Gil Scott-Heron said that the revolution will not be televised, because the revolution would be live, and on the street. And it is, live and on the street, he was however wrong about it being televised. Thanks to technology and social media the causes for the revolution have definitely, categorically, been televised, and watched on replay. There is no hiding from it. The response is being televised, and published on all media channels. If you are not seeing it, you are not watching. This is not the time to cop out.
This is a difficult one to write, as a white Irish person, I have never really thought about race as I have lived in mostly white places, and only recently, having read a friend’s comments about growing up gay in Ireland, did it really hit home that I wasn’t (am not) doing a good job at understand perspectives, and life experiences. I started writing this blog as a way to channel my creative energies and entertain, probably only myself!, and I can safely say that when I consider the other Sarahs’ lives I hadn’t considered that they could be BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour). It really just did not occur to me.
This doesn’t make me a bad person, it does mean, however, that I am ignoring my unconscious bias, I know it is there, I am just not actively doing anything about it. Pretty crappy behaviour Sarah!
Ireland is, as some of you might know, predominately white. When I was growing up, we had one Indian family, one Chinese family, and a bit later one African family. My town had a population of about 15,000. Can you imagine what it would have been like to have been part of these families? When I was about six or seven, I have this memory of complaining to my Mum about the girls in my glass copying my homework, specifically my Irish homework, the girls who copied it were Chinese, and Indian. I think I was frustrated that they never did their homework, ( was/am such a swot!). I distinctly remember my Mum telling me that I should help them, as they probably had no one at home to help them with their Irish homework as they were new-ish to the country, that their parents didn’t speak Irish like mine did. Go Mum, she understood.
In the 1987 Roddy Doyle had his book The Commitments published to great acclaim. There is a famous quote in it “The Irish are the Blacks of Europe…” Writing this now, it really sounds strange, what in gods name did he mean? Back then however we all understood it, we Irish people. We were the underclass of Europe, we had been colonized, our land taken from us; our culture and language outlawed; penalised. The British worked really hard to eradicate the Irish. In the UK in the 1960’s it was common to see signs saying ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No dogs’ I always felt that racism didn’t apply to me, I couldn’t be racist as we were the same.
In doing some, admittedly brief, research on these themes I discovered a book called ‘How the Irish became White’ (which I really need to read, and to read more about Frederick Douglass an American abolitionist who spent time in Ireland in the 1850’s and 60’s and worked as part of the Liberation movement. We started as allies!) having read a synopsis, and reviews of it, it basically analysis how the Irish moved to the US to escape oppression from the British in Ireland, and instead of uniting with the oppressed BIPOC in the US, they joined in with the oppression. God, what is it about people, that the only way to come up in the world is to push others down? When will people realise that your life/society/world gets better if you lift the others up? If you help people, everyone benefits!
We white people created this, we systematised racism, consciously and unconsciously, over hundreds of years, over thousands (millions?) of lives. It is easy to tear someone down. It should not be hard to lift them up. We need to do the hard work now, which is to change the system, to become actively anti-racist. We, white people, need to do this. To paraphrase many a shopkeeper; we broke it, it is our responsibility, we own the fix.
Where am I going with all this? That I have learned, even if it is belatedly, that as a white person I am complicit in racism, not because I am consciously racist, but because I am not consciously or actively anti-racist. I need to self educate, I need to be active in my support. I need to wake up, to activate.
Common parlance with the Covid pandemic is ‘flatten the curve’; how about we apply it to our society and flatten this curve, this pandemic of oppression and mistreatment, that has destroyed countless lives? I mean, Jesus Christ, isn’t it about time?
IJustHaventDoneItYet 