Black Lives Matter

Mea culpa, I’m sorry!

Nobody subscribes to this newsletter for breaking news analysis (I hope). But when you opened up my newsletter earlier, you probably thought I was pointedly ignoring what might well become the most significant civil rights movement since Moses parted the Red Sea — why, Dave, why?!

I’m rather ashamed to confess: ignorance.

I don’t read the news, don’t use any social media, don’t live with anyone else and — until an hour ago — had only spoken to a couple of friends this week (who apparently don’t read the news either, or at least didn’t want to talk about it).

You’ll probably find this quite hard to believe, but the first time I noticed that something monumental was happening outside my no news bubble was when a newsletter from Documentally dropped into my inbox earlier this evening.

(The second time was when I found out Piers Morgan is now a socialist. I’ve got a lot catching up to do…)

You guys are probably waaaaaaaaaaaay ahead of me on this one, but on the off chance that you find yourself in the same submersible, somewhere in the darkest depths of the Mariana Trench of awareness, Documentally has collected a whole ecosystem of video, audio and text on the Black Lives Matter movement.

When I first heard of the killing of George Floyd (of all places in a football news story), I made the mistake of classifying the tragedy as yet another ugly symptom of an American disease.

I’ve seen some pretty disgusting racism in my time — with refugees in Calais and Greece, but also in broad daylight on the high street when I lived in South London — but still I never believed that the lived experience for people of colour in Europe was anything like as bad as it was in the US.

I don’t want to make that mistake — complacent, complicit — again.

I’ll shut up now.

Much love,
dc