Communication or Camouflage-Choose Wisely

Advice to my nephew and his friends in a white-dominant school.

On Truthfulness in the White Supremacist State and Its Institutions

I used to share my thoughts and feelings straightforwardly. Whether at home, as a teenager, at University, or at the various colleges where I worked as a lecturer/teacher, I was applying a dialogical humanist mode of engaging, learning and teaching that was essentially in opposition to the norm of being authoritarian.

Very very slowly, I learnt that being truthful and straightforward in all of these settings, was a catastrophic mistake. I was a woman of colour and it took me ages to realise that despite a liberal or left of centre stance, deep down, very few white people could cope with being talked to as if they were my equal! They just assumed they were my superior. I was supposed to act deferential or at least, defer to them, and when I didn’t they felt insulted! I was slow to learn this lesson because I had got convinced that reason and rationality rules and sincerity and truthfulness wins. I’m not so sure of that any more. Why? What happened?

When I look back over the years, I see the pattern. Everywhere I went people generally warmed to me and wanted to get to know me. Usually, I was the only person of colour in the setting. From Quaker meetings, to Anti-Nazi League discussions, from conferences to seminars, to college-based meetups, I formed friendships with white people many of whom were ten/fifteen years older than me. My undergirding assumption was they’d be similar in principles and commitments to my philosophy tutor, Dr Kathleen Lennon and her husband, Humphrey Forrest, who became an employment judge after activism in the trade union movement.

Once I moved to Yorkshire, and then began working full-time as a lecturer, I didn’t often see them, but I moved in circles of white people expounding similar values to them — or so I thought.

All was well, and we shared meals, went for walks, and generally, got on together like good friends do. It was when I expressed something they didn’t agree with, or outshone them in some way, that the friendship crumbled down to nothing.

Alongside such bewildering abandonments, within the liberal institutions of education in the UK, I came under attack from multiple directions, both as a student and as a lecturer. I was devastated on many levels, harmed repeatedly by people who did not follow the simple rule, “Do as you would be done by”. By speaking truthfully to them, I inadvertently handed them the information that they used as ammunition to sabotage me. I was undermined, invalidated and worst of all, slandered by a campaign of character assassination that occurred across many many years.

Did I recognise the patterns? No! I was blinded by my faith and trust. I believed people were basically good. I didn’t think I needed to have strategies, amongst family, friends and colleagues. I didn’t realise that the simple truth was not good enough, or was in fact, abhorred, especially if critiquing institutionalised racism or the others’ blind spots. Trusting that people, (white people) would be as straightforward as I was being with them, meant that in many situations, I could not see from which direction the arrows were coming at me. To my face, colleagues and managers were pleasant, but behind my back they lay traps lined with lies and falsehoods.

Getting Disciplined by Discipliners — Let’s Look Deeper at White Managers/Token Blacks and Plantation Owners and Overseers

I had three or four disciplinaries thrown at me over an eight year period while I was teaching in my first position as a lecturer at college. Only many years later, looking back, could I discern the pattern. Some accusation of ‘unprofessionalism’, would be made up towards the end of the academic year, around May/June and then the accusation would be hanging over my head during the summer break. I wrote memos clarifying, explaining, defending myself, and lived in tension till, towards the end of year, the whole thing would fizzle out. Never an explanation let alone an apology was ever given.

At the time, I didn’t understand that I was being attacked for daring to try to bring accountability to a white-dominant institution which wanted people of color on board only as token presences to validate the institution’s mission statements. Eventually, stressed to the point of developing adult-onset asthma, like a wounded animal, I was forced to lie low. Being able to go on sick leave, proved a life-saver, quite literally, as I had time to rest and recuperate, and recover my sense of self.

The first disciplinary occurred after I spoke up for students who came to me upset, feeling they were being held back so that it would take them two years to pass their proficiency exam in English. All the European/white students took a year, while many of the students of colour who were paying far more for the same course, felt they were being held back. There was no system for recognising when a student was ready to go up a level. Only those in the top two sets were eligible to sit the exams.

Students of colour who were categorised as ‘overseas’ were paying far more than the European students and they started to feel they were being held back because there was a financial incentive for the college to extend their period of study.

Hey, it’s the old old story of Black people/people of colour being exploited. This did not end when slavery ended, contrary to all my education, or rather, brainwashing propaganda growing up subjected to white rule and its current forms of softly softly modes of diminishment, denial, persecution, punishment, exiling and gaslighting types of erasure.

Physical and Psychological Abuse : When Wounds and Scars are Visible and When they Are Not

The photo below, taken in 1863, is of Peter. Let’s honor and commend his bravery (not call him, ‘poor Peter’ as some reports at the time did) for escaping the clutches of his white enslaver, after a whipping by his white ‘owner’ of such savagery, that he was left immobile for some two months. Peter’s heroic refusal to submit, led him to escape yet again and join the army from the Northern states. The photo below helped to shift the narrative of Southern plantation owners’ insistence they were benign in their relations to their enslaved work force.

Isn’t it easy to see abuse when it’s displayed in all its physical brutality? But emotional abuse and psychological torture for the same ends — to exact compliance, is much harder to ‘see.’ Surely this is the very definition of ‘neoliberalism’, creating wounds on dissenters that can’t be easily discerned?

One early evening in the staff room, when everyone else had left, there was a knock at the door. I turned and smiled and as I stepped forward to open the door. The South Asian woman whom I’d never seen before, took three steps into the room and turning to me, began sobbing on my shoulder.

She was a qualified doctor from Pakistan but in order to work in the UK, she had to pass the English proficiency test at the college. She had been failed by Ruth Brown, the Head of the EFL department. Yet when I looked at her actual test paper, and checked the multiple choice answers, she should actually have been given 92/100, not failed !

I could hardly believe my eyes! But I did believe them — this was undeniable proof that Muslims/students of colour were being failed/held back at Park Lane College, (later, renamed, City College, Leeds).

I sought advice from the Equal Opportunities Coordinator, at the time, June Crowther, who was actually based in the same staffroom with me. She had been part of the interview process, had invited me to her home and I liked and trusted her. It was she who advised me to write a memo to her and she would raise the matter. Only years later did I realise that she had manouvered me into becoming a target. Because never again in any situation did she raise a matter formally — it was always, ‘whisper whisper’ behind closed doors, isolate the student and block any meaningful action.

So, when I raised the situation in the form of a memo, it was I who became the pariah. I think that was the start of all the harassment. At the time, I failed to join the dots. I was really really bewildered. I couldn’t compute that my colleagues, whom I shared meals with, who’d invited me home, and I viewed as friends, would join hands with the other department to cover up studnets’ complaints. Isolation and being overwhelmed by attacks from multiple directions does confuse, you see. There are two other similar situations I want to write about, but another time, not now.

Suffice to say, my harassment took so many forms, with Ruth Brown, the English department head and Pauline Waterhouse, the head of the Division, henceforth giving information I needed, too late, or not at all, thus scuppering my work one way or another. I ended up ill. I had absolutely no clue about the forces ranged against me.

Several years later, it took a solicitor to check the ‘chronology of events’ he asked me to write, and he discerned the patterns of systematic abuse. “They are obviously hoping that by putting you under constant pressure, with concocted charges, you would get frustrated and just leave”, he commented. But it never occurred to me to resign, as I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong! The other thing the solicitor said was ,’ We are a small law firm, we can’t ake on the jewsih big wigs in Leeds, who’ll have a network of support we can’t match”.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Havent you realised that all these people involved in harassing you, and throwing discilinaries at you, are all Jewish? Ruth Brown, Mr Green, Wasser haus was probably chnged to Waterhouse…” The solicitor they brought from London for the grievance, the fact that both trade unons reps said the night before the hearing, they would not attend on your behalf, so you had no-one representing you… “

I looked at the solicitor, dumbfounded. Ultimately, I did nothing with this information, partly because I was too overwhelemed and if the solicitor was wrong in his assessemtn, I didn’t want to add to anti-Semitism that Jewish peope has suffered across so many societies. I found it really hard to accept that very thing I’d told people off for saying about Jewish people seemed to be proving true. It felt too bizarre and I was very upset, though I could see the solicitor had no axe to grind. After all, he was turning down case and the possible money to be made.

The harassments which included shunning , continued. Each year, I was given several weeks on sick leave by a range of doctors. Developing adult-onset asthma helped them ‘see’ I was under severe strain. On each occasion, I slept a lot and in between, I attempted to recover and figure out what the heck was going on and how to handle my return to work. Trying to figure out the covert stuff going on was akin to doing a job on top of teaching full-time. Because of these extra complications, along with the scenarios in my family of origin, it took me three years to complete a part-time Masters degree in education, that should have taken only two years.

Instead of being promoted, as had been promised, I was demoted. A white male was given my role — he didn’t even have a teaching degree! All my classes were taken off me, and I was placed in the English workshop to work with whoever came along, from whichever department. I’m grateful to the young ‘probationary’ teacher , because he commented to me, ‘I heard you’ve been stitched up”. It was the first verbal acknowledgement of the systematic abuse I heard, and it was very validating.

Acting Color-Blind is a Form of Gaslighting

I should have left the college then, but I didn’t. By then, I didn’t believe it would be better anywhere else. ‘Better the devil you know’, I told myself and decided I needed to gain insights into my blind spots. So, I read books on Philosophy, Psychology, Politics and Law, Human Rights, Islam and Feminism. I applied and got work in another college, after a year’s leave of absence.

But here too, problems soon emerged. I was asked to do an entry level qualification for teaching English that usually 18 year olds did, in order to flit around abroad as ‘native’ EFL teachers. I suggested the money (£1,000) would be better used on something else. Instead of seeing it as a helpful suggestion, the manager was clearly angry that I had not complied with her.

Later, I was asked to make up the attendance for classes that had not taken place, but for which funding had been acccepted. Was I to compromise and collude with financial fraud? I refused. Around the same time, I raised concerns that indicated as a department we were failing to implement our duty of care to underage students.

I again, made the choices which rendered me unpopular or a threat to corrupt managers. Thus it was that I became a whistleblower at this college too, with rampant institutional sexism (where a female student was raped on the departmental floor toilets) despite my warnings about the culture of harassment by recently arrived under-age migrant males. After many tricks and forms of harassment, I was dismissed.

Thanks to support from Humphrey Forrest, an employment judge who helped me to check the documentation I gathered and wrote, and validation and emotional support from Professor Kathleen Lennon and several other white colleagues and friends, I would win, eventually, but, it was at a high cost. I attended all the meetings at the employment tribunal alone. Meanwhile, the college had employed a big law firm from the centre of Leeds.

So it was that between 2009 and 2011, I spent all my time dealing with the union reps and the lawyers representing Bradford College. The support from anonymous people, in a yahoo group called, Bullying in Academia, was also vital. Professor Denis Rancourt, waging his own struggle at Ottawa University in Canada, was also a big support. Staff at ‘Public Concern at Work’ were brilliant in shedding light on what had been done during my employment at Bradford College. They are a whistleblowing charity, established in 1993. Public Concern at Work advises individuals with whistleblowing dilemmas at work, supports organisations with their whistleblowing arrangements, informs public policy and seeks legislative change. To the extent that I succeeded it was not only my determination and skills, but also that of all these supportive people. Now, some ten years on, I want to shout from the rooftops:

Gaslighting the needs and the experience of pupils of color, and people of integrity, is the order that the vast majority of white teachers follow in the color-blind educational structures of the UK. When there are only white teachers, delivering a white-centering curricula in a white-dominant society, what can we expect? The few teachers of colour hardly dare to be present beyond their designated role of tokens. Even after I first raised the issue of Eurocentric curricula in 1985, as a philosophy undergraduate, little has changed some thirty-five years on. But thanks to the proliferation of resources in the age of the internet, I have been overcoming the big gaps and blind spots in my knowledge base.

It’s important to add here that I received no support and validation from anyone in my Muslim-origin family. This is how intersectional realities for women of colour can be so very crushing. We are often facing challenges on multiple levels and in multiple sites of struggle.

I was the first to leave home to go to Uni and whether it was a combination of jealousy and envy or other factors like the strain of my siblings’ failed marriages, my work and commitments and problems were mostly trivialised or ignored. I had disobeyed the rule about arranged marriage. Therefore I was on my own, and my problems were of no concern. This shunning and exiling as I came to realise, is a major reason why people stay within authoritarian family structures. Some protection from family is better than none, when there are marauding wolves, tigers and scorpions eveywhere.

The Neoliberal World only APPEARS Less Dangerous than a Militarised Fascist State

Would I have made other choices had I realised this early on in my career? I can’t say really.

But, to summarise some forty years of experience with authoritarianism in its various manifestations in the U.K, I suggest to you, my teenage nephew and your circle of Friends of Colour and indeed, any of your friends opposing the dominant norms that are providing the wealth of this militarised society — learn from what happened to Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. And the many many cases that do not hit the headlines, where dissident voices in the western ‘democracies’, are gagged by Non-Disclosure Agreements.

Do not be lulled into a false sense of security. Freedom of expression depends on who you are and what you want to say. For instance, right now during May/ June of 2021, youngsters in school, who are wearing the colours of the Palestinian resistance to show their support, have been reprimanded and face possible sanctions by headteachers up and down the country.

To youngsters today, I would say that in both private and public contexts, it’s wise to sometimes, be seen to comply. Camouflage yourself, to survive. Later on, when you are less subject to others’ power plays, having survived, you will have grown and have developed the means and resources to thrive. Meanwhile, who you choose as your friends and companions is of vital significance. Choose wisely.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrews, Kehinde. ‘The New Age of Empire — How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World,’ Allen Lane, 2021.

Ed. Lennon Kathleen & Whitford, Margaret. Knowing the difference: Feminisst Perspectives in Epistemology’, Routledge, 1994.

Brown, Nina W. ‘Children of the Self-Absorbed’, New Harbinger Publications, 2008.

Haworth Robert H. (Ed) ‘Anarchist Pedagogies ; Collective Actions, Theories and Critical Reflections on Education’, PM Press, 2012.

Jones, Owen. ‘The Establishment And How they Get Away With It,’ Allen Lane, 2014.