Hey.
I was torn whether to write today or not. I know there’s a social media blackout today, and I wanted to support that, but I also know right back at the beginning of the Coronavirus outbreak I made a pledge to you that I’d be here every day until we got through the other side completely.
So today, I’m going to do what feels right, and run with my heart on what’s most important.
Sometimes the jokes don’t come.
I remember the first time I ever met a black kid.
Why?
Simply because where I grew up in Inverness in the Highlands, at the time there were no black families.
The first black kid I met was a guy called Freddy. He was a doctor’s son, and he just happened to be staying at the camping site in Alford the week we were there on holiday too.
If you know the site, you’ll know they have a walled garden, which is actually just more of a park with a stone border. Back then it was where kids were directed to play any kind of ball sport, presumably so the noise didn’t bother too many guests, and the balls didn’t shatter too many caravan windows.
I played with Freddy all week. At times we roped in Dads and other kids to make full eleven aside games. We ran ourselves into the ground and laughed ourselves hoarse.
And then he went back to Mount Florida, and I went home to Inverness, each with the other’s address to keep in touch. I’m not sure if we ever did. Maybe a couple of times but it fizzled out over a longer period. Life got in the way.
These days I just remember him as a kid I played with, and strangely, I never once thought of him as black right up until I started writing this and forced myself to try and recall.
Because kids don’t see skin colour, or certainly they don’t perceive any negative attached to one colour or another. They simply see another kid to kick a ball with and have some fun.
Racism is a learned behaviour.
In 2008, my family holidayed in Houston, Texas at my brother-in-law’s. I remember being so excited I would be there for the American Election and the chance to see Barack Obama become President.
I don’t know if you remember at the time, it seems a world away now, but there was a real sense of optimism and hope. Slogans collectively drummed from the podiums reverberated around the stadiums…”Yes we can. Yes We Can….YES WE CAN”. “Change you can believe in.”
A campaign that was crowdfunded before crowdfunding was on the map. Small donations dripped, then flowed, then flooded in. This was the start of a movement. The world was going to be irreversibly altered for the betterment of all people.
In shopping centres in Houston, I spotted merchandise like this.
I really felt I was there when the world was on the cusp of becoming a better place.
And then someone told me just before election night, that if Obama were in Houston, the good ol’ boys he worked with, would, given the chance, tie him to their car bumpers and drive in opposite directions.
“It wasn’t their fault”, he said, “it’s just how they’ve been raised”.
Raised on hate.
Even then, on election night, as he spoke to thousands, open air, at a park in Chicago, hope and opportunity filled me more than dread.
This was a possibility to unite.
I, like millions, thought the world had finally turned a corner. That a nation with a past as hate-filled and racist as any, had universally risen up and voted for a new, better future.
But history, and right now in the present, have shown I was wrong.
If anything, behaviour which remained largely in the darkness for a long time is now burning in the light.
Division is rife and hatred is the fuel.
And for what?!
Because people who have a different skin colour simply want the chance to be treated like those who are white – to be equals.
It’s incredibly difficult for me to talk with authenticity on this because I am a white man, who’s never suffered racism in his life.
But if people EXACTLY like me don’t speak up for change and try to affect it in some way, will it ever stop? Will we ever move on?
Children are the connection through all of this.
Born perfect. The world imprints upon them. Maybe instead of teaching them we should try and be more like them.
No judgement. No hatred. Just finding some other kid to kick a ball with.
There are things you never truly appreciate until you have a child in your life.
“….where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”
Martin Luther King wasn’t asking for freebees or a foot up for his kids. He simply wanted them to be at the same starting line as everybody else in the human race.
I have a dream as well. My dream is that I help raise kids who don’t see colour as anything other than it is, a beautiful mix of blends and textures, accents and backgrounds, religions and traditions. An opportunity to learn more, not to judge, shun or revile.
That as adults they can looks back on this period, thankful that we’ve learned from it, find it bizarre that movements such as Black Lives Matter ever had to exist, any more than World Women’s Day has to exist.
If privileged white men are the problem, if I am the problem – then I want to be part of the solution.
And that leads me to possibly the most powerful thing I’ve seen today….
In a world so quick to judge, take a breath…..
Be a positive force for those you influence in the world.
Maybe then we can reach a place where we can truly say without fear of rebuke or repercussion – ALL Lives Matter.
Thanks for reading.
Stay safe x
Sociable Distance 
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