If your first emotion is anger then you are either part of the problem or yet to be educated.
Edward Colston was a slave trader. A leading figure in the transportation of 84,000 Africans, including children, to be sold.
Around 19,000 died on the journey from West Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas.
Toppling his statue ended, in a few historic, liberating minutes, a debate that ran for years in Bristol over whether it should even be there.
For black people around the country, enduring the institutional racism that oppressed our parents and ancestors, it represented yet another small moment of this momentous fortnight during which we have started to believe that this is not yet another false dawn.
It may be just a statue but it could turn out to be our Berlin Wall, our Tiananmen Square.
The first steps of a generation looking to dismantle the structural racism that silenced hundreds of millions for decades and kept us as an underclass.
Dumping that statue in the river was the first incision into the umbilical cord of conscious and subconscious bias that black people have had to live with.
The mobilization of millions for the weekend’s global protests show that white people and other races get it too.
It is only those who want to maintain the status quo that don’t.
