Around twenty years ago, in the big Sainsbury’s at Dalston Junction, London, I needed to pay for some food. As I got in line a woman said, ‘Excuse me,’ and she sounded cross. I must have moved in front of her by mistake. I said, ‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t see you there.’ And then she replied, ‘You wouldn’t have done that if I was white.’
WHOA!
I felt rage. How dare she accuse me of being racist because I didn’t see her? I huffed about it, mortified by the accusation, feeling like all eyes were unfairly on me. I felt anger in that moment and carried it with me for years. The injustice of it. I’d just moved to London that week; I was intimidated by it all and didn’t know where my life was going. As if I needed that on top of everything.
Oh, poor me.
Twenty years later and I have a very different perspective on what happened that day. The woman in Sainsbury’s might have experienced multiple microaggressions just that morning. By the time I pushed past her in the supermarket, maybe she’d just had it with white people like me acting like she didn’t exist. Maybe she had discovered that her white female colleague was being paid more than she was, despite the fact she works twice as hard. Maybe her employer had told her she couldn’t wear her hair naturally at work, and maybe someone else had tried to touch it. Maybe she’d tried to speak up about a racist incident but was accused of being a bully and silenced, again. Maybe the night before she had watched yet another Hollywood film that failed to represent people with her skin colour. Maybe someone had shouted offensive racist slurs at her out of a car window. Maybe her kid is the only black kid in his school, and he is being bullied because of it. Maybe an old lady had clutched her handbag extra tight because they were alone in a lift together, and it made the woman feel horrible because she’s never stolen a thing in her life. Maybe a white person at work had called her by the only other black person’s name in the office. Maybe she had been in hospital and felt the level of care she received was less than the white woman in the bed next to her. Maybe she had read about another innocent black person in America being shot by the police. Each and every one of those scenarios is a real scenario that my black friends have told me about; the list, to be honest, goes on and on. I wish I could go back to that day in Dalston. Rather than huff away from the woman who thought I didn’t see her, I’d look her in the eye and tell her I was sorry for getting in her way, rather than acting like she had done something wrong. That would have been the right thing to do.
At my workspace in LA, they use ‘Slack’ to communicate with us all. It’s basically a kind of WhatsApp but with different ‘channels’ for different themes of chat. When the physical space shut down due to Covid, the digital community thrived. There was daily programming, meditations, stuff for kids and workshops. It was brilliant and the response from the members was always encouraging and enthusiastic. It’s a group that celebrates diversity and is quite charged in terms of activism. Despite it being proud of its diversity, however, it remains a majority white-run organisation and that is something I know is being looked at. They focus a lot on the issue of race and dismantling inequality. They host ‘racial affinity’ workshops and do their best to inspire conversation despite how uncomfortable it might be. Most of the time it’s a supportive, fun and fascinating group to be in. Until something goes wrong. One day, someone thought it would be funny to post a picture in the group of an old woman tying a noose. The caption read something like, ‘How I’m feeling about marriage right now.’ Or words to that effect. I never saw the post, it was taken down very quickly. What emerged next was a very official letter from the club explaining that the image of a noose symbolises historical racism and the lynching of black people by white people. The image was both offensive and triggering, and it was being taken very seriously. The person who posted it was being spoken to, and anyone who was hurt by the image had the club’s full support. This was a ‘zero-tolerance’ response, and I admired it greatly. I messaged the person who would have been behind the letter, a friend of mine. I asked her if she was OK and said that I was sorry it had happened. I said the person who posted the image probably felt awful, and that I hoped they were OK because racism is an awful thing to be accused of. And this is where I finally understood what I (as a white person) keep doing. As my friend pointed out, we sympathise with the white person who caused the harm, rather than the black people who were hurt by their actions. It happens almost every time, and there I was doing it myself, despite my insistence that racism is a concept that applies to other people.
I do not consider myself a racist person, but 2020 has taught me that the word ‘racism’ isn’t only about violence and verbal attacks. Sometimes an act of racism is very small, often totally missed by a white person but heard loud and clear by the person of colour to whom it was directed. This is the year that white people, no matter how un-racist they consider themselves to be, have had to examine even the smallest acts of discrimination that they project into the world every single day. Until white people, all white people, admit to their part in it, racism will never go away. If those of us who consider ourselves not to be racist only respond defensively when it’s suggested that maybe we are, then nothing will ever change. With the incident at my workspace, I was confronted with the fact that my sympathy unconsciously falls with white people – this has been a personal lesson that I am taking on board, and I want that to change.
When I was growing up on Guernsey (it had a population of around 75,000 people), it was almost entirely white in its demographic. I didn’t really know about racism because I never saw it. I never saw it because there were no black people around me for people to be racist towards, it’s that simple. When I went to drama school in Liverpool, my eyes were opened to gayness, blackness, brownness, those who are able-bodied, those who aren’t able-bodied, small town-ness, big town-ness and every kind of person. But it was still majority white. It wasn’t something I questioned back then as it was what felt normal to me. I had a couple of black friends but never discussed race with them or had any real awareness that their experiences might have been different to mine. It was when I moved to Dalston in my early twenties and became nestled into a black community for the first time that I realised how sheltered I had been. I was beginning a career in TV. Most, if not all, of my colleagues were white. So much of the TV we were making involved white hosts and was aimed at a white audience. I lived in the heart of a black community, yet these people were not represented in the programmes I was making. I remember thinking this, but not saying it. When I started making documentaries and was on camera myself, I should have requested to have a more diverse crew. But I didn’t. That was fifteen years ago, and people didn’t talk about that kind of thing back then. I regret it enormously. It makes me as responsible. I should have requested diversity.
Last year, when I was doing the press tour for my novel So Lucky, I sat with my publicist and we talked about race. I had just read the book So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. Having become more involved with initiatives around diversity in my workspace in LA, and feeling less nervous to talk about it, I was realising more and more that the world I moved in was geared towards whiteness. It had also made me think about what my role in that was. I’ve never felt a responsibility as a writer to tell everybody’s stories, but there should be more diversity in my novels. Why isn’t there? It’s something that bothers me a lot about my work, and now when I am reading books, I often find the whiteness irritating. Same with films and TV. If you haven’t noticed, then look out for it. Look at how many black cast members there are in your favourite films and shows. Look out for the diversity on TV quiz shows, the characters in the books you read, voices on the radio. Once you start to notice, you can’t un-notice it, and it’s really got to change. In So Lucky, I left out physical descriptions of a few of the characters with the intention that they could be whoever the reader wanted them to be, but was that enough? I’m not sure it was. In another of my novels, The Cows, I had originally written the character Stella as a black woman. Only when I mentioned this to a black friend of mine, she told me to be careful. She warned me of tokenism, saying that unless I delved into the true experience of being black, I couldn’t just have a black character. In a way she was right. The Cows deals with many themes, but racism isn’t one of them. So, I created Stella as a white character. I became too nervous to write a black character, because I was afraid of getting it wrong. And so there it was, another novel by another white writer, full of whiteness and marketed towards white women. I regret it enormously.
I’ve had many uncomfortable moments in the past few years when discussing race but I am grateful for them all. When one of my black friends calls me out on something, it hurts, but I take it in. Another recent experience taught me something else; black people, especially black people here in America, are dealing with a level of continuous trauma that white girls like me will never understand. When I see the police, I feel safe. When they see the police, they feel afraid. Imagine that? I once came across an Instagram post by Snoop Dogg that read: ‘If the police never did wrong people would trust them. Nobody ever made a song called “f*ck the fire department”.’ I thought it was well put, mildly amusing but also powerful. So I sent it to a black friend of mine, who has taught me more about racism than anyone in my life. I thought it would make her smile. It didn’t. She responded by asking me kindly not to forward posts like that to her because we see these things through different eyes. I may see that as Snoop making a fair point, but to her it conjured images of violence and an institution killing people who look like her. It reminded her of the real threat that lives on the streets outside her apartment. It reminded her of hundreds of years of racism in the country she calls home. These lessons have been invaluable. I am grateful for them all. It’s easy to get caught up in the social media version of anti-racism, but when you actually apply it to people who are living the experience, more sensitivity is needed. Not everyone lives the Instagram way. Most live the real way, and for them there is little appreciation for memes and quips.
I have insisted I am not racist for most of my life, but my whiteness and the whiteness I continue to prop up through my work, my social groups, the shows I watch, the books I read, the people I follow, the way I speak up, all needs examination.
After the murder of George Floyd, there were protests and riots quite literally on our doorstep, and it dragged my eyes fully open. At first, Chris and I were watching the Black Lives Matter protests on the local news and we kept commenting on how close it was. The protests were peaceful, until the cops showed up, creating a stand-off, and it all kicked off. There was violence and looting, and the crowds started to move. Soon helicopters started to circle our house. The sound of the protests got louder. People set fire to our trash cans and I was afraid the flames would catch and that we would need to escape. Chris and I put the kids to bed and I packed a bag, in case we needed to run. I was watching the news in our bedroom and could hear it on the street outside. It was unbelievable.
In the days that followed I walked down Melrose Avenue where the riots took place, and moments from my house there was a huge piece of graffiti saying the words, ‘DADDY CHANGED THE WORLD.’ It was referring to George Floyd. They were the words said by his six-year-old daughter after he was murdered by a policeman called Derek Chauvin, who pushed his knee into Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes because he attempted to pay for something with a fake $20 bill. The devastating, but possibly hopeful, truth is that sweet little girl was right. There we were, all locked inside, only our TVs, radios and the Internet to relieve us from our own heads, and everybody had to listen for once. In the silence of lockdown, the streets were alive with the sounds of protests. The night the looters hit the shops outside my house, it was scary for a few reasons. There was fear, but also excitement. It felt like we could hear the world changing; all eyes and ears were on the news. Of course, no one with the right intentions wanted the violence, but the point of the protests came through loud and clear. I know it sounds strange, but it was an honour to be in the middle of it. In the weeks that followed, the peaceful protests went on and on. Chris got out there a number of times and I joined a couple myself. It was powerful and electrifying. People in cars handing out masks and water to those walking. A feeling of unity and activism for the greater good. Shops boarded up, but with beautiful and heart-warming graffiti all over the chipboard. The words ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ pasted loud and proud on every spare surface.
2020 saw the world shut down. Voices that had been screaming to be heard were finally the loudest we could hear. When we re-emerge from the fear and anxiety that the virus has instilled into us all, maybe more people than ever will have the chance to feel safe.