Protest

PROTEST.

During lockdown the world has been in more of an accord than we’ve seen in modern times, we’ve been at home, with family, looking at what is going on in our immediate environments in more of an intimate way, and we’re in sync. This energetically is really rare, most of the time we are busy in our lives and our focus is on getting through the tasks that lay before us, but what has happened during this pandemic which we’ve been speaking up on during all incarnations of my work online, is the racial injustices facing black and brown people in western societies.

This has been something from the first podcast I’ve ever made, to the work I do in beauty, that I have been fighting for and a lot of the guests I’ve invited onto the platform have been people who have really educated me on experiences not only in European environments but on a global scale, and this is the effect of white supremacy. Whether we celebrate monarchs in stolen jewels, we make laws and protest in halls built by slaves, whether we watch charitable organizations depict poverty only on brown faces or we see an exclusion of afro suitable products in stores entitled beauty - the setup is drip-fed biases that benefit those that are visually caucasoid. Looking white and having lighter eyes has enabled me to benefit despite the prejudices that encompass sexuality and gender expression, I have been given safe passage in areas that people of colour have not, and for that, I protest.

I think everyone remembers the utter soul impacting images of Sandra Bland and the captions on social media, that she was positioned after being murdered into an upright stance, to take a photograph as a mugshot to alleviate the crimes of the policemen involved. In an era where we get to see what’s happening in real-time, it’s shattered any type of rose-tinted spectrum we can possibly live under. This shit is happening too fucking often and in the spotlight of the west, whether the UK, Australia, France, the US, this is happening everywhere because black people are associated with fear. One of my friends Kola who I invited to speak here, has repeated in a plethora of interviews on the history of the black American and the timeline of events from West Africa to bondage, and her books have educated me on how the religious orders at the start of the south pacific slave trade would try and associate the word black, with dirty to prevent white men forming romantic relationships with black women, because this was actually a long story that we are taught in schools. This began as a tribal judiciary system where criminals were exchanged for arms, and that has been the true undercurrent for four hundred years. Private prisons are full of people unfairly imprisoned for white-collar crimes and we need to start talking about the impact on generations, the crime bills democratic candidates forged to divide the black family and the reality of what has caused the image of black people to be distorted.

No one is born with an irrational fear. We need to address the outlets that are underlining this fear, media, systemic and educational and tackle them one by one. There is absolutely no way in hell we are going to provide a suitable change if the way it’s handled is through a corrupt political system, we need to facilitate a strategic and longsighted plan of action to create infrastructures that enable everyone to have a love for each other despite our differences.

So I will leave this issue with that purge of thoughts and repeat that fear is something that can be overcome with love. We cannot let fear destroy any more lives.