Telling it like it is

As black children growing up in Bristol in the 1960s and 70s my cousins and I knew a thing or two about being on the wrong side of racist abuse and attacks. We experienced racism in all its ugly and unpleasant forms, from running through a volley of taunts to get to the school bus, to having stones thrown at you in the park or even having mixed race children call you names, totally oblivious to the fact that they too were considered by wider society as black. Back then, it was permissible to call people of colour the N word and my step brothers and I even had ugly racist songs made up and sung to us by large choirs of white boys. To this day, I can remember the words and tune of one of the songs which if I wrote them here would shock many people to their core. This was our life and everyday experience in a pre race equality act Great Britain. It was a time when people had signs on their doors saying, no blacks, no dogs no Irish’ where on TV, Alf Garnett and Eddie Booth were openly racist and used derogatory language about people of colour. We know that age captures the length of time you have been alive, it also captures the experiences you’ve had during that time, for good or bad.  My experiences have shaped me and made me the woman I am today. 
It is against this backdrop and the joint experiences that I believe I shared with my cousins that two weeks ago when Muhammad Ali died and I wrote on our “Bristol bunch” whatsapp chat group that the worlds greatest men, Ali, MLK, Mandela and Ghandi were all magnificent men of colour and that few if any white men were in the same league that I was shocked by my cousin Colin’s reaction, ” I have never read a such racist statement” he wrote, “and I am surprised at it coming from you!”. He then promptly left the chat group, leaving me no room for manoeuvre or right of reply. 

I have been thinking about the anger he must have felt to have generated such an immediate and irrevocable response. 

Actually, his response made me really sad, Colin and I have know each other all our lives and I was and am incredibly fond of him. Now in our fifties with grown up children and both with white partners we have been married to for over 30 years it made me really think about what so deeply offended him about my statement. The silence of the other family members on the chat was deafening, no one wanting to get involved or take sides. No one prepared to speak up for or against me or Colin. I had opened a huge can of worms and there was no putting them back in the tin. 

Muhammed Ali, MLK, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela all had one thing in common, their unswerving commitment and desire for equality and for the black or Asian person to be treated with dignity respect and fairness. They fought tirelessly for that aim and often put themselves in dangerous life threatening and definitely life changing situations to achieve that aim, they did this by speaking up, saying difficult things, discussing issues people did not want to talk about or acknowledge. 

Muhammed Ali, refused to go to Vietnam, he was not going to fight other ethnic people who he said did not call him the N word or do him any harm, he recalled winning the Olympic gold medal and going into an all white restaurant back in the US and being refused service because of the colour of his skin. He was stripped of his world titles and given a suspended jail sentence, he had his passport taken away from him, because he stood up for what he believed in. On Friday evening my husband and I watched the Muhammed Ali service on TV. The fact that it was multi faith was a glorious thing to behold, From his grave Mohammed Ali was bringing people together. Time and time again friends and family alike spoke about his values, his belief in the freedom of all men and his ability to say things that needed to be said, even to his own detriment. That takes strength and courage as well as belief in yourself and your values.  

The reverend Martin Luther King, spoke openly and honestly about how black people in the US experienced discrimination at that time. He said, “Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them”. This is the world that Martin Luther King and Muhammed Ali lived in, it was the same world that my cousin Colin and I grew up and lived in, it was what it was at that time. 

Earlier, the great Mahatma Gandhi, fought tirelessly to free India from the days of the Raj, he protested like Muhammed and MLK in as peaceful a way as possible, abhorring violence and never using it to make his point. Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you and then you win” and later, Nelson Mandela another one of the heroes of the modern age, an icon of freedom and the epitome of forgiveness and statesmanship, a larger then life figure in today’s world said, ” No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion”. He said, “be the change you want to see” You can only do that by speaking up.

Those amazing and wonderful men all had one thing in common, they were true to themselves, to their values to their beliefs, regardless of the consequences for themselves and their families they stood firm and true and as a consequence the world changed and it has changed, not enough perhaps but enough so that my children did not have to run a gamut of insults when going to school. It is no longer permissible to discriminate openly against people because of their religion, colour or sexuality, the Jim Crow Laws in the US and apartheid in South Africa and Zimbabwe thankfully, have been consigned to history. Many people believe we are post racial inequality, that race is no longer an issue, that fairness and equality are embedded within our society, they believe that because there has been a black American president discrimination no longer exists. The facts tell a different story, a story of how aboriginal men live on average 20 years less than their white male counterparts, how for every $ a white American household earns a black household will make 18 cents and that here in England if you are a woman of colour you are more likely to experience a postnatal death than if you are a white woman. Two weeks ago on the day Muhammed Ali died, the workforce race equality standard (WRES) baseline data for the NHS was published. https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/WRES-Data-Analysis-Report.pdf. The report shows clearly how much work we still have to do to achieve fairness and equality in the NHS and I would argue that there is still much to do globally. In Professor Michael West and Professor Jeremy Dawson’s work, ‘Making a difference’ https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/making-the-difference.pdf a similar pattern of people of colour having a poorer experience than white people emerges.

On Friday of this week my good friend John Walsh posted a blog entitled, “Calling the jubilee” https://yestolifeblog.wordpress.com/ he started his powerful blog with the words of MLK,

“It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, “Wait on time.” His blog made me think of another of my favourite quotes

Marianne Wilkinson wrote, . 

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

At Muhammed Ali’s service on Friday night Rabbi Michael Lerner from Louisville, Kentucky talked openly, freely and bravely about issues of fairness and equality for the Palestinian people. He spoke up when many others in his position and from his background would have been afraid to do so. Speaking up, naming and shaming and speaking truth to power are all difficult things to do, Saying things people don’t like or don’t want to hear will never make you popular, it might even make one of your favourite cousins block you from a family whatsapp chat but speak up we must, particularly if we want a different and better world. I stand by the statement I made on the chat and will reiterate it here now, Some of the most amazing and fabulously courageous men over the last 100 years have been Black.