The 'R' Word E-Book

Kurt Barling

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 183

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Race and racism remain an inescapable part of the lives of black people. Daily slights, often rooted in fears and misperceptions of the 'other', still damage lives. But does race matter as much as it used to? Many argue that the post-racial society is upon us and racism is no longer a block on opportunity - Kurt Barling doubts whether things are really that simple. Ever since, at the age of four, he wished for 'blue eyes and blond hair', skin colour has featured prominently as he, like so many others, navigated through a childhood and adolescence in which 'blackness' defined and dominated so much of social discourse. But despite the progress that has been made, he argues, the 'R' word is stubbornly resilient. In this powerful polemic, Barling tackles the paradoxes at the heart of anti-racism and asks whether, by adopting the language of the oppressor to liberate the oppressed, we are in fact paralysing ourselves within the false mythologies inherited from raciology, race and racism. Can society escape this so-called 'race-thinking' and re-imagine a Britain that is no longer 'Black' and 'White'? Is it yet possible to step out of our skins and leave the colour behind?

Leseprobe

PROVOCATIONS

THE ‘R’ WORD

RACISM

SERIES EDITOR: YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN

For Kim, Naomi, Nathaniel and Joseph Keeping Hope Alive

‘Nigger mind, go black home, you’ll be all white in the morning.’

– Playground chant from the 1970s

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphIntroductionPart I: RacePart II: Racist Britain?Part III: Imagining Beyond ‘Race’Copyright

Introduction

IN THIS BOOK I examine the orthodoxies that have shadowed my life but which I believe need to be roundly challenged. Hard as it may be to question orthodoxies, there will be no progress without such confrontation.

We live in a new information age where news travels fast, old ideas are subjected to constant disruption and the power of ideas can have an immediate and deep impact.

As a Londoner with English, Irish, Nigerian and German roots, I judge I can speak with some authenticity about the impact of skin colour on life in Britain. These are issues I have wrestled with personally and professionally for over fifty years. The simple daily challenges of life, the denigration and sheer wickedness often faced by people of colour in the past must not cloud our judgement on how to transform the prospects of future generations. I care deeply about the country that will provide a life for my children and their children when I am gone.

We people of colour, our families and friends, need to unchain ourselves from the history of oppression, from obsolete notions and language, and most of all from deeply ingrained divisions of ‘them and us’, Black and White, racism and anti-racism.

So let’s start with how it was in my early lifetime. The rather unpleasant playground chant displayed at the start of this chapter gives a flavour of the times in the 1970s. The battle for playground equality reflected the broader daily social torture endured by people of colour throughout Britain.

At school, it was a throwaway line that a minority of bigoted White kids used to provoke you into a test of physical and mental toughness. It escalated easily and in adulthood it could lead to all sorts of accusations of ‘chips on shoulders’ and ‘ungrateful foreigner’ slights.

It formed part of the powerful myth that played out in many different walks of life that the colour of your skin made you inferior, and being White was something you could dream about but would forever be out of your reach. Not being White was presented as a social stigma. Learning to stand my ground toughened me up, physically and mentally, but I find it hard to imagine this would be acceptable banter in a playground today. Indeed, the consequences would be serious.

The consciousness of difference and the antipathy it caused in my mind to ‘race’ certainly began long before I had to put up with these daily micro-aggressions that all people of colour endured in 1960s and ’70s Britain. The micro-aggressions nurtured a suppressed rage. It was common for people to describe me as having a chip on my shoulder when I argued back after being called ‘half-caste’, ‘blackie’, ‘sambo’, ‘coon’, ‘nigger’, ‘wog’, ‘rubber-lips’, ‘fuzzy-head’ or some other verbal slight from a veritable lexicon of racial filth. I can remember the day I discovered my ‘wogness’, which came as a complete surprise and left me winded on the primary school playground. I had a whole bag of chips on both shoulders by the time I reached my late teens. Fortunately, university and success re-educated me to deal with all those chips; to overcome an abject fear of failure imposed on me by the expectations of so many others just because of the colour of my skin. Others of my generation were perhaps not so fortunate.

Before I was conscious of it, my mother lost friends and associates and had to confront the realities of ‘race’ in 1960s Britain. But in her private world her son was neither Black nor White because she loathed ‘racial’ classification. She still hates it. Mothers and their children are linked by blood, which makes a mockery of racial divisions.

It is a worldview I have always respected, but not one I necessarily shared when I was dealing with playground bullies and politics. My mother was of the ‘sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ persuasion. As far as I was concerned, this was demeaning nonsense when National Front supporters were battering me, and others like me. I confess, whilst I was busy trying to survive senseless racism and blatant discrimination, it made it hard to empathise with my mother’s instinct that flesh and blood should not be subdivided into ‘race’. But I’ve come to understand that ‘race’ and racism can undoubtedly exist one without the other, and this short book is my contribution to that debate.

I grew up in north London at a time of significant demographic change. Migration into Britain from the old empire was steady and growing and it was unsettling the patterns of living that imperial Britain had become used to over several centuries. Let’s call it the decolonisation complex.

My mother is Anglo-Irish, born into a working-class Islington family. She is a die-hard Londoner who gave birth to a young baby of mixed heritage in 1961. Nothing really could prepare her for the world her son would come into, which was less liberal, more overtly prejudiced and firm in its caustic judgement on grounds of ‘race’ and miscegenation – a far cry from the more open-minded society we live in today.

It’s hard to recall when the colour of my skin became an issue I needed to wrestle with. As a child I puzzled over how a person’s differences could be entirely captured by skin colour. I think I must have instinctively disliked the notion of race. Of course, it didn’t help when I discovered I was a ‘wog’. It seemed to me skin colour was an arbitrary and poor guide to understanding my friends as individuals, so I got pretty mad – eventually indignant – at how others could so easily pass judgement on me. As a teenager, I became incensed when I was called a ‘half-caste’. Half of what? I would ask. Or being told I was a kind of mongrel. It was no better if others tried to soften the blows of hurt with the idea that being a hybrid proved my vigour and potency. It was all equally nonsensical as far as I was concerned.

It wasn’t made much better when the language changed to ‘mixed-race’. Mixing evoked for me visions of watering down on the one hand and racial purity on the other. Neither of which seemed to me to have the slightest credibility in a world that had suffered the homicidal madness unleashed by the mythology of racial purity in Hitler’s Germany. Millions died because of this idiocy, so why should I put up with an enduring racist hypocrisy in my life? Where, I asked myself, did all these codes emerge from? And how did we become so deeply entrenched in the language of raciology?

I can recall one of the customers on my schoolboy paper-round asking me (after delivering their paper for several years), in all seriousness, if my hair broke off when it got to a certain length or if I had it cut like normal (White) people. Yes, it sounds absurd, but it is a micro-aggression fact and some people really did need some kind of re-education. I never laboured under the delusion that re-education was impossible.

As a BBC journalist for over twenty-five years, it has been my experience that cultural norms and prejudices are merely replicated and propagated by the traditional national purveyors of society’s so-called values. I have always had a thing for alternative narratives in public discourse. I seized every opportunity I could to use these alternative narratives to challenge the representation of people of colour in our social narratives; from soldiers in the Great War to the victims of crime, from Nelson’s sailors to Lloyd’s of London directors.

A particular news story throws this into sharp relief. The story of Rachel Dolezal, a young woman in the United States who, despite being White, had adopted the identity of being Black, became an international story of modern conceptions of difference. Millions of words were expended to criticise her, explain her decision and even to support her. Once upon a time, the answer to her identity question would have been, at the risk of appearing glib, black and white for everyone; clearly that is not the case today. What is perhaps just as interesting is why it became such a big headline-generating story at all. Could it be that the subtext was ‘why on earth in this world would a White person want to be Black?’ It’s highly unlikely that a person of colour claiming to be White would have grabbed any news coverage, let alone headlines.

Perhaps my earliest sense of this absurdity is reflected in one of my mother’s recollections from late 1965. In my early world most people were White. At nursery, that clearly started to make a difference in the way others perceived me. One day on the way home, sitting in the child seat on the back of my mother’s bicycle, I shouted out to a nursery chum I’d spotted. He ignored me even after several attempts, at which point my mother heard me mutter to myself: ‘He doesn’t like me because of the colour of my skin. I wish my name was John and my hair was blond.’

I have often asked myself how a child of three could possibly know about skin colour. It was certainly off limits for my mother, still is as a matter of fact, but somehow I certainly must have felt different. This was probably the first stirring of the ‘us and them’ divide, which humanity so often places at the heart of its social interactions. I have often rationalised it as a child’s defence mechanism against the micro-aggressions that I would soon come to consider as a normal part of everyday life. They would sow the seeds that would flower progressively into self-doubt. From my early teens I would then spend a dozen or so years trying to dig over that cultivated garden of prejudice and plant fresh seeds of ambition and hope.

Throughout my school years I became quite adept at disguising the doubt. I came to comport myself with confidence and even brashness. I was often described as cocky, and sometimes arrogant, but underneath it all were a lot of questions about identity, belonging and deep nagging doubts about whether I could elevate myself beyond the mediocrity so many people (but by no means all) seemed to expect of me.

Who was I, where did I fit in, could I keep getting up when I was knocked back? Even as I became more comfortable in my own skin, others sought to challenge my self-assurance as if I was bucking the rules of the game. For some it was an affront that I could be so confident. I will never forget those others who made it their business to ensure that my confidence and resilience were bolstered (family aside), such as my secondary school head teacher Peter Targett, who insisted and saw to it that I made an excellent Head Boy.

Ironically, being of mixed heritage often made the game all the more complicated because people expected you to take sides. But there is injustice, inequality and discrimination and on those subjects I can most certainly take sides. How do we find resolutions to these enduring problems and does the stubborn mythology of race help or hinder that endeavour?

In any case, this is an essay exploring the impact of race and racism on people’s lives. My experience as a journalist has taught me that there are always stories to tell which can present a particular point of view without revealing the truth of the wider picture. It was just such a story, on what I felt was inaccurate reporting on the Broadwater Farm riots in 1985, that brought me into journalism in the first place.

As my career developed over the years, I recognised that there are legions of people who remain in denial on all sides of the so-called race divide, who cannot help us heal the traumas of the past if they continue to live in that past. The language of race and racism are the unholy descendants of a false science, agreed. But how do we emerge out of the oppressiveness of the language of the past? What do we need in order to become a country that recognises difference, but accepts that the diversity of talent is not colour-coded? How do we ensure we can see the wood despite the trees? Does skin colour really explain everything in life’s experience? Do the headlines on racism continue to reflect the underlying story, or is it just good copy?

Could it be that a headline-obsessed culture in a 24-hour-media environment only serves the immiseration of the debate on race and racism, where easy cliché leads to an increasing disconnect, considering so many of us embrace the living experience of mixed marriages, parenthood and inclusivity.

The organisation of the book

First, a point on definitions. Where possible I use the term BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) throughout to denote those who are non-White in the classifications we use in the UK for statistical purposes. If I slip into the term Black it is shorthand for BAME unless I need to make a specific point, where I will use the appropriate descriptor.

In Part I, I will explore the evolution of the conceptual debates surrounding race. It is necessary to have a grasp of these debates to understand the power they have on our modern consciousness and the language we deploy and I will argue we remain largely trapped in. It will become clear that the debates have progressed and become more dismissive of the concept itself. In fact, there are those who have argued that because race is no longer credible as a concept, or a useful means of helping us understand social relations, we must have evolved into a post-racial society. The election of President Obama, some argue, proved this point. So, I will explore this idea of race, how we arrived at it being such a powerful moniker of difference and what we should make of it in today’s world.

In Part II, I want to look more closely at the idea of racism itself. This ‘post-racial’ constellation has fuelled arguments that racism can no longer exist in its crude, old-fashioned sense, so using it as a means of under-standing inequities, lack of opportunity and downright discrimination in society is no longer relevant. This presupposes that race is as socially or culturally irrelevant as it is biologically extinct. It suggests that we, contrary to a mountain of evidence, live in a world where skin colour no longer defines who we are or where we sit in the social hierarchy. But crude prejudice is not the problem so much as acting on it to elicit social discrimination or hate crime; to what extent has regulation infringed on the foul behaviour of some individuals? Has racism mutated into a new taxonomy of discriminatory habits and practices prompted by, for example, Islamophobia?

In Part III, I want to look at how we might change the language and perceptions of people associated with skin colour. A key arena is that of the media. Until the digital revolution created new paths of access to dissemination, the gatekeepers like the national broadcasters controlled the way we saw each other. Another key set of players in changing the flow of this debate has to be educators. But history has shown us these potential liberators have often been replicators of cultural norms not subversive of them.

Professor Kurt Barling London, 2015

Part I: Race

‘The question of why people love what is like themselves and hate what is different is rarely asked seriously enough.’

– Theodor Adorno

MY PURPOSE IN Part I is to try to get under the skin of what we mean by ‘race’ in modern Britain. To do that I will need to dig deep into the long evolution of this most challenging of concepts. There is so much ‘common sense’ ascribed to the meaning of that singular word that we have in effect created a modern reality out of a historical myth.

Unfortunately, people still take sides. Presumption often trumps reason and there are those who wilfully misinterpret race because they are simply too lazy or ignorant to think about their own prejudices. In these circumstances it is very easy to be in denial. But this absent-mindedness cuts both ways. There are those who, even faced with the evidence, believe racism is a thing of the past, that inequality and discrimination based on skin colour no longer exists. Equally there are those who think that race is all-encompassing and that every slight has racist roots. There are those who believe – despite the evidence – that little or no progress has been made since the 1960s. In a curious symbiosis, anti-racists and racists have come to rely on each other to preserve a set of orthodoxies that impoverish us all.

Of course, ignorance, prejudice and discrimination are not unique issues for people of colour. Only a fool would suggest that. Other classes of people experience discrimination, iniquitous circumstance and setbacks. Travellers, women, people with disabilities, lesbian, gay and transgender individuals can all tell their own stories of humiliation and hurt. But for people of colour it has always been impossible to outwardly disguise their difference, and this makes it all the more challenging to deal with people’s perceptions because codes of race have made it possible for bigots to make a judgement before you’ve even had a chance to open your mouth. And because structural discrimination persisted for so long, the mental barriers that accompanied it have been peculiarly stubborn in coming down.

I’ll use an unusual example to make my point about these psychological hangovers. Once as a junior producer working for the BBC, something that was still extraordinarily difficult in the 1980s and 1990s for a person of colour, I was charged with organising a debate on the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. As a former LSE lecturer in International Relations, it was a subject on which I had some expertise. One of the issues it raised was the protection of minorities in the Balkans, and it seemed like a good idea to invite Enoch Powell (1912–98) on to the BBC panel.

The programme was broadcast as New Nations, Old Hatreds and it captured the spirit of both optimism and pessimism in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But that is not the point of this story. As the person in charge of securing the guests and after a long telephone conversation and exchange of letters, I invited Enoch Powell to lunch at a very nice restaurant in Queen’s Gate in Kensington. I arrived there before the anointed hour and when he arrived I approached him. I greeted him as the BBC producer and he asked if Dr Kurt Barling would be along soon. He was an unflappable politician, but he did do a double take when I said I was that very same person.

Enoch Powell, the politician most associated with introducing race into British politics (in reality ‘race’ was always at the heart of imperial policy), always insisted he was not a racist.

It was odd to find myself in the company of the anti-racists’ devil incarnate. For the sake of accuracy I recall we had a very enjoyable lunch and a very robust exchange of views on the question of changing Britain in which I was not entirely gracious and Mr Powell, if uncomfortable, remained unflinching and extremely courteous.

In my conversation with him he said what he had always found improbable was that different groups could live alongside each other in a cultural bubble without that somehow exploding into conflict. In a historical sense, when we look at conflict around the globe Powell could point to more evidence that he was right than others could suggest he was wrong. In 1969, Powell was keen to distance himself from what he considered thuggish racism or even a xenophobic attitude. When asked whether he was a racialist, he clarified, ‘If by a racialist you mean a man who despises a human being because he belongs to another race, or a man who believes that one race is inherently superior to another in civilisation or capability for civilisation, then the answer is emphatically no.’

Here I simply use the meeting as an example of Mr Powell’s initial reaction, which was not untypical at the time. The surprise and looks on the faces of the other guests offered an insight into British racial expectations of the time. The juxtaposition of Mr Powell with a man of colour in a public place was seen as culturally counterintuitive.

I believe one of the drivers for change over the past decade has been the avalanche of diversity that has electrified the airwaves through ever-expanding digital platforms, in other words competition. This fresh and exciting content has shown vitality and embraced genuine difference in a way traditional providers were incapable of. Arguments about representation on the BBC and other networked broadcasters become a function of power and gatekeeping, not about a need to open up society to the glorious technicolor world we actually live in. That is being done by a revolution in social media. Representation is under assault from what I shall call in this book ‘creative disruption