Black to the Future?

We are now in November! Black History Month has flexed Black issues for a whole month, and we have exercised and, in some cases, exorcised the Blackness. The Colourism Exhibition has given us an opportunity to reflect on our Black identity and consider how far our degree of Blackness is an issue we had not considered…..and the Conservative party have elected the first Black leader much like the Conservative party had the first female Prime Minister.  ….and we know what that did for Women!  So is it any surprise that I am left with foreboding regarding where we as Black people are heading!

Notwithstanding our confusions about who we are, it became clear that there are certain arenas where we come together without question…these are where we pray and where we celebrate death. If only we could capture that sense of togetherness in our desire to respond to inequality and injustice. The irony is that the religious doctrines we have elected to guide us through those moments were never ours in the first place and further detracts from our true Black identity!

When our forebears first came, they sucked it up in the anticipation that they were making things better for the next generation and it was only when that next generation were subjected to the very injustices that their parents were subjected to that the penny dropped and they started to fight back to prevent their children from being further subjected to racism and discrimination. However, one thing that they failed to do was to pass down the chapter and verse of the indignities that they had to endure and the price they had to pay. Sometimes we as Black people have short memories and we inappropriately believe that when we go on about the racism we have endured we are playing the race card, and we should be better than that and we assume some kind of false nobility as if that suffering is part of our destiny!

The crisis of asylum seekers and refugees have made many of us of a different colour and a discernibly different culture too willing to soak up the injustices that are thrown in our direction and we are too easily satisfied with the baubles and beads of cheap awards and tokenistic acknowledgments and the superficiality of tokenistic representation. I am sensitive to the fact that new asylum seekers and refugees are rightly cautious about making any noise, but we can all do more to provide a means by which their experiences are heard and reported, and the Race Advice Service was supposed to provide that but the local authorities and our MPs did not want to know. What was the last time any of our local representatives Black and White ever spoke up about Racism….It seems to be a taboo subject that might impact on their popularity with their White supporters who have allowed them entry to their world!

The more we assist in the erosion of legitimate means to address issues of racism and race discrimination the more such issues will become a part of our everyday experience. The fact that we are not physically attacked on the streets in the way this was being experienced in the 40s , 50s, 60s and 70s does not mean that we should be satisfied with the other means by which Racism manifests itself.

In recent times there have been national and international issues that relate to the proliferation of racist ideology that impact on all of us but impact even more so on Black and ethnic minority communities and I must confess that I am disappointed that ethnic communities in the region seem not to express their position on many of these issues and those who purport  to represent the interest of those communities are outstandingly silent! We seem to be reverting to a new colonial culture where any advances we may have made towards self-determination have been abandoned and expression of the experiences of the more recent past are viewed as self-indulgent. It seems that we have surrendered any expression of anti-racism to the White far left, with a sprinkling of Black & Brown associates, who are probably more invested in Class issues than Race issues.

There was a time when just being Black was enough to register some kind of kinship and some shared ideology. Yes, there was a time when we shared a common understanding and appreciation of our past experiences…..but was it just The Racism that bound us together. We were Christians , Muslims, Africans, West Indians, working class, middle class, and some of us were already fully moulded before we came from the motherland, and we infected our children with western inspired attitudes pitting our national identities against each other….the very national identities that were created by our colonial masters.

Perhaps our delusions of commonality were a myth that was created from the flattening experience of Racism that saw no difference in our distinctions and our mutual support dismissed whatever distinctions that we had. However, we should have known better, and we should have appreciated that the Empire would strike back and some of us would have been seduced by the divide and rule principles that have worked so well in the past. The dearth of inspirational Black leaders in the UK is unfortunate as those with any profile are consumed by the established institutions and repackaged as Black versions of White commentators and only confirms our view that sometimes being Black is not enough……and we should always look beneath the skin!

I know that most of the systems to respond to Racism have been dismantled but even when those systems were not in place, we still registered our position on Racism…..So when did Black people stop complaining about Racism or the failures of those who represent us. Perhaps it was when Black people became a substantial part of the system that were perpetrating the Racism, no doubt in the hope that they would change things from the inside….well how is that working out!!

Don John

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