Did I ever tell you about the time I realised I was racist?
Well...
Of course it was hard to face reality
That even little old me with the afrobeats obsession and the politics degree
Even little old me who at 13 ran upstairs
at my brothers’ birthday party to print
off reams of information about immigration
to brandish at my family
Even little old me with a dissertation on
the hypocrisy of foreign aid and the West's supremacy
It happened to happen on Facebook
when a friend shared a story of the captain of the England women’s football team
blacking up as Sister Act for a fancy dress party
“I just really hope one day we live in a world where this isn’t a problem” I said whitely
Well meaning and polite, delightfully light
and fully righteous
And of course I wasn’t really suggesting
that one day I hoped we could all get away
with blacking up to ‘accurately' look like
Minaj or Beyonce
But “I just want a better world where we
can all be equal”
Oh and I read back on that conversation this
morning and people, I can tell you. It wasn’t good
Because what I hadn’t understood
Is that it didn’t matter what my intentions
were or how I was feeling or what I thought
I was healing or appealing to
With that one sentence I had erased the history of people whose race
Has been traumatised by hundreds of years of fucking black face
Black face which has been used to export racism and stereotypes worldwide
An artefact of prejudice, hostility, ignorance
a tool of apartheid
I’d made it personal, as is our usual way
I’d made it all about whiteness, that stubborn cliche
"Let's talk about race baby"
"Let's talk about you and me”
"Let's talk about how white folks make race"
"talk all bout me me me”
Even though white supremacy exists systemically
My friend very gently told me to stop making
it about me, to stop making it about my feelings
and to open my eyes to the structures of whiteness
I just didn’t see
She told me to read and read and read
and indeed I did. I do
And discovered literature and wisdom that
whiteness has eschewed
She said “Listen to people of colour when"
"they talk about racism"
"because we live it every single day"
"Think about how women ask men to step back"
"in conversations about sexism in just the same way"
And today I don’t take for granted the work
that my friend did
The daily emotional labour of people of colour
to lift the heavy lids
Of the eyes of white people who are blind
to a world that’s been made for us
Who think that equality exists, the colonies are free
that #AllLivesMatter and that anything
more is just a fuss... about nothin’
Who confuse a black Potus with post-racism
Worry 'bout policing black words while
police are killing black children
And I know I’m another white person up here
spitting shit about race, but it’s time
to face the facts
That it’s perfectly clear that
And they're tired of spelling it out, trying
to make us understand
Tired of telling us how hard it is to live
the daily reality
Of a life where the mainstream subordinates
your personality to your race
Where to have an opinion is to be an “angry
black woman”
Where blonde, white and blue-eyed is default
‘good looking’
Where ‘progressives' progressively
sideline you
Out of ‘femininsm’, out of climate change,
politics too
Where gentrification takes your businesses,
your communities and homes
And appropriation takes your creations and
makes them white-owned
Where your skin colour is shaded from terrorist
to mentally ill
And you’re nearly three times as likely
to be killed by police
Where your history is erased, or confined
to just one month
And slavery and colonialism are just those
little things we dabbled in that once.
And I don't pretend to know the suffering
or the depths of the complexity of how it
is to live a life defined so visibly by skin
colour
And this isn’t a Dozeal, noone owes me anything
I don’t like what it stands for but i'm comfortable in my skin
I know it shouldn't be me standing up here using my voice
but they've been saying this
for centuries and getting back only white noise
And….I cried white tears for three days
when the veil was lifted
Something deep had shifted and I was grateful
for the gift of perspective
At first I felt guilty but neither guilt nor moral superiority ever helped anyone
And being ‘woke’ doesn't mean not touching hair
or asking where they’re really from
What’s to be done in fact is to truly
To realise that it’s not us and them but
we and that being white just means you
get the majority
of what we all should share
It’s a mistake to think that white people win when the system is unfair
Recognising privilege doesn’t mean to bear the blame
For something that’s conferred at birth
that you didn’t choose to claim
But when it’s named and you’re older and you see that it exists
This is when it’s time to come together to resist it
We’re born into a system that reflects whiteness back
The default always 'white', other always 'black'
The work to be done by us is to break the vow of whiteness now
The process of deschooling, unravelling and
reaching beyond perspectives, of understanding
how we got here
It’s not just about representation or an invitation
to black folks to see their faces in board
rooms or on TV
It’s about dismantling white systems and
white supremacy
and FYI, you with the black boyfriend, colleague, child or wife
You who knows the blacker the berry the sweeter the juice
and who's chasing the thug life
You who’d never say the 'n-word', 'coloured' or ‘half caste'
Who namastes in the morning, then takes a twerking class
You might not think you’re racist, because
you’re super nice
You have black friends, you never slur
love channa dahl and rice
But it’s not enough to just think you're 'not racist'
it’s something to actually do
Because we’re complicit in upholding so
much
and it starts inside me and you
