What I discovered on my anti-racist course

What I discovered on my anti-racist course

Over the course of this year, I have been on an anti-racist course with Anti-Racist Cumbria.  I decided I knew very little about what being anti-racist means, so I paid for myself to go on a course. This was made up of four online sessions, each of 3 hours, about 2 months apart.  I think I was the oldest person on the course, by some margin. About a quarter to a third of people were black or brown, and more women than men. There was so much thought-provoking material over the course of the sessions, but here are some of my main thoughts.

I am so, so privileged.

On almost any criteria, I am privileged. I am white, I am male, I am older, I don’t have any real health problems or disabilities, I went to private school, I have three degrees. The list goes on and on. So the lens through which I see the world includes all of those factors. My interpretation of the world is through those lenses. How I see things, my experience of life, is therefore wildly different from people without those perspectives. This means while I can try and empathise with what it is like to be young, or black, or disabled, I can’t. Yet too many people with privilege believe the world is for others, as it is for them.

Words matter – for better and worse.

There is a whole dictionary of words in anti-racism. But nowhere is this more obvious than in the terminology used to describe people who aren’t white. The preferred terms continue to change (and have done for all of my adult life). BAME, BME, black and brown, people of colour, global majority, BIPOC, ethnic minorities, to name but a few. It's not just in this country that the language changes – listen to Martin Luther King’s speeches where he uses the term ‘negro’, something I don’t think people would use today. I am not sure this constantly changing use of terminology helps anybody tackle racism. It can just mean that energy is taken on language, rather than other issues.

I am a racist... and an anti-racist.

One of the things I realise from the course is that being anti-racist is a journey. I can’t ever say I am not racist – because being racist is far, far more than just hating people of colour. I notice race in a whole variety of ways. I like to think that my consciousness is mostly positive, but is it always? Is being overly positive about race as bad as being overly negative? Above all, I shouldn’t think that just because I am not like those who are overtly and stereotypically racist, I don’t need to think about these things any more. A lot of the stats and sessions on the course emphasise how far we are from a society in which race is not an issue.

Racism is, for me, about my values; for many, it's about their lives.

We did an exercise where we all talked about when we became aware of the colour of skin. I partnered with two other white people. Our first awareness for all three of us was when we were in our late teens or early twenties, and when we were overseas and in the minority. For the others on the course, they were aware of the colour of their skin when they were very young – typically 5 or 6 or younger. As I said above, the lenses through which I see the world are very different.

One of the sessions that left me most perplexed was the frequent breathing and relaxation exercises on the course. What on earth? But then I realised that this simply emphasised my privilege, the pampered life I lead. Anti-racism for me is about my values, the kind of world I want to live in. But for people of colour, the reaction to racism is often physical – stress, tension, raised heart rates, anxiety and the like. Nowhere is the difference that the colour of my skin makes more than in breathing exercises on an anti-racism course.

I hate the word intersectionality, but bond with its meaning.

I am not a fan of the word ‘intersectionality’. I think it's another bit of jargon that makes it harder, not easier, for people to know what those who want to tackle racism are talking about. It’s a shame because the notion that the biases in society based on race, gender, age, etc. don’t act in isolation, but are cumulative, is really important. This is true in both directions. There is intersectionality in my privilege – because I tick so many of the boxes. And there is intersectionality in prejudice – the forces on a black woman, or a disabled black woman, are in a different league from race alone.

Am I woke?

The simple answer is yes. I believe in championing diversity, tackling racism and all those other prejudices, because it is the right thing to do. However, I am also an ecologist and zoologist by training. All my experiences of ecosystems is diversity of species, ecosystem and habitats makes them more resilient and more vibrant. That belief in natural diversity holds for me in human diversity. We will create a stronger society with greater diversity, with more lived experience, the more we incorporate the perspectives of all parts of the populations. If decisions are only made by people like me, the result is worse decisions and a weaker, diminished society.

I learnt a lot from my course. I have to keep learning about the way that the prejudices in society manifest themselves. Some reading this may be horrified by my innocence, ignorance, or lack of insight. I am saddened if that is the case, but let me know. There remains a lot of learning to do, even for a privileged white man like me.