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The answer is clear. It is because BLM feeds into the same wretched culture of victimhood and oppression that has been cynically championed by the left for decades. By continually caricaturing black people as perpetual victims of systemic white racism it infantilises them by depicting us as stupid, helpless and impotent cultural punchbags, forever crushed beneath externalised discriminatory forces beyond our control.

It is a grotesque form of reanimated cultural imperialism that envisages a world in which every black action can only ever be a reaction to white provocation, as if we were little more than flaccid puppet minstrels forever tied to the string of white mastermind omnipotence. In so doing, black people are absolved of our need to take responsibility for our own actions and futures and must instead await salvation by accepting that our own freedom and empowerment are not ours to claim but a white establishments to give.

Oddly, it is a cult enthusiastically energised by successful black personalities, with the likes of John Boyega, Afua Hirsch and Stormzy absurdly claiming that the society in which they gained their own success is somehow systemically inclined to withhold it from all their black peers. And thiscult is founded on a toxic crucible: slavery. Martin Luther King talked of freedom far more than he talked of slavery. Yet now the civil rights lexicon has been reversed and slavery is now the historical deadweight from which BLM and its liberal enablers refuse to let black people escape.

Yes, the Atlantic slave trade was a horrendous evil. But to claim that a 400-year-old event that adapted barbarous Arab and African practices that had already been in place for thousands of years is responsible for unilaterally framing the life choices and experiences of black people today is as preposterous as suggesting that cruise ship bookings are still hampered by the Titanic. It is also a claim that might attain more integrity were it accompanied by even a scintilla of concern for the estimated 40 million people worldwide trapped in slavery today.

BLMs twisted narratives have been underscored by a liberal establishment and mainstream media that deploys identity politics to objectify and homogenise black people. In so doing it offensively lumps all black people into a vast cultural tick-box in which, by magical virtue of our pigmentation, we have all been gifted with the telepathic ability to think, eat, act and talk exactly the same way.

Yet by ignorantly conflating the richness and diversity of the black experience into a single diminished entity, patronising, reductionist terms like the black and dreaded BAME community invariably flow and perpetuate an embattled sense of otherness that merely succeeds in further separating and marginalising black people from mainstream society.

And, like all good liberal pogroms, this homogenisation is specifically designed to disenfranchise individuality, sever the links between black people and our brothers and sisters in other racial groups and, most importantly, to achieve the hallowed liberal goal of glorifying difference. And glorifying difference is exactly what BLM and the Marxist junta it seeks to establish is all about.

True integration - where character matters more than colour and George Floyd could just as easily have become a cardiologist as a criminal - was the utopian vision on which Martin Luther King based his dream, and it should be the goal of all mature Western democracies. But celebratingdifference is intolerable to a guilt-ridden liberal elite groggy on the opiate of multiculturalism. Instead it embraced the tyranny of diversity to obscure integration and emphasise what divides us rather than what unites us.

We now see this tyranny being prosecuted in a McCarthyan culture war that seeks to expunge white post-imperialist liberal guilt and self-loathing by unilaterally imposing its revisionist, puritanical values on society and toppling all ideological dissenters from Gone With the Wind to historical statues. But make no mistake, this nave identinarian purge could not just incite the odious far right but sow enough resentment and division to set backrace relations by years.

Racism is real and horrific and must be rooted out wherever it is found. But the UK, and England in particular, has offered sanctuary and prosperity to generations of immigrants who in turn have helped to transform it into one of the most welcoming and inclusive societies in the world. Moreover the way to defeat racism is to not throughthe divisive rhetoric and crass militancy of a movement that seeks to commoditise black suffering to perpetuate the divisive, defeatist myth of white privilege.

The answer is for black people not to define ourselves by how others may define us but to realise that we and we alone are the key to empowering our lives and claiming the freedom that is everyones right. Yes, of course the lives of George Floyd and all black people matter. But so too did the life of Tony Timpa. And the life of the innocent unborn black baby Floyd threatened to execute in its mothers womb.

Until black people take responsibility for their role in ending and oppressing the lives of other black people and until the regressive liberal elite realises that sowing division and resentment will lead to genuinesystemic inequality, then black lives will only continue to matter on the rare occasions when white people take them.

Ike Ijeh is an architect and critic

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Why does Black Lives Matter only care about black lives when white people are threatening them? - Telegraph.co.uk