Black Lives Matter - Accountability

Accountability.

Pause. Let that word sit with you for a moment. Accountability. How does that make you feel? Does it give you weight, empowerment, conflict, make your heart race?

Stay with me.

By definition, accountability entails “an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions” (Marrian Webster, 2020). Or in my case, in our case, accountability for lack of action.

Now for context, I write this as a white, slim, middle class, heterosexual, cisgender, female (she/her/they). In other words, I write this with every privilege going, with the exception of gender. Now this is important, because it entails that I am accountable. I am accountable for my ‘blissful ignorance’ in not learning, or even truly engaging, with issues that frankly don’t or haven't affected me. I know that I have been into bookshops and glanced over books relating to racial oppression. I directly recall seeing Reni Eddo-Lodge's ‘Why I’m no longer Talking to White People About Race’ on a table and not picking it up.

I am therefore accountable. I am accountable for turning a subconscious blind eye, having selective ignorant hearing, scrolling past articles about race, assuming almost everywhere I go in the country I was born in that I'll have teachers and colleagues of the same skin colour. I am accountable for walking past the books that were sat there, screaming out, yelling that I must be accountable for change. I am accountable for the systemic and institutionalised racism that exists today, because it thrives off of white people who are ignorant to their privilege. It needs us to stay complicit. I say ‘I’ am accountable, because it is clear that as white people, if we do not take this personally, there cannot be change. Institutionalised and systemic racism is the parasite and white ignorance is the host.

You know the events I am referring to. You know the lives, the people, the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, loved ones, that I am talking about.

George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, Henry Grove, Ahmaud Arbrey, Botham Jean, William Green. Their names are hauntingly endless. And the list only grows.

Now, these murderous acts are obviously, overtly racist (if you feel they aren’t, you are the most important readers here). But this is the eruption of layers upon layers upon layers of ingrained societal micro-racism.

I'll share my own examples:

17yrs old. Our sixth form have two visiting schools for a day of workshops. Our school sits in rural Wiltshire, where the vast majority of people are white. One of the visiting schools is from a neighbouring town and the other is from South Africa. I am unsure how or why this question came about, but a teacher asked me if I knew which school a black girl was from. On reflection, the fact the teacher did not ask her herself is extremely telling of how uncomfortable we can be as white people around race. I told her that she was from the school in South Africa. To which, having overheard, the girl replied, “I’m from [neighbouring Wiltshire town]”. Fair to say, this is the moment I learnt a very hard and sickening lesson; I carried unconscious racist assumptions, despite it going against all I so strongly consciously believed in. The girl was incredibly calm about it, far too kind to me in my beetroot face and exploding heart rate. It may well be that this was not something new to her. I carry great shame in this, but in it, I learnt needed ugly truths about myself.

19yrs old. I have met up with an old school friend. She tells me about a new colleague at work, who is of Islamic faith. I'm not sure why this is relevant or why she felt a need to clarify this. Ah. She shares their office 'jokes' relating to bombing, which she seems to find humorous. I sit in silence, no comment, no facial expression, too uncomfortable to want to ignite confrontation with someone I haven’t seen for years and risk tainting the mood in the cafe. Vile. I made a commitment to never be complicit in overt racist ‘humour’ again.

2nd June 2020. 24yrs old. I had just listened in to a brilliant show on BBC Radio1 Xtra, where hosts Seani B and Ace shared their experiences of living in England as black males. I e-mailed them to express how powerful their conversations were. In my e-mail, I stated that “white people need to be taught about this (issues regarding race) as if we are newborns or aliens”. Here, I have again made a gross error. Of course, the information is already there, history is already written, black people have been screaming about their oppression for hundreds of years, and we have not listened. I now realise that this is a lazy approach to learning about racism. Black people have no need to teach us about racism or black history. We must educate ourselves.

My point here being, as much as it punches my stomach to admit these, we are all un-learning and re-learning. We need to confront the errors we have all made and we continue to make. We need to take ownership that our seemingly minor actions have not and do not line up with what we might forecast our beliefs to be. If we reject self-awareness, if we do not permit ourselves to admit the micro-racisms we carry, if we are content in a sea of denial within ourselves, the change we wish to seek is redundant. Trivial. Impossible. Barricaded by our egos.

We must learn. We must actively do better. It is not enough to not be racist, we must be actively anti-racist.

We need to be reading literature such as Reni Eddo-Lodge's. We need to be conscious in acknowledging what content we are actually consuming. We need to actively listen. We need to actively speak out against racism and racist language. We need to learn black history. We need the education sector to ensure black history is mandatory in the curriculum. We need to challenge our family, our friends, our colleagues, our MPs, ourselves. We need to look at our actions through a wide lens. At looking through the world through a white lens, we are lying to ourselves. We are telling ourselves an untrue story about the world.

Yes, it’s overwhelming. It’s uncomfortable. It’s noisy because we have subconsciously, and in some cases consciously, silenced it. And the very pinnacle of this, is that it is an immense privilege to learn about racism, rather than experience it.

But let me share what I understand to be at the root of all of this so far.

Racial injustice stems from the insecurities of white people, particularly white men, so much so, that we have not been able to bear to compromise our positions and status’ that we have done nothing to earn, because it would entail that we would have to work harder. Imposter syndrome at its peak. If there is true equality, true equal opportunities, it might be exposed that actually, we're not the dogs bollocks after all. Our egos can't entertain that. Nope. Nada. Must. Seek. Validation.

For generations, MPs and white owned and lead corporations, have piled energy into purposefully manipulating every system possible, to ensure they don’t have to work harder. The oppression of black people has not and does not resolve, it reforms. The segregation and continued mistreatment of black people following the slave trade, was built upon a white fear that black people may (understandably), seek revenge. You know, for white people shipping and trafficking12-15 million black people from their homes, 20% of which died in the journey, while thousands of others committed suicide, and those that survived were enslaved and dehumanised... for 400 years. 400 YEARS. The Slave Trade Act only came into effect in1807. Just 213 years ago. Let that sink in for a moment.

And there are people out there that are going to tell us that racism does not exist today? When entire backlogs of policies and laws over hundreds of years have been constructed with the sole purpose to oppress black people/people of colour to purposefully reserve entitlement of white people, that we still benefit from?

Essentially, the idea of equality threatens their ego?

We cannot undo what has been done, but we can change what we do now. In the words of Maya Angelou, “do the best you can until you know better, then when you know better, do better”. We know better now. We must do better. We must take accountability.