#blacklivesmatter racism is a human problem

if you're darker than a caucasian, then you're black no matter you're ancestry/cultural history, because that's how white society will view you.
My wife( Bethnal Green born, East Ham breed has be saying something like this for some time. She is of south Asian heritage. Been brewing for some time but I’m stoked that she won’t take this anymore. Last year she said from now on my racism tolerance is 0%.There is a lot more to all of that but not gonna do a massive post. Of course I should have been the person to say she should not have any tolerance but sadly
I was not.

Allowing black kids to access higher education for free would be a start especially in institutions like Oxford and Cambridge. Equity not equality is for me far more important

Apologies, I don’t think you can see what part is a quote. First 3 lines is what I’m trying to quote.

Tyres and handlebars and experiences of riding bikes have much less peril

Not trying to be snitty, but very few of your recent posts are about cycling or are cycling related. A lot of them are in threads that relate to politics and society. I'm sure you can find a way to engage meaningfully and sensitively with this conversation.

Thanks for your advocacy, you don’t owe us this but your insight is powerful and appreciated.

My own perspective is that this is a white problem, and needs to be owned and addressed as such. I am not racist is not enough. We need to defend and stand with our kin.

I would advise anyone here afraid to post to ask the advocates here for advice. Dialogue is paramount, and this thread has shown to be a safe space for growth.

It's a pretty old film but babylon addresses the institutional racism in the police 🚔

all good sources above akela and afua hirsch are really good sources

I agree with respect to equity over equality but surely one leads to the other?

I know that you were providing an off-the-cuff response to my comments but means-testing tuition fees with a bias towards race would prove contentious.

Were reparations to be applied I'd hope that they were extremely precise to the point of pettiness.

I think that I'm derailing slightly - once more thanks for starting the thread.

It's an interesting one because I do not 'feel' black and nor do I think society views me that way. I've often felt ticking any box that puts me in BAME for stats purposes is a distraction and dilution - I make places diversity stats look good, I make people feel better about not being racist, but the truth is (IMO etc) that I occupy space that should be for others - black, brown, anyone who challenges the safe norm. Often I feel that white people pretend I'm white. Except when they need to look around for a voice or person of colour - and then I'm a safe candidate. I've been asked explicitly to take part in things 'for diversity' but I don't threaten the status quo. I keep things comfy. Is it as simple as the fact that I'm light-skinned? Yeah I do think that's a factor, a bigger one than people would like to think. But it's also the way I dress and talk. I tell you what, I also smile a hell of a lot more than I did when I was younger. Sometimes I forget, and people still get the glare.
Edit: ^this sounds super passive. I acknowledge that it's on me to not keep things so comfy and it's something I'm working on.

Good call. Wasn’t it Brinsley Forde from Aswad? Shot in and around Brixton

I'm not sure how relevant to other posters this is, but

NASCAR has banned Confederate flags from its events and properties.

https://twitter.com/NASCAR/status/1270819350644211719?s=20

I understand(well, not from own experience)what your are talking about. My wife being brown....but you know not too dark, does seem to make it easier for white people to deal with. Well until it comes to promotions, good service at restaurants, being taken seriously in general. It seems that she is fine until she speaks up or trying to be "smart"( she is damn smart, well spoken and earns a heap more money than me ....and for good reasons). As I have come to understand and see things as long as you as a BAME person assimilates and try to be as white as you can be the less shit you will have to take......but make no mistake you will still have to take a whole heap of shit every single day. Oh and she didn't smile a lot in public when we first met either.....she still doesn't. She needs to keep that guard up for a reason. 0% tolerance is the only way forward but thats on mine and all other white peoples shoulders to sort out.

Yep it was. Shot mainly in Brixton and surrounding areas with some shots in soho/central an too. One of the best soundtracks to a film ever imo, warrior charge gives me shivers every time it comes in.

Slowly been showing it to various friends over the years and prob on round 4 myself. . Needs to be watched if anyone hasn't seen it yet. Well worth finding/renting a HD version of the film too so you can see the grain from the film clearly and plugging in some decent speakers to hear the bass properly.

Thanks for the thread and thanks for all the links for reading and watching and listening I keep trying to educate myself.

3am prob isn't the best time to be writing this but I think its relevant to this thread as Babylon sparked lots of emotions when I watched it for the first time. Below also relates to some of the above comments. Especially @almac68 mentioning how they are a "Londoner" part.

My parents are from different ends of Latin America, I was born in London. My skin is far from white, much more on the brown side in the summer, so was always subject to unnecessary questions from the police during "routine stop and search days" in the 2000's. They always had a racial undertone with me which was obvious, asking the classic "where are you from?", responses of, London or Archway and England followed by a laugh would lead to the officers getting annoyed. I kept deflecting it with whatever rubbish I could come up with until it got boring. Also the "What country are you from?" was another regular. My reply was always the same "why does it matter... where are you from??".

I was always treated differently by police compared to my white middle or working class mates. They mainly wore tighter jeans and looked less hip-hop than me, they hardly ever got put in cuffs for a stop an search and sometimes weren't even searched!! which was good as they prob had quite a bit of that high grade on them back then anyways haha...

I had a lengthy discussion once with the technician at my uni about what I "called myself". So when talking about my family history to her, I said to her that I never felt "English" and would never want to identify as English or even British really. I would say to people I was British as a last resort and legal reasons but always pushed to tell people I am a Latino/Latin American Londoner. But when I said the latter, people would always lead to questions of why I spoke English so well and where was I born. My answers would lead to people telling me, "but your English then." To which I always replied, "No."

The technician couldn't really comprehend why I still wouldn't want to call myself English. She's a very very intelligent person but was very proud of being English, which I suppose blinded her a bit to the true reality of what most non white people have experienced here in the U.K.
Further down the line I would then go on to say "why would I want identify as English when the police are racist, English football hooligans/fans are racist, most white english people outside of London are racist, the country as a whole is racist etc etc." Over-generalisations I know. I also explained my experience of the police alongside other issues with the government to try to give merit to what I was saying. Also, around that time time I had just been to Dartmoor and on the way to the toilet in a random village pub I saw a pretty much life sized black face servant statue.. utterly shocked to see something like that in real life and in this day an age, we all left and I couldn't really comprehend how fucked it was until a few days later when I was back in London. So that didn't help my views of England outside of London.

Eventually I had to finish the discussion with a simple "I am a Londoner and thats it." ending. But she seemed quite disappointed with it all. I don't know but I just could never see myself wanting to or being proud to be British or English.

Anyways, its late and I don't really know what I was trying to say in the writing above anymore.
But I just want to show solidarity as a Londoner.

Massive respect to @chokalateboywonder for starting this thread.

Feels a bit trivial to post this question after the post above, but this feels like the right place to ask...

What's an engaging response to a relative commenting in relation to the protests, "Well I bet they're not socially distancing".

(I understand that lots of the demos say they are, but this doesn't seem to be reflected in the media coverage)

Thanks.

Because the protests are essential work to change our society.

/edit
removed because there's a far better answer further down the page.

Yep, that’s the one

Thanks for starting the post, much needed...

Couple of links to learn a bit more about some of the terms that often come up.

What are micro aggressions?

Harvard implicit association bias
(Gaming the test doesn't mean you're "above" implicit bias - we're all human, implicit bias is part of what makes us who we are)

I believe Anthony Joshua asked if the people that were expressing concerns over SD at the protests were focusing the same energy on people going to the beach, parks etc. If not then why?

Not sure if relevant but it would be interesting to know what the daily foot fall in a large supermarket is atm. The one time I've been, once people were past the entrance barrier they sure as shit were not making much effort to SD or wearing masks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVIhRvkT8kg

@hugo7
I think I would reply:

This government's failure to address racism parallels its failure to address the pandemic. The fact that one can be changed by us as a society means we must strive to do so. Covid is visible, it is immediate. The human brain can envisage this with ease.
Racism is malignant and hidden, its effects spread through and across generations, but these effects are just as (if not more so) damaging to health, wealth and social inequality.

People don't (?won't) see it unless we have a reason to see it, and as such this movement is vital, necessary and important.

From my own POV- I have failed to be as anti-racist as I should be. My own background and our collective experiences after 2001 should have instilled greater responsibility in my actions.
The data released by the NHS in 2018 about pay discrepencies, coupled with WINLTWPAR and a few other resources have helped me understand and spurred me towards better actions, but my relative ongoing inaction is unacceptable.
I will do better.

Don't worry I'm not denying racism. It's more just a musing on the subtleties. I don't "try" and be white, or assimilate, or whatever. But my existence is not perceived as a threat to person or status quo in any comparable level to if I was black. It is used, undeniably, to make people and organisations feel that they are diverse and non-racist at minimal effort. Anyway, bit of a navel-gazing diversion on my part.

Stef who used to be on here wrote something similarly recently

https://medium.com/@steflaihk/i-am-not-white-but-i-benefit-from-white-privilege-f4c0eb3f9c27