Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

Fear of a black planet destroys good fiction, and it demonstrates how racism gets in the way of human empathy.

And this is nothing but insulting when heard by the black fiction lover who, if they are to enjoy their chosen genre, have no choice but to empathise with a character who looks nothing like them.

The imaginations of black Hermione’s detractors can stretch to the possibility of a secret platform at King’s Cross station that can only be accessed by running through a brick wall, but they can’t stretch to a black central character.

Far from destroying our most well-loved works of fiction, abandoning assumptions of the whiteness of our characters infinitely expands all of the fictional universes, whether it be the wizarding world or the Star Wars galaxy.

Free speech is a fundamental foundation of a free and fair democracy. But let’s be honest and have the guts to unpick who gets to speak, where, and why. The real test of this country’s perimeters of freedom of speech will be found if or when a person can freely discuss racism without being subject to intellectually dishonest attempts to undermine their arguments.

I think that there is a fear among many white people that accepting Britain’s difficult history with race means somehow admitting defeat.

At the core of the fear is the belief that anything that doesn’t represent white homogeneity exists only to erase it.

Racism’s legacy does not exist without purpose. It brings with it not just a disempowerment for those affected by it, but an empowerment for those who are not. That is white privilege. Racism bolsters white people’s life chances. It affords an unearned power; it is designed to maintain a quiet dominance. Why don’t white people think they have a racial identity?

When I write about white people in this book, I don’t mean every individual white person. I mean whiteness as a political ideology. A school of thought that favours whiteness at the expense of those who aren’t. To me, it is like yin and yang.

Because I don’t know what the other people in the room are thinking, but if I’m thinking about that and no one else is saying it, then it’s on me to say something.

His words strike at the heart of the issue. There’s nothing to suggest that a black child with a white parent, or who is adopted into a white family, won’t be on the receiving end of immeasurable love and support. But, having never experienced it, the parents might not be well equipped to deal with the racism their child will receive.

It makes sense that interracial couples might not want to burden themselves with the depressing weight of racial history when planning their lives together, but a colour-blind approach makes life difficult for children who don’t deserve this carelessness.

This left-wing writer was angrier at people’s reactions to racism than the racism itself. This was the beginning of a backlash against conversations about white privilege.

The Stephen Lawrence trial was perhaps the closest Britain has ever come to a national conversation on the insidious nature of structural racism, and how it manifests as a collective mindset– partly through malice, partly through carelessness and ignorance– to quietly assist some, while hindering others.

You’re never sure when a conversation about race and racism will turn into one where you were scared for your physical safety or social position.

I thought I might be able to persuade her to think outside of herself and question the wider context, but then every sentence she said sounded like every word I’ve ever heard from people defending whiteness. It’s like they all learn the lines from the same sheet.

How can I define white privilege? It’s so difficult to describe an absence. And white privilege is an absence of the consequences of racism. An absence of structural discrimination, an absence of your race being viewed as a problem first and foremost, an absence of ‘less likely to succeed because of my race’.

Neutral is white. The default is white. Because we are born into an already written script that tells us what to expect from strangers due to their skin colour, accents and social status, the whole of humanity is coded as white. Blackness, however, is considered the ‘other’ and therefore to be suspected.

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.

Not seeing race does little to deconstruct racist structures or materially improve the conditions which people of colour are subject to daily

Along with them are people who consider themselves left, progressive and very critical, who in some ways join up with the post-racial liberals and colour-blind conservatives to say, “if we really want to get beyond race, we have to stop talking race”.’

In 2014 I interviewed black feminist academic Dr Kimberlé Crenshaw,she elaborated on the politics of colour-blindness.‘It’s this idea that to eliminate race,you have to eliminate all discourse,including efforts to acknowledge racial structures & hierarchies and address them,’she said.‘It’s those cosmopolitan-thinking,twenty-first-century,“not trying to carry the burdens of the past and you shouldn’t either”[people].

It was in that moment that I had to reluctantly accept that pushes for positive discrimination were not about turning the whole place black at the expense of white people, but instead were simply about reflecting the society an organisation serves.

Because, if the current system worked correctly, and if hiring practices were successfully recruiting and promoting the right people for the right jobs in all circumstances, I seriously doubt that so many leadership positions would be occupied by white middle-aged men.

Opposing positive discrimination based on apprehensions about getting the best person for the job means inadvertently revealing what you think talent looks like, and the kind of person in which you think talent resides.

When each of the sectors I mentioned earlier have such dire racial representation, you’d have to be fooling yourself if you really think that the homogeneous glut of middle-aged white men currently clogging the upper echelons of most professions got there purely through talent alone. We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance.

Quotas have been suggested as a strategy in many sectors– from politics, to sport, to theatre– and they always receive a backlash.

Instead of being seen as a solution to a systemic problem, positive discrimination is frequently pinpointed as one of the key accelerators in rampant ‘political correctness’, and quotas are some of the most hotly contested methods of eliminating homogeneous workplaces in recent years.

Over a decade ago, Neil Davenport wrote in Spiked Online that ‘affirmative action enforces rather than overcomes notions of equal racial abilities’.

Black people are also more likely to receive a harsher police response (being five times more likely to be charged rather than cautioned or warned) for possession of drugs.14 That probably won’t come as a surprise to him, though, and he will be used to the feeling of an overbearing police presence in his life.