Don’t Tell Us What Racism Is...

“People who insist on dividing the world into 'Us' and 'Them' never contemplate that they may be someone else's 'Them'.”

- Ray A Davis

I’ve been told that I’m black for as long as I can remember. As a small child I always saw myself as me first, and the colour of my skin was just one of many adjectives that could be used to describe me. But as I got older – I’d say I was around 6 years old – it became increasingly clear on a daily basis that my colour was important. And it was mainly important to people who looked nothing like me. Yep. My skin colour was really important to white people. “Oi you wog’ or ‘run nigger, run’ are the two of the earliest memories I have as a 6 year old of walking to school. Or running to school depending on the situation. Or running home. There was a shitload of running. Aaaah, those were the days. I once heard the question, what age is a black boy when he realises he's scary? In my case 6 years old.

Now don’t get me wrong. People who looked like me expressed the significance of my ‘blackness’ and as I grew older, these discussions became more impassioned, educational and personally relevant. But these discussions were from the perspective of those who shared an understanding of the impact of being viewed through a prism of prejudice. And the cumulative knowledge acquired through experience, anecdotes and education made some things very apparent to me. Black people, Asian people, Hispanic people – basically non-white people – really knew what racism was because they actually experienced it. They felt it in their lives and the effect that it had on their ability to successfully navigate their days, all the time hoping that things were getting better and quietly suspecting that they weren’t. They didn’t see racism as simply having a few unwelcome epithets thrown at them. No, racism was an insidious, pervasive and unavoidable force in their lives that affected everything in existence. Access to work. Access to justice of any kind. Access to housing. Where your kids went to school. Whether they were safe at school. Whether they were safe anywhere. And they had an implicit understanding of white culture because they had no choice. After all, if they were to have any degree of acceptance, they needed to adapt to and assimilate in to white culture. Or at least as much as they were allowed to.

As such, forgive me when I see the relentlessly delusional comments about race relations and racism from people who are the least likely to understand it. When Boris Johnson dismissively suggested that President Obama had an ancestral dislike of British Empire because of his grandfather and colonisation, or that the queen adored the Commonwealth because of flag-waving picanninies with watermelon smiles these comments were viewed as racist by anyone with melanin skin content. To be fair a vast number of white people felt so too. When Marine Le Pen opens her mouth so much of what she says is rooted in prejudice that it’s almost too easy to identify her as a racist. And of course, at the top of the present day list we have Donald Trump.

Mexicans are rapists, although some might be good people. An American judge with a Hispanic name is incapable of being fair because he is ‘Mexican’ (he’s not but what does it matter to a bigot). He refused to condemn white supremacists who voted for him. He treats racial groups as monoliths (‘the’ blacks, ‘the’ Jews, ‘the’ Latinos). The Central Park 5. There’s a long ****ing list. But it’s fair to say, the broad consensus is that the tangerine Stalin if not racist, has said some pretty racist things. However, like the other people mentioned on this list, their defenders not only claim they are not racist but proceed to have the gall to define what racism is. Just listen to Rudy ‘Goebbels’ Giuliani saying that Black Lives Matter is inherently racist and then even more ludicrously, that it was outrageous to call anyone racist. But then, it’s Rudy Giuliani. And in his case actions lie louder than words.

So when those of us whose skin isn’t white, we who have historical disenfranchisement and an unfortunate shared history of mass genocide, enslavement, subjugation, cultural theft, oppression and colonisation over centuries, speak about racism and express justifiable fear and concern at a white world ostensibly rejecting the concept of equality, hear us. Race doesn’t really occur for you because it has never been a barrier. We told you for years the Police were murdering us. We told you about the fact that justice was only blind if you were white. We told you that we were being refused jobs, housing and basic dignity in every sphere of life. And in the main your responses suggested that you thought we were lying, exaggerating or – and this is my favourite one – ‘things were much better now’. Well now we know that once again we were right. When it comes to racism we’ve always been right. Because we are conditioned to see it, to taste it, to sense it. Our racist radar has been genetically encoded over centuries and although it may have been diluted a little because white people keep Columbusing our shit (Miley Cyrus did NOT invent twerking) we’ve had cause to recalibrate it recently.

People of colour know racism is about the economic ability and political will to enforce restrictive and discriminatory practices against a people or peoples, who are often in a minority. And of course, irrational hatred. As I said earlier, racism isn’t just a few unfortunate epithets. Just because you understand it intellectually doesn’t mean you actually understand it. And unless you go through the daily humiliations and cruelties that have been inflicted on us (by you) over millennia whilst we stand back and watch it’s unlikely that you ever will. We appreciate that witnessing racism discomforts you and appreciate your sympathy. But no patriarchal white guy – or any white person over the age of 45 gets to define what racism is for us. Sorry, but none of you do.

Because that’s how we get Steve Bannon in the White House (that name seems less and less ironic) and how the racist language of the Farages. Johnsons and Trumps normalised.