“WHEN fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving the cross,” is a quote commonly, if erroneously, attributed to the novelist Sinclair Lewis. 

Yet regardless of its provenance, the quote appears eminently applicable to the upheaval taking place across the Atlantic. There, since the murder of George Floyd by a cop in Minneapolis, thousands have been in open revolt against a system whose foundations - not of democracy and liberty but organised violence and white supremacy - have been exposed as they never have been since the 1960s.

Then, as now, there was no middle ground. People were obliged to take a stand on the side of the black and brown victims of racial oppression or on the side of their oppressor, the forces of racism.