This needs to end

I'm not going to share my partners experiences, because it's not my story to tell. But I'll be honest, until I was in an interracial relationship, I never really thought much about race. It never affected me by myself, this is my white privilege and we are all guilty of it. Now as I hold my partners hand in public, I get stared at and children point. To begin with I didn't have any idea what was happening, but I soon realised that to them, a brown man and white women holding hands was weird, but why? What had they been told or heard at home to make them think that was wrong? My partner and I have a continuous open dialogue about racism because we HAVE to!! I have to understand when he feels uncomfortable in a room full of white people and when he tells me he feels uncomfortable I never just go 'don't be stupid' as who am I to say that, I have no idea what he deals with everyday. I am so proud of this movement, it feels so great to be able to support my partner more and everyone else who suffers from racism. Because it needs to end here.

But what can we do besides post on social media? You may feel helpless in this situation but if you can educate yourself then you can help educate others. The more people that are educated, then the less likely racism will happen or tolerated when it is seen. We are never going to change the opinion of every ignorant adult, but we can change the future. Teach your children, buy them books with all different races in. It should be the norm, it shouldn't be something we think about. Don't look back at the past, look to the future and the changes we can make there.

Ways I have educated myself:

1. Discussed racism with my friends and we have learnt from each other
2. I have watched some films: 13th and When they see us were my favourite, both free on Netflix
3. I listened to some podcasts: The diversity gap and Code switch were brilliant

All of the above were things that I could chill and watch or listen to whilst doing the cooking or the cleaning, I didn't feel like I had to sit and read a big boring book. This is how I could feel like I was actively helping.

On the larger scale of things, companies and corporations could help massively if they were proactive.  If you take Nike and Adidas for example, it's great they have tweeted about anti racism but that is fairly easy to do. As an article in Forbes rightly pointed out, what's hard is incorporating black people into the decision making of the company.  In their boards, Nike has 7 white Men and 3 white Women and Adidas has 4 white Men and 1 White Women.  There is no colour included at all. It's structural changes , not tweets, that will ultimately tackle racism.