Getting Yet Another Last Minute Invite
These days I am refusing to participate in spaces loaded with disrespect towards me
Growing up in the UK, I recall trying to imagine the audacity of Palefaces in the USA, who expected Colourful people to give up their bus seat.
( In using the Native Americans’ expression for European invaders of their lands, I want to honour their naming, and centre that, instead of the self-serving terms used by their conquerors. Furthermore, the term, ‘Colourful’, encompasses both majority world peoples and those of mixed ethnicity, which is a better reflection of reality than the dichotomising words, Black /White). Of course where I am quoting an author, I stick with the expressions they are using).
So Rosa Parks’ action in refusing to give up her seat, and move to the back of the bus kicked off the civil rights movement in the USA of the 1960’s.
As Alison Wiltz succinctly explains:
‘Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat to a White person was an act of self-care because “repeated exposure to racism severely and negatively impacts the health of people.” Thus, standing up for herself and against the mistreatment of others in the same social group was empowering. Self-care, for Parks, meant no longer enduring the disrespect of the racist Jim Crow system. Racism is painful. As Parks said, “the only tired I was, was tired of giving in’.
As a woman of colour, who became totally exhausted from years of one-sided demands by a patriarchy-affirming family, self-absorbed partners, racist workplace dynamics and social activist circles that sought to impose a conformist ethos on me, I was enthralled by Alison’s explanation of self-care as being revolutionary.
Below is the whole of Alison Wiltz’ article.
Sometimes people say racism here is not as bad as in the USA, citing the lesser rates of ay police violence. But I want to make the case that the UK’s version of racism is as intractable as that of the USA — and perhaps even more so. After all, the elites of England were the ones who initiated the worldwide grab for other’s lands and resources, justified on the grounds that all peoples and cultures beyond Europe were less human than themselves.
It seems that this attitude has become so deeply embedded in the psyche of European people over the centuries, that a kind of schizopherenia prevails whereby most of them espouse anti-racism as theory but the opposite percolates out. In my experience, here in the UK, the beneficiaries of Empire really do still have to some degree of the following:
- A sense of entitlement to the labour and resources of people of colour, while avoiding acknowledgement and/or fair remuneration.
- There is resentment, envy and fear when people of colour outperform them at work, studies etc.
- Instead of openly and honestly addressing a point of difference or conflict with me, the white person quickly distance themselves and bails out of the relatioship entirely.
These are interpersonal social relationships of apparent equality, not relationships at work or in some sort of structured hierachy .
Certainly in terms of unequal pay and promotion of people with similar qualifications in every industry and the experience of Colourful people needing for example, medical care, the poorer outcomes and higher incidence of maternal mortality for example, all point to systemic racism here in the UK, some fifty years after the civil rights movement in the USA.
But overt racism is not so much in evidence compared to fifty years ago. The Western democracies. are more ‘civilised’ these days. For instance, there are laws against notices by landlords who used to get away with displaying signs saying, ‘No Irish, no Wogs, no Dogs’.
There’s been two decades of trainings in public service institutions concerning legislature that has stamped out all such overt forms of discrimination.
But, racism has not thereby been ended.
Rather, it has become much much more subtle. I think this is especially so in the U.K. Differential and unequal treatment based on skin colour is expressed in ways very much harder to discern and to challenge.
As social beings, we humans thrive when we feel we are accepted and we have a feeling of belonging, in our workplace, our neighborhood and social/political activist circles.
In my experience, it is at this root level of social interaction, that subtle racism and micro-aggressions are perpetuated and are generally speaking, much more difficult to suss out, and then, address or challenge in some way.
I feel very uncomfortable writing this. There is a voice in my head asking me if I am being mean, too ‘sensitive’, or skewed in my feelings and perception? This is how the very subtle forms of racism that involve social exclusion, emotional distance, a refusal to engage, can feel disorientating and create self doubt.
Let me share some specifics arising from a couple of my own experiences in the UK.
Barry, an Anarchist Musician And Teacher of Excluded Youth
I have attended many of his performances in pubs, and other venues over the years — perhaps over twenty. He and his partner have also hosted music events at their home. I have attended, always taking flowers or a plant and made Indian food which they enjoy, as my offering.
Last year, I invited Barry to a reading of my play — the very first play of mine, appearing in the public domain. He texted me that he could not attend. He never followed up with any interest in how the event had gone either. A couple of months later, he invited me to an event that was happening some three hours later, on the same evening. Was I to accept being treated like an afterthought? Hell, no! So I declined.
Some weeks later he invited me to another music event at his house. By then, I had finally begun to let in the painful realisation that I was probably only invited to be the token person of colour. I declined again. Silence since then.
Extinction Rebellion Local Group
Also last year, I had got involved with Extinction Rebellion and part of my role was to support the local group. I suggested we meet in a park and have a picnic, for those still aiming to keep distance due to Covid. I also suggested we could meet at a cafe. Over a period of a couple of months, I sent more texts proposing we gather in places like allotments or occasions like the University Open Day, and have a stall, and give out leaflets, initiate face to face conversations. But nothing I suggested was accepted by anyone in the group. There was no meet-up. Not even one.
The action of the group seemed to consist of the Admin for the group on Facebook, randomly decided a morning of action, every three or four months or so. Seven or eight, twelve or so people would turn up on that day, stay outside the driveway of the factory for a pre-arranged two hours. The attending police and the lorry dirvers parked up, waited nicely for the two hours to be up. The handful of protestors , took photos of themselves with their banners. And then everyone would disperse. I felt little contact and real sense of connection. The first time I went, some of the people, met in a cafe for lunch after the performance of protest. The second time, several months later, it was a Saturday and again, more or less the same handful of people stood with banners in the town square and then dispersed.
To me this was utterly unsatisfying and not a way to build a movement. Were they even serious, I thought to myself? After recieving no response to my efforts to have some form of face-to face- meetups, I decided to focus my attention on XR groups whose members held regular meet-ups in a cafe or pub, even if I had to travel 25/ 40 miles to get there.
Some ten days ago, there was a notification about the group local to me, meeting in a cafe, to plan action. Having withdrawn from them some four months ago, I decided not to respond.
But then last night, a member of this group whom I’d exchanged texts with about meeting in the park, some ten months earlier, invited me to that meeting happening the following evening.
Our feelings are a good barometer of the social relations and social reality. Does contact with someone make you feel peaceful, uplifted, glad to be alive? Or the bloody converse?
I felt irritated, and then rather angry about feeling an obligation to respond. What to say?
“How come none of you responded to my suggestions and invitations, but one year on, you are asking me to attend your get-together?”
Would it sound petty to say:
“Why should I respond to you, when you all ignored me?”
I am tired of being typically, the only person of colour in these circles. I don’t feel accepted on the same terms. It seems that I am always expected to accept the agenda and analysis of others, while what I offer is consistently ignored/not engaged with.
So, thanks but no thanks. I would rather do something self-nurturing, than enter a space where I already know I’m being disrespected and diminished and where my voice does not count. Pretence at equality is not equality.
Let me say this again: pretence at equality is not equality!
The audacity of Palefaces in the USA, expecting everyone else from the Majority World, to give up their seat for them on public transport, is similar to this expectation of theirs, in the UK, some fifty years on, that I participate in events organised by them, but they feel no obligation to support my initiatives.
Time after time, I have participated in Paleface institutions of education, workplace and social /political organising, and realised that I was supposed to follow a script. Because the moment I expressed thoughts and priorities that differed from Paleface imperialism’s beneficiaries, I was shunned, ignored and abandoned.
It happened when I was an undergraduate and the Paleface peace women who gave me the silent treatment when I answered questions they could not address at a public meeting as they had not given any deep thought to the issues being raised. Worse was to follow, as my punishment meted out to me by the extern al examiners, for my audacity in critiquing Western philosophers in my dissertation as Eurocentric
Being shunned, and having disciplinary charges made up about me happened again and again, in the colleges I was teaching in, over a fifteen years period, whenever I spoke out to support Global Minority students, many of them refugees from wars caused by NATO forces. I was only applying the colleges’ own ‘equal opportunity ‘ policies as referenced in the institutions’ mission statement. But the response I invariable got was ‘how dare she bring accountability and take action as she thinks fit?
At university, the Head of th ePhilosophy department told me, ‘As an undergraduate, you are not supposed to think”. Years later in the college where I was teaching, at a meeting with two senior managers, I said, ‘I think that …: I was interrupted and one of the managers yelled at me, ‘don’t think, just teach’.
The only time I got physically attacked though, was when at a rally I gave a speech in which I criticised the Muslim fascists who don’t think women should have freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, but that we should submit to men.
I was abandoned and then I was shunned, by the people I thought as socialists, and feminists, would back me against the Muslim fundamentalists. My Paleface socialist and anti-Nazi activists expressed disapproval, they told me speaking up for the rights of people who want to leave Islam (I’d referenced the brave 16-year old girl who was beheaded by her father, for converting to Christianity)… I was wrong to defend her rights — that was being ‘divisive’.
“Now is not the time and place”, they kept repeating. The organisers of the rally where I been invited to speak, (because a pig’s head had been left outside a mosque door) even pressurised me not to press charges against the man who tried to hit me with a stick. There was one Palface friend from Uni days, who decided he would come to the North, from London, to support me in this situation. He was told he should not do so, as the decsion had been made to shun me! These were people I had shared meals with, gone for walks with and regarded as on some level, ‘comrades/friends/colleagues’.
There’s nothing worse than standing with people you think stand with you, only to find that you were actually standing alone, all along.
Following this realisation, I have a short answer now, to this invitation to join in the meeting tomorrow evening.
The short answer is two words: F*** o**.
