Naming the Water: Dismantling White Supremacy

I wrote this poem in February. I started this blog after the murder of Ahmaud Arbery and the lack of justice around his death and now I’m finishing it as protests surge all over the US, around the death of George Floyd as a result of police brutality. At this moment, this could not be more relevant.

Here in the UK, gun crime isn’t so prevalent, police brutality is more subtle and white supremacy perhaps does not look so extreme. But the fact is, our whole society, our modern way of life in the west and the economic dominance of the UK was built on the enslavement, subjugation and extermination of black, indigenous and people of colour. We are living out the implications of this.

If you’re white, I doubt you would ever identify yourself as ‘racist’. Racists are those bad people over there. Racists are those Ku Klux Klanners, those people in America who chase and gun down innocent joggers and Trump supporting cops in backwater towns in the southern states. But racism is so much more than these extreme, external acts of hatred.

Not being externally ‘racist’ is not enough. We have to dig deeper if we are to achieve the unified, reconciled, healthy and just society that we need in order to be whole as humanity and for us to be able to embrace all of the challenges we have ahead of us as a species.

My grandparents came to the UK from Jamaica in the 50’s. Middle class, with slightly lighter skin, their Jamaica was part of the commonwealth, they were Anglicised in culture and they very much identified with the UK as being a ‘mother’ country. My Grandfather became one of the first black Anglican priests and served in a white suburb of London for 40 years. They had racial difference, but they assimilated to fit in. My dad very much tried to ignore, suppress and compensate for any difference that he felt.

A generation on, I felt ‘other’ in subtle unacknowledged ways growing up. As I left home, it was important for me to claim that side of my heritage as part my identity to become my whole self, who I am.

Last year I took part in non-violent civil disobedience to demand government action on climate change and this resulted in me being arrested. This experience with the law and its enforcement fundamentally opened my eyes to some of my own blindness to, and complicity in, the pervasive racism that gives rise to acts like we have seen in the news this last week.

After my very calm and polite arrest, I spent a night in a cell, having watched officers police thousands of black youths leaving a festival near the protest site in Marble Arch the night before. The screams of arrestees and officers at the station kept me awake as I imagined the scenes.

When I finally emerged from my cell the next day, relieved, exhausted, emotional (having been safe, respected and treated very well), 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. 

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.” 

Groups such as Wretched of the Earth and Black Lives Matter, met these actions with a deep suspicion; not surprising considering the station’s part in Britain’s ugly history with police brutality, riots and the deaths of black people in police custody. 

This was well meaning. It was acting in non-violence, trying break down boundaries with the police. It was acting to try to halt runaway climate change, the effects of which are the most devastating to the global south - predominately black, indigenous and people of colour – right now. 

Although I don’t these actions were intended to be racist or offensive to anyone in anyway, what they did was expose blindness to other British peoples histories, to white privilege and the current realities of black communities.

I felt confused, guilty and angry with those activists. I wasn’t a racist. I wanted to distance myself from those actions. But the truth is, I had been part of that too. I had joined in with the songs ‘police, police we love you, we’re doing this for your children too’.

Although on so many levels I feel in solidarity with, and often part of, black communities, because of my lighter skin and also class of my black family, I do not have the same lived experienced of the police prejudice, violence and brutality that has marked the history of black British people in the UK and across the world. My actions were insensitive to this.

As part of becoming who I am, as a person with a mix of races in them, I have claimed and explored black identity in myself and my family. But what about my whiteness?

Although people can see that I am clearly not just Caucasian, I do pass as white. And I get every type of invisible privilege that goes with that. It’s therefore my responsibility to discover, own and dismantle all the subtleties of my whiteness.

This poem is called Naming the Water because we live in a culture where, although starting to change, ‘whiteness’ is the norm. It can be invisible. If you are white-passing, it can feel normal - what you live and breathe. Your experience can seem the ‘universal’. The unearned ‘privilege’ of being white in a system that invisibly rewards whiteness can make white people blind to the realities of those who do not have that privilege, thus upholding and perpetuating it.

Throughout lockdown, as part of ‘naming the water’ I have been working through the book Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad and also White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. I am revisiting wonderful books such as Natives by Akala, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge and discovering Elizabeth’s Martinez and Peggy McIntosh, whose work has does wonders to frame the debate.

It’s hard and it’s right. I thought I was ‘exceptional’ in the way that I was aware of so much; I’ve worked as a Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade educator, I’ve facilitated diversity events, I even wrote my final year degree project on post-colonial theory and my grandfather’s internalised racism but I am discovering the subtle ways that I have internalised the racist narrative of our culture and as we all do, have blind spots.

As we continue to socially distance, and now as a response to the deeply disturbing scenes we are seeing in the US, I wonder whether this could be a chance for us all?

And one more thing. Instead of the claps, as a way of thanking those MANY black and Asian people working in the NHS, our heroes (thank God we are finally calling them that!) the doctors, nurses, care staff and attendants who prop up the whole health and social care system, who we now know are MORE vulnerable to dying of Covid-19 because of a range of cultural and social factors, most probably to do with subtle but pervasive inequality, let’s each do our own work of naming that water.

What is needed is not charity, but solidarity. If you are also white passing, what is needed is a deep dive into owning, deconstructing and then renouncing all the subtle privileges that fall along racial lines.

This is hard and humble work. What is needed is not guilt - but it is our responsibility to each do our own internal work to play our part in putting an end to the wider structures of white supremacy and the subtle, internalised racism that fosters the extreme acts of hatred that we are so appalled to see on our screens.