‘There is no end point in sight,’ I reply. ‘You can’t skip to the resolution without having the difficult, messy conversation first. We’re still in the hard bit.’
After my talk, a group of black teenagers crowd around me outside, talking excitedly. ‘I think the people who want to skip to an end point are the ones not really affected by the issues,’ says one girl. I’m impressed by her insight.
When Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, everyone was quick to crow that we were now living in a post-racial society. But proclaiming post-racial success was a way to bury any discussion of racism – to insist that we had actually pressed fast forward, and everything was ok now. That there was no need to complain. ‘End point’ is the new ‘post racial’. The narrative has changed ever so slightly. ‘Post racial’ only acknowledged racism of the past, and insisted that the present was an anti-racist utopia. ‘End point’ accepts the racism of the present, but doesn’t want to dwell on it too much, instead hoping that the post-racist utopia is just around the corner. Both are very reluctant to talk about racism.
I didn’t want to disappoint that class of sixth-formers, but there was no happy ending to my speech. Britain’s relationship with race and racism isn’t a neat narrative with a feel-good resolution. Change is incremental, and racism will exist long after I die. But if you’re committed to anti-racism, you’re in it for the long haul. It will be difficult. Getting to the end point will require you to be uncomfortable.
In my original blog post of 2014, I spoke about a communication gap that was so frustrating that it pushed me away from talking to white people about race. I still think there is a communication gap, and I’m not sure if we will ever overcome it. Even now, when I talk about racism, the response from white people is to shift the focus away from their complicity and on to a conversation about what it means to be black, and about ‘black identity’. They might hand-wring about what they call ‘identity politics’ – a term now used by the powerful to describe the resistance of the structurally disadvantaged. But they won’t properly engage in the conversation, instead complaining that people mustn’t divide themselves off into small groups, and that we’re all one race, ‘the human race’. Discussing racism is not the same thing as discussing ‘black identity’. Discussing racism is about discussing white identity. It’s about white anxiety. It’s about asking why whiteness has this reflexive need to define itself against immigrant bogey monsters in order to feel comfortable, safe and secure. Why am I saying one thing, and white people are hearing something completely different?
Often white people ask me, very earnestly, what I think they should do to help end racism. Anti-racist work – the logistics, the strategy, the organising – needs to be led by the people at the sharp end of injustice. But I also believe that white people who recognise racism have an incredibly important part to play. That part can’t be played while wallowing in guilt. White support looks like financial or administrative assistance to the groups doing vital work. Or intervening when you are needed in bystander situations. Support looks like white advocacy for anti-racist causes in all-white spaces. White people, you need to talk to other white people about race. Yes, you may be written off as a radical, but you have much less to lose.
Talk to other white people who trust you. Talk to white people in the areas of your life where you have influence. If you feel burdened by your unearned privilege, try to use it for something, and use it where it counts. But don’t be anti-racist for the sake of an audience. Being white and anti-racist in your private or professional life, where there’s very little praise to be found, is much more difficult, but ultimately more meaningful. When Jeremy Corbyn MP was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015, it upset many in the political establishment who felt his politics were far too extreme. As he announced his first shadow cabinet, political commentators suddenly found themselves concerned with the fact that the top jobs – shadow foreign secretary, shadow chancellor and shadow home secretary – had gone to white men. A Telegraph column on the topic began: ‘The Labour leader is a white man. His deputy leader is a white man. His shadow chancellor is a white man. His shadow foreign secretary is a white man. His shadow home secretary is a white man. Welcome to the new politics.’1
This sudden interest in the unbearable whiteness of politics seemed utterly disingenuous to me. This was an example of how the language of liberation causes can be used for political football. When these political commentators discovered anti-racism solely to oppose Jeremy Corbyn, there was no real interest in disrupting the overwhelmingly white political landscape. There was no interest shown in unpacking the race and class standards that marginalise people of colour in the political professions. It was anti-racism for the show of it.
And online, the performative nature of social media anti-racism couldn’t have been more apparent than in the wake of the Paris terror attacks. In mid-November 2015, suicide bombers detonated their explosive vests in densely populated areas of Paris, while gunmen walked into two restaurants, a bar and the Bataclan Concert Hall, injuring hundreds and leaving 130 people dead.
The Paris attacks saw an outpouring of grief on social media. Facebook designed a specific statement for its users in Paris to mark themselves as safe from danger. The outpouring of grief led some to ask not just Facebook, but also their peers, why they grieved for some, yet not for others. The answers invariably led to factors like race, development and location – to who does and who doesn’t make a ‘relatable’ victim of terror. And then something very peculiar happened. As the rolling coverage of the Paris attacks continued on traditional news media, the seven-month-old story of terrorist attacks on Kenya’s Garissa University was being shared all over Facebook and Twitter. Two days after the Paris attacks, the Garissa University attack had become the most read on the BBC news website. The news organisation’s trending team reported, ‘About three-quarters of the hits on the story came from social media, rather than from the front page of the BBC news website.’ The report on the phenomenon continued, ‘Around half of the hits on the story came from North America, with another quarter from the UK. In total, the story attracted more than 10 million page views over two days – or about four times as many as it did when the attack actually happened in April.’2
Here, it seemed, was a warped attempt at solidarity with Kenyan people, clumsily wielded to make a point about empathy, race and sympathy after the Paris attacks. It was telling the BBC trending team noted that when the attack happened in April of that year, the reception of social media was utterly lacklustre. The resurfacing of this story in order to elicit grief – or to guilt others who were already grieving – in order to make a point, was nothing but shallow, performative anti-racism. To put it bluntly, Kenyans needed that solidarity, and those social-media shares, back in April. They didn’t need it seven months later, in November, as an act of self-important ‘proof’ that people in the UK and US cared deeply about black and brown countries affected by terrorism in light of press coverage of the Paris attacks. The events in Kenya were cynically used so that people in the UK and US could prove to themselves and to their friends that they were socially aware. That they were one of the good ones. That they believed that black lives matter.