Afropean: Notes from Black Europe

to those used to a certain kind of privilege, equality can feel like oppression.

For most black people in Europe, the battle against prejudice is for life, which is why you have to pace yourself to run a marathon instead of exerting all your energy in a spring if you want to survive — you can’t be throwing beer bottles at police and telling them to fuck themselves simply for the fun of it.

structural racism – that is, racism that is inherent in a society, even if not consciously in individuals, because of the way it is organized to place white people in positions as bearers and inheritors of privilege accrued through exploitation.

It's not terrorism when white people plot organised murders in the name of an extreme ideology.

Those unemployed black men I saw loitering all over Europe weren’t inherently lazy, but lost and low on confidence and opportunities, and their crime was that they were visible, unlike the black staff who cleaned the station and whose hard work had rendered them invisible.

And he made this all too rare journey with hard work and focus on his craft, any anger or disenchantment found not in a Twitter rant but in subtle and well-considered arguments in beautifully written prose, in deep work that allows us to enter into the minds of those often written out of history.

These scattered fragments of Afropean experience had formed a mosaic inside my mind, not monolithic, but not entirely amorphous either, rather, the Afropean reality was a bricolage of blackness and I’d experienced an Africa that was both in and out of Europe.

As someone with enslavement in my heritage, I can’t help but feel haunted by these journeys of old money and the histories of inheritance,