I have been quiet for a while lately because, frankly, this year is emotionally and psychologically intense. As if Brexit and Coronavirus were not enough, the world is now in upheaval – and rightly so – about racial discrimination and unjustified killings, especially by police forces who are supposed to protect us.
At first I felt uneasy about the protest given the pandemic, but somehow also in favour. One cannot look at pictures of George Floyd’s last few minutes of life and remain cold.
I struggled – and still do – to fully understand why this happened, I guess because I never lived in the US and don’t know their intrinsic culture other than from films, media and social media. I like to think that in the UK and in Europe things are different starting with the fact that in Great Britain most police officers don’t carry guns and generally speaking we have a wildly different gun culture in Europe.
I was desperately trying to make sense of it, to understand why things got so bad, when I stumbled upon this article:
In 1994, former Nixon aide and Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman proudly told writer Dan Baum that racial control and discrimination was in fact the purpose of the war on drugs.
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Over 5 decades ago political circles decided to lie and go to war – legally – with peaceful protesters and blacks. Let that sink in.
What we see in the media today now makes sense. Politicians and police have orchestrated this strategy so well, it is now deeply embedded in our culture – American and worldwide.
Understanding the root cause of this cultural behaviour allows us to understand how to counter it.
It’s about power, control and money.
But what can we do about it?
Keep filming and sharing videos and photos
It’s the video of George Floyd on the floor with 3 police officers on him, one kneeling on his neck suffocating him.
It’s the video from a by-stander showing a 75-year-old man falling in Bullafo, a video that changed the narrative from ‘he tripped and fell’ to ‘he was pushed by police and fell’.
Keep filming and sharing what you see happening.
Listen, learn and understand
These days I find it hard to read what the people I follow on social media say, but I do it because I am learning about the reality and details of racial discrimination. I am a white woman, I don’t know what it’s like to be black, but I want to learn and understand.
Use your money as your own powerful voice
- Look after your finances – if you have savings and investments you can afford to resign from a work where you don’t feel respected, take (unpaid) time off to go demonstrate, and donate to causes you believe in (Vestpod published a great list of US and UK organisations that support the BLM movement).
- Don’t buy from companies you don’t respect and who don’t respect you. Instead support people and companies that share your values.
- Support writers, film-makers, bloggers, artists, crafts persons of colour so that with your help they can keep the conversation flowing and don’t end up in a useless job just to pay their bills.
Vote for better political representation
You don’t feel represented well enough by your politicians? Change that by casting your vote at Every Single Election.
Women fought for centuries to acquire this right, just as blacks and poor whites before them. I vote at every election both for myself and for all the women before me who made sure I am allowed to vote now.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
Martin Luther King
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