Climate & Colour
Last week I curated, spoke & performed at ‘Climate & Colour’, an event reflecting on white privilege, a history of institutionalised racism and the racial lens through which we view climate change, feel grief and plan action. It was a journey into further understanding how these things are deeply intertwined & dismantling pervasive racism to create a more just world & a diverse & united movement for change. You can read the full text of my talk & watch the full event below.
Good Evening,
My name is Samantha Lindo, I live in Bristol & I’ve been part of CCA just over a year. My grandparents came to the UK in the 1950s from Jamaica, my grandfather was one of the first black Anglican vicars in the UK and served near London for about 40 years.
I’m also a singer, songwriter and I try my hand at poetry. I’m going to perform a piece called ‘Naming the Water’ to start us off this evening. It is about the experience of being arrested last April for taking part in civil disobedience to demand government action on climate change.
It narrates how as a mixed race person, having explored my black heritage and identity, my experience with the police catalysed the process of ‘Naming the Water’, of becoming truly aware and responsible for my whiteness and the privilege it holds, something that in a system of white supremacy, often remains invisible.
Naming the water
In which I swim
Naming the water
In which I swim
Naming the water
Naming the water
In which I swim
So I’m naming the water, that allows me to swim
Because I can belong if I want to
I can just about fit in
And sing my mermaid song,
to my inheritance beyond
I pick my treasures from the wreckage,
And stories long gone, with those merchant ships
But I am in the water, the water is all this
That is invisible and all around
And I now hear the immeasurable sound
of anger that echoes down the halls
And bounces off the metal and the tiling on the walls,
Like in Birmingham, Bristol, Brixton, but now Bromley
Here I am and I can see, that to me
the water is given
Although this time in a plastic cup
It is measured, delivered, and then topped up
Through a hole in a double bolted a door
For which I smile, and say thank you for
And I see flowers in the reception
From those that stayed a here too
courtesy of her majesty, they took the room,
But by choice, and just for the night, and they were quenched by the waters
Of an unearned right to privilege,
Boiled up into tea
Hot to touch and pale to see
But blindness tends to obscure the view
Of a history, when it wasn’t you,
But we shouldn’t be angry
That’s not how we should be
No I don’t remember, because it was never me
I’ve always felt safe, I’ve always been in the right
And this has always been invisible,
because this has always been white.
As I describe in the poem, last year I was arrested, by choice, on Easter Day. After my very calm and polite arrest, I spent a night in a cell. Although scary, disconcerting, unusual, I was treated with respect.
The night before, however, there had been a free festival near the protest site in Marble Arch and I had watched officers police thousands of black youths leaving the area. It was a very different dynamic.
During the night in the cell I was kept awake by visceral screams, shouts, from officers, from arrestees as I imagined the scenes.
When I finally was released the next day, relieved, exhausted, emotional. On turning on my phone, I saw tweets, news articles, debates raging, not just about the protests, which were in themselves controversial, but about some well-meaning white activists whose actions were being called out as ‘racist’
I had an explosion of feelings inside. I expected the press to not be on side with protests, but I did not expect the criticisms to be around race.
Flowers had been delivered to the police station in Brixton.
“To all the kind souls at Brixton police station, for all you have done with decency and professionalism.”
This was well meaning. It was acting in non-violence, trying to break down boundaries with the police. It was acting to try to prevent runaway climate change, the effects of which are the most devastating to people in the global south - predominately black, indigenous and people of colour.
However, groups such as Wretched of the Earth and Black Lives Matter, understandably met these actions with a deep suspicion, considering the station’s part in Britain’s ugly history with police brutality, riots and the deaths of black people in police custody.
The police have historically reflected the institutionalised racism of the state, a state which just a short time ago in human history, was propagating a white supremacist dehumanising ideology in its science, philosophy and religion, to justify the enslavement, oppression and colonisation of millions of black and brown people all over the earth - and ideology that is now baked into our system.
Although these flowers were not explicitly racist, what they did was expose blindness. Blindness to other British peoples histories, to white privilege and to the hurtful and minimizing impact that these actions might have.
I felt confused, guilty and angry. I wanted to distance myself from the actions of those activists. But the truth is. I was not exceptional. I had been part of that too. I had joined in with the chants ‘police, police we love you, we’re doing this for your children too’, and I too, and had meant well.
I felt defensive. Here was an intersection of my identity. Two tectonic plates colliding.
As part of becoming who I am, as a person who is mixed race, I have claimed and explored black identity in myself and my family. But what about my whiteness?
Although it’s clear I’m not just Caucasian, I do pass as white.
I understood intellectually, but largely based on the class of my Jamaican grandparents, and my light skin privilege, I have not had the type lived experience with the police that could allow me to understand this experientially.
This was a blind spot for me as it was for many others.
This poem is called Naming the Water because we live in a society where, although changing, ‘whiteness’ is set up as the norm.
It can be invisible. If you are white-passing, it can feel normal - what you live and breathe. Your experience can seem ‘universal’.
The unearned ‘privilege’ of being white in a system of white supremacy is that it invisibly rewards whiteness and can therefore make those people blind to the realities of those who do not have that privilege, thus upholding and perpetuating it.
As part of Naming the Water, I am going to introduce three concepts that I can identify in this story, that I will dive more into in the follow up sessions.
I think they will be useful in starting to structure reflections on how people may be unknowingly complicit with racial injustice in activism and in everyday life, and how through education, awareness and action they can begin to to dismantle it from the inside out.
First of all it is important to define what white supremacy actually is.
By ‘white supremacy’ I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings. (Ansley, 1997: 592) like the police, education etc etc
In Time to Act, Anthony Reddie explains that the white supremacy that served to justify slavery, colonaistaion and genocide is also deeply intertwined with capitalism and climate change.
The ‘slave trade’, which was underpinned by rampant greed & profit, was the displacing and exploiting of bodies’. Once we’d done that, we moved on to the environment, grabbing fossil fuels to drive growth.’
The disproportionate impact of climate change on black and brown-skinned people comes on the back of 500 years exploitation of their bodies anyway. It’s a compound disaster, adding one injustice to another’.
So in light of this, when thinking about racism, we need to:
1) Focus not just on extreme acts of hatred but how one’s actions unknowingly or knowingly uphold this system of white supremacy
2) Know that it is not enough to be ‘not racist’ - passivity in an oppressive system - as we know is complicity - we must be actively anti-racist & work to dismantle those structures
3) Recognises that the inequality crisis is intertwined with the climate crisis and if we don’t work on both, we will succeed at neither.
Next, white privilege, which is explained by Peggy McIntosh as an invisible package of unearned assets that she could count on cashing in each day, but about which she was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious.
White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks.
She famously listed 50 privileges that accrue from being identi- fied as white, ranging from the ability to shop without the threat of being followed by security personnel, to the possibility of living free from harass- ment and the option to act however you choose without being seen, as emblematic of an entire racial group - to me being treated well by the police in comparison.
And finally white fragility, a phrase coined by Robin De Angelo, is the ‘discomfort and defensiveness on the part of a white person when confronted by information about racial inequality and injustice and the inability of white people to tolerate racial stress.
This phrase has its limitations, but I mention it as I think it could have felt really easy to feel fragile, as I probably did reading the press about the flowers, about the letters written by Wretched of the Earth, and dismiss them with all of the other, expected criticism.
Having an awareness the way our society is structured, privileges which may have previously been invisible and this common fragile or defensive response - may give a greater self-awareness when having these healthy & inevitable discussions about race, as well as structure a process that, as we venture forward, will integrate this much needed, active anti-racism into all levels of our activism.
Thank you for listening.