Being White: We cannot UNDERSTAND but can we STAND-UNDER and serve?
A note about this piece. I have written about, talked about and campaigned about racism and diversity both personally and professionally for years and yet now, when it seems the world is alight with the flames of racial anger and of revolution for a better world, I have fallen silent. Since the murder of George Floyd, I have grappled with an inner conflict on how to personally respond, and have now cautiously decided to share some of that grappling, in the hope that I can learn from others, and perhaps add something to existing conversations about being white and what it means for how we use our voices at this time. Since I wrote this piece, my hometown of Bristol has hit the headlines, with a deeply important symbolic act of rebellion. I have written a short post-script to the original piece to reflect what actions I commit to in the crucial weeks and months to come, to add my shoulder to the momentum that has created.
Being white I can never understand the experience of the BAME community. I can empathise, I can listen, I can learn, and I can act. But I can never truly understand what it means to be judged, to be marginalised, to be systemically disadvantaged at every turn, by the colour of my skin. So what can I, or any other white person actually DO? Is it time to shout out or shut up? Time to stand aside and let those who do understand speak, time to stand alongside and cheer, or is it time to stand UNDER and humbly serve those whose voices need to be heard and who’s time for justice is long, long overdue?
In the early noughties I had a rare privilege, heaped on my already privileged life, when I spent 6 years working almost exclusively in the company of an extraordinary group of BAME colleagues. They are a fiercely clever, honest, courageous, and inspirational group of people from across Africa, the Middle East and Europe. It was and remains a privilege to know them and to work alongside them, but the greatest privilege was the education they allowed me. A hard and often tear strewn education, that, like all good learning is never complete. They taught me, often gently, sometimes rightly brutally, about my own white privilege. They helped me to explore my whiteness and its influence on my life, my family, my history, my thinking, my opportunities, and my power and affect on others and the world around me.
I made mistakes. Boy did I make mistakes! But we grappled and learned together, we trusted each other, we laughed, we cried and asked questions of each other that are often not OK to ask. They also helped me see how very much more I had and have to learn.
One of the most influential of those relationships was with one particularly dear and close colleague and friend. We had strangely similar lives in many ways. We both had supportive families, teenage children and middle class comfortable inner city lives. The big difference was that she is of Afro-Caribbean decent and I am of Anglo-Irish. She is black and I am white. With so little else to separate our lives on paper, the clear and daily impact of the colour of our skin was plain to see in 21st Century Britain. I found the most brutal contrast of all was for our children. Her son would get stopped and searched by the police on a regular basis. Mine never was. Both hard working, law abiding, middle class British kids. But the world literally saw them differently, and too often judged and treated them as differently as was possible to imagine. We talked long and hard, often into the night about this reality and we both agreed that until ‘mothers like ME’ were as angry and active about changing this outcome as ‘mothers like HER’, nothing would change.
I have never been in an all-white social situation where the conversation has naturally turned to our ‘whiteness’. You would not find a single black person who could say the equivalent thing of conversations in all black circles. We, the white population of the UK, are able to ignore even the idea of race and racism only because we are white. If ‘colour-blindness’ exists it is a blindness to the power, privilege and influence our whiteness has at every turn. When I brought up white privilege then, almost every white person I knew had not even heard of it, and most were horrified at the idea. In a country where our collective ideas about ‘privilege’ are so tangled up with class, most white Britons know exactly who they think are ‘privileged’ by our system, and it’s ‘definitely not them’. Whenever I bring up race and racism (though not often enough), or the colonial influences in every aspect of current economics and global politics, it is treated like any other ‘intellectual discussion’ rather than as the real, raw, insidious influence on each of our lives on a daily basis. When I talked about our collective lack of recognition of our past, our need to embrace and deal with our guilt for it and face up to the enormous and ongoing present day benefits and privileges gained from it, then as now, the discussion would usually go quiet, and my educated, socially liberal friends and colleagues would nod and agree, but quickly move back onto safer ground.
But I must admit at this point, to widespread and shameful failure. Failure to keep that fire burning quite as brightly as I would have done had it actually been MY son who was stopped and searched so often he could ‘shrug it off’. Failure to keep being quite as vocal as I was then about white privilege in the face of the anger, hurt or avoidance around me. Failure to fully build on the momentum of the education my dear friends and colleagues began for me all those years ago.
And so to today. Suddenly (and we must urgently recognise this is only sudden for white people, it is centuries old for people of colour) white people are waking up. Suddenly they are joining in the anger, the indignation, the need for change, for honesty, for solidarity. I’m not sure why this one brutal murder is so different from all the other brutal murders that have gone before it but I have seen more posts about race, racism and white privilege posted by white friends and contacts in the past few days than in the rest of my 51 years of life.
So I should be cheering from the rooftops. Sharing every post and commenting on every article. But I’m not. I have been largely silent. Partly because I am uncomfortable with the ways some white people are choosing to lend their voice to this work, but partly because I have felt more aware than I have for many years of my whiteness in the past few heart-breaking yet hopeful days
I’m conflicted. Deeply conflicted.
My conflict is in the need to both shout and be silent. The controversy about ‘white allies’ is real and right. Nothing will change unless white voices join POC voices demanding change. But white voices shouting loudest and being heard first is a big part of the problem.
In the same way that as a woman I have had enough of being ‘mansplained’ to about the institutional and structural problems we face in society, mostly designed and still controlled by men, I think most black people have had enough of being ‘whitesplained’ about the institutional nature of racial injustice. We white people need to learn to listen and to learn, and we need to own our personal role in this situation and the benefits we reap every single day from the racist lens through which our society is shaped.
I want to say less and hear more.
I want the voices of those who REALLY understand what all this means to be the ones we tune into. I want us to explore the word ‘understand’ and rather than pretending we do, I want us to take it more literally and try to ‘under-stand’ — stand at the feet of our BAME brothers and sisters and elevate them onto platforms, magnify their voices, promote their ideas. We don’t need more white sympathy or shock, we need more white humility and commitment to serve those who must be heard and whose voices must prevail.
So yes, perhaps we do need to shut up. But we need to shut up in a way that shouts from the rooftops that this is not OK. We will not tolerate it any longer. We are deeply and truly sorry for our ignorance and our complicit acceptance that has allowed racism to prevail for too long. We need to shut up and learn to hear the wisdom of others and stand at their feet to serve our shared cause for a better future.
We need to work on the urgent task of growing our capacity to humbly ‘stand under’ and support. As Gary Younge so eloquently put it, “when Martin Luther King said that the arch of history bends towards justice, it doesn’t do that by itself, we need to put our shoulder to it”. We, the white people in our communities, need to take the knee more than just symbolically. We need to get on the ground, at the feet of those who DO understand what racism really means, and put our shoulder to their words, add our actions to theirs, stand-under and elevate their efforts to change the arch of history.
Post script.
Since I wrote this piece, I shared a draft with trusted colleagues, who DO understand. They urged me to share this, but to do so with some specific commitments to action from me to back up my words. I had hesitated to do that for fear of joining the army of virtue signallers across all social media channels, seeking out ‘likes’ as a form of activism and affirmation. This cannot be a short term spike of interest or action for me or anyone else. This is a centuries old struggle and will need our long term commitment to change it. But in the spirit of learning and listening I have listened to them and share an initial list of my own personal commitments for now:
1. As a white person, I commit to upping my game. I commit to lifelong learning, and pushing myself into those difficult and dark places not staying in the comfortable armchair activist seat. This is my problem too and I must work harder from the inside out.
2. As a citizen of Bristol I have been moved and inspired by the actions of so many, from politicians, to police chiefs, to artists, to activists and anarchists, all supporting us to face up to our city’s long history of racist oppression, but also live up to our long history of radical rebellion. I will use the privilege of my diverse personal and professional networks in this city, to listen first, and find ways to best lend my active support to this work, beyond signing petitions, talking and marching.
3. As a neighbour and friend, I will recommit to keeping the flames of this moment alive whenever I find myself, as I sadly too often do, in wholly white circles. This cannot be a fad.
4. As a mother I will further my efforts to support my passionate adult offspring, not just to care as they do, but to increasingly add their active ‘shoulder’ to the fight. I will also reach out to other ‘mothers like me’ to see what role we might play in fighting the racism in our communities.
5. Lastly as a leader. I rarely describe myself as a leader, but I am, and as such I have power and influence and must use it. I head up a UK charity that is actively challenging the economic system that underpins racism, inequality and climate chaos. It is easy for me to feel ‘I’m doing my bit’. But I am not doing enough. I commit to doubling our collective efforts within the Centre for Thriving Places, to put equality, diversity and racial justice more visibly and vocally at the heart of our work. Building a new economy is vital to changing that arch of history — it is about challenging the structures that continue to privilege the few over the wellbeing and even the lives of the many. I commit to seeking and sharing more black voices in this space, collaborating with more BAME organisations around the world, inviting more challenge to our ideas and action. As a writer and speaker on this subject I also re-commit to ALWAYS pushing for every panel or platform I am invited to be on, to represent the country we live in, not the just the voices we have grown used to hearing.
Please note:
I’m more than aware of the irony of talking about shutting up whilst sharing my thoughts here. I’m not seeking easy ‘likes’ to this post and actively invite both challenge to my words and personal commitment to action whatever your opinion of them.