Conversations about race are uncomfortable. Addressing a system that you have benefitted from whilst never having to experience the hate whilst not wanting to look like you are performatively posting a black square and “Black Lives Matter” or looking like a white saviour. But we as white people must address the events of this week. We cannot ignore the long lasting trauma that this week will inflict on our communities and the people of colour who have watched the hate, and the support of hate for years whilst the anti Muslim and anti refugee rhetoric has built and built and been doused with kerosene. We must actually address the long term ramifications of the race riots in the North.
There are things you can do today.
Offer tangible support to those people of colour in your life that have spent this week trying to hold it together in front of their kids and pretend that rioters don’t aim to do them harm.
This week is a reminder that POC can never fully relax, that they can never just assume that their kids will get home without witnessing or being a victim of hate. How can you help give people in your community a breather?
Offer additional child care cover. Offer dinner, in the States we always give food to show concern, care or community. Offer to sit with elderly relatives that they may be hesitant to leave alone or offer to go to the shop. Check in on shopkeepers that may be experiencing abuse along with the fear that their shop could be the next casualty of right wing disciples of Tommy Robinson.
Acknowledge how impossible it is to let kids be happy carefree kids whilst trying to keep them safe and making sure they aren’t oblivious to the dangers they may face. Parents will not have slept this week, offer them a chance for a breather where they don’t have to be strong for anyone else. Don’t offer solutions, but offer to bear witness to their experiences, fear and anger. Don’t say you can imagine. You cannot. I cannot. Don’t attempt to create false equivalencies with your experiences.
I campaign for women’s safety and try to address intersectionality regularly and keep myself in check, but if it is a choice between me fighting racism or sexism, I am fighting my lived experience, I know how to address that. I know how to articulate misogyny in all kinds of disguises but I have never experienced misogynoir. I have never had to experience white feminism not including me. I have never had to censor my words when campaigning for police reform, because my being a punchy white woman from Philly is feisty and attractive rather than combative and a threat.
Women of colour don’t have that choice. They can’t prioritise the ism’s they try to protect their families from. I can’t stop what the despicable violent men are doing and the targets they are aiming, but I can reach out. I can verbalise that although I can’t ever really get what generational trauma does to a community, I can offer my time, my kindness and my comfort.
Growing up in Philadelphia my first memory of earth shattering news was the police bombing a house occupied by Black Liberation activists knowing that women and children were still in the house. The Philadelphia Police dropped two bombs on a home with 6 adults and 5 children inside. The police bombed Black citizens of the United States. I remember what felt like my whole neighborhood standing in the street and watching the smoke less than a mile away. I remembered women screaming and kneeling. I remember my mom holding up her friend Connie while tears ran down her face. I was too young to really understand what happened and what it said to every African American in the city.
I remember attending the protests afterwards and how upset people were but I didn’t really understand and we went to lots of protests as children. My mom was political and visibly showed up for her entire life. My childhood was filled with Rainbow Coalition meetings and political rallies that I grew to resent. Another protest, another meeting, another endless meeting discussing racism and hate. In a city that was incredibly diverse, in a neighborhood that was home to a huge population of Laotian refugees, there were still racial divides. In working class Philadelphia the poorest white people stomped on the only people they thought were beneath them. Cops were white, Mummers were in blackface every New Years and in white company the N word would be dropped.
I can pretend that my upbringing made me so aware of inequalities that I was publicly anti racist and constantly stood up against jokes and an under current of racism, but of course I didn’t. It is impossible to grow up in a racist country and not absorb racism. The song in the Q Musical, everyone is a little bit racist, is accurate. Yes, you can be more aware and you can make efforts to not be complicit, but humans are lazy. It’s hugely unpopular to always be the crusader. It is exhausting and not required. We can look the other way, because it isn’t our daily experience. We have the option to turn off the telly and lighten the mood.
Our silence as white people is deafening. We have written off the ‘real’ racists that use the N word- but not those that say the only non white person in the office just isn’t a cultural fit. We pretend that people of colour are overly sensitive rather than actually admit that we might not have the jobs we have because of our ambition or work, but because you remind the hiring manager of someone they are mates with.
We have to stop the cycle and stop the laziness of only caring about what directly effects us. We have to do better. We have to put in the effort, we have to counter balance the hate. We must make our country safer for people that don’t look like us.
If you think it is exhausting for you as a white person to be the difficult one and call out bad behaviour, imagine how exhausting it must be to worry about the risk of every person in your family.
I have often said everything here revolves around class and everything in the states revolves around race. I grew up knowing that if I was caught under age drinking or smoking weed, I would get told off, but my future wouldn’t be in jeopardy. And as a student at the top high school in Philadelphia- similar to a grammar school here- we were encouraged to dissect and discuss race, sex, gender, abortion, poverty and affirmative action.
My school was 40% white, 40% Black and 20% Asian and hallways and cliques still self segregated although classes and friendships in class were across the spectrum.
I thought I was enlightened, I thought I got it. But I can never get it. I can listen. I can consciously work to be anti racist, I can lend my platforms and voice to people that will never get the level of amplification I get, but I will never digest what it is like to watch racist attacks and accept it is just a fact of life as a non white person. I will never understand how racism is an element to every encounter and the damage is unavoidable.
I will never be able to understand the ramifications because I don’t have to. I don’t have to endure it or face the threats daily. And the actions of those rioting this week are cementing the fact that minority communities must always be on guard. Parents will never sleep completely without worrying if their families are safe from a skinhead or just a run of the mill racist.
Racism is a daily fact of life for people of colour. And we can acknowledge that. We can’t fix racism but we can actively be an ally. We can show up. We can offer to provide some additional childcare and read on a sofa if parents are working late—- even if the kids have been home alone for a couple of years. We can bring soup. We can listen. Sometimes it’s difficult to break down to someone else in the same boat, as they might be having a good day and you don’t want to burden them. You can offer to babysit so a neighbour has time to go and privately cry and process where their children won’t see that they are barely coping. You can drop off food. You can offer a deliveroo. You can offer to sit with elderly relatives and read to them, and just shoulder some of the weight and lend the piece of mind that those elderly relatives aren’t alone and scared.
You making dinner or offering daffodils will not solve racism, but your efforts to extend kindness and friendship will matter. Don’t press, don’t demand, but offer some tangible things you can do to help and allow them the space to ask for something else that they could use. Some relief and some humanity.
And not just while buildings burn. The ramifications of this crisis might take months to be apparent. Watching children process the riots may manifest in any number of ways.
Put a weekly reminder in your diary to check in on new mothers who are thinking about the world their children will face. Trauma doesn’t present in the same ways for everyone, but please offer regular touchpoints so if someone needs some help- you are a safe option. The person you reach out to may never take you up on that offer, but it can be a reminder that those racist skinheads don’t speak for you.