Enough for me

Tomorrow is the United Nations International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. It was marked in Oxford today by a small group of people taking the knee for eight minutes then standing with placards in the middle of town for about 30. I'm conflicted about such events - do they really change anything? But today, in the middle of town, someone came up to me and my companion and told us we were wrong: by naming black people as 'black' we were creating division and we should put our placards in the bin and go home. We agreed that we wanted to break down divisions (between women and men too), we talked about white privilege, we said that if just one black person felt more supported by us being there that was good, we agreed that it made sense for all of us to do whatever we could to try to make the world a better place for everyone, we parted company saying we were glad to have met each other. That would have been enough for me, but as we carried the placards home, we got a thumbs up from a black guy pushing a child in a buggy towards us.