1/ You don’t need to watch video of George Floyd crying out ‘I can’t breathe’ as he is killed or Amy Cooper, a white woman calling the police on a black man in Central, to see the echoes of Eric Garner crying out ‘I can’t breathe’, or the Central Park 5 brutalised & imprisoned.

2/ Frankly black people being killed on video - be it in Palestine, drowning in the Mediterranean, or on the streets of the US has become normalised. For every black person these images are utterly traumatising, the pain & anger is felt collectively as everyday it’s clear that

8/ As James Baldwin said ‘The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes... is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often.’

18/ We must remember words of James Baldwin “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” Our challenge is to fight the present, learn the lessons of the past, connect struggles & reimagine a different future.

7/ told it wasn’t the right sort of protest. They are only ever outraged when they see buildings are looted - never when lives are looted every day.

6/ Always demanding that we protest quietly for the right to live free from attack. Which of course means can you please just die quietly & stop disturbing us from business as usual. When Kaepernick took a knee or the Palestinians marched in Gaza for the right to return they were

9/The preservation of ‘white supremacy’ is why Trumps response 2 armed white men storming State capitols b/c they wanted ‘lockdown to end’ was 2call them ‘very good people’ in contrast 2 calling unarmed black protestors who want right to live ‘thugs’ & for the ‘shooting to start’

10/ If you think this is just Trumps America - remember that the UK black community was demonised in exactly same way when it rose up in Brixton, Toxteth, Handsworth, Tottenham, Southall. & that former PM Margaret Thatcher wanted 2 deploy armed police against the black community

3/ our lives don’t matter. Just as they haven’t mattered in the past & won’t matter in the future unless we act. Even when these murders are captured on film for all to see - even then it still it hasn’t brought justice. Which is why the call ‘No Justice, No Peace’ has long been

11/ The real question progressives should ask is ‘what will it take to stop the State using violence against Black people?’ & to support the right of black communities to defend themselves from this violence.’

13/ As Martin Luther King Jr said ‘I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government’