialogue, in west Belfast telling us about the struggle to build transnational solidarity within a historically divided society? 

Vandalism is an important albeit disturbing part of the story of Belfast’s George Floyd mural. Community responses and remedies to paint bombings form part of that largely hidden history too. A discordant ‘call and response’ narrative, visualised: paint, vandalise, repaint ad nauseum or until one of the parties concedes. (Remembering, however, that erasure was always likely the mural’s fate, one way or another.)

The mural’s pendulous life cycle illustrates well the story of Northern Ireland’s ambivalent response — our ‘successes’ and ‘failures’, if you will — to last summer’s racial justice uprisings. Not an easy, comfortable story of transnational solidarity as many (overwhelmingly white) Northern Irish progressives would wish, but a difficult, disturbing tale that sees antagonists co-opt an international cause into a local conflict.

To move forward, we must resist the urge to look away

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, our usual response is to brush aside or cover-up happenings that do not quite ‘go to plan’; troublesome, unruly stories become untold stories. (News and social media, as well as politicians, often favour ‘good’ news over ‘bad’ news stories.)

To move forward, however, we must resist the urge to look away, to paint over the cracks. ‘Bad’ news stories have their own revelatory promise, or power. Here, not only exposing just how difficult rescripting narratives — transformative worldmaking — can be but the intersecting, deep-rooted issues — differences and divisions — we must confront if we are to foster the solidarity required to bring about robust, meaningful change, abroad and on the home front.

And moreover, how we might usefully go about that confrontation. As bell hooks advises, ‘only by becoming more fully aware [do] we begin to see clearly.’ A sentiment rippling through, nearly 30 years later, a conversation between Tricia Rose, Cornel West, and William Barber, with Reverend Barber observing that ‘Sometimes you have to first help people see the gravity of the problem, and then put a face on it, in order to mobilise.’

George Floyd is the most recent ‘face’ of America’s long-running campaign for racial justice, some 400+ years now. The face on our mural, defaced. The promise of a face: to help change our way of seeing the world, to see its injustices, to face our prejudices and privileges.

Thereupon, to execute a volte face, a sharp, swift paradigm shift in attitude and orientation. But in effacing the face — first the vandal, then the cover-up artists — we lost sight of the bigger picture, the chance to confront the brutalising realities of race and systemic racism (and other intersecting forms of structural violence). Moreover, for white allies, the opportunity to confront and interrogate the nature and expression of our allyship, so often scored with superficiality and pragmatism. 

George Floyd became the public ‘face’ of NI sectarianism and anti-Black racism

The defaced portrait on a Belfast wall saw George Floyd become the public ‘face’ of Northern Irish sectarianism and anti-Black racism too. Revealing the multifaceted quality of resistance to political and social change, local and global, and thus the intersectional activism required to dispel that resistance. (A reactionary nexus stretching to accommodate other oppositional standpoints, not least, immigration, feminism, LGBTQI+ rights, police abolitionism, and science.) And furthermore, bringing to the surface the synergistic direness of the situation facing those who wish to make the world a better place, at home and abroad.

That is, the ‘gravity of the problem’ confronting those working to bring the two dominant communities together, to bring down the labyrinthine network of ‘peace’ walls (material and ideological), to bring about local unity (viz. all publics, not just the two dominant white communities). All this is to say, to bring about inclusive, meaningful, and lasting peace and reconciliation. Steps we must surely take if we are to ever organise and mobilise the kind of deep, wholehearted transnational solidarity required to help bring about the ‘beloved community’ in the US and closer to home.

Steps we did not, however, take. Choosing instead to tread a familiar path; to cover-up not confront the time-honoured divisions facing us, safe within the (dis)comfort zone of our walled world. Not willing to risk ‘the road less traveled’ despite the new horizons we might have opened had we been bold enough to stray from our well-travelled byways. I say might, here, because, as Frost’s poem paradoxically suggests, choosing one path over another does not always guarantee different journeys nor our arrival at a different destination.

What makes ‘all the difference’, however, is how we choose to approach the way ahead; will we be path-followers, -finders, or -makers? ‘We do not’, as Audre Lorde teaches, ‘have to live the same mistakes over again if we can look at them, learn from them, and build upon them.’ Lorde’s ‘look’, to me, transcends the idea of observational or examinatory looking; it feels engaged, agentic, and confrontational. (Not full of hostility, but rather a radical form of confrontation that can help bring about revolutionary change.) 

Radical, participatory action would see the mural transcend the limits of a brick wall

Painting over the problem (the vandal’s mark) represents a top-down, surface level solution — after all, Belfast still had a #BLM mural to show off to the world — but the underlying problems remain. This is not to say that the mural should have been left vandalised, transitioning into something of a ‘teachable moment’. Just that its creators need not have rushed to shush it, to conceal it. Shamefacedly. Haphazardly. Thoughtlessly. Or so it seemed to me. The sting of the vandal’s mark is, I think, outmatched only by the stinging sense that we failed to reimagine our response to the vandalism and thereby to resurrecting the mural. (Or failed to even think in the first place that we should be reimagining our actions.)

Might we not have drawn upon the idea of participatory art, for instance? Artistic practice built to agitate, provoke, and awaken publics. So inspired, the mural’s creators — commissioners and artists — might then have thought to include people from all communities (historic and emergent) in the creative process of reviving the vandalised mural. Social action not artificially engineered from above, but a bottom-up, collective approach.

This kind of radical, participatory action would see the mural transcend the limits of a brick wall. Imagine, textured solidarity and protest: polyphonic, multi-authored, multi-layered artivism. Underpinning the creative impulse/action with supported discussion groups and awareness-raising sessions — focused on the matter in hand, racial injustice in the US, but thinking too about local issues around racism, militarised policing, colonialism, and system change — and community-organised diverse, inclusive (covid-safe) solidarity protests and marches would foment critical dialogue, awareness and understanding, and engaged empathy and solidarity. A difficult but rewarding process; one with no formal beginning nor ending, flowing beyond the painted wall, the street, the workplace, the home, and deep into the heart, and the ballot box too.

Our recuperative (mis)step lost us the opportunity to meaningfully confront the vandal’s destructive act — and thus our local and global differences — and generatively transform it. This time, yes, but perhaps not next time.