With Hope Powell
I was lucky. When I was travelling the world as a cricketer or commentator, if I saw, heard or felt that threatening atmosphere of racism I always knew I would soon be on a plane back to a place where I could feel the freedom of not being judged by the colour of my skin. I didn’t have to live with it. I learned about racism instead through reading books written by other people and listening to stories told by other people. Some people live it and every day I thank the Lord that I was saved that experience. Everybody else learns about it. Or, rather, should learn.
I am still learning and again I thank the Lord that opportunity has come in my mature years. Those who know about my more impetuous playing days (I was reprimanded for kicking over the stumps in a fury in a Test match in New Zealand) know what I’m talking about.
May 12, 1976, was a day I will never forget. I was twenty-two years old and I was in the first twelve months of my career as an international sportsman. So young, in fact, that the idea of being a full-time cricketer was not even a consideration. I remember it not for sporting achievement or even the realisation that I had ‘what it takes’ (I wasn’t even selected to play in the match), but because it was a critical stage in my journey to understanding what racism was and how it manifested itself.
The West Indies were playing a friendly match against Surrey at The Oval in south London. This was my first tour to England and I had played only nine times for our nation of islands. It was a warm-up match, designed for us to find fitness and rhythm. We were just tuning up for the big contests to come against England which didn’t start until early June, almost a month later. In short, the result didn’t matter to us. But it mattered to a hell of a lot of other people. And I was about to find out why.
On the last day Surrey set us a target of 239 to win in about three hours. Clive Lloyd, our captain, told us that we were not to attempt to win the game. He wanted our players to get used to playing in English conditions. The objective was for any batsman who got to the crease to just spend some time getting acclimatised. Nobody raised an eyebrow because Clive was the boss and we knew what our main aim was on the tour. Clive was always planning ahead and he is to this day revered and respected for being one of the finest leaders on a cricket field.
There were a large number of West Indians in the ground ready to cheer and whistle us on to victory. And when we started our innings, they were as loud and partisan as usual. Until they realised we were not trying to win the game. The whole mood in the stand to the left of the pavilion changed dramatically. They had come up, mainly from Brixton where so many West Indians lived in London, to celebrate a West Indies win. So they booed. And they heckled. And as the ‘contest’ wore on they became more and more agitated.
I couldn’t work out why they were so furious and why they just didn’t pack up and leave since they were so unhappy with our approach. But they stayed right until the end of the match – and beyond, as we found out much later when we headed for the team bus. As per usual, at the end of the game we hung around in the dressing room having the usual chat and a drink or two with some of the opposition members. That was the norm those days and, with some of the West Indies squad regular participants in the English domestic scene, there were many from both teams quite familiar with each other. I don’t remember exactly what time we all started going downstairs to get on our team bus but it was fairly dark, even with the long evenings just about starting to set in for the English summer. Lo and behold, as the first members of the team emerged from the pavilion, the heckling and booing started again.
I was bemused. What is wrong with these people? I thought. I turned to Gordon Greenidge, who had only just graduated to senior player status and was someone who had played in England for years, and asked him what was going on. His answer was like an alarm going off. ‘You wouldn’t understand, Mikey. These guys [they were all men awaiting our appearance] want us to win every game we play in this country.’ Gordon explained, though not in huge detail, what West Indians living in this country were going through at the time. They were being racially abused. They were being made to feel inferior. They felt like second-class citizens. But if we won, they felt like somebody. They could hold their heads high as they walked the streets, or went into their workplaces because they were from the same place as these guys who excelled on the cricket field. They felt that they were equal. That if their brethren could win on the field of play and be respected, they would gain respect someday too.
I was totally naive about the people I was supposed to be representing. And I had no idea about what their life was like. This was not the England I had been told about back home in Jamaica. It was not the way the ‘Mother Country’ was supposed to be. Or the way it was viewed. My mother, having spent a year in England in 1949 as part of her training to become a teacher, always spoke highly of London. Miss Joyce Couria, a great friend of the family who I became very close to, spent three years doing nursing at about the same time. She never had a bad word to say either, at least not in my company. I won’t go as far as to say they thought the streets were paved with gold, but England was considered a place of fair play, opportunity and a welcoming British handshake. This was what we had been told at school. This was what families and friends believed. It wasn’t a place full of hate. After all, the British had been desperate for West Indians to come after the end of the Second World War. Everybody in the Caribbean knew that.
The country was broke and labour was in short supply. Between 1945 and 1946 the working population in the UK fell by 1.38 million. People were leaving the country for places like Australia, New Zealand and Canada. They invited us, they courted us to come over to the ‘Mother Country’. We answered the call and took work in factories, construction; helped run public transport, staff the NHS. They needed us. So we came. The Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury docks in 1948, carrying 492 West Indians eager to start a new life.
They were the first of many. British Library articles show that between 1948 and 1952 some 1,000–2,000 people entered Britain each year, rising to up to 40,000 by 1956. This was the year Transport for London was recruiting directly from Jamaica. A Conservative minister called Enoch Powell implored West Indians to come.
One of those who came was a lady called Linever Francis. She arrived in England on 25 November 1963, married and raised two children, a son and daughter. The daughter was called Hope, a brilliant piece of foresight when it comes to choosing a baby’s name if you ask me. Hope Powell continues to provide hope for the future.
She was the first ever Black coach of an English national sporting team when she took on the role of England women’s football manager in 1998. Now she is the coach of Brighton and Hove Albion Women. She has thrived despite racism being rife in England’s national sport. She has inspired people of all ages, races and backgrounds. And she is the perfect riposte to that venomous, racist jibe, ‘Why don’t you go back where you came from?’
Why? Because Hope is the living example of resilience and fight. She is the living example of what Black people bring to a country. And she is a living, breathing history lesson. The ignorant – deliberate or otherwise – don’t want to be told that Hope’s mum came to England because the government were begging for help. It is the plot twist their fable of supremacy cannot stomach. All the West Indians emigrated because they were told that they were needed, that they would have jobs and they would be welcomed.
This is why I wanted to speak with her. To understand what she was going through, how she rose above it, how others can do the same and, most importantly, to educate about why people from the West Indies came to Great Britain and the good they have done. Hope’s story is the story of living with racism and overcoming.
Twelve years younger than me, she grew up on an estate in Greenwich in south London. It’s not far from The Oval. And I’m conscious that when I was in England for the first time in 1976, she was aged just ten, becoming streetwise, just as I was, to racism. That I was so much older says a lot about our different experiences growing up.
‘I have this vivid, grim memory of being a child,’ she told me. ‘This old white woman shouted to me as I was walking past her, “Why don’t you go back to where you came from?” I didn’t understand what she was talking about. After all, I was born in England. I do now. I could turn around and say, “You sent for my parents.” This country was built on immigrants. And then you want people to go back? What are they talking about? Why don’t they know this?’
It is a rhetorical question. Hope knows why people don’t know. I know. It is because they were never told why people from the West Indies came. Not by the government. Or by the media. Or by the education system. ‘Windrush’ is a word you will not find in the history curriculum.
On that first tour of England I didn’t read about what was really happening to the West Indians who had migrated. No historical accounts had yet been written. The internet did not exist. But nor did I seek out reading matter. I now know that newspapers at the time, like The Sun and the Daily Telegraph, were stoking the discontent. As a young man I started to learn more from meeting people and my understanding of what it was like to try to eke out a living in those times grew every time I went back to England to play cricket. Now, of course, I know more because there is a wealth of information available.
It might be easy to think that the ‘Mother Country’ was having an awakening of its own. Had the deep dislike and distrust of people of colour, forged hundreds of years ago, awoken from its slumber? There had, in fact, been a report produced in 1955 called ‘The Colour Problem’. You can guess from its title that resentment and racism had surged as soon as the Windrush docked. I guess hate never takes a nap.
The report said that two thirds of Britain’s population held ‘a low opinion of Black people or disapproved of them’. More than a third would have no contact with people of colour, whether that be refusing to work with them or to allow them in their homes. The same ratio wanted them sent back.
Like so many people of colour, Hope and her family bore the brunt of it. When we talk, she is sitting in her office at home, tracksuit top zipped to her neck. ‘You just missed my mum,’ she says. ‘She was here five minutes ago. Now, she has some stories about what it was like back then, what she had to put up with.’
Hope goes on to explain what it was like and I notice her voice starts to break as her memory is jogged, suggesting that maybe she hasn’t been asked that often.
‘My mum and brother were in a park and there was another child there, a white kid. My brother was touching him, reaching out as babies do, because babies are attracted to each other. And then the mother of the white child hit my brother to get him away from her child. And that was it, my mum lost it… had to be dragged away because she wasn’t having it.’
Our matches against England that summer of ’76 were played against a backdrop of racial tensions. Tony Greig, the England captain, had said he intended to make us ‘grovel’. I wince at the word. Tony, as I realised once I got to know him much later when we worked as co-commentators, was not a racist. But he was ignorant of the slave era connotations of the word. Particularly spoken by a white South African who was only playing for England because the country of his birth was banned from international sport due to apartheid. It was incredibly insensitive. I may only have been twenty-two, wet behind the ears to the ways of the world and just beginning to understand racism, but I knew what he said was wrong. He was suggesting we lacked courage or fight. And, because of it, each member of that West Indies team had motivation to ram his senseless words back down his throat. We beat England 3-0. West Indies fans in the big cities turned out in their droves to cheer us on. And we knew that we were able to give them some sort of respite.
It had only been eight years earlier that Enoch Powell, who clearly had a change of heart about the good that immigration brought, had given his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. A sort of ‘playbook on how to be a racist’ and one that has been regurgitated and reused by populist politicians ever since. All the lazy, hateful lies were in there that we are so familiar with because of the Trump administration and the UK government’s handling of Brexit. ‘They’re taking our jobs’, ‘they’re going to take over’, ‘whites will be made to suffer’, ‘they won’t integrate’, ‘there’s going to be violence’. And, perhaps most vehemently of all, that Black people should be ‘sent back to where they came from’. The National Front had been particularly vociferous about this. The children of Black people, who had been born in the UK, should be denied citizenship, too.
Powell was sacked by Edward Heath, the Conservative leader, for the speech. He said, ‘I dismissed Mr Powell because I believed his speech was inflammatory and liable to damage race relations. I am determined to do everything I can to prevent racial problems developing into civil strife… I don’t believe the great majority of the British people share Mr Powell’s way of putting his views in his speech.’ What was telling, though, was when Powell was actually speaking (at a meeting of Conservatives in Birmingham) there was almost no anger or disagreement with what he said.
Heath was right about its divisive nature, though. The racists were emboldened by an MP saying what they had been too afraid to. And Black people, like Hope and her family, felt under threat. Cue Donald Trump in America over the past few years, and it seems nothing has changed. Just a different country.
‘I do remember, and I’m sorry to be rude, but there was dog shit thrown on our doorstep, sometimes put through the letterbox,’ Hope says. ‘We endured that quite often, as well as the verbal abuse or the looks when you went out.’
I had heard stories like that before. But what was startling to me was how much support there was for Enoch Powell. I didn’t realise it until I started researching in preparation for talking to Hope.
The polling company Gallup found that 74 per cent agreed with what Powell had said in his speech and 69 per cent said Heath was wrong to sack him. Before his speech Powell was favoured to replace Heath as Conservative leader by 1 per cent; after it this rocketed to 24 per cent, and a massive 83 per cent felt immigration should be restricted.
Governments could not ignore such numbers. There began moves to officially make people of colour second-class citizens (as if they didn’t feel like that already) with new immigration laws. The 1971 Immigration Act pandered to Powell, the National Front and their supporters by birthing the ‘grandfather clause’. If you had a grandfather who was British you could come in, no problem. If you didn’t, tough luck. It effectively meant that immigration was eased for white people and descendants who had left the UK to migrate to parts of the old empire (Australia, New Zealand, Canada) but people from the new empire, say, the West Indies, Pakistan or Kenya, faced harassment and deportation.
The British Nationality Act followed in 1981. This was a piece of legislation that the Sunday Times said would define ‘who belongs to Britain’. The words ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ don’t appear in the bill but it was cleverly designed to exclude Black and Asian populations from the Commonwealth while, again, making things easier for white nationals born in the empire.
This act led to deportations with a brutal, racist police force doing the dirty work. Hence the death of Joy Gardner. Surely you all remember Joy Gardner? One of the women murdered by police for no reason? Of course you don’t. Joy Gardner’s name and what happened to her has been erased. At least that’s what the authorities tried to do. No camera phones back then.
Joy, a 40-year-old Jamaican, was arrested for deportation in 1993. The police used force to restrain her, tied her arms to her side with a body belt, braced her ankles and gagged her with 13 feet of adhesive tape around her head. Thirteen. Feet. That’s twice as tall as me. She died. Three officers faced manslaughter charges but all were acquitted. The media indulged in a character assassination to aid the cover-up. This is why you don’t know Joy’s name. Had there been someone there with a smartphone that day, you would have done.
Alas, Joy wasn’t the first. Or the last. The 1980s was a particularly brutal decade. The police had a unit called the Special Patrol Group, which would cruise around London looking for Black people to harass. Or maybe arrest under the 1824 Vagrancy Act, which allowed police to arrest anyone they suspected was about to commit a crime. Strangely, a lot of Black people found themselves in cuffs for just standing about. Later on in this book, you will see where that tactic stems from. The same was used just after the abolition of slavery.
This police brutality was a major cause of the 1981 Brixton riots. The 1985 Brixton riots were sparked by the shooting by police of Cherry Groce during one of these searches. Again, people don’t know her name. Cherry was unarmed and had been shot ‘by mistake’. Her 11-year-old son recalls how his mother was gasping for breath, saying, ‘I can’t breathe.’ Sound familiar? She was left paralysed for life. The police officer who shot her was acquitted. It took the Metropolitan Police twenty-nine years to apologise. Funny that. Apologising for something the officer got acquitted for?
The Broadwater Farm riots followed a few weeks after Cherry’s shooting. But in between Cynthia Jarrett had died while police searched her home. She had a heart attack and family members claimed they saw police officers push her to the ground.
England was ablaze in the eighties. Riots in Toxteth in Liverpool, Handsworth in Birmingham, Chapeltown in Leeds, St Paul’s in Bristol and Moss Side, Manchester, were not all to do with race. Poverty and class were also significant contributors. I wonder when Powell made his speech, and he warned of the violence and civil war that would follow, whether this was what he had in mind? I suspect not. He didn’t envisage Black people being discriminated against and killed and brutalised by the state and the police respectively. He thought it would be the Blacks rising up, trying to take over. Instead, Black people just wanted to be treated as human beings.
The West Indies toured England in 1980 and 1984. Each time we returned the atmosphere between Black and white in the towns and cities seemed to be worse. And the treatment of our fellow West Indians was getting worse because they told us about it.
Hope was still living it. And, all these years later, I wanted to know how the hell her mother brought up a young family in such a dangerous and hateful environment. In 1985 Hope was nineteen. Had her mother told her what was happening and why as she grew from a girl to a young woman?
‘She did,’ Hope says. ‘But I’m not sure that I understood it completely. And I guess, growing up, I think I was aware of the differences. I think I tried to, and still do, live in hope that people just accept it.’
I asked Hope whether, because of the colour of her skin and what was happening in the country at that time, her mother told her she would have to work twice as hard and be so much better than others? Some call it the rule of two. To get anywhere you have to work twice as hard. To get anywhere you have to keep your head down and not make a fuss.
‘She aligned it with and wrapped it around education. “Education is the way forward,” she would say. “Education is the way out,” she would say. Even today, she’d still say education is a way to achieve, to become better, to elevate.’
That resonated with me. My mother was the same, as a teacher and a headmistress. She used to say, ‘Get yourself a piece of paper behind your name, Mikey.’ That is why at the start of this section I said I didn’t think professional cricket was a realistic career. My mom meant a certificate, a diploma, a degree, or whatever qualification I could muster. And I have always thought – and saw and heard with my own eyes and ears – that West Indian families and West Indian parents always push that. Education coupled with the way you presented yourself. You had to be smart in both senses of the word. For me, it was a way of life. For Hope, though, education and looking the part was a survival mechanism.
‘I’m so thankful that she really drummed that into me and my brother and the way we present ourselves. We used to go shopping, and we had to look like a million dollars, and present yourself in a way that nobody, and these are my words, that nobody can look at you and say, “You look like a scruff.” Because they would. They would take that opportunity to say, “You’re not clean” or, “You can’t speak properly” or, “You’re not educated.” And I think that was her way of protecting us from what was really going on.’
It comes as something of a surprise that when Hope started playing football, racism had a day off (small mercy, huh?). There were, of course, a couple of incidents that stick in Hope’s memory. But it was not the every-week occurrence that one might have thought, especially as she played for Millwall during her career.
‘When I played for England in Croatia, I pulled my hamstring,’ she says. ‘And I remember it as clear as day; the dressing-room area was down some stairs underground. As I was walking off, and it sticks in my mind because it was a young boy, and he did the Hitler salute. I just thought, This is really sad. I couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. And he was a small boy, no more than twelve. Immediately I thought, His parents taught him that. Where else?
‘As for experiences in England, a player called me a Black “whatever”. My Black team-mate went for the girl that said it. My brother, who was watching, got involved. And it didn’t stop there; it went on after the game. As a manager for England, I can honestly say, on the sideline, I haven’t experienced it, thank God. I think I’ve been lucky. And I think maybe the reason it didn’t happen is because I guess I was a success in sports and people like to align themselves with success. So “she’s all right” – if I was doing really badly, there’s a possibility there might have been more. But I think because I did well, people want to associate themselves with things that are positive and going well.’
Hope played sixty-six times for England as a midfielder, scoring thirty-five goals. Her first game for England came when she was just sixteen and she played in the 1995 Women’s World Cup. Three years later she was made manager of the national team, leading them to the World Cup quarter-finals in 2007 and 2011 and European Championship final in 2009. She also restructured the coaching of the women’s game from Under-15 to Under-23 level, and she was the first woman to achieve the highest coaching qualification possible.
Some people might read those achievements and think, Well, how can racism exist if she was able to do that? And even more might say it when they consider the Football Association is one of the most old-fashioned British institutions to survive. It is not an exaggeration to say that back when Hope got the top job it was run by establishment white geriatrics, who would sit around in their blazers and old school ties, puffing on cigars and drinking brandies. As I type this, the FA chairman, Greg Clarke, has been forced to resign for using the term ‘coloured’ and claiming that ‘different career interests’ meant British South Asians choose jobs in information technology over sport. He was speaking to a government committee about racist abuse of players on social media. It makes you wonder how Hope got the job. Well, she was thinking the same.
‘Was it a “ticking a box” exercise? Female, tick. Black person, tick. What was it? And I asked the question, and I said, “Is this a token gesture?” Even today, how many Black coaches are there in the men’s game? At the highest level, it’s 6 per cent [five head coaches from ninety-two professional clubs]. So, fifteen years ago, it was probably even less. Not even 1 per cent. So I did question it. I didn’t feel I wasn’t good enough. I was very suspicious, rightly or wrongly. So I did challenge it. I questioned why, they gave me a reason and I accepted it. I spoke to my friends, a really good Black friend in particular, who also played with me internationally. And she just told me, “You have got to take this job, you have to take it.”
‘And one thing I was absolutely clear on in my own mind was: “I cannot fail.” Not for women, nor for Black people. They were my drivers. “I don’t care if I have to work like a dog, I will make sure this works.” And I knew people would say: “See, told you she couldn’t do it.” “Look, we gave a Black person a chance, we gave a female a chance and they couldn’t do it.” That was in my head constantly. And that is the case still today. I still look at that, and go, I have to do this. For me, it’s really important that there’s visibility for the next generation. And, look, if I’ve done it, bloody hell, anybody can if they work hard.’
Hope has come a long way. Has Britain? Well, progress has been made but perhaps not as much as I thought. The UK government’s own figures show issues remain. People of colour have twice the unemployment rate of their white peers, they are twice as likely to live in social housing. And, guess what, they are more likely to be stopped by the police and searched. An Oxford University study (the European Social Survey), inspired by that data, found that 18 per cent of the British public thought some races or ethnic groups were less intelligent, and a staggering 44 per cent thought some groups were more hard-working than others. Depressing. Keep those numbers in mind the next time someone tells you this is just an American problem.
So, as a trailblazer, it is important that Hope – and others like her – continue to be, as she says, ‘visible’. It is so important that white, Black, everyone sees her in a position of authority in an industry and is made to think twice about how the world is changing and how it can continue to change. There is still an awful lot of work to do across the spectrum of society. And she says that football needs to do so much more. The sport, back in the 1980s, was often the way in which racism was ‘visible’, if you like. And for some it still is. John Barnes, born in Jamaica and star for England, used to have bananas thrown at him on the pitch. A decade later, Les Ferdinand, who played as a striker for the national team, told a story about how white supporters wouldn’t celebrate if a Black player scored a goal.
‘The amount of Black footballers in the men’s game doesn’t translate or transition into management, or positions of authority or decision-makers, and even less so in the women’s game,’ Hope says. ‘I know since Black Lives Matter there’s been a real opportunity to enforce and advocate change. And a lot of people are really pushing the FA. I’m on some panels, I chair a panel for women and Black coaches to try to enforce change through the FA, and have had some very, very heated discussions around that. And I’m hoping that, like everybody, given current events and what’s happened, that this is an opportunity, and hope that things will change for Black people who have the ability to do jobs within football. Certainly, there’s discrimination there.
‘It was not overt but the fact that I was female and Black was a definite issue. I still believe this to this day, if I was white, I would never have been fired. I’m not saying I would always have done that job. But I would have been offered something else, technical director or something, I categorically believe that. And I was seen as a troublemaker, because I asked questions. I was relentless at it. And had I not been, I don’t think the game would have moved as it did. But it would have moved a lot quicker had they supported the things I was saying earlier. I know I did a lot for the game but I could have done so much more.’
This is really important. Even at the top of her game, Hope experienced that racism. She experienced it when she was a small child. When she was growing up. When she was playing for England. This is the crystal-clear dehumanisation of Black people in the modern world. They are made to feel worthless, made to feel as though somehow it is their fault. ‘You stay down there, you know your place and don’t get any ideas.’ That is what the message is.
This is the life of Black people. This is normal. Why should she have had to put up with any of it? I have heard or read hundreds of stories like it and every time I count my blessings that it didn’t happen to me and impinge on what I wanted to achieve. As I said, I was fortunate. And I want to make it clear that I am not reproducing Hope’s thoughts and feelings here just so they can be dismissed as a list of complaints or gripes. They are here to make people think carefully about what each of those incidents must feel like. Try it. Please try really hard. Put yourself in her shoes in those situations she has described for just a second and tell me there isn’t a problem.
Hope is tough. Good for her. And it’s lucky she is like that. I wouldn’t have blamed her if, when she suffered racist abuse for the first time in her life, or on that football pitch, she had said, ‘No, I don’t need this.’ In a sporting context, how many others have suffered something like she did that made them walk away? How many dreams were dashed and ambitions ruined? Extend it to any industry or walk of life you like. The person who didn’t get the promotion, the job they wanted, the university place. It doesn’t matter. It is all the same.
The vast majority of the time it is not about having a policeman’s knee on your neck. That is crude, brutal violence. The everyday racism that most people suffer is therefore more subtle. Hope has described it as a ‘drip, drip’ effect, deliberately designed to wash away confidence (Ebony Rainford-Brent said the same on Sky). And there’s no real comeback to that. If you stay silent, nothing changes. If you push back, you are a troublemaker.
Being ‘other’ and not fitting in will be feelings recognised by a lot of people of colour in white-dominated environments. It makes me think back to the story about my mom’s family rejecting her because, in their eyes, she had married someone who was too dark. It’s the idea of trying to blend in, to be as white as possible, so that you can be treated with equality.
Luckily, Hope pulled herself up by her bootstraps. But my guess is that when she did that, the powers that be didn’t like it so much. Their noses were put out of joint and they were looking for any excuse to get rid of her. That’s a problem going forward. It’s one thing Black people being given responsibility, it’s another to let them actually do the job. Perhaps I’m too cynical now about it all but, with an organisation like the English Football Association, it sounded like Hope was being told, ‘Know your place, this is your level and what’s been assigned to you since 1400.’ No change.
‘I have to be careful what I say, Mikey, but as a Black person when you have an opinion, or you disagree with something, some people don’t like it. If I was white, and male, it would have been okay.’
But let’s be clear, this is not solely a football issue. It is just one context. This is not really a book about sport, either. It’s a book about society. Football reflects society in the same way that cricket does. Just like every sport. Just like every other industry. The experiences Hope has had would have been repeated all over the world day in and day out on the factory floor, in the office block, in the board room, on the shop floor, in the dressing room. It would have been repeated on public transport, in restaurants, bars. Or just walking down the street.
You see, George Floyd died because a cop put a knee on his neck. It was a senseless, tragic murder. But, as I said earlier, that is the extreme end of the spectrum. And, of course, we notice that and it gets the attention it deserves. But there are small deaths. Every single day. Slowly, quietly, subtly, Black people are having the life and breath squeezed out of them. At some stage in their life, most Black people have metaphorically felt that knee on their neck. Like Hope did by being abused on the street or having dog faeces put through her door, victimised by people who had the power to control her career. Dehumanisation comes in many different forms, some obvious, some not. To start to prevent this dehumanisation, to get that knee off our neck, people have to understand why it exists in the first place. How it came to be like this and why. And when you understand that, you can also understand the huge, important struggle that humanity has on its hands.