Bullying in context

While you’re showing the behaviour of discrimination you cross into the behaviour of bullying.

Bullying is a repeated behaviour that is intentional to hurt someone either emotionally or physically because of race, gender, religion, how they talk, look or their disability.

Don’t think of bullying only as the physical violence stuff. That’s assault and it’s a crime just as racism is a crime.  Bullying is name calling, threatening behaviour, making things up to get people in trouble, taking things away or damaging other people’s stuff, cyber and social bullying. All of these and more.

It can have a massive effect on your mental and emotional health to even drive self harming, anxiety and lack of self esteem that we don’t live our best lives. You may have seen a story about a boy with dwarfism some time ago who was bullied at school and wanted to hurt himself.  A whole host of celebrities came out to support him against the bullies. You’d say that is good revenge but all this causes a great deal of pain.

If you’ve ever been bullied for no reason or been treated unfairly, called names, someone lied against you, put you in trouble, pretended to be you, making fun, depriving you of just space to be you, this is what racism feels like. In those moments you want to fight or stand up against the bully.

This is what activism is about. This is what Black Lives Matter is about. We all want to be treated with respect and fairly without prejudice either by skin colour, language, religion, accents, disability, sexual orientation or appearances. If you won’t like these or haven’t liked it when done to you, don’t do it to other people.

Let people be who they are and appreciate them for it.