Racism, UK-style

A base note of unrelinquished coloniality, with top-notes of contemporary white supremacy

Photo by James Eades on Unsplash

Kofi sits down heavily, looking dejected.

“What’s up? More trouble at school?”

“Yeah. Another student giving the N-word to my face, another class where students kept making sexual remarks to me about my imagined body parts - and another pointless meeting with the head”.

“What’s the head saying now? Doing anything - or is it same-old same-old?”

Kofi sighs.

“Another fixed-term exclusion for the N-word student - but it’s pointless. They either come back angry at me about the exclusion, or they smirk and thank me for the 2 days playing on their Xbox at home. None of it addresses the problem”.

I tell him,

“Yeah, I can see that - I grew up when all that casual racism was totally normal. And a lot of white people really haven’t changed their attitudes - they’ve just learned what they shouldn’t say in public”.

“That’s just it. It’s in the water: it’s in the culture, it’s at home, it’s on Tik-Tok. Exclusion only teaches students what they can’t acceptably do in a shared public space - it doesn’t deal with the racism. And not just racism - I hear misogyny, hate for gay and trans people, all kinds of hate every day around school”.

Kofi leans in, frowning -

“You sense of a kind of indoctrination; the offensive language echoes around the corridor as students move in bunches. It can present as youthful verbal diarrhoea - but the offensive words they’re using are unmistakably ‘of old’.”

I sigh.

Kofi elaborates,

“There’s a very deep-seated hatred of the Other. All kinds of Others. Women, female staff and female classmates, brown-skinned people, gay people, transgender people. It happens more with our boys than our girls. It’s usually the white males - the older ones, coming up to year 11”.

This is disturbing.

When Kofi found a Swastika in his desk drawer, he,

“Thought we’d hit rock bottom, but I’d hoped it was some kind of unthinking use of a symbol not properly understood by the students…”

We look at each other; I’m trying to take this in - Swastikas in schools? Isn’t WW2 (notoriously) endlessly on the history curriculum? Isn’t Anne Frank’s Diary a standard in English Lit?”

Kofi speaks quietly, pain in his voice,

“ … But it’s sounding as though, actually, they know full well what that Swastika means”.

“Don’t schools educate around that?” I ask. “Black History Month, WW2 and the fight against fascism, slavery and empire?”

Kofi shakes his head at my naivety.

“We have staff meetings where we discuss every possible misdemeanour - so-and-so had the wrong shoes on - or school rule breaking - so-and-so was eating in class. School leadership seem obsessed with that sort of thing; but about the growing hate? No. We don’t discuss that”.

Photo by Thiago Rocha on Unsplash

These students’ conscripted great-grandfathers would find this hard. Remembrance day heavily promoted and glorified every November, but posting Swastikas and supporting ‘blood and soil’ variety nationalism? Makes no sense.

I’m trying to imagine how undermining this constant hostility and harassment must feel. And there’s more, of course.

“There’s constant microaggressions - like they ask me if I’m “really qualified”; they ask if I’m “in a gang””.

(Kofi’s parents are middle-class professionals. So too, of course, is he).

I’m shocked at the lack of support from school leadership. Embarrassed for Worthing. I often defend this place against outsiders (Londoners and Brightonians) who look askance when I tell them I’m living here, and I tell them that Worthing’s not what people think. Clearly I’m wrong. Worthing sounds actually unsafe.

Maybe things are better out of high school, at college and university level? Among older students, and at higher levels of study, we’d find better levels of education and critical thinking?

I’m talking with three older students, some of them doing degrees at a local university accredited by a respected London University; you’d imagine, then, a certain level of cosmopolitanism and professionalism?

Lily tells me,

“I did a dance degree. It was advertised as developing dance practices across various genres. But it was actually all white girls who wanted ballet and more ballet. The students weren’t encouraged to expand themselves. There was bias - towards ballet and against Black dance”.

Lily’s Dissertation title was “Why is ballet so white?” She ripped into the academic literature - but failed to get her point heard. Books like Turning Pointe are many by now - but the problem persists. It’s baked in to the form itself.

Lily’s higher-level studies left her feeling excluded, less worthy, and severely undermined - confidence shaken. I ask for concrete examples.

“An outside teacher came in, supposedly to run a commercial dance style class. You need commercial, not ballet, for a professional dance career! She told us to do a freestyle. I asked what the freestyle part could be like. She looked at me and said, “I don’t want to see any of that sexy stuff, it is disgusting”. We had that one single chance to do a little bit of professional training, but that teacher and the white girls on my course changed the workshop into a tap dance class, because they thought commercial dance style was ‘disgusting’ ”.

Like Kofi, then, Lily has run up against white people’s stereotypical ideas about Blackness: too sexy, not ‘respectable’, fit only to be brute bodies - Black people’s education, artistry, creativity and professionalism all ignored.

Worthing seafront. Lily.

Angelica goes on,

“When we had Black outside teachers in doing a workshop, students would be laughing, whispering, not taking the teacher seriously. And they were not challenged on their behaviour. They were unprofessional and disrespectful”.

Anna picks up the thread,

“My teachers have been great! Eventually. But it was really hard. We [3 Black students in her whole degree cohort] had a really hard 2 years, felt like we were always making trouble or complaining, but the staff began to listen. They finally pushed back in Year 3 on what the white students were saying and doing, challenged them. The teachers organised more workshops given by Black teachers, plus some training for staff in how to be more inclusive and combat racism. They thanked us in the end for making them aware. Hopefully things might be better in future”.

Kofi and Anna both tell me they’ve suffered serious mental health issues, directly from being continually in environments where white people have made their lives miserable, tacitly supported by other white people around them - even by leadership - failing to build atmospheres without prejudice/cruelty. This is structural violence, at its sharpest.

Recent outbreaks of flag-shagging and roundabout painting have added to the atmosphere of menace. I’m hearing that many people are now feeling very unsafe in public space, as the realisation hits hard - They hate refugees, migrants - and us!

Worthing, a road near my house. It’s fairly easy to turn the St George’s Cross into a Battenburg Cake. (Note to police - wasn’t me who did this)

Will Black History Month this year bring respect for our Global Majority residents and some education for Worthing? October is a chance for leaders across Worthing to step up and help our town become a place for everybody to thrive.

Until then, anyone who asks me about moving to Worthing? I’d tell them to hold off until it’s a safer place. The Town Centre Development initiative promo video makes it clear who they want here.

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I write for a local magazine (Inside Worthing). I also belong to a large family that holds within it people who are Black; and also some white people who hold old-school racist attitudes, and who voted Brexit - and who will vote Reform. This was my piece for October’s edition of the mag. I heard even more horror from the interviwees, but can’t write it up because it would be identifying and would de-anonymise the piece. Confidentiality and the ethics of representation matter.

Because I’m shifting from academic writing, via commentary, into fiction, I thought about fictionalising the story for the Stack; but I’m doing a fiction take on issues around race, class, sex-gender in my big WIP (On Campus) and I need to focus my tiny time slots for writing on getting that bloody book finished, so I’m leaving this piece here as it is. The quoted words are all from interviews with Worthing residents.

I could also (of course, you know it) add a zillion nerd links to academic work around all this, but not got time right now. If you need to dig in to stuff like white feminine respectability, the whiteness of the dance world, the hidden curriculum in schools, education as a deliberate system of social class and values reproduction, structural violence - ask in comments and I’ll drop links.

Fuck this shit - fight it! And never think it can’t happen here in UK; never think that anyone actually believes “never again” when they stand sanctimoniously at the November Remembrance Day memorials.

Reform are zooming along! And there’s even more extreme groups out there and active in Uk - actual right-wing racist terrorist cells.

Act for Hope, not Hate.