For me, being an ally is using my privilege and voice to uphold voices who do not have such a platform as I do. With my privilege as an ally, I want to be able to stand with people and make sure that their voices are heard, and do as much as I can with that privilege.

Molly and I are both white people, and we had a lot of conversations around it. We knew that we needed to make this protest for the people of colour to have their voices heard, and we decided to do that as white people using our privilege to make a space for the people of colour in our community. We decided that social media would be a great way to help us advertise it. We used Facebook, Twitter, our own personal Instagram accounts, we made posters and we had a Google account where people could email for any information. We used everything we could in making this as big as possible. 

To me, that is doing as much as we can. It is not enough to say that you are not a racist. You should actively be doing things to learn about our past and the responsibility we had in that as white people. We need to be teaching anti-racism in school and change the curriculum. We need to unpick everything that we have built up, actively immersing ourselves in the beautiful culture and diversity that Wales has.  I would love to see a place where we can celebrate those cultures here in Merthyr. It is about learning what we have done and then taking steps forward to unpick that and do the work that we need to do as white people to make sure that it does not happen again.
I wish I could say that Anti-Racism has been in my life for a long time, but this is the first protest I have organised and from doing this, I know that I should have been doing more earlier. We needed to ensure that the next steps were also covered hence we organised a Zoom protest to ask our local governors and politicians what was going to happen next and how they were ensuring that we live in an anti-racist Wales?

One of the first things I did when the Black Lives Matter movement was at its peak was making placards and taking them down to a very local area of mine, probably five minutes down the road, within ten minutes they were taken down and posted on social media, saying “this has no place in our community, we don’t need to be doing anything, racism doesn’t exist here”. That angered me and I wanted to let everyone know which inspired the protest because I needed people to hear the voices from our local community and know that racism exists in our community. We had so many beautiful voices stand up on that day, telling us their lived experience. We listened, took in what they had to say, we responded to them and we acted as best as we could in putting the best places forward to anyone who believed that racism does not exist in Wales.
We have heard the voices; we have to acknowledge and believe them because they are those truthful point of views. As we step forward, we take those on, learn and make ourselves better. 

It was heart-breaking and horrifying. Till this day, it still breaks my heart and scares me. But, I as a white person feel so minuscule to the people of colour, the Black people in my community and globally that I cannot fathom how they must feel. I feel heartbroken and I also feel saddened for the people around me who are not white and have a way more personal connection to that video.

I would say do as much as you can, take a step back, acknowledge the privilege that you have and use it. Do not get angry with it, use it and help the people around you who do not have that privilege. 

No justice, no peace.