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I can halt the entitlement they feel towards me and I’ll start that by stopping the conversation.
IntolerAnce
I stopped talking to white people about race because I don’t think giving up is a sign of weakness. Sometimes it’s about self-preservation.
Tolerance
When I asked her why she wanted Black History Month in Britain, she said it was to ‘celebrate the contribution that black people had made in the United Kingdom. It wasn’t about hair . . . it was history month, not culture month. There had been a history, a history that I had been aware of, from my own father’s experience.’
(research in 2015 revealed parts of the country where black people were seventeen times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people.)40
We tell ourselves that good people can’t be racist. We seem to think that true racism only exists in the hearts of evil people. We tell ourselves that racism is about moral values, when instead it is about the survival strategy of systemic power.
A 2003 NHS England report confirmed that ‘there is a uniformity of findings that people of African and African Caribbean backgrounds are more at risk than any other ethnic group in England to be admitted to psychiatric hospitals under the compulsory powers of the Mental Health Act’ – that’s being sectioned against your will.16
The insistence is on merit, insinuating that any current majority white leadership in any industry has got there through hard work and no outside help, as if whiteness isn’t its own leg-up, as if it doesn’t imply a familiarity that warms an interviewer to a candidate.
Until fairly recently, media internships had been running on word of mouth and nepotism, relying on someone who knew someone who knew someone. If you didn’t have someone in your family, friendship group or extended network who was in the profession, or you weren’t prepared to work for free, you were cut out.
Colour-blindness does not accept the legitimacy of structural racism or a history of white racial dominance.
White children are taught not to ‘see’ race, whereas children of colour are taught – often with no explanation – that we must work twice as hard as our white counterparts if we wish to succeed. There is a disparity here.
Not seeing race does little to deconstruct racist structures or materially improve the conditions which people of colour are subject to daily. In order to dismantle unjust, racist structures, we must see race. We must see who benefits from their race, who is disproportionately impacted by negative stereotypes about their race, and to who power and privilege is bestowed upon – earned or not – because of their race, their class, and their gender. Seeing race is essential to changing the system.
When I talk about white privilege, I don’t mean that white people have it easy, that they’ve never struggled, or that they’ve never lived in poverty. But white privilege is the fact that if you’re white, your race will almost certainly positively impact your life’s trajectory in some way. And you probably won’t even notice it.
The idea of white privilege forces white people who aren’t actively racist to confront their own complicity in its continuing existence.
Freedom of speech means the freedom for opinions on race to clash. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean the right to say what you want without rebuttal, and racist speech and ideas need to be healthily challenged in the public sphere.
‘When feminists can see the problem with all-male panels, but can’t see the problem with all-white television programmes, it’s worth questioning who they’re really fighting for.’
If feminism can understand the patriarchy, it’s important to question why so many feminists struggle to understand whiteness as a political structure in the very same way.
When an organised gang of seven white men were found guilty of raping and abusing children (or conspiring to) in April 2015, the far right did not co-opt the story as evidence that we should deport all men from the country.
We as a nation hate paedophiles. We malign them because they are paedophiles. But crucially, we see them as anomalies. We don’t think that their actions are because of the deviancy of white men. When white men target babies, children and teenagers for sexual gratification, we don’t ask for a deep reflection on these actions from the white male community.
Feminism doesn’t work well as a polite, gender-only analysis that is neat and unchallenging enough to be accepted in corporate environments.
After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don’t wish to be assimilated into the status quo.
There is a difference between saying ‘we want to be included’ and saying ‘we want to reconstruct your exclusive system’. The former is more readily accepted into the mainstream.
My suspicions weren’t unfounded. In 2013, The Economist reported that in the neighbouring London borough of Hackney between the years 2001 and 2011, Stoke Newington’s white British population jumped by 15 per cent and Dalston’s by 26 per cent.
Information tracking sales between 2015 and 2016 showed that for the 12,246 council homes sold to tenants in England under right to buy, just 2,055 replacements began to be built.9 This is a consequence of government direction, not grasping immigrants hoarding housing.
Black people with education up to GSCE level were paid 11 per cent less. Black people with A-levels saw an average of 14 per cent less pay, and university-educated black graduates saw a gap of, on average, 23 per cent less pay than their white peers.12
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.
