day 16 - 17/11/20 : Racism, BLM & J. Baldwin

I'm acutely aware of the irony that a white man is talking about the institutional and cultural prosecution facing black people across the world. Just for the obvious but necessary disclaimer, I have a very limited perspective of the black experience. I'm going to be pulling a lot of thoughts from a recent documentary I watched, 'I Am Not Your Negro' (Peck, 2016) so the word count today will be reflective of that.

"If we were white... if we were Irish, if we had in your mind a frame of reference, our heroes would be your heroes too. When the Israelis or the Poles or the Irish pick up guns and say, "Give me liberty or give me death" the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing - word for word - he is branded a criminal."

- James Baldwin

I want to use this quote to establish a sort of frame of reference for myself. When I eventually began thinking more critically about topics of racism long ago, one of my first reference points was the Irish experience here in the north and across Ireland for these past few centuries. This is a viewpoint reinforced by many in Sinn Féin - that the experience of the fenian in British Ireland is identical to that of a black man in most western societies. This comparison was reinforced again in around 2016 when the Gaza/Israel conflict was re-entering the mainstream newscycle where you would have seen many Sinn Féin pundits posting a picture of the tricolour and Palestine flags merged with an empathetic message of unity. While this was my first step in trying to understand the rampant discrimination against black people, it is entirely problematic and I worry for people that try to claim that our experience and our parents' experiences here in the North are the same as black people across the world or Palestinians on the Gaza Strip. Even the old line, "No blacks, no dogs, no Irish", attempts to lump us into the same level in this hierarchy of victims. While I'm not trying to demean anyone whose been woefully treated by the British government or their loved ones, there is some clear distinctions. Before I make these clear however, I want to entertain some similarities.

Soldiers stand guard over a Catholic mother and child as they go to school at Holy Cross on Ardoyne Road in 2001. (Figure 1)

15 year old Dorothy Counts, one of the first black students to integrate into their segregated North Carolina school in 1957, with a crowd of racist schoolchildren surrounding her. (Figure 2)

In both of these instances, these schoolchildren are simply trying to survive and make a life for themselves in the face of a population that is so utterly taken hold by a siege mentality that they enter into terrorising kids. On top of this, there's certain overlaps regarding how both Irish Catholics' and African-Americans' tormentors adopted de-humanising language and laws that reinforced this parochial view of humanity. With all of that said, I still hold that trying to claim our experience at home and the journey of the black rights movement as identical or on the same level is massively problematic and demeaning to the countless faces that have died in the name of Black Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter.

One key reason is visibility. For people here in the North, you wouldn't know if they were a Protestant or Catholic until you said your first or last name, your school, where you grew up or some other miscellaneous indicator of your political identity. For African-Americans, this ambiguity isn't a privilege that they have access to. For fuck's sake there's people that have gotten a deep tan and received racial abuse even though they're Caucasian. Some sectarian cunt could walk right past you and neither of you would be any the wiser. If you're a black person living in the US and a white supremacist walks past you, you cannot hide - you're forced to face this tirade of abuse, be it coming from a cop or some random cunt off the street - can you imagine how insane and exhausting it is to constantly have your guard up?

Another reason I think there's separation is what I'm going to call 'social identifiers'. What we may not realise from living here in the North but the Troubles is actually one of the most documented conflicts in history. When things hit their melting point in the 90s, we had the eyes of the world on us, on this tiny slice of land in the Irish Sea. I'm not going to pretend that this hasn't got anything to do with the colour of skin. When a white person from Germany sees a white person on the news, they have no idea if they're German or Irish, they just see another white person. With a white-dominated media machine, it then becomes much more advantageous for us to call attention to injustices when we have a network of well-connected Caucasians to keep an eye. Again, this is not a quality shared by black people. As Baldwin pointed out, our cultural values are engineered to support the White Everyman. Films from Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915), Uncle Tom's Cabin (Pollard, 1927), Imitation of Life (Stahl, 1959) and beyond support this idea of the righteous white man taking up their right to vengeance and happiness, regardless of them being painfully racist fucks. If you think we've grown out of this cultural depravity, think of ten of the most recent films you've watched and tally the white actors and black actors. Moreso, look at their production crew, and see how a film that is triumphed as a Black Power film such as how Disney labelled the Lion King remake, and see how despite all the front-facing tokenism, this movie was written, shot, edited and produced by a fish barrel of Causcasians. When we finally begin to make steps towards giving fuller representation for minorities onscreen or just in popular media, there's a disgraceful blowback. Last week Sainsbury's delivered a Christmas advert of a black family. They're not delivering a revolutionary manifesto or declaring a white genocide whilst tucking into their roast chicken, they're literally just having a cheerful ol Christmas ,,, and there's an embarrassing parade of gammon in this shop's mentions saying the tropes of, "grr I feel like an alien in my own country" or "agh you've gone too far this time sainsburys!!" Insanity. Do you see the separation now? Every idol we (if you're white) grew up watching looked exactly like us, every newspiece about the Troubles had a train of white-sourced resources to support us, and we can dominate all of these parts of public life with no protest and no blowback. When we white people grow up, we have our pick and choose of role models to pull from in the films we grew up idolising or the celebrities that populated the news and TV. We could grow up as strong and courageous and with as an unconquerable sense of identity as they do. Then where does an African-American kid find their heroes in? So many of the trailblazers like MLK or Malcolm X that led the Civil Rights Movement were murdered, so who then fills the void they left? How is a black person supposed to feel as if they have a strong sense of identity when every idol that looks like them is cut down in their prime? Again, this is a privilege not extended to African-Americans. I'll leave this point with the Baldwin quote that inspired it.

"It comes as a great shock, around the age of 5 or 6 or 7, to discover that the flag which you have pledged allegiance - along with everybody else - has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in it's whole system of reality evolved any place for you."

Over the past 20 or so years, it appears as if with the growing awareness of racism both in the US and across the world, dog whistle racism has supplanted or atleast complemented overt racism, particularly in political spheres. Both seem to be accomplished with the identical effect - entrenching biases, strengthening discriminatory institutions and little substantial change without someone within this racist system becoming a 'whistleblower'. With the popularisation of BLM and anti-racist activism, there's a willingness among white supremacists and their sympathisers to speak in code. After Black rights protestors were attacked by Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Trump said there were, ‘very fine people on both sides’. When the 17 year old Kyle Rittenhouse shot two black protestors in Illinois, he was considered 'misunderstood.' These are not the awkward mistakes or mishaps where you try squeezing past someone at a doorway. This is murder and any pretence that it somehow isn't should be laughed out of any self-respecting political establishment.

Throughout all of this blog I've been speaking as someone who is exempt from blame. This isn't true either. Over lockdown, Black Lives Matter protests were held across Belfast in solidarity with the movement in the states. This was promptly shut down, at a level of competence and swift decision-making we rarely see from the Executive. A Policing Board report has now found that the 68 fines delivered to protestors has damaged the PSNI's reputation and the PSNI may consider backtracking its original decision. Considering our own issues with racism here in the North and the rest of the UK, I feel it's especially important for the government to make a moral commitment to racial equality rather than hiding behind the curtain of health guidelines.

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

Left: Birmingham, USA, 1963. Right: Minneapolis, USA, 2020