Ignorance Stops Now 15/06/20

Currently, the entire world seems to be rife with protests and riots and shows of solidarity against racism. So much so that we all seem to have forgotten that we are still in the midsts of a global pandemic. You know what they say about global crisis, you wait for one and they all come along at once. My main question is why on earth has it taken so long for people to wake up to discrimination and social injustices? 

Whilst everyone I know seems to be posting about it on social media, retweeting shocking footage of police brutality (not all of it recent), promoting petitions and pages that offer advice on how to talk about race (especially if you’re white), I’ve remained relatively quiet. At least on a public social media level. Instead I’ve spent my time having face-to-face conversations with people about the current prevalence of the BLM movement, signing petitions and donating what I can to causes like ‘The Bail Project’. It’s absolutely crazy how addicted America is to incarceration, imprisoning people before they’ve even been put on trial. Specifically black men who, although they make up only 6.5% of the US population, they make up 40.2% of the US prison population. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that those figures just don’t add up. That there’s clearly an issue either in the living conditions which lead up to the crime (allegedly) committed, the judicial system itself or both. That's without even going into the detrimental impact imprisonment can and does have on peoples' mental health, with most deaths in suicide occurring in the first week of incarceration. Whilst I understand that it can be really beneficial to use your social media platforms in order to engage with and inform others of these issues, I also think we are in danger of missing the importance of genuine live discussion with each other. The relevance of debate and moreover of action. My concern is that people will whack up a post about ‘Justice for Floyd’ and think that they’ve done their part by playing into the movement. In reality, of course that is LITERALLY the bare minimum that you can do. 

I think my silence on social media is partly because I’ve wondered at how much good me posting about racism and in particular George Floyd’s murder would do, or how much awareness I could actually raise about systemic racism. It’s not like police brutality or the targeting of oppressed minority groups is a whole new concept. Especially in America where police only require a shockingly short period of 21 weeks of training before receiving their badge. Take the countless incidents of the same nature, captured on video or not, that came before Floyd. Maybe it was the shock of Floyd’s death captured in such a close proximity in which we could see both his face and the face of the policeman who was taking his life away, but it is a sad and belittling notion that over time we’ve become numb to these daily occurrences.

Furthermore, It’s not that I feel like I ought to be separate from racism as a white person, in fact far from it. As someone who has benefitted from white privilege, of course the oppression of minorities is my issue. There is absolutely no way you can solve a problem without acknowledging that you may (be it actively or transcendentally) exist at the very root of it, If not at least a very prevalent component. It’s like if someone tells you you’ve hurt their feelings, you can’t just claim that you haven’t and be done with it. Emotions don’t work that way and by default people do not work that way. Thus perhaps what people need to do is LISTEN. Rather than briefly acknowledging the areas in which they’ve been reaping the rewards of white privilege for years or have been absent-mindedly using micro-aggressions, just sufficiently enough to warrant an Instagram post of their new knew found awareness. Instead, would it not be more progressive for people to just APOLOGISE for their ignorance and ask in what ways they can being to understand the situation better. I think it’s a much needed learning curve for all, and one that I pray to God will continue. 

I’ve also realised that it’s hypocritical to validate my silence on the subject of racism with the excuse that I’m taking the time to educate myself whilst calling out people who refuse to talk about racism because ‘it doesn’t affect them’ when that in itself is a sign of privilege; that you can choose to abnegate yourself from the situation as if it wasn’t ‘your issue’. Because your skin colour hasn’t negatively impacted the opportunities you’ve been given throughout your life. Maybe the importance of conversation outweighs the fear that I’m sure many people have of saying the wrong thing, and it is in fact worth making the mistakes so that we can learn from them and humble ourselves in allowing ourselves to be corrected. I think that that more than anything shows a genuine desire and capacity for growth. I admit this with a sense of shame but I think this is something I hadn’t quite realised until I saw the video in which Steven Twitch Boss (@sir_twitch_alot) compares the importance of speaking out against racism as a white person with speaking out against misogyny as a man. It’s true whether we like to admit it or not, that we tend to prioritise things which affect us directly and so, although I abhor the idea that racism and sexism would be compared in a competitive context, I understand that by comparing the issues rather than their values, it was easier for me to see the issue from a point of view I hadn’t considered before. Not until Boss pointed it out to me. Thus, as  a white person, rather than making futile attempts to lead the movement, I think it’s necessary that myself and other people present ourselves as supporters and allies of #BlackLivesMatter as much as possible. 

That being said, another thing that I think is important to understand is that now that white people have suddenly “woken up”, it is not then the job or responsibility of black people to provide information and resources. To essentially serve us with their history, their statistics and evidences of their oppression that we caused. In a way that kind of defies the whole movement. I think one of the best messages that white people can take away from all of this is that we finally need to start taking responsibility. Whether that be responsibility for our offensive behaviours (whether we were aware they could be received in that way or not) or from a more positive outlook, taking responsibility for our own education and knowledgeability around issues such as racist discrimination. You wouldn’t approach a person in a Burka and demand that they tell you everything there is to know about the religion of Islam. Go and look it up, don’t be lazy. 

I think one of the best explanations I’ve seen for the treatment of black people (specifically in America) is a speech by a woman named Kimberly Latrice Jones who analogises America’s black history as a Monopoly game: 

“If I right now decided that I wanted to play Monopoly with you, and for 400 rounds of playing Monopoly, I didn’t allow you to have any money, I didn’t allow you to have anything on the board, I didn’t allow for you to have anything, and then we played another 50 rounds of Monopoly and everything that you gained and you earned while you were playing that round of Monopoly was taken from you, that was Tulsa. That was Rosewood. Those are places where we built black economic wealth, where we were self-sufficient, where we owned our stores, where we owned our property, and they burned them to the ground.”

“You can’t win. The game is fixed. So when they say, “Why do you burn down the community? Why do you burn down your own neighbourhood?” It’s not ours. We don’t own anything. We don’t own anything.”

In the same speech, Kimberley makes reference to Trevor Noah, host of ‘The Daily Show’ who talks about the social contract that was broken by the authorities who swear to protect and serve. That the same unease people are feeling at seeing places like ‘Target’ smashed up and looted from is a small price to pay for the treatment black people have been subjected to for centuries as they’ve had to “watch themselves being looted every single day. Police in America are looting black bodies,”. So yes, looting is not upholding a social contract, but neither is shooting unarmed civilians based on the colour of their skin or depriving people of their basic human rights because they’re not descended from white slave owners. Black people are not the first ones to break this so-called contract, so how dare some white people belittle the importance of a movement such as #BlackLivesMatter with oppositional claims that #AllLivesMatter. It’s not white people who’ve been enslaved, lynched, murdered, stolen from, denied equal opportunities and treated as lesser just because of the colour of their skin. If your house is on fire, you don’t hose down the whole street. 

Upon reflection, maybe one of the most unsettling things for me about seeing white people posting so much about race and encouraging conversations about race is not  the actual posting of this sort of important and political content but rather the lack there of previously. It’s great that people are talking about it now but why did it take the video-captured death of a black man at the hands of a white policeman to spark this level of outrage. Why not the wrongful incarceration of the ‘Central Park Five’, or the failure to arrest the policeman who shot and killed Anthony Lamar Smith in a car chase in 2011? Or Rodney King – a black man who was viciously attacked by four police officers in 1992 – leaving him with skull fractures, broken bones and teeth, and permanent brain damage? Or the death of Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland and Philando Castle, all at the hands of policemen or whilst in police custody. Why have people, in the UK in particular, pretended for so long that racism is an American issue when it doesn’t take a BNP rally to realise that you would have to search far and wide to find a member of a minority group here in this country, who’s grown up never having at least heard a racial slur against them. It’s not like racism is a recent 21st century form of oppression. It is perhaps one of the oldest forms of deprecation and oppression towards another group of people that exists. And I really hope that now that people have woken up, it is a topic that will be implemented into school curriculums and work place conversations.

I wasn’t going to say anything online about all of this. But now, to be quite honest it just seems ignorant not to at least try.