115: “ … I began to wake up from my racist sleepwalk.”

It wasn’t until George Floyd was brutally murdered (more than a year ago now) that I began to wake up from my racist sleepwalk. My partner’s (white) daughter (in her early thirties) was very upset by George Floyd’s murder and her upset made me think. And then I remembered that I’d bought Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad but I hadn’t read it. As I began to read, I began to understand that the simple fact of my white skin means that I have never been denied anything, never been denied access to anything, because of the colour of my skin: not a job, or a house, or a school, or a club, or a peaceful night’s sleep, or living in a particular street, or a partner, or a polite conversation with a police officer, or service in a shop, or a grant, or a loan, or a credit card, or access to emergency or medical services. Never, not once in my long (I’m 70) life has my white skin caused me to be denied one single thing. Instead, my white skin has granted me white privilege and my white privilege has denied people with black or brown skins the same privileges. The amount of melanin in a person’s skin should not be, should never have been, the arbiter of privilege. But it has been. I vow to serve the cause of antiracism, to becoming a white ally, for the rest of my life.