Kierkegaard's Lunch

It's been another difficult 24 hours. I am going to start this post with a lengthy quotation from Reni Eddo-Lodge, from The Guardian piece that flowed from her original 2014 post, and was in 2017 about to be turned into her best selling book, ' Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race ': 'They’ve never had to think about what it means, in power terms, to be white, so any time they’re vaguely reminded of this fact, they interpret it as an affront. Their eyes glaze over in boredom or widen in indignation. Their mouths start twitching as they get defensive. Their throats open up as they try to interrupt, itching to talk over you but not to really listen, because they need to let you know that you’ve got it wrong.  The journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings. Even if they can hear you, they’re not really listening. It’s like something happens to the words as they leave our mouths and r...

Trans Rights Protest, Parliament Square London, July 4th 2020.  I often find protesting a melancholy experience. How many have I been on since 2016 now? Several to fight Brexit; at one of them over a million turned up. Two to express my anger at our government's pandering to Donald Trump. A Women's March. I was there as a woman with my sisters. I even stood in a damp Trafalgar Square along with a couple of hundred EU citizens to show my solidarity with them. Each protest had a personal purpose, often to show my support for others. The cataclysm of Brexit still awaits, and though it will hurt me and take money out of my pocket, I am lucky to be able to hope that the effect will not be too great - economically at least - on me. It, of course, depends on how bad it gets. I went on the anti-Brexit marches thinking of the millions it will crucify (all the more so now). The anti-Trump marches felt like solidarity with Americans reeling under the boot of a proto-fascist, the W...