The summer of 2020 saw the largest black-led protests in UK history. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets across Britain, primarily focused on the ongoing problem of police racism. Britain had not seen black-led protests on this scale since the early 1980s, and this paper examines some of the impediments to radical black action and thought during that thirty year period. The liberalisation of black politics the 21st century is analysed through the language of diversity, hate crime, privilege and unconscious bias. These processes offer a window into how grassroots collective action against state power can be displaced by individualised policies which focus on racial prejudice. The paper goes on to argue that police brutality is always a point of antagonism that invests black social life with recurrent sites of contestation. In other words, policing is where moments flare up to shed light on other issues. These moments include specific case of police violence, but also the everyday forms of state power and control which criminalise black spaces, black lives and black cultures. It is this direct antagonism with the state that enables a more radical black politics to break away from the limitations of liberal anti-racism, culminating in protest movements like Black Lives Matter.