White supremacy is in my blood; we need to get uncomfortable fast to defeat it

I wouldn't be here without white supremacists. My ancestors were 17th century, Eton-educated colonials. My ancestors were also poor Indian women, taken as mistresses by the English and Portuguese upper classes whose wives remained in Britain, kept in silks and butlers thanks to the treasures bled from the colonies by the Empire. This is the history of my Anglo-Indian maternal family, who lived in Calcutta until the 1960s, when my mother and her family moved to Britain courtesy of their British passports, only to be greeted by "No Dogs, No Irish, No Coloured" signs and a cold shoulder from the supposed "Motherland".

My mum met and married my dad, an Englishman who is pretty much as white as they come, and along came I and my brother. Growing up in a mixed race marriage was something I'm really grateful for. It showed me what it looked like for different cultures and backgrounds to meet and blend. When I was growing up, I didn't notice that my mum had brown skin. I don't even really understand this since I'm not blind, but I remember a clear moment when I was around 11 years old when I realised that the woman I simply saw as my mum might be seen as "the lady with the dark skin" by other people. Race and racism were discussed around our dinner table and experienced first-hand.

I came out freakishly white, considering the gene pool I emerged from. My brother has far darker skin than I. Perhaps for this reason, it took me a long time to embrace or be curious about my Indian identity and heritage. I've always felt like a fraud. Many people look at me and think I'm "a bit..." (their words, not mine), but I don't clearly look Indian and as such I've struggled to feel like I can openly own all the facets of my ethnic background. 

Reading one of the books below, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race, liberated me from this imposter syndrome by showing me that race is about far more than the colour your skin turned out. But the fact that I pale in comparison to most BAME people means that I too share the same privilege as white people in this country and the US and all around the world. I speak for myself and my experience but I cannot speak for anyone in the black community or any other individual from any ethnic group. It means that for me, the tears that have fallen in the past week do sting more personally, but it does not mean that I can deny my privilege or understand the difficulties and obstacles and threats that black people and minority groups face every single day all around the world.

Me, my Mum and my brother... back when you could get haircuts

It took me a while to decide whether I should write this blog. I don't want to compound the ignorance and I know I'm all too capable of being ignorant on these matters. But then I realised that if I blog about anything, I need to blog about this. Whatever forms of communication we use, whether it's face to face conversation, the phone, or social media - we need to be talking about this right now, and for good. For good. 

The trouble is that we are so scared of getting it wrong that we don't get it at all. I'm sure I've phrased things clumsily in this piece. But this afternoon, having stood in my kitchen crying tears of rage over Trump's proclamation that "today is a great day for George Floyd", I knew that I must say something. We all must.

So here are some of my thoughts on how those of us who don't experience difficulty because of our skin colour can act positively moving forward:

1) We need to get prepared to get uncomfortable 

It's not comfortable to discover that Britain pillaged the rest of the world and is built on the backs of slaves. The British school curriculum has serious gaps in its content on racial history, teaching the "greatest hits" of US black civil rights and the abolition of slavery. There is a gaping hole swallowing up that whole embarrassing Empire thing. We do not teach our children why India and Pakistan are two separate countries and why we are responsible, or why the "Windrush generation", so recently newsworthy again, had British passports. No wonder, then, that so much resentment and ignorance is being bred even among younger generations, when the structures of education do not breed understanding and historical context in its place.

Fact: when slavery was abolished, the British government agreed to pay a giant chunk of compensation... not to the slaves, but to slave owners. This was finally paid off in total in 2015, meaning our taxes have been going towards paying slave owners off until 5 years ago. Source here and thank you to Reni Eddo-Lodge's excellent book Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race for educating me on this.

What's even more uncomfortable is sitting and listening to, or reading, or watching, somebody who tells you of the struggles they daily face and how you can be part of the problem - if not by being actively racist, by failing to see the ordinary everyday issues and confront them; by not even noticing that every birthday card has only white people on it, that plasters only come in peachy-pink and that foundation shades are few and far between if you have dark skin. It's uncomfortable realising you didn't even realise. It's uncomfortable discovering that black explorers, NASA scientists and doctors have been edited out of our history books. It's uncomfortable checking our privilege. But it's absolutely essential. Comfort is not our goal. Justice and equity is. 

2) We need to get prepared to get it wrong and be called out

I was pretty shocked when one of my heroes, Emily Maitlis, got it so wrong on this week's Newsnight. Interviewing George the Poet (George Mpanga), she stated,

"‘You’re not putting America and the UK on the same footing… our police aren’t armed, they don’t have guns, the legacy of slavery is not the same."

Mpanga's bowed head said it all and he called her out on it respectfully and firmly. So many of us are capable of this kind of well-intentioned lack of understanding. We have to recognise we have no entitlement to get upset if we are told that we are asking the wrong questions and taking the wrong approach. Learning curves are best travelled with humility. If you want to correct me or challenge me on anything I've written here, please do. Tell me what could be better and what I need to change.

If we are starting with a statement, we need to turn it into a question. Sentences like "Racism isn't that bad in Britain" should be rethought as, "Please tell me what your experiences are of racism in Britain". A white person proclaiming the lack of racism in Britain is the same as a perfectly able-bodied person declaring all infrastructure wheelchair-friendly. It seems like there is no problem if you are not the one suffering the consequences.

Fact: if you are black you are twice as likely to die in police custody. If you are black you are 40 times more likely to be stopped and searched in the UK. BAME groups are twice as likely to die from Covid-19.

I can't speak for all POC but from my point of view, I find it hard that so few people have ever asked me about my ethnic background. It is just as much a part of me as having children is - and boy do you get asked about that if you have them. Not everyone will feel exactly the same about this, of course, but the idea that "we don't see colour" is at best unhelpful and at worst dangerous because it tells us not to see people for who they truly are. Colour is a part of who we are. It is not something to pretend doesn't exist because then you eradicate the problems around it as well as the joy of diversity. You're far more likely to make someone feel uncomfortable and offended by never ever touching on a subject that is highly important to them, than asking sensitively about it. And as in the above point, it's better to try and get it wrong and take it on the chin than not ever move things forward.

This story is a beautiful example of how more understanding can be fostered from these conversations.

The idea that we risk being villified for "political incorrectness" if we talk about race and racism is, in my view, just another form of white supremacy in the guise of white people who want to call the shots on what counts as acceptable. It's a way to silence the discussion and hide the structural injustices that people face every day because of their skin colour. The idea that POC will take offence and attack those who respectfully engage with us in this discussion is a fallacy that is in itself racist and perpetuates and protects racism.


3) We need to be pro-actively anti-racist

We want our children to see all people as equal, regardless of the colour of their skin... but how many books on our shelves have ethnically diverse characters? How many films have we watched with black or brown heroes? How colourful is our friendship circle? Do our kids know who George Floyd was and why he died? If we live in quiet, white villages, do we go out of our way to take them on trips to more ethnically diverse towns and cities? If we see racist incidents occurring, whether it's on the internet, in public or in private, do we call them out? Will we?


4) We need to be educating ourselves by listening to black and minority voices and then amplifying the black voice and the black community

Here are some ideas of where to start:

Why I'm no Longer Talking to White People About Race - Reni Eddo-Lodge

Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire - Akala

White Fragility: Why It's so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism - Robin Diangelo

Episode 102: Empire State of Mind on the Reasons to be Cheerful Podcast

George the Poet

About Race Podcast with Reni Eddo-Lodge

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Becoming by Michelle Obama (this is now a documentary series on Netflix too)

Engage with these - there is plenty on all forms of media - and other voices and information. Only once we have begun to listen and understand and truly hear can we be true allies: standing alongside, sharing the message and widening the platform.

5) We need to be fighting for structural change

All people can be and generally are prejudiced. Black people can be prejudiced against white people, but it doesn't generally reduce their life chances. Conversely, when white prejudice exists it is twinned with power to form societal structures that drive people down and force them to the bottom of the pile; that take away opportunity, health, wealth and ultimately life. To fight racism we must challenge and dismantle these structures.

If you're in management or leadership at work, do you have diverse representation, especially in positions of power? Does your board actively seek to find people of different backgrounds to provide a voice? This isn't just about providing a voice for people of all communities, it's about the fact that diversity of experience and opinion enriches everything and makes us all better and stronger together. Do you have a good mix of ethnic backgrounds in your workforce, and if not, why not? That might mean quotas for interview; it might mean looking into your job application processes to find out why no one is applying who isn't white; and it might mean being really honest about whether applicants with names you can't pronounce are equally considered, consciously.

Fact: 69% of FTSE companies have no ethnic diversity on their boards and this BBC study shows that you are three times more likely to get a job interview if you have an English-sounding name than a Muslim name.

We can write to the powers that be and demand answers. Adidas currently has 5 white men and 1 white woman on the board. Nike has 7 white men and 3 white women. Let's ask why. Ask your employer. Ask your kids' school.

Let's support black-owned businesses. Let's support black female-owned businesses (black women are the victims of intersectionality, discriminated against by both their gender and race and struggling against the most obstacles to health, solvency and opportunity). Let's read books by a range of authors, watch movies and TV series that you might not naturally choose, and take the time to watch that Facebook video by Black Lives Matter that we would normally scroll past.

Let's get out of our comfort zone. Because every day, millions of people in the UK and around the world have to live in a world that's uncomfortable at best and fatal at worst. George Floyd's family know that; and so does every ordinary black and brown family in the UK.