Mathew Clay Freeman

…rump and Putin supporters don’t read the Guardian, so writing there is just reassuring our friends. We need to find a way to bridge from our closed groups to other closed groups, try to cross the ever widening social divides…rump and Putin supporters don’t read the Guardian, so writing there is just reassuring our friends. We need to find a way to bridge from our closed groups to other closed groups, try to cross the ever widening social divides.

At a local level in time people think things are fine, then things rapidly spiral out of control until they become unstoppable, and we wreak massive destruction on ourselves. For the people living in the midst of this it is hard to see happening and hard to understand. To historians later it all makes sense and we see clearly how one thing led to another. During the Centenary of the Battle of the Somme I was struck that it was a direct outcome of the assassination of an Austrian Arch Duke in Bosnia. I very much doubt anyone at the time thought the killing of a European royal would lead to the death of 17 million people.

We attempt to rise above our whiteness, but there is literally nowhere to go. There is no glass ceiling, no shackles, no cage containing us — our ancestors ensured that we would never need to fight for our right to exist in this world with their unprecedented savagery, with rape, torture, murder, with the establishment of power structures that value whiteness in any and all forms, with education that fiercely defends western ingenuity while ignoring the theft of cultures, with media that refers to POC as ‘minorities’, and with people, ordinary people, who refuse to confront their own whiteness and instead look to others for moral and tangible culpability.