Did we change his mind…

This article isn’t for you (Sorry)

It’s for me; my anxieties, fears, and honestly, just general being

But I still need you to read it, and hopefully why becomes clear down the line.

“Boys, dinner some point this week. We’ve not discussed in a minute.”

That was the text that dropped in our mini group chat at 12:19 on a Monday afternoon, appearing less like a catch-up request and more like the Bat-signal demanding our presence. But he was right though, it had been a minute and as he would later observe, we were “better than that”, or at least we actively tried to be. So, we made some abstract plans and a couple of days later we were walking outside Euston station looking for somewhere to eat.

Slowly, our conversations got longer and our strides shorter as the North-West London sky darkened. We told ourselves we were looking for the right restaurant but really, we were just three Black boys enjoying the walk around London, finally able to catch up amid the mess that was 2021. However, we would soon bite the inevitable bullet, give in to our (Black) impulses and enter the first Nando’s we see.

Some light small talk and perhaps flirting — I can never tell — later, we found ourselves seated two seats down from a man watching the Champions League on his iPad while nursing a bottle of wine (“I didn’t even know Nando’s served wine”). Our conversations floated from insignificant topic to topic. We had the obligatory 90 seconds of considering whether you’re going to change your standard Nando’s order (you never do), touched on work, holiday plans, tried to ascertain whether the girl was indeed flirting (every one of us as hopeless as the other) and all in all managed to catch up in that kind of weightless, frivolous manner that only old friends can.

Good storytelling practices dictate that at this point I highlight two points of note. The first is that I was wearing my BLACK LIVES MATTER hoodie, for no particular reason, except maybe because:

1) It’s a very warm hoodie

2) I have it, so yeah, I’m going to wear it and

3) Black lives do matter.

This doesn’t have any immediate relevance, but it is important for you to know, and, like Chekhov’s gun, we’ll just wait for it to go off.

The second is that, as I hope anyone that knows me can attest to, I have always had clear opinions on racial issues and my, admittedly, infrequent tweets can confirm that I’m willing to vocalise them.

I’ve never liked talking to strangers — Taxi drivers, corner shop bossmen, or the woman seated beside me on the bus — I’m just not a fan. I’m not inefficient at it, in fact, my little bit of main character syndrome convinces me that I can strike up a conversation with literally anyone about anything. I just think it requires too much effort, and I’m a very socially lazy person.

However, these friends revel in it, they love finding out the details of the Uber driver’s last trip or how work went for the person ahead of us in the queue, leaving me vacillating between jealousy and disgust. So, predictably, when Mr. Nando’s Wine reached out to apologize for a recent football-related outburst, I was the only one eager to return to our conversation.

My friends would, in probably record time, find out what match he was watching, what team he supported (both Manchester City), and why he was alone in a Nando’s, drinking wine (he lived in Manchester but was in London for work). This inevitably led to him enquiring about our own football allegiances — a Chelsea fan and two Arsenal fans, myself included. The fact that we publicly identified as Arsenal fans in 2021 then led to a very long comedy bit from him spread across the course of our entire conversation. (This writer’s verdict is that while the jokes were funny, they were often ill-placed at important points of the conversation.)

All in all, it presented as just a fun, jovial conversation about football with the two Arsenal fans bearing the butt of the jokes when…

BOOM! There goes Chekhov’s hoodie-gun.

…in the middle of the table laughing at his latest Arsenal joke, he (being a white, middle-aged man) points to my hoodie and says, “I’m just looking at your shirt and…”

I didn’t hear the words that immediately followed because, at that moment, I was now preparing myself for what I feared would become a Twitter interaction come to life. He would go on to recount a story about how at a recent business breakfast, a colleague’s defence of Quinton de Kock’s (a South African cricketer) decision to not ‘take the knee’ with his teammates, had resulted in someone else calling this colleague a racist, in I’m sure a much calmer tone than was being relayed to us. He then, in the least shocking move of 2021, made the straight-line jump from this point to how his son and his son’s friend (more on them later) made “good points” on how the act of taking the knee had now become a “performative gesture”.

Maybe it was the Amapiano playing over the Nando’s speakers, that we had all semi-bonded about how doomed Arsenal was, or that, aided by his almost empty bottle of wine, he genuinely seemed like a reasonable person that could be reached (it definitely wasn’t because he had already assured us that he was “not a racist”) but whatever the reason, we all, almost psychically, decided to press on and try to explain all the nuances of racial protesting to this man from Manchester we had met at a Nando’s at 9 pm.

We made very salient points, many of which I’m not going to bother detailing here because again, this article isn’t for you. (If you’re looking to be convinced of something, please read way smarter people than I.) The three of us collectively tackled all the questions he raised. And they were questions, not arguments, he genuinely seemed interested in learning. We made points, expanded on these points, gave examples (our High School English teachers would have been so proud of our thoroughness). Importantly though, we emphasised that it was not for him, his (white) son, or his son’s (white) friend to decide what was an effective method of Black people’s resistance. That, most of all, seemed to get through.

He agreed with our points, he stepped back on most of his, he acknowledged his biases and blind spots. He genuinely seemed to be learning; the exact opposite of a Twitter interaction, it was miraculous. So much so, that when his white fragility triggered him to hilariously bring up the fact that one of his “closest friends” was a Nigerian currently back in Nigeria burying his mum, we shrugged it off and laughed at his jokes, not questioning the relevance of this anecdote.

Earlier, during the less racially tense parts of the conversation, he had asked us what we all did for a living: Consultant, Data Analyst & Writer — that was the simple answer. Now, as a spiritual follow-up to that question, he asked us if we, as three educated men with “very good jobs” had ever experienced racism. My friends answered affirmatively while I remained temporarily stunned by the fact that he had called writing a “very good job”. I came out of that initial shock to catch my friends explaining that you would be hard-pressed to find a Black man (especially one not born here), who hadn’t experienced some version of racism. We added that even in the absence of capital R ‘Racism’, we lived with several forms and effects of racism daily. Be it our innate Black curiousity to ascertain how many other Black people are in every new room or the immediate instinct to take off your hood the moment you step into a supermarket. Oh, you want to holiday in a European country? Wait, let me just do a week’s worth of research on their Black population.

All this continued to make an impact; we watched him nod in acknowledgment. We could tell that we were introducing this man to a whole other world, one that he had never been curious enough to seek out. We could see his biases slowly fading away, he was actually learning. We would be the three Black boys who changed this man’s life. He could then go on to positively affect the lives of his friends. My predisposed cynicism was slowly seeping away. Were we solving racism? We were racism heroes! Maybe I should talk to more strangers. He could go back home and explain to his son…sorry wait, what? What about your son?

“The one thing that pisses me off though, is when my son and his white friends are always saying “nigga this, nigga that””.

All six of our ears perked up, my brain refusing to register what he had just said. The friend closest to him tried to subtly correct him by saying “n word”, but nevertheless, he persisted. “They are listening to all this music and from that, they are calling their friends, white boys, “nigga””.

I…

Hmm…

Umm…

I froze. I was lost on how to proceed. Even at the time of writing, the words to accurately describe my reaction (or lack of) escape me. I tried to look at my friends to decide on our plan of action but our psychic link was severed. I would later find out that they too were frantically scrambling, trying to formulate their own plans.

On further, personal, examination of this evening, I would realise that this was the point I sat back in my chair, folded my arms, and stopped talking. If this was a Primetime video interview with Oprah, Twitter’s ‘body language experts’ would have had a field day.

Unfortunately, my shock has made it that I can’t accurately recall much that happened after this exchange. I can faintly remember my friends, bless them, engaging with him. One tried to explain the nuances of Black people reclaiming and using the word, the other asserted that it was wrong to blame music because the kids knew their use of the word was bad and would never use it in front of older, Black people. But they too were just trying to politely smile through the discomfort, but at least they spoke.

I was silent.

And livid…

…with myself.

Why was I quiet? Why was I not addressing the fact that this man had used that word?

We very quickly made the decision that this battle was a step too far for the evening, as we ran the risk of him thinking we were vilifying his son. We needed to stop and take the small Ws we had got from earlier in the evening. After all, is having to be content with small Ws not our perpetual role in this fight for racial equality?

Throughout all of this, my internal debate on whether I wanted to confront him about his nonchalant use of the word continued and every time, I convinced myself not to. I hated myself for doing so. Our walk back to the station was tinged with our own individual perceptions of some sort of failure. We all felt, in one way or another, like we could have done more. We should have done more. These would be our own personal battles to face.

I mentioned at the start, that this article was for me and my anxieties around not speaking up at that Nando’s table. I knew I should have called him out on it, so why didn’t I? The more I’ve thought about it, the more reasons (excuses) my brain has put forward. Was I afraid of looking like the difficult one, because neither of my friends had said anything? Or maybe I could excuse it away as not being that bad because he wasn’t “actually using the word” but relaying what he had heard people say? Was that the Tarantino training?

Most pertinent though, was that perhaps I felt like this was a negligible wrong that we could allow for the greater good of the evening’s work? What if I called him out on it and then antagonised him? Would I run the risk of ruining all the good work we had achieved that evening? Jeopardizing the results of my friends’ very eloquent arguments.

Another scarily apt explanation was the terrifying thought that maybe it was because we had come to like this man during our conversation. He had come across as a decent, albeit ignorant, person. Maybe I felt that it wasn’t “who he was”. What does that then say about me, though? Does that mean I’m only willing to confront a particular type of person that uses that slur? A certain kind of hood-wearing, torch-burning, racist that I have concocted in my head. If I was this lenient to an okay stranger at a Nando’s, how would I react if these were the actions (and words) of a real friend?

What all these excuses had in common was that I was again convincing myself to accept the small Ws and I was trying to excuse away the fact that I felt hollow and very much like a fraud. I had become the passive participants I very often derided.

Here I sat wearing a fucking Black Lives Matter hoodie unable to correct a middle-aged white man on his use of the worst slur Black people have faced, while still fake smiling at his “jokes”. Who was I to then speak to anyone about these issues? The splinter in my eye felt permanently lodged, I fear(ed) that I will never be able to remove it, that I’m forever banished to the life of a hypocrite.

The truth is that most important of all, I had disappointed myself. And this is a disappointment that remains till whatever day you’re reading this. I don’t know how I proceed knowing this about myself. Once you see the crack, you can never unsee it and like the teacup that’s been shattered, I feel that no matter how well I try to put it back together, the cracks will always show. How do I now learn to live and grow with these cracks?

I mentioned earlier that I needed you to read this. It’s not for any form of reassurance or even scolding but I had this urge to bring light to the crack. It may end up doing more harm than good, but unlike my moment on that Nando’s table, I decided to follow my urge this time.

As is par for the course on this blog, I don’t have answers. In this case, I really wish I didn’t have the initial questions as I am now left with even more questions. From the moment we left that Nando’s (till — and not to be dramatic here — possibly the day I die), the biggest of these questions has continued to nag at me, biting at my consciousness:

Did we change his mind…or am I just a bad Black person?

Bankole Imoukuede

Popcorn for Dinner

P.S I know this blog has been devoid of Film and TV content lately so allow me to direct you to the latest episode of our Podcast where a guest and I recommend the Best Shows of 2021 that you may have missed and I reveal my Top 10 shows of the year.