Being restrained by a police officer at 5 y/o because I walked out of a shop with a toy fireman’s hat on by accident.

At 6, be forced by my year teacher to stay behind for a same day detention because she didn’t believe the art homework I was so proud of had been drawn by me. I had to do it again in front of her. After 20 minutes she conceded she could see I had done it but I had to stay anyway

- Same teacher showed my work for a different project to another student’s family, they copied it verbatim, guess which child ended up in detention.

- Being told my name and face didn’t match by an ex Prime Minister

- Being called a slave by my history teacher

Have another teacher tell me in front of my whole class that my mother was illiterate and my name was misspelled because of it. The be punished because of my subsequent reaction.

- Being the only one in a group of friends (only black person in the group) to be questioned by police about why I was playing in a small park outside my friend’s house on his birthday. His parents had to resolve the matter

- Carrying my violin in school uniform on way home from and being stopped n searched and questioned over the ownership of the item because frankly, ‘we don’t see boys like you doing things like that.’

- Less than 3 miles from where Stephen Lawrence was murdered have a group of white men pull up to my bus stop and threaten me with weapons if they saw me in the area again.

- Be the only one in a group of teenage boys, (same again) to be stopped, questioned, and had details taken when playing tag on the heath in Blackheath.

- Be stopped and further questioned at Heathrow when returning from a school trip in Gambia, again I was the only black persons in the group.

All of this by 18 years old, and whilst very much entrenched in a proximity to systemic whiteness that my mother sought to create to protect me.

This is respectability, the delusion that appealing to tropes of British civility (private education, classical languages, classical instruments, dining ettiquete etc) will elevate you to a place where your humanity somehow becomes immune.

Firstly, don’t get it twisted, you can do any of this stuff and love it for the sake of your own enjoyment but it’s the undertaking of it as a form of appeasement, a going belly up to illustrate harmlessness, docility, and submissiveness that it becomes dangerous.

Secondly, this mindset does nothing to help your community as you become a pawn, an example to be held up whilst being used to further beat your community down.

Thirdly, and most importantly ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. The delusion that respectability politicking your way through life can make you some sort of double agent is pure fantasy.

You don’t over come facism with proximity to facism, you don’t overcome gender inequality by getting closer to those who create the inequality. Head on confrontation (non-violent or violent is a conversation for another time) is how change is earned.

When Hitler threatened the status quo of the Western World, there was no cosying up to him. I recall the opposition being quite clear in fact. Why? Because existence was threatened and something had to be done. Unfortunately, history shows us that given freedoms are rarely free

Freire teaches us that true freedom and liberation cannot be given. It must asserted in the forming of a new construct that frees all from oppressive structures. That means the oppressed as much as the oppressor or those who find themselves in the oppressor class

yet fighting for change. This is why there are protests, this is why people won’t be silent, because abolition, desegregation, ending of empire rule, civil rights, are all gifted freedoms that are from perfect and serve as appeasements whilst keeping the core of modern western

society, the white supremacy upon which colonial Europe and colonising America built their powe upon remains in tact and able to mutate into new form.

If this is uncomfortable or rankling to read, tough! Imagine leaving within it and resisting its most benial impacts upon you on a daily basis your entire life, let alone its more dangerous violent ones.