Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(51)
Instead, get angry. Anger is useful. Use it for good. Support those in the struggle, rather than spending too much time pitying yourself. Unlike white people, people of colour don’t often ask me for advice on what I think they should do to fight racism. Instead, they ask me if I have any good strategies for coping. I don’t have any magic formulas, but I’m a big advocate for setting boundaries when needed. Surround yourself with people who you can draw strength from. If you need to stop talking to white people about race, don’t feel guilty about it. Rest and recharge, so that you’re ready to do your anti-racist work in a sustainable way. I don’t want anyone of any race, when faced with the insurmountable task of challenging racism, to collapse into despondency. As a long-time depressive I know how much it can paralyse, how the feeling of hopelessness works to utterly crush creativity, and passion, and drive. But those are the three things that we will definitely need if we’re ever going to end this injustice. We have to fight despondency. We have to hang on to hope.
In a world where blunt, obvious acts are just the tip of the iceberg of racism, we need to describe the invisible monolith. Now, racism can be found in the way a debate is framed. Now, racism can be found in coded language. Attacking racist frame, form, functions and codes with no words to describe them can make you feel like you are the only one who sees the problem. We need to see racism as structural in order to see its insidiousness. We need to see how it seeps, like a noxious gas, into everything.
In a conversation about structural racism, a friend of mine once made a point that was both glaringly obvious and painfully elusive. Structures, she said, are made out of people. When we talk about structural racism, we are talking about the intensification of personal prejudices, of groupthink. It is rife. But rather than deeming the current situation an absolute tragedy, we should seize it as an opportunity to move towards a collective responsibility for a better society, taking account of the internal hierarchies and intersections along the way.
It doesn’t have to be like this, and the solution starts with us. Racism’s cultural reach is so pervasive that we must take up the mantle of changing our workplaces and social circles ourselves. Often in these conversations, someone will pipe up to say in order to win, we need unity. But I think that if we wait for unity, we’ll be waiting for ever. People are always going to disagree about the finer points of progress. Waiting for unity is just inviting inertia.
So, a word to those who feel the weight of racism, who keenly feel the effects of how it suffocates kindness, and generosity, and potential. How it is slowing down the world we live in. We cannot escape the legacies of the past, but we can use them to model our future. The late Terry Pratchett once wrote ‘there’s no justice. Just us.’ I can’t think of any other phrase that best sums up the task ahead.
It’s on your shoulders and mine to dismantle what we once accepted to be true. It’s our task. It needs to be done with whatever resources we have on hand. We need to change narratives. We need to change the frames. We need to claim the entirety of British history. We need to let it be known that black is British, that brown is British, and that we are not going away. We can’t wait for a hero to swoop in and make things better. Rather than be forced to react to biased agendas, we should outright reject them and set our own. Most importantly, we must survive in this mess, and we do that any way we can.
If you are disgusted by what you see, and if you feel the fire coursing through your veins, then it’s up to you. You don’t have to be the leader of a global movement or a household name. It can be as small scale as chipping away at the warped power relations in your workplace. It can be passing on knowledge and skills to those who wouldn’t access them otherwise. It can be creative. It can be informal. It can be your job. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you’re doing something.
AFTERMATH
This book is nothing without the political climate that greeted it.
The events of 2016 caused a state of shell shock for progressives across the western world. It began with Britain voting to leave the European Union – a symbol of continental unity – in June 2016, and ended with the election of an unqualified, unpredictable opportunist, Donald Trump, in November of that year. Among progressive circles, it felt like we spent the beginning of 2017 agonising over Trump and Brexit. If we weren’t agonising, we were using these electoral gains as a reason to organise, a point to stand against. Because these seemingly unexpected political gains happened in both Britain and America, they dominated conversation. But they were part of a political trend that was totally encompassing Europe – a lurch to the far right. We should have seen it coming.
Almost a decade on from the global financial crisis, during which the vast majority of people had been living with prolonged financial insecurity, an old kind of politics emerged. Brutal, punitive strong man values were back on the agenda. The resurgence of the fascist, violently anti-immigrant group Golden Dawn in Greece, a country hit hard by the financial crash, was testament to this; by 2015, Golden Dawn had become the country’s third largest political party, with far reaching tentacles in the judiciary and police force. Late 2015 saw Switzerland's anti-immigrant Swiss People’s Party win the biggest share of vote in the federal election. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ far right Party for Freedom topped political opinion polls in 2016. The same year saw Sweden’s white nationalist Sweden Democrats, with roots in neo-Nazism, become the country’s third biggest political party. In France’s 2016 presidential election, Marine Le Pen and her far right party Front National were so successful that they made it into the final round of a two candidate race, losing with a 34 per cent share of the vote. The unstoppable tide of European far right electoral gains also took place in Cyprus, Denmark, Austria, Slovakia, Germany, Italy, Greece and Hungary. Their archaic, regressive values were demonstrated in the success of Finland’s Finns Party, who won second place in the 2015 election. According to the BBC, their 2011 manifesto suggested that young white Finnish women turn away from education to concentrate on providing the next generation of Finnish workers – thereby circumventing any need for immigrant labour.1 In the white nationalist revolution, a woman’s place is barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.