Some time ago I was running a workshop with a black community group in Manchester. The session had gone on longer than expected and the group leader Joe asked another member of the group to go and get some snacks and beers, giving him the keys to his car. He was gone a long time and eventually Joe made enquiries and discovered that he had been arrested. The only law he had broken, I was told, was that of “being a young black man driving a nice car”. I was shocked, but what really disturbed me was how normal this was to the group. They guessed immediately what had happened, knew who to call and treated it as a fact of life living in a major city like Manchester.

I started off feeling that I had no right to write about these issues in this column, being a white male. But I take to heart the point made by many Black Lives Matter activists that we all need to take responsibility for racism. If we are not seeking to be part of the solution then we are definitely part of the problem.

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