Before birthday tea, thousands of us stood silently on the seafront to demand changes to how my son, my daughter, their dad and millions of other black people are treated in the UK. As a white woman I've not experienced racism, I've experienced its by-products. I've tried to comfort my children, stand up for them, listen to them. I've witnessed them and their dad humiliated by teachers, bosses, so-called friends, parents of so-called friends, neighbours, the police, random strangers, security guards, shopkeepers, their peers.
I have been forced to listen to extracts from my father's diary read aloud in which he referred to the father of my children in terms I couldn't write down here. I have been told this act had nothing to do with race (of course not, I am white) and all to do with me. I have witnessed this tactic adopted gratefully by white liberals who believe we won't notice as they turn the objects of their discomfort into aggressors.
I didn't have a clue what I was embarking on as a mother. I'd never been around babies. The family I was brought up in was self-contained, almost hermetically sealed. There was no laughter, no socialising, no sharing small children and babies around. My father's bitterness and racism tainted our lives until my mother had enough and left. I was 21.
When I was eight, I remember my grandfather carving lamb at one of the Sunday lunches we endured in Wembley. He stood to carve, at the top of the table. Behind him, the main road, changing demographically. It was 1963 and 15 years since Empire Windrush docked in Essex. Even then, so young, I felt uncomfortable with the language my grandfather used to describe his neighbours. Beside me, two younger brothers. Beside me, my mother, cowed, my aunt, cowed, my father, nodding. So I should have known what I was embarking on as a mother bringing up black children. The hard bits, anyway.
Twenty eight years on from the morning after that birth around dawn on June 13, after I'd looked down on the seafront, over the waves, the horizon, the sky from the hospital tower block, we reminisced about the maths teacher who humiliated both my children, now an alcoholic. Mum and I heard my children describe not one, not two, but multiple teachers' abuses of power. This was not the 1950s, it was post millenium, in a school described as one of the best comps in the UK.
We sometimes remember a man with flickering eyes like a lizard who accused my son of threatening him, whose racism was so intense and shameful that just thinking about the incident makes me shake. The people paying him couldn't grasp or admit it, so they spent months turning it around until they had a story in which my son and I had threatened them. They told their friends, their cleaner, their workmates. They built a narrative that was repeated until it reached people I knew.
Incapable of admitting they'd employed someone who had behaved so dangerously, so transgressively - god forbid they couldn't be racist - they convinced themselves they were victims.
Yesterday, we didn't need to state what my children learned from birth, that racists are dangerous and to be avoided. When I saw a video of the woman in Central Park calling police because a black man asked her to put her dog on a lead, I remembered lizard-eyed man, my shaking hands, my nausea, my fear.
We have all seen the contortions of truth deep racists and covert racists share and live with while planning for a post-lockdown holiday "somewhere hot." Eavesdrop, hear them complain among themselves that they can't say what they like anymore, we've seen them adopt victimhood and transform it into firearms and fists or deflect attention away from change.
My children have taught me unpicking racism is a long game. That like all good crime stories, there are innumerable false statements of truth and plot twists. People may pretend a poster in a window can erase a decade of racist behaviour but what do you think? I've learned that despite having black children I can also be racist but I hope I have learned to challenge myself. To be self aware. To listen when I am challenged.
What I never anticipated all that time ago was that my life would be divided in this way and I would learn so much. But the racists, overt/covert, pissing on war memorials or avoiding the seafront Black Lives Matter protest for a walk in the country, are on the wrong side of history. No amount of playing black music, going to Womad, buying Fairtrade makes privilege righteous.
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