This is sad but inspiring.
So, I was called a nigger today. I was on the phone, going through the turnstiles at Elephant. It was busy and someone asked the woman behind me if we'd all fit in the lift. She replied, "If this fucking nigger gets off her fucking phone, we might." Wait, what? For me - and I acknowledge I have been blessed never in my life to have experienced this directly before - these were first time feels. My body instantly wanted to be as far away as possible. My eyes wanted to stare her down. My heart wanted to both break and thunderously roar with rage. My lips couldn't speak but my tongue wanted to say, nah luv, there is no space big enough for both of us to fit, there's no world big enough for me and you and all your pettiness and all your hate. I looked at her. She was pregnant, quite heavily, with empty, unimaginative Daily Mail eyes and a grim, hollow, unreachable stare, and she sat on the tube with her squinty, brittle, pockmarked husband and they downed a magnum of Smirnoff Ice and cussed and grumbled all the way to Bank. And I realised that she was too pathetic and lost to deserve my pain.
We live in a divided world. Whether you are just suddenly reeling at the acknowledgement of this or whether you have always known it, felt it, experienced it, suffered from it, we must not park our collective reactionary response at anger, anguish, resentment, cynicism, or entrench ourselves deeper within our categorised comfort zones. We must all play our part in disembowelling this monstrous invention of whiteness. Racists and bigots, they're the metastases. We have to get to the cancer. We must dismantle the dominant narratives that fuel white supremacy and confront directly the systems of power that insist and thrive on keeping it alive. We must confront ourselves. We must all acknowledge what it has offered to us and what it has kept from us by virtue of the colour of our skin, the colour of our passport, where we exist in the world and on the neoliberal economic ladder. We must empathise, listen to each other's stories, believe them. We must allow each other time to catch up, without malice or scorn. But seriously, do dig deep and catch up. If you don't know, go know. We owe it to ourselves, to each other, to our futures to do this. Let's take this collectively shitty feeling and do the work. We live in this world together. We must fight for it together. As Baldwin said: 'People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." This could be the threshold for something new, more alert, less inert. We're all here. Don't be a bystander.
