2020 is a challenging year for the entire world due to the COVID19 pandemic. Over the last few days Britain (and the USA) is gaining more understanding about the disproportionate COVID19 deaths in black and south Asian groups. We’re seeing with horrifying clarity racist Police brutality in America. People of colour are hurting, they’re fearful and angry.
On trying to manage the different emotions and reflect on how we got here and face our own experience of race, writing can help. It has helped me to write a perspective.
The one thing I am reasonably confident about regarding my children is that, unlike me, my siblings and my husband; my children are unashamedly comfortable with the colour of their skin. It’s normal, beautiful, particularly beautiful to my daughter. She proudly colours in her pictures of herself in brown crayon, often using a far darker brown than her actual colour with keenness and vigour (not sure how long this will last..).
I am very comfortable in my skin, but I wasn’t always and I’m sure for many 2nd generation kids of black and brown parents living in Britain their skin colour has been a source of angst. I’m not saying all such kids wanted to be white but I am saying they noticed their skin colour as different and at least once, specifically as different and inferior.
I could write about structural racism and try to articulate what I understand using words from authors and scholars who have described the issues and sentiments I found hard to express whilst growing up. Instead this is a more experiential piece. People of colour in the UK are striving forward with proud purpose and expressing what structural racism is, feels and looks like. I’m glad for that, but it hasn’t translated to effective or sustainable change. Like a lot of complex, historical, deeply conditioned issues – they only get more complex when we forget to understand and recognise our own silence and complicity. Again, for structural reasons, experience and fear enables silence and complicity.
We have restrained ourselves to fit in, to increase our chances of achieving in British society. We have ignored minor, also major racism to enable our future. Perhaps not often to extreme lengths, not necessarily covering up; but allowing systemic, structural racism to continue; in order to achieve and have the opportunity to flourish within the constraints of modern institutional systems. I think we’ve even pitched ourselves against other people of colour; ‘if I keep quiet I’ll succeed, I can be just as good as the white folk, and we know not all people of colour can be, some are chosen, those who ‘don’t fit in’ are left behind’. Perhaps we believe success after a bit of silence can achieve bigger things, play into bigger vision? Who knows…
This has been an option for more privileged black and brown people. For more deprived, marginalised black and brown communities, there often wasn’t/isn’t even the opportunity to self-repress racism, there has been little opportunity to thrive legitimately, hence the only option is to survive. Surviving in an unequal world, where you believe through experience that no one is bothered to help or enable you isn’t straight forward for many privileged folk to understand. In general, you either succumb to repression and marginalisation or you fight. Fighting can look ‘civilised’ but often it doesn’t. People repeatedly treated like they are second class, like the obvious assailant, like they don’t belong and have no legitimate home; who have watched their loved ones suffer; they cower, or they fight. Fight against an establishment that has hurt them for generations and why should that look nice?
Racism is embedded institutionally and within society. It has been conditioned for generations. Black and brown people are of course not devoid of racism. Racist beliefs exist between brown people, black people and each other. Hierarchal race related structures are integrated in many cultural and religious Asian and African societies. Within Asian and African cultures, fairer skin tone is actively preferred and celebrated as an example. Whether as a consequence of centuries of colonialism and divisive tactics to rule, a hierarchy of colour/race and level of inferiority inflicted by apartheid or perhaps an aspect of human behaviour; racism (like stigma) is embedded within most societies.
However, right now we are visually observing, with the backdrop of the COVID19 pandemic, how decades of structural racism and health inequality are playing out in two of the major global western nations contributing to disproportionate deaths in black and Asian people. To add fuel to the fire we are viscerally reminded what structural (white) superiority in action looks like; the most poignant of examples a video showing law enforcement calmly murdering an innocent man. None of this is new but we’ve all woken up and been alerted. Or at least I hope we have.
I remember the time apartheid ended in South Africa. I distinctly remember the quiet look on my dad’s face of relief and I remember thinking perhaps people will now think we are as ‘special’ as all the others. As I got older I forgot all that nonsense and realised the world was far more complex and that racism was more than just being about the colour of your skin. What we’re observing in America is not only about race or racism, it’s about longstanding historical repression; enforced difference; power and control from an establishment.
I have not felt significantly held back from an educational or (medical) professional point of view by my skin colour (this is certainly not the same for many other people of colour in the same profession). Perhaps related to the fact that although my father is an Indian who came from extreme poverty, he and my mother, through grit and hard work, ensured we never lived in poverty. I was privileged, I had a short name, brought up with an English accent in the south of England in nice towns; I had instilled in me by my parents that there was nothing I and my siblings couldn’t achieve; that all people are the same; all people should have the same opportunities but they don’t. A similar narrative likely for other migrant families. My father was unusual I think for that time to provide us with not one lens to look life through with. I came across racism many times in my life and was wary of it for most of my young life, but it didn’t stop a psychological drive to thrive. Interestingly my sister, only 4 years older recalls a far harder time of racism while growing up, no doubt it impacted her self confidence in ways hard to fully appreciate. Some of it was not obvious; subtle examples include the fact that she was ‘never’ eligible to play the part of the main character in a school play who was clearly a white character; or that she could never ‘marry’ the hottest guy in all the magazines, as he was white and would never get with a brown girl. Some of our hardest memories involve our parents suffering, seeing them undermined, attacked, disadvantaged; we would have far preferred ourselves affected than our parents, it hurts more. We also recall them resisting racism, challenging, answering back. In fact, much racism I encountered in childhood has been pushed out of my mind. Many people of colour don’t have the privilege to dismiss racism the way I could.
I’ve probably felt more held back due to my ‘Indianness’ as an adult than my skin colour specifically. Is it right that an Indian friend at one time tells me with glee that a passer-by mistook her for being Brazilian! Far cooler and less stigmatising than being an Indian or a Pakistani. If we don’t feel truly equal and comfortable in our own skin, how do we expect others to see us as this way?
These personal insights only touch the surface of structural racism in our society that stems from colonial origins. Countries were ruled and developed via racial superiority structures for centuries. How many decades will it take to deconstruct that? If we bothered to teach kids in all British schools about the British Empire and of the centuries of slavery from the 1600s; not simply that slavery happened, but that it was enabled for hundreds of years; perhaps British society would look different. As we grapple with biology and COVID19 disease risk in black and Asian groups, one wonders what centuries of repression, slavery and colonisation does to the human stress levels and the innate health of communities over hundreds of years; are biological epigenetic changes induced by this? Race may be only a social construct, one that’s been used to command power by driving difference. How do we break that down and turn it on its head? Perhaps it can only start with the next generations. Because of my privilege I have less personal understanding of what true deprivation does to a person’s mind, body and soul. Through my work as a doctor in many diverse environments including in the land of my heritage, I’ve developed an understanding of what deprivation and repression does to people and to their children. I can stand to watch much hardship because I’ve had to help people deal with often extreme hardship and pain, with care and professionalism. But the older I get, I stand it less when I see the faces of children facing deep hardship. That’s a killer for me. Because I know if you remove childhood, if you remove love, safety, joy from a child and replace that with fear, disappointment, pain and neglect, that child doesn’t return and their childhood is lost; their adulthood is scarred, their body neglected, the mind desperate and uncaring, their soul broken.
Whatever the current time is telling us and teaching us; whatever we think the fight is about, we must enable change for the adults of the future who will create their own society. We need our children to understand right from the beginning what equality truly looks, but more importantly, feels like. We need to build self confidence and worthiness in black and brown children to recognise and resist racism and repression; change anger and passion in to action, teach them to live to thrive like everyone else, to find peace and love like everyone else, to find purpose and a true home like everyone else. But also to listen. If we eagerly label racism without listening all we do is shut down the conversation and never make real change. What appears as racist is often not simply about racism; it may be about hurt, anger, mis-understanding, poor (context) communication. We must try to listen, understand the context and converse without personal agenda; it is up to all of us, black, white, brown to listen to those whose lives are different from our own. If children feel truly equal, truly invested in just like the kids around them of differing colours, they will notice and object to institutional racism as it hits them.
A global pandemic is enough to rock our world; in the UK and US we see how deaths have disproportionately affected black and South Asian communities, we also see the visceral images of George Floyd’s murder by law enforcement in the US and understand many more cases of institutional racism. Tensions are high, people are fearful, grieving and angry. This is a time of history in the making and it is an opportunity for desperate change.
While the current time unfolds, take care of those small ones and take care how we teach them about this current time. I hear Whitney Houston’s beautiful, troubled voice, albeit with corny lyrics, singing her 1977 hit ‘The Greatest Love of All’, that ‘children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way…’ and we know she’s right.