#BlackLivesMatter

This is a really difficult post to write.

Partly because it’s taken time to reflect, to educate ourselves in history, to find what we consider to be the best words to express our sentiments and it could come across as too little too late. And partly because it’s coming from a pair of middle-class white dudes that set up a business and with six months of hard work made it pretty successful with basically no bumps in the road or difficulties.

You could say we are the very picture of white privilege. University educated, married with kids, homeowners in nice neighbourhoods, law-abiding, can just go off and do pretty much anything without any challenge or resistance.

But just like you and everyone else, we are human. We fall over and graze our knees and blood comes out. Our bones can break, we feel the same range of emotions as everyone else and we cry salty tears. We need food and drink to survive and sometimes, we just want to be held by someone who understands.

So it breaks our hearts when other humans are treated as less than human.

Despite generally not being very bothered by what other people think of us, we don’t want to be accused of bandwagon jumping and we don’t want to be accused of not caring.

If we say nothing, people put their judgey hats on and say our silence is complicity and to a point, we agree. If we speak up, other people put on their judgey hats and say we’re just following the crowd and jumping on the bandwagon for attention. That’s not true.

This post is not designed to attract new business, it is an attempt to reiterate and share our business ethics and core values. It is a way of demonstrating that we care and we are here to listen and to learn.

We are profoundly moved and appalled in equal measure that our brothers from other mothers and sisters from different misters that happen to have a different colour skin tone have been treated so badly over the centuries and that they now have to face the very real threat of the heightened risk from both increased exposure to a virus that they are more vulnerable to and becoming targets for further discrimination.

If we hadn’t promised our clients to keep away from all potential risks of coronavirus exposure, we would be out there, joining the protest marches with our worldwide family to protest the persistent and pervasive oppression of our black sisters and brothers.

Our work is to help people and colour is not a barrier to us achieving that. To us it doesn’t matter what colour, gender, race, sexual persuasion or ‘class’ you come from, you’re a human in our eyes.

To be completely honest, because of our own upbringings and where we have worked and who we have worked with, when clients come in, we see people. Not different races or ethnicities, but just people. Mothers, sons, fathers, sisters, grandparents… humans with hearts and needs. In our varying client base, we see a ‘salad bowl’ of beautiful diversity to be embraced and cherished.

So whilst, yes, all these different lives matter to us, right at this time, Black Lives Matter because black lives are more vulnerable, more oppressed, less heard, and have the weight of historic oppression behind them. The white ones among us need to be sensitive to that and be supportive.

Us white people that don’t experience racism or prejudice, oppression or discrimination need to sit back and listen to our brothers and sisters that are suffering and take a back seat. We must be followers, not leaders in the fight against racism, because we don’t know how it feels or what should be done. If we try to ‘lead’, we are disempowering the very people we are seeking to help and missing the whole point.

It’s time us white people stopped talking and giving advice and instead started following the advice of our black siblings on how to help the situation.

Equality and equity are fundamentally important to the human race thriving. Shrinking the gap between the haves and have-nots is the only way the planet will emerge from the current challenges in the healthiest possible state. Lets face it, if we’re completely honest, white people in charge for so long has basically led to a climate disaster, an ecological disaster, an economic disaster, an equality disaster and a global spiritual disaster that has left us in a fractured and disparate mess.

To be passively non-racist is no longer enough, we need to be actively anti-racist, so please, black sisters and brothers of planet earth, let us know how we can best serve you in the fight against racism and discrimination. Guide us, because we’re white and we don’t know what’s best to help you be able to live the same unlimited lives that we have been fortunate enough to be gifted in the lottery of birth.

And its fine if you just tell us you don’t need us to do anything different, but only to keep helping anyone and everyone with the same unprejudiced, open-armed welcome that underpins our business.