The Black Lives Matter era is over. It taught us the limits of diversity for diversity’s sake | Nesrine Malik

Hastily established racial equality schemes are being shuttered. What survives is a movement that's achieving real change

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.