Everything about her heavily monoracial upbringing was comfortably calculated, Jenny explained. ‘I lived a really deliberately sheltered existence on a lot of fronts. Not only living, I guess deliberately, around other white people and white communities – my school that I went to was majority white – it was also a fairly middle-class school. The neighbourhoods around the school at the time were fairly affluent. There were all these different factors that led to me being in a very specific environment. I don’t think any of that was accidental. My parents buying a house – you look at the neighbourhoods and you look at the schools, and you make decisions based on your own criteria, some of which may be overtly racist, or classist. “I want my kid to have a good school.” What does a good school mean?’
Given her background, I wondered how her stance on race could so drastically change from then to now. In my experience, a white person who has had an almost all-white upbringing brings with them an insularity, as well as a reflexive urge to defend whiteness when it is criticised. At what point in her life did she first realise she was white? ‘[I had a lecturer whose] class was unbelievably challenging for me, because he talked about race. He talked about race, he talked about imperialism . . . That was my first exposure, not just to the facts of it, but to politically challenging historical viewpoints on it. At the time I was really resistant to it. Thinking back to what I said now, and I just fucking cringe at it. But that really planted the seeds of change for me.’
At first, she was defensive. ‘I think what made me feel defensive is that I was embarrassed that there was a chance that someone knew something that I didn’t. On some level, maybe I could sense that accepting whatever that person was saying would open a can of worms. It was a combination of embarrassment and panic. I can’t put my finger on exactly what I was trying to protect or defend. I think it was an indignation.
‘I’ve lost a lot of sensitivity about being told I’m wrong. That’s a massive gain, on a personal level. I haven’t lost my white privilege. It hasn’t reduced because I suddenly understand what it is.’
I was curious to learn how Jenny’s anti-racist politics affected the rest of her life. ‘I discuss [racism] with family, with friends, in a work context, although those discussions can be really difficult,’ she says. ‘In the last three or four years, I’ve definitely had a few mega-fails where that is concerned, where I’ve either picked the wrong discussion to have or passed up the chance to have a discussion that was essential.
‘I’m trying to do more things in my ordinary day-to-day life that aren’t in activist spaces, to bring issues up when they’re relevant at that time. Because I don’t know what the other people in the room are thinking, but if I’m thinking about that and no one else is saying it, then it’s on me to say something. Being accountable for that, really only to myself. Doing things when there’s nobody there to see it, because it’s not really about somebody witnessing it or patting me on the back for it.’
It is unusual that Jenny is willing to do the heavy work of dismantling racism. Frankly, it’s unusual because she is white. So many white people think that racism is not their problem. But white privilege is instrumental to racism. When I write about white people in this book, I don’t mean every individual white person. I mean whiteness as a political ideology. A school of thought that favours whiteness at the expense of those who aren’t. To me, it is like yin and yang. Racism’s legacy does not exist without purpose. It brings with it not just a disempowerment for those affected by it, but an empowerment for those who are not. That is white privilege. Racism bolsters white people’s life chances. It affords an unearned power; it is designed to maintain a quiet dominance. Why don’t white people think they have a racial identity?
4
FEAR OF A BLACK PLANET
In 1968, the late Conservative politician Enoch Powell told a rapt audience in a speech about the ills of immigration: ‘In this country in fifteen or twenty years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’1 Inadvertently, he revealed his own tacit recognition of racist power relations in the country at the time, and although he didn’t explicitly say it (because he knew what side he was on), Powell clearly thought that a power transfer in race relations would lead to white British people facing the mistreatment and systemic barriers that black people were working to overcome. There is a reason why he said ‘whip hand over’ rather than using the less symbolic phrasing ‘advantage over’. Whip conjures images of beatings, misery and forced labour, of subjugation and total dominance – of slavery. Enoch Powell’s speech has consistently been earmarked as one of the most racist speeches in British history, but his language was only as racially charged as Britain’s relationship with blackness has historically been. The only way he could envision power being maintained in Britain was by subjugation of a people, because that is how Britain has held and maintained its power in the past.
The projection of an ever-encroaching black doomsday is what I call ‘fear of a black planet’. It’s a fear that the alienated ‘other’ will take over. Enoch Powell’s fears of a flipped script have lived on in modern-day political rhetoric on immigration. When, in the run-up to the 2015 general election, the Labour Party released official merchandise which included a mug that read ‘controls on immigration’, they played into that fear. Some insist that we are living on a tiny island and it’s time to shut the doors. There is a worry the ever-disappearing essence of Britishness is being slowly eroded by immigrants whose sole interest is not to flee from war or poverty, but to destroy the social fabric of the country.
The fear takes on many guises. We hear it in the form of ‘concerns about’ immigration, touted by political parties in recent general elections. We hear it in the form of ‘preserving our national identity’. At the core of the fear is the belief that anything that doesn’t represent white homogeneity exists only to erase it. That multiculturalism is the start of a slippery slope towards the destruction of Western civilisation.
It seemed borderline paranoid when UKIP’s Nigel Farage2 expressed a nervousness at hearing fellow passengers speak different languages in his train carriage. In a 2014 speech, he said, ‘The fact [is] that in scores of our cities and market towns, this country in a short space of time has frankly become unrecognisable. Whether it is the impact on local schools and hospitals, whether it is the fact in many parts of England you don’t hear English spoken any more. This is not the kind of community we want to leave to our children and grandchildren.’3