Despite the slogan on the child-like cardboard placards held above the heads of Black Lives Matter protesters, the silence of us lower-case whites is not violence.
For a while it was something considered as objectionable as racism — indifference.We neither canonised nor fetishised black men and women as our experience of them was too diverse to classify them as a placid victim or an exotic rara avis. They were ultimately as dull and workaday as the rest of us, harbouring similar hopes and grudges. That’s how it is when you move from society’s margins to the mainstream. (This is the price of equality, at least the equality — it’s an amorphous creature — Britain was trudging towards before identity politics became the pub bore that emptied the bar.)
The upside is you’re not solely knife-wielding, drug-dealing absent fathers (the classical view of the far right); the downside: you’re not simply the carnival-loving soul man in fear of the policeman’s knee and the neigh…