The hatred within

 

It's nice to be back after the summer break, I needed that break to get my head right and just enjoy being a Dad, and it was the last summer holiday before my son started secondary school, he's been back a week and he is thriving.

During this little break, I have been thinking a lot about how race and political thought are linked, and I ended up asking myself, is it so ridiculous to think that people of colour or the LGBTQIA community are committing an act of self-harm by lending their voice to groups that ultimately want to restrict their freedom? Or does it come down to an individual's political beliefs shaped by their environment?

When I was a kid, I was the only mixed-race kid in my school, I didn't meet another mixed-race kid until I went into secondary school, so all through primary school, I was the only mixed-race kid around, there were white kids, black kids, Asian kids, even a Chinese girl, that was very rare in 1970s West Bromwich, so I had no one who I truly identified with, you see I was bought up in a white household, in a white family, there were no people of colour in my family, so I guess you could say that I was a white kid with dark skin culturally, so I had some very strange beliefs when it came to race, but as I got older I realised that I wasn't what I thought I was.

Until I went to school, race didn't play any part in my life, I was a child after all, but being brought up in a white family, made me believe that I was white, Don't get me wrong, I knew that my skin was brown, but I had what I can only describe as racial dysphoria, and that has probably manifested itself as a need to be an ally to the trans community, I know what its like to not be allowed to be my authentic self, and the only “cure” is to let people be who they truly are, but I digress.

I had many feelings as a kid, confusion, hatred of myself, hatred of others, and a deep sense of not belonging, It felt like I wasn't black enough for the black kids, and I wasn't white enough for the white kids, I was on my own and just trying to fit in, there was no help for me so I had to figure it out on my own, and the only way I could do that was to choose a “side”.

As I said, I was never black enough for the black kids, culturally I didn't fit in with them, they all spoke patois, and used lotion on their skin and had the cultural knowledge to navigate the world around them, I got through it all but not without scars, I will be scared for life, there are certain things that even now, as a 51-year-old man I can't deal with, I still feel embarrassment if someone talks to me in Patois, and I don't understand some of the words being spoken, and the one thing that is guaranteed to provoke a violent reaction in me is being called Bounty or coconut, two names that mean the same thing, white on the inside, brown on the outside, it's something I am working on but it just brings up so many bad memories for me.

So why the history lesson on the life of Trevor Pritchard? Well it's relevant to the subject, because I wanted to fit in so badly, that I had to become “one of the good ones” I became a master at making people forget that I am black, I assimilated into my surroundings and never made a fuss about stuff that now I call out, my life became about stealth, and trying to avoid confrontation as much as I could, because they leave you alone if they don't notice you right? Not quite.

To be left alone, I had to go further than being neutral on race, I became someone who would do almost anything to seem like one of the boys, and to my eternal shame, I became a bit racist but racist in a confused way, my best friend in primary school was a Sikh kid, we were inseparable, we lived on the same street, and were in the same class, proper best friends, but away from him my attitude towards Indian and Pakistani people was as shitty as it gets, I had this feeling that if I could be higher socially than a group of people the racists would leave me alone, and pick on someone else, and I found that the more racism I dished out, the less I got, but as you can Imagine, that wasn't a sustainable and ultimately hurt me almost as much as the people I was racist towards.

As I got into secondary school I found a better way of fitting in, being funny, I became the class clown and made it my mission in life to make the bullies laugh so hard that they forgot that they were meant to be bullying me, it wasn't good for my academic career, but at least I could stop hurting others, but if I had not found humour, I could have ended up a lot worse than an uneducated clown.

This experience makes me wonder about the right-wing commentator who are also people of colour, I'm thinking of Candace Owens, and Calvin Robinson to name but two, they both comment on things that most people of colour either think is wrong or just don't want to speak on, and while I fully support their right to free speech, I can't help thinking that they are both being used.

You see when a person of colour speaks on a subject in the same way that a white person speaks on it, they give the subject matter more weight, take for instance BLM, If a white woman were to say some of the things Candace Owens has said about BLM, they would be dismissed as a crazy racist, but because she is a black woman, it gives actual crazy racists ammunition and gives the BLM is bad rhetoric a solid foundation on which to espouse some crazy shit, because it gives them a free pass, “how is it racist, a black woman said it” is the get out of jail free card.

I'm not saying that Owens or Robinson shouldn't express their opinions, but spewing these types of opinions is damaging to the black community, because it gives legitimacy to racist rhetoric that wouldn't exist otherwise, and you are in danger of becoming a voice for people who hate you rather than being logical, you become the mouthpiece for bigotry, and your own voice barely matters any more.

You only have to look at our current government in Britain today, a cabinet that has quite a few people of Indian and Pakistani heritage and a Prime minister that is of Indian heritage, on the surface it looks like the party of diversity is the conservative party, but ask yourself this, all of the talk of stopping the boats, and the general discussion around immigration, would that fly if there were no people of colour in the government? Of course it wouldn't, the only reason that the government can get away with it is to have second or third-generation children of immigrants in positions of power so that prejudicial legislation can get passed without being challenged on being racist.

And I'm going to do something that I rarely do, take aim at the left because we don't call out enough of the problematic behaviour that is within our own ranks, if you think you are being progressive because you don't want to call a person of colour a racist, then you are part of the problem, you allow people of colour to be used as mouthpieces for the far right, and let them cover racism in a cloak of legitimacy as if black and brown people are too fragile to be challenged, I guess I'm thinking of things like transphobia and homophobia, two areas that I have seen for myself are rife among black men, not all, but enough.

So how do we move forward and level the playing field once again, that's simple, don't be afraid to call out bigotry no matter where that bigotry comes from, if I ever say anything racist, bigoted, sexist, homophobic or transphobic, I implore you to give me the verbal slap down I deserve, life is nuanced, and we have to be able to speak up without fear of what the optics are, we are in a very strange time in history, we started to get better about the racism, personally I put it down to all that MDMA we shovelled down our necks in the 90s, maybe that's what we need now, maybe we could all benefit from getting sorted for Es and Wizz, but right now we need to sort out who we are as a country, are we the country that sent the Nazi's packing? told Mosley to do one? Told Enoch Powell to go fuck himself? Or are we going to slowly make our country uncomfortable for the men and women who came from all corners of the world to work in our NHS and contribute to the country just because some twat who hasn't got the balls to be racist with their full chest, and so skirts around it using dog whistles and innuendo, had a bad experience once and now is making it everyone else's problem.

Now is the time to be brave, its time for us as a nation, no a planet, to do what's right not what is popular, because when you ignore wrongdoing even for the right reasons, that wrongdoing still hurts people, and that's the goal of the modern world, freedom, but unless we are all free, none of us can truly be free.

Photo by RDNE Stock project: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-woman-with-blond-hair-holding-a-plate-of-food-8798985/