How Sarah Everard’s Murder Helped Me Further Understand #BLM

This past week has been emotional. Grieving for someone I’ve never met is a strange experience, I don’t have any memories to miss or inside jokes to remember, yet the case of Sarah Everard has drawn me in and kept me captive since. From sharing the missing posters online and constantly googling for updates, to experiencing what I can only describe as the most deflating feeling when any hope I had summoned, was lost - I may not have known Sarah, but I have been her. Every single woman, no matter age, race, sexual orientation, has been Sarah.

We have walked well-lit streets, phoned our friends for comfort, carelessly tossed around a ‘text me when you’re home,’ gripped keys between our fingers and felt our blood run cold when we hear heavy footsteps approaching. Though not all men abduct, murder and rape women, all men pose a potential threat to us, and we’ve unconsciously learnt this since we were children.

The anger and pure devastation I feel about Sarah Everard’s murder is because that could have been any girl. Sarah was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was unlucky. Had she stopped to tie up her shoe laces, perhaps she would have missed him. Perhaps she would have made it home. Perhaps whilst she settled down in her flat, sipping a warm cup of tea unknowing of what she had just avoided, another woman was taking her place as the victim. It doesn’t matter what Sarah did or didn’t do, she was murdered because she was a woman, and simply because she was there.

I find myself so angry at the fact that a MET police officer could do something like this. The absolute distrust I felt for the entire police force shocked me - I thought myself as being a bit dramatic for a girl watching from the side lines, but I couldn’t help it. I would have blindly followed police orders before this. After a few days of confusion and sorrow, I realised that if one female murder, at the hands of someone we are supposed to trust, could make me feel this way, I couldn’t even imagine the depths of distrust black people across the western sphere feel.

Though I have always supported the Black Lives Matter movement and will continue to do so, due to my own privilege as a white woman, my grievances and anger at these cases were never even remotely close to how black people must have felt. That was a feeling I couldn’t, and still can’t, ever truly understand.

As a white woman, I would never be able to comprehend the terror, intimidation and anger that a lot of black people feel, as I have only ever watched from the side lines. I have never had the feeling of ‘that could have been me’ whilst watching the news about the latest murder of an innocent black person. I had never truly experienced the feeling of grief for someone who had died because of something they can’t control – until now.

Whilst the death of Sarah Everard does not personally cause me any systematic discrimination, or anguish of the same extent that #BLM seeks to heal, her murder has helped me understand more clearly the anger, the distrust and the desperation felt. Her murder has helped me to understand why there is an ‘us vs. them’ mentality in a lot of #BLM debates and minority protests. Her murder has taught me so much more about the grief and hopelessness felt.

If this is what one female murder case, thrusted into main media (most likely because she is a white victim), can make me feel, then I can truly admit that my eyes have just been opened to the daily devastation caused by racism and systematic racial discrimination.

I am so sorry Sarah. And I am so sorry to the #BLM movement, and all those affected, for not advocating for you in the way that I have for Sarah. I will do better.

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