Caller's harrowing account of racial profiling, and having to explain it to his children

28 June 2020, 09:03

Caller in Ilford says big changes need to be made to address racism

This caller explained that he has been stopped on a regular basis with no real justification and has had to explain the situation to his children.

Ben phoned in to LBC to speak to Matt Stadlen about race relations in the UK and opened up about his experiences of being stopped by police "an unlimited amount of times" in his youth. Matt was surprised to hear that he still gets pulled over as an older man, often in front of his children.

"It gets frustrating, for somebody to bite their tongue every time is very hard" he said. He pulled the argument back to people dismissing the anti-racism movement and called on those to "try and live a year in our shoes and see how you do."

He went back to share with Matt that some of the excuses for traffic stops have been that he's "been involved in knife crime, suspected robbery in the area, all kinds of rubbish."

"You think to yourself 'what is it I have to do to not look suspicious?'"

He reiterated "unless you go through that, I think it's out of order" for people to dismiss anti-racism and black lives matter protests.

Matt asked Ben if he thought that anti-racism activism "had its moment in the sunlight" and it's now losing media attention because it isn't a hot topic anymore. Ben argued that although the media might think this to be the case, "there's no way we can try to stop this movement."

"I've got two kids, I don't want them to go through this"

He went on to share that "we always try to enforce love in our family, we always try to help people" and when his children have seen him being profiled by police, they cannot understand why the kindness and love they practice isn't given back to them by authorities.

"He doesn't understand why if we treat people fairly we don't get treated the same way back" Ben told Matt, who was taken aback by the conversation.