Most Americans have not heard the name Henry Nowak. He was an 18-year-old British student who was stabbed to death by Vickrum Digwa in Southampton, England, last December. But his case—and the police bodycam footage that was released last night—could hardly be more disturbing. Police who attended the scene did not initially arrest the attacker—who was found guilty of murder last week. Instead, they handcuffed Nowak as he lay dying. All because he had been accused of racism. As the new footage reveals, Nowak uttered grimly familiar words as he was being arrested: “I can’t breathe.” In our Big Read today, Konstantin Kisin draws a direct line from the racial reckoning that started with those same words in Minneapolis in 2020 to the death of Henry Nowak. —The Editors
Cast your mind back exactly six years. It is the summer of 2020 and Britain is undergoing what its commentariat breathlessly described as a “reckoning.” The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, thousands of miles away, sent hundreds of thousands of British people into the streets. As American cities burned, across the pond, statues were toppled. Multinational corporations issued groveling statements. Police officers—British police officers, in British cities, policing British people—took a knee before British protesters. So did Keir Starmer, then leader of the opposition and now prime minister. So did every major soccer team in the country. People were fired, companies changed, a new code of acceptable behavior was drawn up. Life in Britain changed, if not quite as much as it did across the Atlantic.
The message that was repeated endlessly by politicians, journalists, and institutions of every stripe was unambiguous: Racism kills, and we will do whatever it takes to make sure it never happens again.
Ends today: The Free Press Community Sale
New subscribers to The Free Press get 20 percent off their first year.
Think for yourself, not by yourself.
Five years later, last December, an 18-year-old student named Henry Nowak was stabbed five times on a Southampton street after an altercation with a British Sikh man. As he lay bleeding, he told police officers who arrived at the scene exactly what had happened: He had been stabbed. Vickrum Digwa, who was standing nearby, and his brother told the officers something else: that Digwa had been the victim of a racist attack.
On the call to police, Digwa’s brother, Gurpreet, said to the dispatcher, “We’ve just been attacked by . . .”, paused, then finished, “someone racially.”
