Brown face in a white room
“My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.” — Audre Lorde.
I’ve sat on the committees of a number of activist, political and community groups over the years, and found them to be uniformly emotionally sterile and humourless social environments. It’s an experience shared by many committee members I imagine, and while I could devote pages to that sense of suffering, I’ll spare you that. My focus here is on the experience of being the only person of colour in an otherwise white-dominated group.
Most recently I served on the steering group of a city-wide community group for almost three years. The group focuses on removing social, economic and racial barriers to access to nature, informed by scientific wisdom that time spent green and blue spaces is vital to the flourishing of physical and mental wellbeing. I’ve always applied the lens of racial justice when looking and thinking about this work above all, motivated by own experience of growing up in an overwhelmingly concrete neighbourhood.
Perhaps it’s useful here to offer a portrait of what that upbringing was like in 1980’s Britain. This was a time when being chased by gangs threatening to kill me was an everyday reality, Being called paki, wog, or nigger as I walked to or from school was nothing out of ordinary. I was spat at more times than I can remember. I was beaten up by middle-aged men for doing my paper round. When Stephen Lawrence was murdered, I remember hearing the news, and I wasn’t shocked.
Racism in the UK now finds expression very differently today, for the most part. It’s safer to walk the streets, the visceral threat muted. This might sound perverse, but I don’t find the meeting room a safe place. Instead, it’s fraught with lazy assumptions, reckless language and the toxic air of indifference. Challenging any of those things feels unwanted and perilous.
I don’t want to deal in abstractions, so I’d like to invite you into my experience. In a meeting around 18 months ago, a committee member remarked, as we were discussing how to increase engagement with diverse minority communities in our projects, that he noticed “more people from ethnic minorities on the Common”. You might think that’s a harmless comment, but it belies a multitude of worrying assumptions.
Primarily, it’s irrelevant to the topic of discussion; there’s no debate that diverse communities of all backgrounds visit the largest green space in the city on an occasional or even regular basis. That’s true everywhere in the country, but to highlight the fact is to denote surprise to an unlikely occurrence, as if those communities are somehow less predisposed to sitting on grass, enjoying a picnic, flying a kite, or playing football. That’s definitely not my experience, and that’s been true for as long as I can remember, since I was a kid. Was he suggesting that some sort of seismic cultural shift has been taken place? It’s far more likely he just wasn’t paying attention. There are a greater number of immigrant communities in Southampton than previously, and that’s reflected in their presence everywhere — but that’s a different conversation and a different observation.
It also lazily reinforces the idea of a monolithic ‘foreign people’. Just as white people from different backgrounds are raised according to different cultures that encourage or discourage certain behaviours, it’s also true of minority communities. No two ethnic groups are the same, and within those groups they may even differ in religion and language. As a community group seeking to engage with these groups, the starting point must be to take the time and care to find out who they are, surely, beyond identifying them as simply not white.
More recently I’ve also been whitesplained to on how to engage with a classroom of immigrants, which as the child of immigrants I of course found incredibly helpful, even as an experienced teacher of English as a foreign language to different groups of students in different countries — which I tried in vain to get across. When I discussed this with the chair of the group later, she dismissed it as a harmless rambling anecdote, and justified its crudeness on the basis that the committee member was working class. She also told me she cringed at the use of the term ‘them’ to describe the class, but remained silent.
I don’t believe that either of the examples here are intentionally discriminatory towards a particular race or minority group, but I’d contend that they demonstrate the logic of racism. Reducing a different racial group to a single characteristic, making broad assumptions about the behaviour of entire communities and failing to recognise the inherent positive qualities of the immigrant community are all points on the way towards developing a simplistic and prejudiced perspective. It’s in these less explicit, “harmless rambling anecdotes” for example that ideas are more easily accepted and absorbed, a seed planted in the consciousness.
Of course, some of my experiences have been more obviously dangerous. In other groups, I’ve been told that anti-racism is a radical movement, and that the voices of people of colour aren’t important. In every case I alone challenged what had been said, while none of my white peers had said a word in to question it. I did that because they maintained a silence, not because it is uniquely my responsibility as a person of colour to do so. It’s a lonely, frustrating and draining duty that I’ve never asked for. That emotional burden is unspoken, so rarely considered, and one I’m tired of carrying.
There is, I think, an explicit social purpose to being silent: it confers authority of what’s been said, but more importantly maintains the status quo. And when you’re in a position of influence, the very last thing you seek is anything that might disrupt that. To say anything that forces others to question their beliefs and assumptions that have perhaps been held for years, decades or entire lives is an onerous, unwelcome thing.
We helpfully dress that silence in the clothing of politeness, and by extension respect- the opposite cast as something disrespectful, often aggressive and hostile, In reality it’s simply what an unfiltered honest view sounds like. Yes, you can locate anger in that honesty, but it’s a hard-won anger that needs to be understood as the only possible emotion in response to experiencing the seemingly endless continuation of discrimination — instead of being reduced to a failure to observe social convention. That just isn’t true, and feels absurd to even write. And yet it’s precisely what happens, and is allowed to happen.
