Until a few years ago, news about police officers in the USA killing a black man was hardly news. Thanks to increasing resistance from the black community, and especially by the Black Lives Matter movement, such killings have become world news, as has been the death of George Floyd and the court case against his assassin.

After years of marginalized local existence, the antiracist movement has taken international front stage in many ways:
• Influencing the publicity of large business corporations and the fashion industry.
• The U. S. Senate advances a bill addressing hate crimes targeting Asian-Americans, and for the first time in years, the debate about reparations for slavery has reached congress in the USA.
• Universities in the USA and the UK have begun to examine the relations of their founders or benefactors with slavery.
• Facebook now prohibits pictures of the blackface Zwarte Piet (Black Peter) children’s icon in the Netherlands, a country that finally begins to critically examine its colonial past and racist present with an exhibition in the famous Rijksmuseum.
• In the UK, an official report on racism has been broadly criticized for its denial of systemic, institutional racism.
• Following the global move against sexual harassment of #MeToo, black actors in several countries are protesting against the routine racist taunts by their colleagues.
• The racist and neo-colonial consequences of the Covid pandemic in minority communities and poor countries in the global south are being both reported and commented on.
• The global prevalence of racist hate speech in social media has been challenged socially as well as academically, and their powerful CEOs summoned to account for such abuse of power, earlier known from the pages of the British tabloids.
• And last but not last, the guilty verdict of the policeman who had murdered George Floyd.

From these global events one might conclude that some optimism is warranted about the resistance against racism, ethnicism and xenophobia. Yet there is still a long way to go from deeply ingrained, systemic racism to what should one day become systematic antiracism.