Misconstrued tweets led to abuse and threats to my life – but I was making a valid point approximately racial prejudiceKatie Hopkins and the Mail on Sunday,quickly followed by others in the mainstream media, final weekend picked up on tweets posted on my personal social media. The headlines made allegations that I believe all individual white people “are racist”, and insinuating that I support violence against white people because of this. The newspapers claimed that I supported specific behaviour from protesters in Dalston who “lit bonfires and hurled petrol bombs at officers”. There were reports I believed that white people had “colonised” Dalston. This is supposedly all the more shocking because I am a student at Cambridge University and president of its BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) campaign. The Mail on Sunday quoted a Conservative MP,Bob Blackman, who said I should be prosecuted for inciting racial hatred.
These papers misconstrued the meaning of my tweets and stripped them of proper context. Much focus has been placed on my claim that “all white people are racist”. This had been pulled out of a discussion I was having in which I addressed how racism is often portrayed as the sole preserve of the working class – and has been used to further stereotypes of working-class people as uneducated and brutish, or which I reject.
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Source: theguardian.com