Black Tiles, Black Lives, Black Rage: Navigating your new found wokeness.

I haven’t written anything in a long time, mostly because life got in the way and work and uni and the general routine of everything didn’t give me enough time to stop and reflect like I used to. However, I’ve got nothing but time and a lot of thoughts at the moment. I wanted to write not just to address what’s been going on but also because I needed an outlet to break this down for myself. I see and hear a lot of white people talking about being anti-racist? But what does that amount to in your world? What real material shifts and changes are you making? What parts of yourself are you challenging? And is this newfound awareness just for today, tomorrow or just for Instagram?

This past week has felt very weird to me. I have felt very angry and also sad. I think it’s because this isn’t just purely performative to me this is my life, and now you’re in it as white people saying that you are standing for me and people like me. But I’ve been here, and we’ve been dying. I went to school with you, I worked with you. You know me, Tendai, who can’t handle her drink and makes dirty jokes. You’re friends with me, but I never knew how much you cared and I find it sad (which may be selfish) that you had to watch a black man dying to see that my life matters, that black lives matter and that racism is very much real. I think it’s weird because it’s revealed a weird apathy or disconnect in the white people that are around me to something I’m very aware of. 

I want to say I see the black tiles on your Instagram and the outrage in your stories and on your Facebook walls. But that’s not all this is. Please know that. Being anti-racist is not just awareness, it’s not just solidarity or showing up it’s challenging the very notions of your own identity. Racism and anti-blackness underpin our systems of meaning, and structure so much around us. So you need to start by reckoning with that. It’s overt, insidious, and it’s local and global and it’s in everything you’ve probably internalised from a young age. 

“Race works like a language … signifiers refer to the systems and concepts of the classification of a culture to its ‘making meaning practices’. And those things gain their meaning not because of what they contain in their essence, but in the shifting relations of difference which they establish with other concepts and ideas in a signifying field. Their meaning, because it is relational and not essential, can never be finally fixed, but is subject to the constant process of redefinition and appropriation.”  

Stuart Hall

The very notion of whiteness is that it’s not the other. This is how whiteness is defined and is how whiteness operates, always in relation with difference. Whiteness secures its place as superior and as the norm by drawing its parallels in the presence of difference. This relation is what makes you, you and means that I don’t belong. The language of race penetrates the way we think about gender, class and sexuality. These things work in intersection with one another not only to further and define oppression but constantly inform each other creating networks of power. This is what you need to start understanding, this is the basis of white supremacy, which is the basis of our society and many parts of your identity and privilege. It’s why Black life is thought of as disposable. Realising this is ugly and hard work and not as easy as reposting information on social media or showing up to a march or protest. But black liberation and the end of racism will never happen until this structure and network of power are deconstructed. I keep seeing “I can’t believe this is still happening in 2020”, but why? This society wasn’t built for us, and although it’s shifted and changed and “allowed” us more rights, it’s still based upon and rooted in the same colonial understandings of race that places Black people and POC at the bottom of every social, political, economical and cultural hierarchy.

“RACISM IS LIKE A CADILLAC, THEY BRING OUT A NEW MODEL EVERY YEAR”. 

Malcolm X

Racism isn’t a faraway thing happening in America or happening just institutionally and systemically through politics or the economy. It’s very much underpinned by how you relate to POC every day, wether you’re conscious of it or not. 

Culpability and accountability aren’t saying you signed off on any of this because you were born white, but it’s understanding what being born white means, and using that privilege to combat racism every day, in your home, at your job and with your family and friends and by yourself when no one can see. Use the space that you occupy within society to demand that it be deconstructed to be fair and equal for everyone. 

(Originally published 4/06/2020)