I SOMETIMES wonder what job I would have ended up in if I hadn’t become a priest. Perhaps I would have ended up doing something in public relations; maybe I would have gone back to being a lawyer but sometimes I think maybe I should have been a taxi driver.

And the reason for that is simply the number of times over the years I have been mistaken for a taxi driver.

There was the time when I turned up at a church to speak at a conference on the rise of racism and the British National Party only to be asked on my arrival by one of the other speakers if I was his taxi driver.

Then there was the time when I was walking into my office when I worked as press officer for the Bishop of Birmingham and someone who was visiting for a job interview immediately approached me and asked me as I if I was her taxi driver.

And then there was the time when I was due to speak and take part in a conference at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle. On asking for directions to the car park I was told that I wasn’t allowed in there and that taxis needed to pick up their clients outside.

The first time I was mistaken for a taxi driver it was kind of funny; the second time it was annoying and the third time, it stopped being either funny or annoying.

As it happened more, I began to feel angry, but as it continued to happen, I stopped feeling anything, I stopped thinking I should expect anything different and I just accepted that being stereotyped was part of life.

So when, in 2004, not long after arriving in Durham to study to become a vicar, I was walking home one night and a car slowed down and two men could wound down their windows and shouted at me to “go home you paki bastard”, I didn’t pay it much heed beyond noting that Brummies like myself had been led to expect a warmer welcome in the North-East.

It is just over a year to the day since the murder of George Floyd. The repercussions were felt across the United States and around the globe, with protests and demonstrations being held in our own cities.

It has been a political movement for change – but it has also had a personal impact.

Having managed to spend years ignoring and squaring away the slights, humiliations and everyday racism of decades, my own response to Floyd’s murder took me by surprise as every incident of racial abuse, every racial slur, all the institutional racism and systematic injustices came flooding back to leave me in a bewildered mess of tears, anger and frustration at the injustice of it all.

All that I had managed to leave behind was reawoken by a chain of events that began a year ago in St Paul’s Minneapolis. George Floyd died of asphyxiation with his last words being “I can’t breathe”.

Now it is for the rest of us – whatever our colour – to resolve afresh to raise our voices both in his memory and to shape our own future.