[Spoken]
For 125 years the statue of Edward Colston stood in the center of Bristol
Three decades of attempts to have it removed through official channels resulted in humming and hawing and hand-wringing and ultimately
Dead ends
In 2014, a poll of locals found that 56% of people wanted it to stay
When the system for maintaining our shared public spaces fails
And a monument to a proud slave trader is allowed to stand in the center of a town, getting older and grander by the year
Sinking his rotten roots deeper and deeper into the ground
The people (I would argue)
Have a right
Even a moral duty
To tear it down
And to roll it without fanfare into the nearest fucking river
And this is exactly what they did
On June 7th, 2020, against the explicit wishes of the democratically elected council and the majority of the city
This is not, despite what you may think or may have heard, "a complicated issue"
White Britain doesn't have the privilege of saying there is a gray area here
Not anymore
We have been living comfortably in the gray area for hundreds of years
And failing to do the bare fucking minimum for the people we have transplanted over here against their will
It is hard to not feel more than a little cognitive dissonance when your country tells you that racism is a thing of the distant past
While a monument to a professional racist stands towering over a major city with his chin resting lazily in his fucking palms
It took me way too long to figure out
That equality and fairness
Do not always equate to treating everybody exactly the same
Or to insisting that groups with competing interests work together to come to a compromise
Why should a group, whose primary interest is disempowering white supremacists, be forced to compromise with groups whose sole interest seems to be to impede that progress?
I have very little problem, it turns out
With saying Group A are allowed to take direct, destructive action, while Groups B through KKK are not when it becomes clear that Group A are right and everybody else is completely fucking wrong
For 125 years the statue of Edward Colston stood in the center of Bristol
Three decades of attempts to have it removed through official channels resulted in humming and hawing and hand-wringing and ultimately
Dead ends
In 2014, a poll of locals found that 56% of people wanted it to stay
When the system for maintaining our shared public spaces fails
And a monument to a proud slave trader is allowed to stand in the center of a town, getting older and grander by the year
Sinking his rotten roots deeper and deeper into the ground
The people (I would argue)
Have a right
Even a moral duty
To tear it down
And to roll it without fanfare into the nearest fucking river
And this is exactly what they did
On June 7th, 2020, against the explicit wishes of the democratically elected council and the majority of the city
This is not, despite what you may think or may have heard, "a complicated issue"
White Britain doesn't have the privilege of saying there is a gray area here
Not anymore
We have been living comfortably in the gray area for hundreds of years
And failing to do the bare fucking minimum for the people we have transplanted over here against their will
It is hard to not feel more than a little cognitive dissonance when your country tells you that racism is a thing of the distant past
While a monument to a professional racist stands towering over a major city with his chin resting lazily in his fucking palms
It took me way too long to figure out
That equality and fairness
Do not always equate to treating everybody exactly the same
Or to insisting that groups with competing interests work together to come to a compromise
Why should a group, whose primary interest is disempowering white supremacists, be forced to compromise with groups whose sole interest seems to be to impede that progress?
I have very little problem, it turns out
With saying Group A are allowed to take direct, destructive action, while Groups B through KKK are not when it becomes clear that Group A are right and everybody else is completely fucking wrong
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