is not a Race

it is a graphite

F pencil

attached

to a

Hellbent

eraser---

and We

are not

escaping.

(Whoa

put that

in rewind!)

---F as in 

"Fine Grade"

and in all

our shades

of gray,

Who is to say

what is

the positive

or the negative

Space

in the lines

of ancestry

we are tracing?

--Maybe

we're scratching

well beyond

the surface of

the blind paper

on which

we thought

we were

placing

centuries of

question-

-able

categorization?

---Maybe something

out of this cut,

is peeking IN

at all of us

asking,

for

more to

discuss...?

---Maybe

our efforts

of editing

and/or pre-

correcting

have left

greasy

paint film

on the skin

rather than

the contrived

polishing

stated Policy

is suggesting?

--Maybe

we do

need to be

skinned

of our old

thinking

to stop

running

blood

and air

out of

every

living

being

that is

holding

on for

its time

--in the country--

--in the city--

--on the streets--

always leaving

always heaving

and carrying on

in carbon tracing

the tenuous heavy

lines of History

in the making

Life

is not a Race

it is a graphite

F pencil

attached

to a

Hellbent

eraser---

and We

are not

escaping.

‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’ (Martin Luther King)

One of my prized possessions is a battered cloth-covered geography text book published in 1886 by George Gill & Sons. I found it in the home of one of my grandparents as a child. Its full title is the rather delightful Gill’s Oxford & Cambridge Geography: expressly compiled for middle-class schools and for pupils preparing for the Oxford and Cambridge Local Examinations. It’s a fascinating read, speaking of an era of privilege and class distinction that was once an integral part of the fabric of Victorian society. It hails from a long-vanished Age of Empire, when a quarter of the globe was coloured pink, and Britannia ruled the waves.

Almost a century and a half later, the world-spanning British Empire has been reduced to a dozen or so scattered rocks and outposts; and we can no longer boast (as Gill does) that ‘England is the chief commercial nation of the world, and her ships are found in every sea’. But the era of privilege and class distinction is all too alive and well. Of the five Conservative Prime Ministers of the UK since 2010, two of them (David Cameron and Boris Johnson) attended Eton School, whilst a third (Rishi Sunak) attended Winchester College (founded in 1382, and one of the oldest schools in Britain). All five were graduates of Oxford University. And the current Prime, Rishi Sunak, is the richest Member of Parliament, and together with his wife is said to possess a greater personal wealth than our soon-to-be crowned British monarch, Charles III. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Yet the ascension of Rishi Sunak to the premiership of the United Kingdom might suggest a different lesson. Sunak was born in Southampton, but he is of Punjabi descent, his parents having migrated to Britain in the 1960s from East Africa. He became Prime Minister six months ago on October 25th 2022, on the Eve of Diwali, the first Hindu PM of the UK, and the first of British Asian heritage. Our capital city has already had its first Muslim and British Asian Mayor, Sadiq Khan, since 2016. And only last month members of the Scottish National Party elected Humza Yousaf as their party leader, and First Minister of Scotland. Like Sadiq Khan, he is a second-generation Pakistani immigrant.

I remember the election of Barack Obama as 44th American President in 2008 and the euphoria that surrounded it, not just in the United States but across the world. I remember the gracious speech given by Senator John McCain, his Republican opponent, in which he conceded defeat, and said this of his Democrat rival:

‘In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, his success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance. But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving. This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight.’

I rejoiced at the outcome of that American election. I also thought to myself: ‘There’s no chance of anything similar happening in the United Kingdom.’ Yet here we are, fifteen years later with Rishi Sunak in No 10 Downing Street, Humza Yousaf in Bute House, Edinburgh, and Sadiq Khan ensconced as Mayor of London. Perhaps Britain is changing, after all.

*

And then, today, April 22nd 2023, I remind myself of events that took place on a street in the south-east London suburb of Eltham, exactly thirty years ago. That was the day on which a young black student named Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racially motivated gang attack whilst waiting for a bus. He was just eighteen years old.

Stephen’s death was a watershed moment in the history of race relations in this country. It deeply shocked the nation. But it wasn’t just the savage brutality of his murder that disturbed people, appalling though that was. The way in which it was investigated by the London Metropolitan Police, with a mixture of indifference and incompetence, followed by an undoubted attempt to cover up that indifference and incompetence, was seen as definitive proof of what many people, not only people of the ethnic minority communities, had been arguing for some time; namely that the Metropolitan Police was ‘institutionally racist’.

That damning phrase was attached to the Met as a result of the 1998 public inquiry into Stephen’s death, and the police investigation that followed, chaired by Sir William Macpherson. His report, published the following year, has been described as ‘one of the most important moments in the modern history of criminal justice in Britain.’ One of its key recommendations was that the so-called ‘double jeopardy rule’ should be repealed in murder cases to allow a retrial upon new and compelling evidence. This recommendation was enacted, and as a result two of the individuals responsible for Stephen’s death were subsequently retried and convicted.

Stephen’s parents battled courageously and persistently over many years for justice for their son, at great cost, and initially in the face of considerable establishment passivity, undercover police attempts to smear them, and palpable hostility from some sections of the British press. Their perseverance paid off, and Stephen’s mother Doreen now sits in the House of Lords as Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, from where she constitutes to champion the work of those seeking to improve race relations, and those working for a more equitable society, particularly in regard to the British criminal justice system.

In 2018, as the 25th anniversary of Stephen’s murder drew near, the then British PM Theresa May, to her considerable credit, announced that henceforth there would be an annual national commemoration of his death. Twenty years earlier, in 1998, an annual architectural award, the Stephen Lawrence Prize, was established in association with the Royal Institute of British Architects; thereby commemorating Stephen’s deeply cherished ambition to become an architect. And back in 1995, a commemorative plaque had been placed to mark the spot where Stephen was killed.

Shockingly, that plaque has been vandalised several times since its installation. But more disquieting still, perhaps, last month saw the publication of a new report, the Casey review, commissioned by the Metropolitan Police itself, in the wake of the abduction and murder of Sarah Everard in March 2021 by one of its own serving officers. If anything, it was even more condemnatory than the Macpherson report had been. Baroness Casey’s scathing review described the Met as ‘broken and rotten, suffering collapsing public trust and is guilty of institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia’. What, one wonders, has changed in a quarter of a century? Is it yet another case of Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?

Sir Mark Rowley, the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner, has accepted the review’s conclusions, yet refuses to accept the term 'institutional’ to describe the racism, misogyny and homophobia so prevalent in his force, preferring to speak instead of it as ‘systemic’. One may or may not be able to see much in the way of distinction between such carefully nuanced phrases. There is no doubt of Sir Mark’s sincerity in his desire to ‘clean up’ the Met; and in the desire that he and other senior officers have for change, he has said that the force is no longer the same institution that it was 25 years ago. But it is hard to find fault with Baroness Lawrence when she expresses scepticism, and says in response: ‘I think the public should be the judge of that and not him’. Or in other words: ‘Show, don’t tell.’

*

As a boy, I grew up in a socially conservative Welsh mining community. It was a decidedly monocultural upbringing. I don’t think I even met a person from an ethnic minority until the year I turned eleven, in 1977. That was the year in which I began my grammar school education. That was also the year in which I met Dominic Mehta.

Dominic was South Asian. His father was highly regarded in the local community. I would frequently catch the bus between the mining hamlet where I lived and the town centre. Opposite the town centre bus stop stood the town hall, and on a board outside the name of the chairman of the town council was painted, alongside that of the town clerk. The chairman’s name might change from one year to the next, but the town clerk’s didn’t. By the time Dominic’s grammar school education began, his father Manu had already served for many years as town clerk. He was born in India, and had received his higher education at St Xavier’s College, a Jesuit-founded institution in Mumbai, before studying law in London. He had been ‘called to the bar’ at Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court exclusively entitled to call their members to the English Bar as barristers. It was an illustrious pedigree of diligence and service.

But that didn’t stop his son Dominic being bullied at grammar school. Many of the boys in my form faced bullying of one kind or another. Williams was the ‘fat kid’. Neat was the ‘dope-head’. I was the ‘four-eyed git’. And as for Mehta, well the bullies had the perfect word for him. The P-word: pure and simple.

Now, of course, this was doubly-insulting. The P-word was a racial slur almost on a par with the N-word in terms of its negative connotations. But it was also used pretty indiscriminately as a catch-all term of abuse against any person of South Asian heritage. Dominic’s family hailed from India, not Pakistan. Mehta is an Indian surname, derived from the Sanskrit word mahita meaning ‘great’ or ‘praised’. Famous bearers of the name have included Mehta Kalu (the father of the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak), the musical conductor Zubin Mehta, and the spiritual poet Narsihn Mehta (a particular favourite of Mahatma Gandhi). The name is found among various Indian religious groups, including Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Parsis: but not Muslims. Given the historic animosity between different ethnic and religious groups on the Indian subcontinent, culminating in the bloody partition of India and Pakistan at their independence in 1947, it must have been particularly irksome for Dominic to be characterised in this way. But he bore it with remarkably good grace. That, after all, is what you did back then, in Seventies Britain, if you belonged to a minority. If you wanted to avoid a beating, that is.

Very many British people, it seemed, were at least casually racist back then. This was the aftermath of Enoch Powell’s enormously influential 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, criticising mass immigration. The 1970s saw the rise of the National Front - the spiritual heirs to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. At its peak in the mid-Seventies, the National Front was England’s fourth largest party in terms of vote share. On the television we laughed at the bigoted views of Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part and Eddie Booth in Love Thy Neighbour: but one couldn’t help but suspect that many viewers secretly - and not so secretly - admired them.

And then we had The Black and White Minstrel Show.

Minstrel entertainers appearing in ‘blackface’ had been a long-established staple of British music hall and seaside entertainment since the mid-19th century. The television series starring The Minstrels ran on the BBC for twenty years, from 1958 to 1978, garnering audiences in excess of 20 million viewers at its peak. Yet almost from its inception - stirred on, no doubt, by the growing civil rights movement in the United States at the time - there were voices at the BBC expressing their unease about this prime-time hit show. In 1962, the BBC’s own chief accountant wrote an internal memo describing the show as ‘a disgrace and an insult to coloured people’. A year later That Was The Week That Was, the notorious Sixties satire show, mocked The Minstrel Show savagely, producing its own skit in which Millicent Martin dressed up as Uncle Sam and sang a parody of ‘I Wanna Go Back to Mississippi’ accompanied by a band of minstrel singers in blackface crooning away:

Mississippi, it’s the state you’ve gotta choose

Where we hate all the darkies and the Catholics and the Jews

Where we welcome any man

Who is strong and white and belongs to the Ku Klux Klan.

Despite this, no doubt encouraged by the viewing figures, the BBC kept The Minstrel Show on air until finally axing it in 1978. Even then, blackface continued to appear on the BBC, usually in comedic contexts, well after the turn of the millennium, with shows such as The League of Gentleman, and David Walliams’ and Matt Lucas’ Little Britain and Come Fly with Me (the latter series depicting blackface as late as 2011).

Confession time: about twenty years ago, I wore blackface in a church panto. The panto was named ‘A Lad in A Manger’, and was based on the Nativity story. I played one of the ‘Three Wise Guys’: a blackface parody of the Three Wise Men. We played them as Noel Cowardesque characters, wearing tuxedos, brandishing cigarette holders and talking in plummy accents; but - crucially - all whilst in blackface. The worst of it was, the pantomime script hadn’t stipulated this bizarre and controversial performing choice. It was something, I’m deeply embarrassed to admit, that the three of us came up with entirely of our own accord. Our director was not impressed, but against her better judgement allowed us to go ahead with it. We received the requisite laughs from the audience: but twenty years later, it goes without saying that I really wish we hadn’t done it. But - hey - Lucas and Walliams were getting away with it back then, weren’t they? Well, a quarter of a century on from the banishment of The Minstrel Show, they should have known better. And I should have too.

*

The roots of racism are old. They undoubtedly predate historical time. Indeed, an aetiology for racism can even be found in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the Book of Genesis, dating back thousands of years:

‘Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank some of the wine and became drunk, and he lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backwards and covered the nakedness of their father; their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, “Cursed be Canaan; lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” He also said, “Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem; and let Canaan be his slave. May God make space for Japheth, and let him live in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be his slave.”’ (Genesis 9:20-27)

The Table of Nations in Genesis chapter 10 goes on to claim that all the tribes of nations of the Old World are descendants of Noah’s three sons. Japheth is described as the ancestor of Europeans; Shem of Asiatics; and Ham of Africans. The names Semitic and Hamitic, applied by linguists and ethnographers even today for certain Middle Eastern and African languages and ethnic groups, draws upon this Scriptural supposition. The story of the ‘cursing of Ham’ was undoubtedly derived to offer an explanation and justification for how, many centuries later, the Israelites (descendants of Shem) were able to subjugate the Canaanites (descendants of Canaan, the son of Ham).

It’s not hard not to see similar thinking at work today when one views the asymmetrical and fraught relationship between Jews and Palestinians in the Holy Land today. But these verses from Genesis were also perniciously applied in the American Deep South from the eighteenth century onwards as a defence for slavery, and (even after the abolition of slavery) continuing policies of discrimination and segregation. And its possible to draw a line from the days of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Huckleberry Finn, to the anti-abolitionist campaigns of John Brown and the rise of Lincoln and the Republican Party, to the American experience of Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, to the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties and the deaths of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, to the election of Barack Obama, to the continuing violence, often racial in character, of the streets of America today, against the backdrop of the deaths of George Floyd and countless others, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. And down through these centuries of social change and turmoil, some Christians have interpreted their Scriptures one way, and some in another; and all because (so the Good Book says) Noah couldn’t hold his liquor.

*

How do we change such deeply-ingrained prejudice? How do we create a world that truly embraces and celebrates difference, rather than viewing it as a cause for suspicion and dread?

Only through education, through a meeting of minds, and, at an even more basic level, with a meeting of people. For the first eleven years of my life, I’d never even met a person with a different coloured skin. I wish I could say my attitudes changed the moment I met Dominic Mehta. I wish I could say I stood up for him, when he faced the brunt of racism in the classroom. But I didn’t. Was it because of ignorance, or indifference, or fear of the bullies myself? Probably a mixture of all three. I’m still getting there, forty-plus years on. Prejudices that stretch back millennia aren’t overcome overnight.

But have we really improved on that old Gill geography textbook? In its section on ‘Peoples and Races’ it made the following remark, without any hint of surprise, anger or regret, about the native inhabitants of the so-called New World: ‘The Indian or American race…are gradually being exterminated by Caucasian colonists.’

Have we improved on that? I look around the world, and the many conflicts driven by racial, religious and ethnic division; and it’s easy to despair. I think back thirty years - on this Stephen Lawrence Memorial Day - to the cruel, pointless death of that gifted young man; and it’s easy to despair. I reflect on the lessons still not learned from the experiences of the Windrush generation, and the lives, mostly black, needlessly lost at Grenfell Tower fire; and it’s easy to despair. I consider the deep irony of Suella Braverman, our current UK Home Secretary, a second-generation British citizen of Asian descent, endeavouring to introduce immigration laws that would have prevented her own parents from settling in this country had they been in force back in the Sixties; and there is no doubt whatsoever that it is all too easy to despair.

But then I remember the day my younger daughter happened to casually point out, in a school photograph, the face of the young lad she had started dating. It didn’t last long (a couple of weeks, at most), and it certainly wasn’t a serious romantic engagement. I doubt they did more than hold hands! But the real point, for me, was that he was black. I remember that as I looked at the picture, I managed - just about - not to blurt anything out. It’s not that I was shocked: I wasn't. But I would have hated my daughter to have thought that I thought there was anything surprising, or even at all remarkable, in the fact that her (very brief) first boyfriend should have been black. It clearly didn’t matter to her. Why should it matter to me?

Why indeed.

Change is possible. Real change. Genuine change. It doesn’t have to be Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

I hope - one day - we really will live in a world in which Martin Luther King’s dream has been realised. A world in which Barack Obama’s cry of ‘Yes We Can’ inspires deeds not just words. A world in which we no longer have to assert that Black Lives Matter, because that would have become as obvious and irrefutable as stating that circles are round, and that the Pope’s a Catholic. A world in which, at last, I can truly believe that Martin Luther King, and Stephen Lawrence, and George Floyd, and so many others, had not died in vain. Until then, as a prophet of old once said:

‘Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’ (Amos 5:24).

it always makes you wonder

"if God is real

why does he allow bad things to happen?"

I don't know the answer

I just try to find the light

but where is the light?

when the tunnel is miles long

and there's no way out?

when someone dies

of illness or malice

we question again

we come back down to earth

grounded in what feels like hell

and no one wants to help

politicians lie

saying it'll get better

and the mind makes it all feel purposeless

we're stuck, glue

on our feet

one step forward

three steps back

one step forward

we stop in our tracks

if God is real

why does he allow bad things to happen?

We each make our own universe. All of the visible electromagnetic frequencies that strike our retinas, perturbations of air that oscillate our eardrums, temperatures that compare and contrast on our skin to derive a common sense of hot or cold, molecules that trigger our olfactory cranial nerve in a code deciphered higher up as smell--these are all data. The human brain, that majestic evolutionary assembler of such data and collator of it into meaning, is like a graphic user interface--a GUI like Windows or IOS. Others whom we encounter, with their own universes, are like the World Wide Web and have their own GUIs.

We are all individual sites on this web of sorts, and we interact to modulate our actions and those of others such that there is a global intelligence called civilization.

Yet, our inner code assesses each other person while their inner codes assess each of us. Civilization allows for some latitude, but in the end, for it to work, there are mandates--the red lines in the sand of civilization--that cannot be crossed, such as DO NOT KILL, DO NOT STEAL, DO NOT LIE, etc.

Where each of us draws a line, of how interactive we choose to be with others and their universes, constitutes a slippery slope that slides us to the notion that we consider ourselves to be the end-all of existence--but for each of us.

Tragically, however, not for the "rest of them."

By nature, we are--to the world--social creatures; we have evolved and survived as such. But we harbor a secret that lies buried in the primitive reptile that is our collection of emotions and sense of self-preservation: it is solipsism, that metaphysical sense that we are the only thing real in the universe. This may actually be true, but only in the universe we construct from all the data we receive; that is, from our personal universe.

While cosmologists argue over multiple universes as theories in the realm of physics and their possible colliding and interacting, there already are multiple universes colliding and interacting in the realm of metaphysics. We all witness these collisions as we navigate the human multiverse from day to day.

It is solipsism that gives each of us independence and autonomy, but it can warp into an isolationist attitude toward others. When this isolationism begins to distort into a sense of "us" and "them," it goes against our evolution as social beings. It is not a stretch to say that disliking others who are unlike us is a type of mental illness, if mental illness is defined as deviating from the way we have evolved to think.

Evolution in thinking has allowed us to recognize others who are dissimilar, and this has had an important survival upshot for us when we recognize those who want to do us harm; but when concluding that all others who are dissimilar are out to do us harm, this can become mental illness. It is especially insidious when we equate "do us harm" with "do us no good," which flies in the face of "live and let live." Such a sneaky sentiment is the seed of resentment which, if nurtured by the emotions of our primitive selves, can grow into a robust scorn, followed by hate, and subsequently followed by a type of genocidal sentiment of the mind. Civilization allows us to police these negative thoughts, but one of the pitfalls of solipsism is that it depends on ourselves to determine how each of us draws a line between self and others and what negative thoughts are policed.

Stepping back from self is difficult, but if you can rise above your solipsism, walk in others' shoes, you can rejoin the human race in a way we have evolved to walk, that is, upright. We have evolved as empaths, and any straying from that is deviancy.

Solipsism is a matter of degrees, intensity, perspective. Rising above it is the step you must take in order to foster kindness, inclusivity, empathy, and fellowship among your brothers and sisters.

Being racist, sexist, jingoistic, gender identity-hostile, or generally non-inclusive (or even selectively inclusive)--that is, if you're thinking "us" and "them," that is really "us-vs-them." This is the ugly stepchild of your natural solipsism that's a dissociation from reality in which you self-appoint yourself as king or queen of your universe, awaiting tribute. While not exactly schizophrenia, it is close: it turns on voices that speak against others and hardwires your brain for paranoia, with solipsism topping it off with the Fool's Golden Rule:

"Do unto others before they can do unto you."

It is genocidal and it begins as a self-deception when you fear the interaction of the universes that come into contact with your own. History has proven that we are all capable of it; just pick any war from history.

It's fine to foster your individual identity, healthy to champion your self-preservation, and even admirable to follow your ambitions for self-betterment and advancement. Those are the rewards of solipsism; but it's a slippery slope, and if you push others away--sometimes forcibly--you may not be qualified to manage it. You can become qualified, however, if you realize the limitations of solipsism and where, unbridled, it becomes a disease. It's a matter of mental health, and civilization relies upon it.

I have never ever understood the concept of hating someone because of a difference in skin color. I am very thankful that my parents raised me with respect for others and to appreciate the individual. After all these decades to see this beast is still raising its ugly head - I just truly struggle to wrap my mind around it.

When I was a kid there were these little religious pamphlets - little, tiny things that would be stuck in your door. They were done in black and white and the illustrations usually had a white man in a suit committing all kinds of sin and it would always end with him meeting God on Judgment Day....and in the flashbacks it showed his sins and when it came to racism it would show his acts of hatred towards others because of their skin and when the chair of Judgment turned around he saw those individuals faces reflected in God's face. It is so true. We all come from the Father. How can any of us treat a child of God unkind and cause harm?

The lack of simple human kindness and respect leaves me in disbelief. Hate and racism are so senseless. Victims have every shade of skin and come from every ethnicity. Crimes of horror from such dark souls leaves us questioning how this could happen regularly. There is sadly such evil in this world, but I have to believe good will overcome.

Working in an elementary school I have written about the decline I have seen in children with manners, respect and other issues we see in our times but one thing that I see every single day is precious little kids playing with their peers....black, brown, white all laughing and running and playing together. We do not come into this world hating and judging skin tones....it is so sad that the seed of hate is planted and grows in some hearts. I truly believe "if you see something, say something." We all need to be cognizant of things that are happening in this world. If you see or suspect anything - report it. You may just be saving a life(s).