Lewis Hamilton has emerged in recent weeks as a figurehead in the Black Lives Matter movement. In an eloquent, thoughtful essay for The Sunday Times last month, the Formula 1 driver wrote about his lifelong experience of racism in Britain; about the heart-breaking warnings that black fathers like his know that they need to give their sons; about his recognition that the murder of George Floyd, despite seeming a faraway occurrence in a foreign land, was in fact a moment that demanded a global awakening to the systemic racism, witnessed and experienced by every person of colour across the world.

He arrived at the Paddock for F1s resumption wearing a BLACK LIVES MATTER T-shirt. He also wore a chain locked in a padlock around his neck, a clear reference to the collars worn by generations of African slaves.

Heres the problem for Hamilton. Slavery is still with us. In fact, more people are thought to live enslaved today than at any point in recorded history. Most of them are still people of colour. And many are held in nations which happily host Grand Prix tournaments to celebrate their wealth. In 2016, one Lewis Hamilton notoriously voiced his appreciation for his hosts at the Bahrain Grand Prix, arriving in a thobe, the traditional dress of the Bahraini royal family, and tweeting: Nothing but love and respect for this culture, and Bahrain!! Feeling royal. In Bahrain, 1.9 people in every thousand is thought to be a slave. The royal family has been repeatedly accused of abusingslaves.

In Bahrain, as in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and most of the other Arab states in which Lewis Hamilton has happily raced, the overwhelming majority of these slaves are South Asian or South East Asian. The denial of their human rights is enabled by entrenched racism and colourism which preaches the natural servitude of inferior races. Bahrain, to its credit, nominally abolished the Kafala System (which effectively legalised slavery under the guise of bonded labour) in 2009, ahead of many of its Arab peers. Baby steps, eh?

How much does this matter? There are some commentators who would love nothing more than to suggest this negates every word of Lewis Hamiltons activism. Thats grotesquely unfair. Listen to Hamilton talk about his deep, lived experience of racism and its trauma, and you will know that there is no justification for dismissing his pain. While he may now have the advantage of talent and success something for which he has worked hard he is brave to make racism a story in the money-grubbing world of Formula 1, in which white men still own the corporate capital, and no sponsor or host is keen to draw attention to the sports blind spots on social justice. He will lose sponsors and money for taking this stand. He deserves our good faith.

One of the deepest, nastiest problems of todays polarised public conversation is the willingness of agitators on the alt-right or the hard-left, often masquerading as journalists, to try to catch out activists who have made the mistake of campaigning only against one issue instead of all of them, or campaigning now instead of years ago. Far too often, on this particular subject, the long history of slavery in the Arab world is used as a distraction from the Wests culpability for years of slavery.

To my particular horror, I frequently see bad actors trying to set up descendants of Holocaust survivors and of the transatlantic slave trade as competitors, as if to compete for the exceptionality of their trauma. (One could spot elements of this divisive trick when a columnist at a right-wing tabloid pointed out last week that Hamilton drives for Mercedes, a company which exploited Jewish slave labour during the Nazi regime.) That is not my intention here.

The better lesson is that we are all capable of being hypocrites. We have all, like Hamilton, espoused a social cause without necessarily checking that our historic actions and words have been consistent. I know I have. When it comes to modern slavery, its particularly easy to look away.

This week, were still seeing exposs about the slave-like conditions alleged in garment factories in Leicester factories which supply dirt-cheap clothes at prices many of us find far too convenient to question. There is a sensitive conversation to have here about race, which too easily risks being appropriated by the hate-mongers. (Most of the factories which have been the subject of these exposs are run by members of ethnic minority communities, but we should pause before we assume thats a complete picture.

Around the world, many victims of human trafficking are migrants who are most easily lured by those who share their home culture and language; on a global scale that doesnt make this crime the province of any particular race.)

Modern slavery is all around us but most of us dont look. Im too poor a driver failed my test twice to have Hamiltons chances of driving at the Bahrain GP. But Im sure, like him, Ive benefited from the labour of modern slaves without recognising it.

For many of us, that exploitation lies in the supply chains of favourite products. A few months ago, a report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute made clear that Chinese concentration camps, in which genocide is being perpetrated against the Muslim Uighur population, have been supplying Western brands with components made by Uighur slave labour. Many of these enslaved people, like African American slaves before them, work in the production of cotton. Cotton produced in the Xinjiang region ends up in clothing made by some of the largest companies around. (Naturally, all of these companies deny using slave labour.)

The supply chain taints the cheapest products bought by the poorest among us, and luxury goods marketed at the super-rich.

This week, calls for a boycott of Chinese products are growing louder, due both to national security concerns about the surveillance capabilities of the tech company Huawei, and the atrocious wrecking of Hong Kongs former democratic freedoms. Boris Johnson has announced that Huawei components must be removed from British 5G networks by 2027.

But global supply chains are always hard to disentangle and theres always a cost: Philip Jansen, head of BT, warned before the announcement that this would be almost impossible without major outages and new security vulnerabilities. Cutting out Chinese-owned labour from the consumer market on items like fashion would be as complex.

What can we do? Like Hamilton in Bahrain, most of us could use some self-examination: Ive been unimpressed recently to see white friends who regularly holiday in Dubai posting social media statements about racism and the toxic legacy of the slave trade. If you want to shop ethically, one option is to check out TISCReport.org, which publishes registers of companies that have declared their supply chains under the Modern Slavery Act. But in an era of complex global supply chains, weve all been tainted at some point by unethical consumption. By acknowledging that mass hypocrisy, we can begin to do better together.

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When it comes to modern slavery, many of us turn a blind eye - iNews