After so many days of reading about the shooting of Mike Brown by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, after so many days of feeling unqualified to speak about the killing of a young black man by a predominantly white police dept., I finally feel that I am able to contribute.

I am white in a predominantly white community. I do not know the feeling of fear when confronted by the police. I have not suffered that prejudice. The closest I ever came was as a student when I was stopped in the street and searched because allegedly there had been a nearby burglary.

The luxury of my white privilege gave me the confidence to believe that I would emerge from that confrontation unharmed because I knew I was innocent. But there was another incident in my life where I felt much less secure.

I didn’t know at the time, but I am autistic with problems in social interaction. At the age of 14 I was flying home alone from Orlando, FL to Manchester, UK. I suffered a nose bleed on the flight from Orlando to NY JFK, and on landing with blood on my hands and face I was terrifyingly aware of the presence of cops with firearms all through the airport.

It is hard to describe the fear of that time. The fear that because of the way I looked to other people I would be targeted. That I would be pulled from the line and asked to step aside. The thing is,… even then I did not fear for my life. I cannot imagine how it might feel to know that there was a chance that I might be killed for being different.

To imagine that I might comply with police instructions, raise my hands, show that I hold no weapon and pose no threat… and still face the threat of being killed. How can anybody argue that what happened that day in Missouri did not contravene the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution: “nor shall any person […] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”.

Mike Brown was an unarmed man shot dead by the police. I have seen no convincing excuse as to why the police officer discharged his firearm in this case. Except that as a white man he felt threatened by the fact that the victim was black. He was afraid of the color of his skin.

As an English woman I cannot claim that my own country is any better. There is widespread, casual equation of Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani people with Islamic terrorism, despite the fact that many of them are not Muslim but Hindu or Sikh, and the vast majority of Muslims are as opposed to terrorism as the majority of Christians or any other religious group.

The unpalatable fact remains that a significant number of white people feel uneasy in the presence of non-whites. They feel threatened. They feel afraid because non-whites are different. Fear causes irrational responses such as drawing a weapon on an unarmed teenager and shooting him dead.

That fear is wrong. It is unjustified. It is also at the heart of the problem. One cause of that fear is lack of integration between groups in society. In a community where whites go to one church (or synagogue, or mosque) and black folk go to another, how are they ever going to get to know one another? How can they move beyond that fear of the unknown?

I believe so strongly that the only way to an inclusive society where we all know and trust each other, where we recognize that everybody else is just a person (as are we), is to find ways that we can all participate in shared activities. Let us reach out and find our common ground.

It might be a shared love of craft beer, collecting Kenyan wood carving, or being a fan of Doctor Who. IT DOESN’T MATTER! At the heart of it all we are all human. We are all different, but each of us has something in common with somebody else. It might not be our beliefs — I know I’ve got close friends whose beliefs differ from mine — but that doesn’t stop us being friends. We connect on a level that owes nothing to religion. We are of the same species, sharing the same planet, and we found that we are more alike than different.