It occurred to me as I went for my morning walk today that we’re all racist, we’re all prejudiced and, what is more, we always will be. If I’m a bit late to the party on this one, please humour me. Sometimes we can sort of know something, really deep down, and still be floored by the sudden glaring truth of it.
Change can happen painfully slowly for the people living on the wrong side of it, but then erupt with staggering force. There have been countless and shamefully uncounted black deaths at the hands of white people for all of all of our lives, and for long before. But something about the brutality, the horror, the inhumanity, of four grown men crushing the life out of a fellow man pleading I can’t breathe, and we have finally woken up.
Suddenly it’s no longer good enough to hide behind the complacent, self-satisfied I’m not racist. Sure, there are loads of racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes out there, and they’re disgraceful, but that’s not me, thank you very much. I have black friends, for goodness sake!
Hmmm. We’re feeling angry, everyone can agree, but a less spoken truth is that we white people are also feeling humbled, ashamed, really quite foolish, and not before time. I reckon black people could tell us a thing or two about being shamed and humbled — and unlike us probably (sadly) won’t get to shrug off these uncomfortable feelings as soon as the world’s attention turns to the next big thing.
Like most people I’ve spent my life thinking I don’t have a racist bone in my body. One of my most powerful childhood memories, after all, is being kicked off a beach by policemen in Durban, South Africa, because my dad’s black girlfriend wasn’t allowed to be there. There were miles of beautiful white sands (how appropriate) for the good white folk, and one lousy beach covered in some kind of oil slick for everyone else. Under the laws of apartheid my dad and his partner couldn’t even be in a car together. Years later they were finally able to marry and I gradually acquired two younger sisters and a little brother.
So you see I can’t be racist; I have black and mixed race family! (My gay older brother similarly protects me from homophobia. It’s all very convenient). But the truth is that racism, or racial prejudice, or indeed any kind of prejudice, is not an absolute state but a spectrum, and we all fall somewhere between Extreme Bigot and Enlightened Buddha. We must surely be born free from prejudice, but as soon as we start to make sense of and articulate our little worlds using language that is built on prejudice, we’re complicit. Not malicious, not even willing, but complicit nonetheless.
The world had a big wake up call with the tragic murder of George Floyd, but I had one of my own a week earlier, and it was much more mundane. I was doing some reading prep for an online course, and came across this line in Maya Angelou’s autobiography: She was white, wore perfume and smiled openly with the Negro customers, so I knew she was sophisticated. It wasn’t even the whole damn sentence that did it. It was those three little words: She was white.
Even writing the words now they give me goosebumps. She was white. How many times had I read such a thing, in all my decades of devouring books? I’m horrified to realise I can barely remember another occasion. I’ve been merrily allowed to assume characters in books or people I’m being told about are white unless their blackness (their otherness, let’s face it) was announced. How must it feel to be the one whose difference is always pointed out?
I’m reminded of my extremely reserved brother telling me, after he’d plucked up the courage to come out, that straight people didn’t have to go about announcing their sexual preferences to all and sundry. As a straight girl I never had to sit down with my parents and say Hey mum and dad, I really like to have sex with men. I was just allowed to be.
We are all somewhere on a spectrum of racial prejudice and every other kind of prejudice too, and we will never be entirely free from it while we retain our faculties of thought and speech. We will never be free from prejudice but we should surely spend our lives striving to be, shifting as far along that scale as we can make it. Perhaps the spectrum is like a great big seesaw and all the people edging further along as they shed one prejudice after another will, one glorious day, tip the balance and bring all the bigots tumbling down into open mindedness with them. It’s a weird analogy, I know, but I like it.
We are finally waking up; let’s hope we don’t fall back to sleep.
