The fight for black people to, not only live, but also experience the same freedoms as their white neighbours isn't just an American cause, and that cannot be forgotten.

I'm going to tweet out a couple of examples from the UK that I know of...

Back in 2009, I lived in Chelmsford, Essex. Our next door neighbour's were from Jamaica originally (but their children were born in the UK). They were the only black family on the street and they definitely didn't get the same treatment from the other neighbours that we did...

After spending decades in the UK, they'd decided to move back to Jamaica. This involved a lot of moving of boxes and packages (can you already guess where this is going?)

One day, the husband/father returned home to find police outside his house.

Before he could say a word, they forced him to the ground while they searched his car. They then proceeded to search his house.

Again, he was on the ground at this point, with his white neighbours all watching, and his possessions being dumped onto the street...

After an absolute age, they eventually pulled him off the ground and released him, explaining that they'd had a tip this house was a drug den (from all those "suspicious" packages).

This raid happened in the middle of the day in broad daylight in front of this man's...

... friends and family. They were traumatised. And they couldn't help wonder which one of their 'friends' had called in this tip in the first place?

They sped up their plans to move after this. It had been made very clear that no matter what people said, they weren't welcome.

Another less dramatic, but by no means less important, incident was one a black former colleague of mine told me about the insane amount of times he'd been pulled over.

He was a year younger than me. Had had his license for only a few years and was a safe driver...

Yet he was routinely pulled over. In his first couple of years of driving, he'd been stopped more than six times.

And that was just because he lived in a relatively rural area. Had he been driving around the more built-up parts of Essex, he'd have been stopped a lot more.

Anyway, I saw this quote from Malcolm X being circulated earlier and it's fucking true so have it again