What Allyship means in the BLM Movement Struggle

 

 Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced

                                                         James Baldwin

     In an interview I gave back in the summer of last year, a student journalist asked me whether I felt safer in Europe than I would, had I been situated in the USA. This interview happened in the wake of Georg Floyd’s hideous murder that saw protests and civil unrest in major corners of the globe. This question is not new to me. I have been previously asked if I was grateful for the opportunities this country has provided by people who call this place home, as if oblivious that such a strange concept as racism would exist in Europe. Yes, it does.

   And when George Floyd lay helplessly struggling to breathe because of that knee, that feeling of helplessness resonated with me. Most of us ‘BIPOCs’ have been and are in one way or the other structurally knelt on. We constantly have to prove to Whiteness that we deserve to be here. Sometimes even when qualified, we are trusted the least. Like author Amiri Baraka once said, to be black is “the torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.” 

     But how do we change this European complacency of racism?  It does not need to knee someone to death to talk about the obvious existential racism and discrimination. And allyship does not only mean going to a protest and going back to your privilege(s). Start with your environment such as families and jobs, if not raising awareness, call them out because as far as Europe and my black body is concerned, ‘I still can’t breathe.’

 

    Ps. I consciously used inverted commas on the term BIPOC because some part of me finds this term disturbing. I wrote an article on it here http://sitieneikiprono.blogspot.com/ ‘I am not a Person of Colour.’

     The below articles act as a reminder of the grave urgency of the quest to an equitable and just world. 

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-style-civil-rights-protests-come-to-europe-george-floyd-black-lives-matter/

https://www.socialeurope.eu/black-lives-matter-in-europe-too