In another event organised by Unite, the first speaker was Laura Pidcock. She worked on the Show Racism the Red Card campaign for quite a few years, going into schools to tackle the problem of racism. Laura said you have to have those difficult conversations. She joked that it tends to kill the atmosphere and your partner looks at you as if to say: “Do you have to?”, but that it was all about getting racism out of children’s heads before it reaches their hearts.

MP Tan Dhesi then said it was our job to speak up, not just about racism, but also about sexism and discrimination of people with disabilities. He said that words have consequences, referring to the increase in hate crimes after Johnson’s references to letterboxes and bank robbers. He speculated that his recent speech in the house had resonated so much because it was the case of a man defending women.

David Lammy then said that it was sometimes necessary to go back to the roots, to talk about slavery. If we just stay in the present, we will never wipe out racism, only individual occurrences. He said it was important to understand that white supremacy was not just a phenomen on the Deep South. To illustrate this, he quoted the recent scandal around Trudeau blacking up.

The speakers advertised the Wear Red Day, which this year is on Friday, 18 October: https://www.theredcard.org/news/2019/9/6/wrd19-launch

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