This will be scheduled and posted at a time when I feel it is right to do so.

I woke up yesterday morning to another hate-fuelled massacre, let me call a spade a spade, the El Paso shooting was a terrorist act from a white supremacist. The conversations and quite rightly have started around gun regulations in the US.

I could help myself from thinking that gun regulations aim to provide a sticky plaster around the whole issue*?

What causes this hate? Who is responsible for these shootings?

People carrying atrocities are held personally responsible, yes, this certainly is not a vindication or a plea for mercy with concerns to that. I wholly believe that these people should be brought to justice and be held responsible for their actions.

Now, come with me here, let’s move away from the individual and shift the lens to society.

Activity 1

I would like us all to look at the racist to anti-racist spectrum and judge where ‘society’, people on the whole falls. The majority of people making up the society. This is available free here.

I would suspect you would not conclude that society is anti-racist from the above diagram.

White supremacy is typically associated with burning crosses and white hoods, this ‘toxic association’ is problematic (future blog coming September 2019).

The diagram below is the pyramid of white supremacy.

Each tier of the pyramid is based on the layer below it. It cannot exist without the structural integrity of the whole pyramid.

 

• Do you engage in the colour blind narrative?

 

• Do you show white solidarity: stay silent when racism happens because it makes your life easier?

 

• Do you deny the existence of white privilege?

 

• Do you actively engage in the white saviour complex?

 

• Do you support immigration policies that disproportionately impact on people of colour?

 

• Do you choose to be apolitical to not engage in politics?

 

• Do you engage in conversations which lead with ‘the not all white people’?

 

• Do you think racism is ever due to the actions of people of colour?

 

• Do you think and propagate the myth that we live in a post-racial society?

 

• Do you think pro-black initiatives are ‘racist’?

 

• Do you take part appropriation of culture?

 

• Do you enforce hair policies which disproportionately impact on people of colour?

 

• Do you choose to be complicit in an ethnocentric curriculum?

 

There is no such thing as ‘not racist’. There are only two options racist and anti-racist.

 

If you fall on that pyramid. You are adding to the issues. You are holding up the structures.  The impact of your actions are cumulative and ultimately lead to the acts of atrocities, murder and genocide.

Yes. we are responsible. Yes, I’m saying we’re promoting a white supremacist agenda.

If this makes you uncomfortable. I am glad, now the choice is clear. Choose your side because the days of us having it both ways are over.

*As I am born and bred in the UK; I am obviously not in favour of guns in any form.