THE STATE OF THE NATION

“I thought I would be on this day, when I felt like the most amount of the world was coming to terms with the mistreatment of black, brown, immigrant people. I thought I would be because I thought there’d be this sort of realisation and a turn for the better, but in fact I was very sad. Because I think what it was doing was uprooting a lot of trauma for me, and then [I was] experiencing it within the environment around me – my family, my sister, my father were sharing stories about what had happened. Right after it happened, my sister was called ‘a black bitch’ by some white person, where she works, in her community, where typically she doesn’t experience as glaringly. I think it sort of amplified a lot of people’s bigotry and racist tendencies, because they were feeling confronted and attacked, because they were having something taken from them, which was their power via