Footage of the brutality & protests in the US is horrific: more examples of the terrible injustices that led there. But the really appalling vision of America right now is a peaceful middle class suburban neighbourhood where people are going about their lives as normal

No one should wake up comfortable and at ease right now unless they are deeply engaged with issues of inequality, oppression & race whichever side of the Atlantic we live on. we should be horrified by so much of our “normal” existence

We have many members of parliament (not least our PM) with histories not just of racist comments but of deeply racist policies & events from the last few years - Windrush & Grenfell made the headlines but there are many more - that don’t allow us any complacency

And we have allowed - encouraged - appalling levels of inequality to develop for so many communities. We often mistake politeness and niceness for true integrity & decency. It’s easy to feel we’re on the right side of history if we’ve never said or done anything explicitly racist

But many of us - me - have passively benefitted all our lives from racist and discriminatory practices, however invisible they may be to us. What ever our privilege we should be using to it remove barriers for the people around us

This is a small but nice practical example from my friend https://twitter.com/maxjlhardy/status/1212703770930487299?s=21 https://twitter.com/maxjlhardy/status/1212703770930487299

The pictures in the first tweet are from the NYT property section last week. I don’t know anything about these people’s lives but the article was about getting out of the big city to escape the pandemic. Mostly white (privileged) flight https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/realestate/coronavirus-escape-city-to-suburbs.amp.html