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George Floyd was killed on 25 May 2020 and the subsequent global response by people of all ethnicities displaced the coronavirus pandemic from the top of the news agenda. His death was the result of a white police officer kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes and forty-six seconds. The world was able to bear witness to this brutality, seeing the life slowly extinguished from him because it was filmed on several mobile phones. I was struck by the contempt and callous disregard displayed by this officer, the lack of humanity. What I saw left me feeling numb, fearful to connect to the rage I knew existed within, and still does to some extent. That could have been me, that could have been my son, and that scares me. Just the mere thought activates my fear system, which gets assuaged when either he or myself are home. The history of White Europeans sitting atop of the social construct of race by the historical means of slavery and colonisation is receiving much needed scrutiny. It is perhaps within that scrutiny where we can look at how this hierarchy is maintained. What discourse and exploration are needed to effect change? There have been many documentaries subsequently shared on social media platforms on race and social injustice and one shared through The Bowlby Centre, The Color of Fear was universally found interesting. It focused on how American men experienced each other through the lens of race and identity. It highlighted some of the difficult conversations that need to take place around the dynamics of race, how fear organises and dictates discourse and behaviour.
The setting of this documentary was a small county town called Ukiah located in the North West of California. Nine men: two African American, two Asian American, two Hispanic American, and two White/European Americans, along with a Chinese American facilitator discussed their experiences of being American.
The initial theme of identity emerged from introducing themselves to one another. The tension and di