SO THE Prime Minister’s response to Black Lives Matter in the wake of the George Floyd death in Minneapolis is: “Yes, I hear you, but…”

Is that not the classic fork-tongue that diddled the native Americans out of their lands hundred of years ago? 

Is that not the classic fork-tongue that we have to listen to every day when we ask for our legitimate rights in the work place, in education, on the streets?

When you ask for a promotion when you’ve been working somewhere for years and you’ve seen other colleagues pass you by and you KNOW why, but you can’t prove it. All you can prove is that you’re getting poorer working for the firm and the boss says: “Yes, I hear you, but…”

When you get stopped by the police for doing nothing at all and you complain that you;re always getting stopped by the police for doing nothing at all and the copper says: “Yes, I hear you, but…”

We are the “buts” of everybody’s white privilege.

“After hundreds of years of mistreatment, we should be bloody angry”

Here he is, Boris Johnson, stating to The Voice that, on the one hand, he deplores racism and the death of George Floyd and yadda yadda yadda and he supports black rights and this and that and yadda yadda yadda. BUT at the same time, he deplores the actions of some of the protestors who were not as peaceful as he would like them to be. Yadda yadda yadda.

Some of you might be thinking, here we go again. We justly accuse the media of always looking for the negative when it comes to reporting black stories. They only seem to be interested when there’s stabbing or a shooting or some connection to something unedifying. And let’s not forget that we are extremely susceptible to having the label stick on us as long as these news organisations have more readers than The Voice. Until then the “media” can cheat us out of our legitimate protests by focusing on somehow undermining our achievements.

We cannot have a peaceful Notting Hill Carnival without “the media” focusing on the crime stats. It’s true. I myself have been told by national newspapers to go and find out the Carnival crime stats from the police when they know full well that Carnival is seen as a black thing. And it always seems to be when it’s a black thing the media focuses on crime. It has been said time and again in The Voice that arrests at Glastonbury (that doesn’t have a tenth of the numbers of people of Notting Hill) barely gets mentioned – and never emblazoned across the front pages. 

But you can bet your bottom dollar that if anything had kicked off at Glasto when Stormzy was trailblazing it on that night with his era-defining performance, somehow they would have stuck it to the black man in the Union Jack stab vest. 

And now Boris Johnson is playing the same game with another name. He’s giving on the one hand with his sympathies to black people and his solidarity with us and then in the next BUT instance he’s snatching all the humanity out of the protests by talking about protestors turning ugly.

“The truth is very few of us want to see violence. But we do all want to see change”

Some of us are born that way. And it’s a demo for crying out loud. Passions run high. Things turn ugly. There are scuffles. That’s why there are police there to keep the order. The police expect things to get heated that’s why they brought all their clobber and their horses. They know as well as we do that, after hundreds of years of mistreatment, we should be bloody angry. 

You missed the opportunity, Prime Minister, to let the readers of this paper know that you get it – that we ain’t having it no more. That you get that the way that we are regarded and treated in this society is bang out of order. We don’t want our children to go through the same thing. You missed the opportunity to let us know that you get that.

This is the moment, Boris, that you could stand up and be a leader and say, let’s talk about the criminality of pulling down that statue in Bristol separately from talking about the legitimate rights of people not to have to look upon and walk under a triumphal statue of the man who enslaved so many hundreds of thousands of Africans that there is as strong a likelihood that you are related to them. As much at least as if your name is Khan, you are likely to be a descendant of Genghis.

The truth is very few of us want to see violence. But we do all want to see change. 

There are two ways to go about this, Prime Minister – the Martin Luther King Way or the Malcolm X way. You couldn’t quite bring yourself to say: “It’s been a long time coming but a change is going to come under my government.” That’s why young people ain’t turning the other cheek right now. Do you get it, Mr Johnson?