Author: Ruvani de Silva

“The story has always been the same

A source of wonder due to their ability to thrive on poor quality soil offering very little nourishment

But weeds must be kept under strict control or they will destroy everything in their path

Growing wild, then harvested in their prime & passed around at dinner parties

Care for some weed?

So natural, so unrefined”

[Pulp, Weeds II, We Love Life, 2001]

Natural and unrefined about sums me up. Well, if you’re looking for nice words anyway. When I first heard this song in 2001 it was already resonating with me hard. Growing up, I was always referred to as wild which I mistook as a compliment. I imagined myself as some kind of brown-girl Marlon Brando instead of understanding that in the mouths of middle-class mums, the word acted as a thinly veiled euphemism for trash.

Of course, those same mums liked to show off how their kid had a ‘coloured’ (sic) friend as a faux virtue-signaling badge, but for once this isn’t a rant about racism. My presence was permitted as long as I didn’t encourage their precious offspring to be like me in thought, word or deed, that is. A sense of otherness had to be maintained. Of course, my piercings and tattoos didn’t mean I was disinvited to dinner, as long as there was a clear understanding that these life choices stayed strictly on my side of the class line.

Friends ditching me is a bit of a drum I’m banging right now, sure, but as well as being ditched for being too brown, too childless or too lefty, I also get ditched for being too common. So ironic considering I had no friends at school cos apparently I was too swotty (Americans, see nerdy).

Yes, I grew up in a bit of rough town, but I wouldn’t credit Swindon with bestowing my taste and style on me. I was always drawn to excess – to the bold, outre and fantastical. I always aspired to ooze indulgence, much more so than I’ve ever actually achieved in real life (ha), mentally positioning myself somewhere between the Bloomsbury Set and New York’s late 70s punk scene. Never let it be said I don’t aim high.

Embracing my trashiness has never been a problem for me, but it seems to have an ongoing affect on others that I’ll never fully understand. Whether it’s my propensity to leap on stage and karaoke, my willingness to do shots at pretty much any non-work hour, the neon makeup I sport even if I’m just going to the store or my spiky heels and slogan tees, everything about me falls squarely into the category pre-demarcated as immature, chavvy, superficial and ultimately just weird by the middle-class powers that be.

Of course, the parts of me they now ridicule are the same ones that drew them to me like eager little moths in our teens and 20s, when they were trying out personas with intent to shock themselves as much as anyone else. The very idea that I was always For Real (not a Richie Manic quote – definitely not) never even occurred to them. I was expected to grow up, start wearing silk blouses, listening to classical music, only drinking with meals and taking my makeup off before going to bed. And when I didn’t, I became a pariah.

These same people tried on my lifestyle, my values, as if they were thrift store garments of dubious cleanliness, gaudy, chintzy throwaway single-use partywear their parents absolutely wouldn’t approve of, and therein lay the appeal. They used me to guide them, to help them navigate the world of booze and nightclubs and loud, brash outfits when it suited them, dabbling their manicured toenails into what for me is at the heart of who I am and how I choose to live. Watching me with curiosity, mimicking me when it suited them but ready to wring me out and discard me as soon as they’d had their fun and wanted to move on to the next step in the middle class journey to success. Of course, a few kept coming back for a while, just to test the water, see if they could still get away with it. Keeping me at arms length but reeling me in with slippery lies to entice me into thinking I was part of a real friendship, not an exhibit in a zoo.

“Come on: do your dance

Come on, do your funny little dance”

Is there anything nastier than being treated like free entertainment? I don’t understand how or why my authenticity is so often treated like a pathological failure – I can (just about) accept being considered eccentric but when that crosses over into an aggressive critique of my lack of convention, my personal lifestyle choices dismissed as uncultured, uncultivated, unsophisticated and base, I feel the weight of white middle class judgement raining down on me unjustly in a way that makes me want to break shit.

Loneliness is another recurring theme in these posts. My isolation from both brown and white cultures, my unpopular opinions and my ongoing wranglings with sexist and racist attitudes and assumptions. I’d call this classism but I’m not even sure that fully does it justice. It’s more a sense of stifling-a pressure to change, to acclimate, to sacrifice my true self on the alter of inclusion. Which of course is not real inclusion at all. I feel I’ve often been treated like a butterfly in a jar – captured in flight, observed with interest, then left to die alone. I write a lot about being bullied and discriminated against, but being exoticized, fetishized and then discarded is the other, equally insidious side of the coin.

Yes, I still dress like a teenager about to go raving cos frankly why the hell not? I like my style, and I don’t care how many of my contemporaries look down their noses at me. I got this shit even when I was a teenager for heavens sakes – turning up for my first class at Oxford in bright pink bell bottoms while the rest of the navy sportswear-clad students stared and sneered. These days, I’m fortunate enough to have many diverse friends of different ages and backgrounds who are happy to just let me do my thing, which is amazing, but a trip back to London always triggers the disapproval-switch of just how much of a freakish anomaly I’m perceived as.

What even is mature, or adult anyway? A specific colour palate, bedtime and heel height? As I said in my last post, having a home, a career, even a marriage isn’t enough to cut it in certain social circles. Because it isn’t really about being grown up at all – it’s just about being the same and fitting in. Not til I swap out my mini skirts for Lululemon could I possibly be rehabilitated into the rank and file of English 40-something middle class women. And also, what’s with this book club thing? Everyone knows it’s just an excuse to drink wine so just cut to the chase and call it fuckin wine club.

I’m keeping my glitter. I’m keeping my strong cocktails. I’ll keep dancing in my 6 inch stilettos and you can keep calling them stripper heels all you want, cos that’s not even an insult.

“Bring your camera, take photo of life on the margins”

Damn, I could have just quoted the whole song, Jarvis says it all.

Honestly, I shouldn’t need to write this, but I do. The recent deluge of media content lionizing motherhood in addition to some psychological battering closer to home means I can’t stay quiet about this any longer.

I’m 41 years old and I don’t want children. I can’t help it and I can’t change it, yet I feel under constant social pressure to try. To force myself into a mindset I just don’t have. I’ve spent years looking around my body, around my mind, seeking out that part of me that I’ve been told over and over again must be there somewhere, but it isn’t. The promised craving never arrived, not at 30 or 35 or 40. It’s just not there. Maybe that makes me a broken person. I’ve been told I’m not really human. Defective. Deficient. And selfish, always selfish. As if this were my choice.

Since my late 20s, I’ve had to swallow down hammer after hammer to the heart as each close friend who promised me that they too didn’t want a family slowly succumbed to the lure of parenthood, leaving me emotionally high and dry and ever-increasingly lonely. As the camaraderie of young womanhood is swapped out for the bonds of motherhood, not a thought is spared for those left behind.

This is not something I would have chosen. As a queer South Asian woman from an abusive home and a lower socio-economic background with an unconventional appearance and strong opinions living in a white environment, I have already had to live my entire life navigating minority space after minority space, pushing back, standing up for myself. Being fucking different. I am sadly all too familiar with the nightmarish reality of falling unintentionally outside the realm of both the Great White Norm and its Brown equivalent, and if I could possibly choose to be what society wants and expects from a woman my age then yes of course I would. I’m tired of fighting.

I miss my friends, but they have gone where I cannot, in good faith, follow. Mostly too, their denouncement of me has been harsh, critical and without understanding. I’m cast off as immature and childish, refusing to accept adult responsibilities and live an adult lifestyle. Of course, having a self-supporting career and owning my own home as a single woman from the age of 29 are not sufficient evidence of adulthood. Instead of being respected as different, I am automatically marked down as lesser.

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We live in a world where it’s no longer considered acceptable in progressive circles to judge or exclude people based on their ethnicity or sexual orientation, yet it’s still absolutely fine to shame women for choosing not to be mothers. Childlessness feels like the last bastion of a woman’s life that the world is still not just allowed but encouraged to weigh in on, dividing women into the hallowed halls of motherhood and the scorned shaming-carrying non-mothers. It’s so unfair, so tiring and so fucking cruel.

The English are, by and large, a nation of busybodies. They see absolutely no issue with firing off personal questions straight off the bat. We are indoctrinated into this very early. First it’s ‘what do your parents do?’, then ‘how did you do in your exams?’. Next we’re asked about our own job prospects and relationship status, and each time the question keens with judgement – your answer will pigeon-hole you, there will be whispers behind your back. ‘Do you have children?’ ‘No – why not?’ is still considered completely appropriate conversational fare, and telling someone to mind their own fucking business will have you marked down as a difficult-social-outcast before you can spell judgmental. While, in my experience at least, the many Americans give far less of a shit about other people’s business, the questions is still one that arises frequently and I’m painfully aware of how strange I must seem.

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As a woman there is literally nothing I can do in this world that would earn me the approval that giving birth would get me. My extended family, who look down on everything I’ve ever done with my life and think my career is a joke, would suddenly hold me in all esteem they have denied me through every educational and occupational milestone should I suddenly announce a pregnancy. How in the fuck do you think that makes me feel?

There is no community for women who don’t want children. No Mumsnet for the childfree. No safe space, no support network to replace the friendships and intimacy we’ve lost to other people’s motherhood, and most of all no understanding that this may be something that is actually out of our hands. We don’t choose the things we care about in life, or the things we’re good at. As people we are all different, but when it comes to motherhood that established logic flies out of the window. Of course all women must want to be mothers because anything else is unnatural.

And yes yes I know this isn’t just targeted at me. Julia Gillard and the empty fucking fruit bowl. Theresa May. Kamala Harris. All shamed by the media for their failure to procreate. If you don’t give birth what can you possibly know about running a country? Or anything at all for that matter? Unless you’re a man of course. Because while fatherhood bestows its own form of inclusion and respectability, it isn’t considered the holy grail of male experience in the way that motherhood is revered to the point of sainthood. Of course not, men are too busy running the world, but that’s a rant for another day.

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In this sliver of a minority, everyone has different reasons for how they feel. Mine seem to be a mix of nature and nurture, not that I should need to justify them – but of course I do. Growing up in an abusive home meant that I have no first-hand experience of how to parent properly. Seeing my elder sibling become a parent very young and struggle horribly, steeped in misery, poverty and often unable to cope, did not sell me on motherhood either. But ultimately the buck stops with me. I don’t relate to children. Frankly, I don’t really understand most of them. Even when I was one myself I found them confusing-their silliness, the constant questions, the toilet humour, the incessant noise. I grew up with my head in a book, all my Lego pieces in the correct segments of the box and a strong desire to be an adult as soon as humanly possible. I didn’t play mummies and daddies. I didn’t have a doll I pretended was my baby, and at no point growing up did I ever dream of having children of my own. I just didn’t, even when I had to pretend to ex-boyfriends that I did. I guess I was always unnatural.

As someone who has never had the luxury of a close female relative in their life who wasn’t an abuser, my female friendships have been everything to me, possibly too much, but unfortunately I’m not able to change the circumstances I was born into. I’ve been a true, loyal friend, and valued my friendships highly, always making time, providing support and being inclusive. I’ve never neglected my friends because I’ve been in a relationship, and going through the process over and over again of being unceremoniously let go because I’m not joining the great wave towards motherhood feels like I’m being stripped down to my bare bones. With no immediate close family there is no one to fill the spaces left empty. I often go for days without speaking in real life to anyone except my husband. The loneliness is as crippling as the judgement. Knowing this is my life now can leave me in an unending fog of despair. This is the cost of being true to myself.

So what should I do? Fake it and bring a child into the world that would, frankly, be unwanted, resented, poorly parented and most likely hideously unhappy just to gain the respect of my peers? Or stick to my guns and soldierly through life as a second-class citizen, denied the privileges offered up so eagerly to women willing to give birth? When you grow up being abused, you develop a keen sense of what a parent should not be, and selfishness is pretty high up there. What more selfish thing in the world could there be than having a child I don’t really want just so that I can fit in with everyone else my age? As a mother, I’d already have failed at the first hurdle.

Over and over I’m told what an amazing life-changing experience motherhood is, how I’ll feel different when they’re mine. No one understands that I don’t want my life changed and I don’t want to feel differently. Not to mention the fact that I don’t fancy taking that kind of gamble – if I don’t feel differently what will happen to the poor kid?

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And yet. And yet. It’s hard knowing I will have to go through the rest of my life removed from other women, dismissed and looked down on, alone in my values, my aspirations, my experiences. Always being told ‘you don’t understand-you’re not a mother’. As someone who is intensely social and hates being excluded, my worst nightmare of being on the outside of society looking in has already come true, but there is nothing I can do about it. I see the warmth, the love, the acceptance that the world hands out in unlimited doses to women who become mothers. The indulgent smiles as tube seats are offered up, the conversation openers with strangers, the knowing nods and sympathetic sighs shared between women signaling that yes, they too are part of the great circle of life. They get it. They’re on the same team. There is no team for the rest of us, no special signals, nothing at all. I’m constantly lonely, removed from my peers who keep me at a distance for not speaking the language of motherhood. I feel less relevant, less human, less worthy of the space that I take up, the air that I breathe.

I was always told growing up that ‘if you can’t change the world, change yourself’ and believe me I have tried, but I just can’t. I can’t make myself fit in and be accepted and approved of in the way I want to be without going against my own nature, lying to myself and everyone around me, and potentially damaging another human being whose only reason for existing would be to stem the gaping wound of my loneliness, which let’s face it is a pretty shitty thing to do. So it is a life on the outside of society which I will inevitably slink back to, tail between my legs, clutching my shame at being unable to give the world what it wants. My failure as a woman, as a human, for which I will be eternally punished. Every day feels like another painful exercise in taking my medicine for daring to be different, even though it’s something I have absolutely no control over.

I’m so very very tired, and so agonisingly lonely. But most of you probably think selfish, unnatural women like me deserve that, even if you wouldn’t say it to my face.

Full disclosure: I didn’t watch the documentary. Not because I’m not interested, and certainly not because I don’t care. Simply cos I’ve had a really busy week without a spare 2hours to spend listening to a story that, honestly, I feel that I could tell myself.

Meghan Markle was born just one year after me, and while officially we sit on the cusp between generations, when it comes to interracial relationships and the English, we frankly might as well still be boomers, cos at the end of the day it’s their generation, that of the parents and other influential family members of our prospective spouses, with whom we end up negotiating.

I would never have imagined having anything in common with a Hollywood actress, especially one as stunning and glamorous as Markle, but I don’t even need to close my eyes to sit, as she will have done, on the edge on the sofa, knees together, smiling painfully, heart pounding, as she looks into the eyes of her potential in-laws and feels right to the very core of her being that’s she’s been judged and found wanting before she’s even opened her mouth.

I wasn’t even going to bother writing this piece – why say what almost any Woman of Colour born before the mid-80s (and doubtless a few born after) who’s dated white men can say? Then bloody Prince William came out with his whole ‘very much not racist’ nonsense and I nearly choked on my beer. He might as well have said ‘some of my best friends are Black’. Who does he think he’s kidding? I am so happy that there really does seem to be a sense now, among younger people, of accepting love for itself, regardless of colour, sex or even class. But if you’re a Gen-Xer you will forever be stuck in that feedback loop of polite smiles, tolerant nods and sympathetic head-tilts, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that yes indeed, the hue of any potential progeny will indeed be the first thing discussed as soon as you leave the room. Because it’s fine if you’re friends, it’s good if you’re friends, it shatters any question of whether or not you’re racist – if you can count one or two People of Colour amongst your friends. But when it comes to being part of the family, breaching the white line demarcating the inner circle, well then it’s a whole other story. Because they might not say it out loud, but the first thought in their mind when they set eyes on you is how they don’t want to be the ones explaining to the neighbours why their little grandchild is a shade darker than everyone else’s. They might be prepared to fob it off with a shake of the head, oh you know what these young people today are like. But they’d rather they not bother. Easier to nip it in the bud, talk about slowing down, and tackle their discomfort at the source.

So you sit on the edge of the ugly upholstery in your least interesting outfit, lips thinned into a fixed grimace as you suck in every drop of judgement and disapproval, every loaded inference and undermining assumption. You swallow it down, along with the over-milked tea and slightly stale biscuits (these, at least, were better at the palace, one assumes). You go against every instinct in your being that tells you to stand up for yourself, to assert your strength and be proud of who you are and tell these awful ignorant people to get back in their racist little box. But you don’t. Because you tell yourself it’s okay, he’s worth it – you’re taking it for the team, he loves you, he doesn’t see you that way. He can’t help his family, what’s he supposed to do? You want to be together, don’t you? And you don’t want to antagonise them. He’s only got one family, it’s important that they like you. You can take it. You’ve been through worse. And you can go back to being yourself later. And you do. At first.

But every micro-aggression, every diminishing, belittling carp, every stare that lasts too long, they build up. Like tiny cuts, eventually you’re just losing too much blood. Each time, it becomes harder to pick yourself up, dust yourself down, reinhabit the real you. As if they are chipping away at you, piece by piece, with a view to re-moulding you in their image or destroying you completely – and they don’t really seem to care which. That’s the point at which you start to break. The point where even a lifetime of stubbornly facing down nasty little racists, not letting them hold you back, moving on from their grubby attempts to trip you up, stymie your progress, and shame you just for being alive – even all that preparation just isn’t enough to stop you breaking, to stop the gradual internalisation of their constant disapproval. That’s the moment you begin to doubt whether you should, in fact, be alive, as Meghan so clearly and honestly described. I feel her words to my very core.

Harry, by all accounts, got it right. He supported his wife, stuck to her side and he got her the fuck out of there. Full props to him. May god make all men as loving, loyal and smart. My many experiences with this type of family, unfortunately if predictably, all went the other way. No regrets here – Harry is a rare example of the apple actually falling far from the tree and any man brainwashed, ignorant or secretly racist enough to suck up the family was, retrospectively, so not worth my time. Because the English penchant for controlling ones children, always in their own best interests of course, is strong. So is their habit of demonising mental health issues. In my experience, the families were able to reign supreme by cleverly, subtly forcing me to breaking point, then using my desperation and despair to prove to their beloved son how obviously inappropriate and unworthy this unstable character was, and how obviously right they had been to protect him all along from these emotional dark-skinned women. Not that they were racist of course, but really, who wants someone with mental health problems in the family?

Harry, you really are a prince. You didn’t fall for the underhand gaslighting, the sneaky malevolent blindsiding that ‘very much not racist’ families have no moral issues resorting to, to keep the bloodline safe as milk. Meghan, you have the strength of Wonder Woman and Buffy rolled into one. You took on the toughest establishment in the world – the privileged white English family unit, and you won. You are a strong, proud Black, female David kicking the sad, outdated Goliath ‘firm’s ass for the whole world to see. My whole life, I wanted a way to show these people up for what they really are, call them out in public and make them accountable for their racism, their bullying and their deliberate, emotionally violent attacks on Women of Colour whose only crime is falling in love with their precious white son. And you did it – I love you. From now on, any family who pulls that shit will have to think twice. That’s not to say they won’t do it – I’m sure many will still have a pop. But in doing so, they will risk the much-deserved shame the royal family have brought on themselves. I’d like to think they will also risk losing their sons, that men will look at Harry and feel empowered and inspired to stand up for the women they love, instead of getting back in line and hanging them out to dry. Wishful thinking, yes. But on actually seeing the day when the racist chickens of the English establishment have finally come home to roost, I think I’m allowed a little bit of optimism.

They are cremating my mother today. It has been over three weeks since she died (everything in Swindon moves slowly), and I’m glad I waited to write about her death because the landscape of my emotions has twisted, warped and lurched with a ferocity I did not, but probably should have expected in that time.

Initially I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. A strange vortex of nothingness. The tornadoes of my usual emotional state were reduced to brief gusts of wind pushing dead leaves down the street. For someone for feels every little thing so deeply, it was both exceptionally peculiar and awesomely relieving to feel absolutely nothing. Unfortunately it did not last. As details of the funeral plans made their way toward me, the perpetual simmering spitting hate a victim harbours toward their abuser began to build and boil. The idea of her being mourned, of the truth of her life being rewritten in some absurd nod to ritual and decorum, her nastiness and cruelty glossed over because ‘you can’t speak ill of the dead’ began to make me rage, to make me despair, to make me wonder what the point of anything is when you can be such a consummately appalling person and still be seen as deserving of the same processes as actual good people. What the fuck?

Her face and her utterly unspeakable sing-song voice come to me at odd moments, as sharp and shrill as they ever were. Her absurd pomposity, grandiose language and blind reductiveness still make me want to scream. I can still feel the weight of her bullying, her selfishness, her complete and utter lack of understanding that the world did not revolve around her. The insane stress of walking on eggshells in her presence, waiting for something to set her off screaming, bracing yourself for the torrent of abuse you would undoubtedly receive, usually over something incomprehensibly minor. The debilitating pressure of trying to bridge immense chasm between the climate of nonsensical cliches she lived in and the real world was relentless, especially for a child.

My mother had Narcissistic Personality Disorder. She also may have had either Bipolar or Borderline personality disorder. These are explanations, not excuses, and thankfully well-documented enough to have brought me out of the negative-feedback-loop of abusive situations I spent most of my life in, as a direct result of her behaviour. She took all her rage, her irrational violence, her furious frustration and pure, ugly hatred of anyone and anything that challenged her entirely self-centred narrative of the world out on her children. How to live around a person who is completely utterly toxic? All you can do is get out of their way. Unless you are a child, their child, bound to live in the shadow of their narcissistic delusions until you are old enough to escape. As the (significantly) youngest I was the most vulnerable. Like every abuser, she cleared a path for others to follow – beat me into a scrambled egg of a human being ripe to be taken advantage of. I grew up hating myself, internalising my role as an emotional and physical punchbag. I had nothing, no one to show me otherwise and flailed desperately in the world, falling repeatedly back into abusive situations until I finally sought out the help I needed.

One of the most challenging things about recovering from childhood abuse is being responsible for your own healing. It feels like unfairness compounding unfairness. Why should you have to fix problems you didn’t create? Why do you have to do huge amounts of work on your behaviours, your assumed norms, your emotional responses, when it was someone else who fucked them up? Why aren’t they doing the work, taking the responsibility? It feels like a tax on being a victim, an extra punishment. It feels like bullshit. Yet you have no other choice. Do the work or stay fucked up forever. And all the while the perpetrator walks free, moves through the world full of that same bullish, selfish aggression, never pays for what they did, never even admits they did anything wrong. Dying feels like an escape for them. A reprieve they don’t deserve. A free ride to presumed, assumed innocence. Because you can’t speak ill of the dead. More bullshit.

How to grieve for someone who taught you to hate yourself as they taught you to read and write? Who hit, kicked, slapped and spat at you when you were a fraction of their size? Who told you you were cursed and had bad blood before you even understood what those things meant? My grief is for the person I might have become with real love, real care, real parenting. I mourned my lack of a mother a long time ago, and I mourn it still. I ache at the loving bond I see between daughters and mothers, and I always will. That loss, that absence, is another cruel facet of her legacy. These last few days, knowing that she will be memorialised, I’ve felt the burn of an anger I want so desperately to put to bed. It is unutterably unfair that she still has any power over my emotions, that she is still able to disturb or unsettle me, to attack the work I’ve been forced to do to repair the damage she created. No, unfair does not even begin to cover it. The enablers, the wilfully ignorant bystanders, the blinkered do-gooders, those who feel they can profit from her death, either emotionally, financially or both, all the hideous hypocrites who are prepared to stand up and mourn her, to act like she was a decent person, a decent mother, I feel sick thinking about them. I feel sick knowing that, like everything other misery she has bestowed on me, there is absolutely nothing I can do about them. That once again, the onus is on me to help myself, to force myself to let go, to take on yet more responsibility for fixing damage that she has created.

It’s unlikely she ever fully knew or understood that she was a bad mother, a bad wife, a bad person. I doubt anyone with that level of Narcissistic Personality Disorder can. But while it’s easy to explain those behaviours away it’s a completely different thing to live through them, to have them shape your life, twist your perceptions and break you in ways that are truly nightmarish to fix when you’re not old enough to even understand what is happening to you. Her being dead can never, will never change what she was or what she did. It’s not a get-out-of-jail free card. Neither is mental illness. There are responsibilities you take on as a parent that are irrefutable. Another person’s life is, quite literally, at stake. It would be nice, positive, cathartic, to say that the damage my mother did died with her, but sadly abuse doesn’t work like that. Her death neither adds nor takes away from the damage she did in her life. It’s just a thing that happened to her, as it will happen to all of us.

My task now is to find a way to deal with this final indignity she’s exacted on me from beyond the grave. To recapture that halcyon nothing of those first few days after her death. There are so many things – people, places, experiences, emotions – to grieve in life. So much loss, so many memories, and a catalogue of missed opportunities. So much to really be sad about that expending energy, pain, anger, on yet another turn of the shitshow screw of being my mother’s daughter is something I have to be able to rise above, for my own sake. Let them have her. Let them say what they want, twist the truth around their little fingers to make themselves feel better, take what little money she had or do whatever it is their wretched little souls require to feel like they’ve done ‘the right thing’. Putting myself beyond their reach is the biggest fuck-you that I can give to them and to her.

My mother always had a list of things I’d ‘be sorry’ for when she was dead. Things I’d done wrong, things I hadn’t done, always centred around her. But I was right. I’m not sorry. I have nothing to be sorry for.

The abusive nature of institutional constructs of success

‘I wanted to hate this place for its cruelty and power, but I find the beauty working its way inside me. I want to walk straighter, as if my own rhythm has been altered in some subtle way by the austerity and calm’.

Not my words, but those of Anna Small in her exceedingly clever musical-dystopian novel The Chimes. Although her Oxford, a locked musical fortress, is fiction, it captures the spirit of my alma mater so deftly that reading it transported me back to my days among the dreaming spires, breathing in the heady scent of learning yes, but also, undeniably, cruelty and power. The literary world is obsessed with Oxford, from Philip Pullman to Inspector Morse, Evelyn Waugh to Martin Amis, along with, literally millions of others. When you’re there it’s a thing too – the Great Oxford Novel. To an outsider even the concept sounds ludicrously pompous, and it is. But it’s that very pomposity, that sense of self-importance, that seems, by its very nature, to inspire so many words, even these. In the same way that a revoltingly egoistical rock star can make a million fans scream, despite their obviously obnoxious levels of self-involvement, so Oxford continues to captivate writers, academics, tourists and of course students – to hold them in its thrall despite its clear and present awfulness. The university, the city, the architecture, dress code, language (there are special words for everything), and culture is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a myth built on a myth so often repeated that it makes itself true. If you tell yourself and the world that you’re special, important, unique enough times, people begin to believe you.

Being a part of that culture is toxic. For me, my three years at Oxford were exactly like being in an abusive relationship. First, you’re set up to believe you’re not good enough to belong there. You have to audition, fight off competition, be sure to be at your very very best. You are told that making it in is everything – a sign of your worth, a marker of your status in life. If you don’t make it, you feel like a failure, and if you do, the institution gives you permission to laud your success over your peers. You are validated, told how clever and special you are. How you are now a winner – made for life, guaranteed the best of everything. The elite. But that love can and will be withheld if you don’t jump through the right hoops, if you don’t submit yourself entirely to the system. There’s no space for independent thinking, unless it’s independent thinking that isn’t actually independent because they told you to think it. No place for negativity, no support if you are struggling and any sniff of failure is met with censure and disdain. Perhaps you don’ deserve this love after all. Perhaps you’re not special. Prove it, prove how special you are. Show me what you can give me, show me how far you’re prepared to go to keep my validation. Sit, roll over, beg. The power the institution holds, the way it knowingly builds you up, preys on the weakness of impressionable teenagers, toys with your expectations, your dreams, your sense of self is cruel and dangerous. You are told you must be your best self all the time, and not even your own definition of your best self but someone else’s. You must conform and perform in equal measures. And they will slam your square peg into their round hole and tell you it’s for your own good, however much you scream.

Of course, for those naturally round pegs, the whole experience is a walk in the park. Their life experience up to that point has, mostly, already consisted of self-aggrandising pomposity, institutional validation and a strong sense of their own power in the world – all hail the British public school system. If you need an example just look at the UK’s current political leaders. But if you’re not one of them, if you’re not from the right school, the right family, the right mindset or, worst of all, the right level of intellectual snobbery, the skills and talents that you do have are constantly gaslit in an attempt to break you down and remake you in their image. By showing you how much love the institution can lavish on its chosen ones and then withdrawing it at will, by forcing unfair and unnecessary conditions that amount to cultural and intellectual blackmail on you, your spirit, your individuality and your ability to believe in yourself are systematically crushed. Then, as you sink into yourself, low and despondent, crushed at the having that balmy sheen of praise whipped away, they tell you that they are right, look how weak you are. Of course you didn’t belong there in the first place, how could they have made such a silly mistake. You were never deserving, not bright and shiny enough. Inadequate. Unworthy. Whether you’re trying and failing at being what they want you to be or just trying to be yourself and get by, they will come after you, kick you and laugh as you fall. You see the promises they made you, the future they told you to believe in, fall away and you’re left weak, small and confused – positively heart-broken.

We call out this kind of treatment when it’s dished out in intimate relationships, families, even friendships, but we still allow institutions to abuse and bully – particularly ones that are the beneficiaries of their own successful propaganda. Whether it’s Oxford, Harvard, the City of London or Sillicone Valley, powerful prestigious institutions inject their criteria for success and failure into you like a proverbial virus (no, not that one). And the sense of failure doesn’t go away – especially if you’re at a stage of life where you’re very mush still discovering and defining who you are. When you’re held to a standard, a set of ideals like that, rightly or wrongly a part of that dogma can stick in your brain, particularly if you’re a young adult. ‘Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she’s mine for life’ said the inimitable Miss Jean Brodie. And it’s true.  So what’s the point of a this? To say that beauty, power, even cruelty can be seductively aspirational, make you want to be better, different, than how you are, but for all the wrong reasons. Set you up for a fall but refuse to catch you. That dogmatic definitions of success are dangerous and harmful, and that it’s easy to lose yourself in a Jenga-tower of results-dependent affirmation. All of this. Or maybe it’s just me dredging up old memories and ranting. Which of course doesn’t make any of it less true or real or relevant. There’s still a discomfort, an unsettling seeping sense of failure when folks discover my academic background. A ‘but you went to Oxford, why aren’t you running the world?’ accusation that can still fill me with shame the same way that my tutors and my peers used to. I tried, but I failed. But even if I didn’t fail, I feel like I failed. False promises and gilded lilies – Oxford dishes out both in spades. I wish I could say it made me stronger, brighter, more savvy. I wish I had been able to walk taller instead of just wanting to. I wish I could know for sure if I really am a failure or have just been programmed to think I am.

Why I miss the beautiful camaraderie of being physically close to strangers

Hello, my name is Ruvani and I’m a claustrophobic. Along with a whole swathe of other annoying phobias my risk-averse brain gathered up on the rocky road between the intrepid bravery of childhood and the sheer terror of adulthood, at some point I became a person who, along with small spaces, Did Not Like Crowds. While I’ve never been absolutely terrified off them – no avid gig-goer could be – crowds made my heart beat a little faster, put me on high alert. Willfully stepping into a tightly crowded space was only fine as long as I knew exactly where the exit was and kept it in my eyeline. One too many Dodgy Crowd Experiences may have been to blame. I recall getting nastily squashed against a wall at Notting Hill Carnival one year, and there was the rather scary moment in Ibiza when poor crowd control led to me getting lifted off the ground by the pressure of overexcitable humans. The idea of getting trapped, being crushed to death, or more likely to severe discomfort, has its own special chest-clenching grossness for me. Paranoia, yes – but irrational paranoia, definitely not. Getting squashed, trampled, stampeded-over may never have been a likely possibility at the many crowded events I’ve attended in my life (us good ol Brits know how to wait our turn) but it was always there in the back of my head, lurking in a corner, casting a tiny shadow over the fun.

But although crowds can be scary, they can also be incredibly wonderful. That’s why I persevered, always, with every kind of crowd, from nightclubs to music festivals to street parties, gigs, immersive theatre, and of course sports matches. You name it, I was there – diving in head first, with half an eye on the exit of course. The camaraderie of a crowd watching a band, the hive-mind hysteria of a bunch of ravers partying to a fantastic DJ set, the happy chatting with strangers in the snaking queue for festival toilets, the shared sense of place and purpose, the knowledge that everyone is there out of a love for the same thing – that’s what makes crowds amazing, joyous and life-affirming. Every one of the fifteen (yes, fifteen) Glastonburys I’ve attended has been populated with its own little miracles, folks helping each other out, getting each other’s back, sharing water and food, searching en masse for lost property, lifting each other on their shoulders. Whether I’m sweating in a nightclub, cheering for my team, headbanging in a mosh pit or queuing up tight for food, drinks or bathrooms, crowds exert their own energy, their own awareness of the moment. That each moment is a story, a memory, that you are all building and sharing together. Precious, unique and irreplaceable. Humans as physically close as they can be who don’t know one another but all want to be happy, want to create a positive experience, want to root for the same team. The yelling, chanting, shrieking in unison, the huge booming pulsating waves of love and excitement radiating from the heads and bodies squished up together, bobbing in synch, arms and legs akimbo with no thought at all to personal space.

Thinking about it now, it feels almost mystical, all that person-power, all that energy and life. With festivals, clubs and events banned, sports played to empty stadiums, the perpetual six-foot-scare-distance keeping us apart, I have never craved the warmth and intimacy of a crowd more. I dream of crowds, of hair in my face, elbows in my back, jostling this way and that, head ducking to get a better view, the sound of other people’s conversations, the access to their experiences as part of my own. I crave speakers and spotlights, the shared wave of anticipation that ripples through a crowd in the moments before a huge beat drops or a goal is scored. I miss hugging strangers when everything is going right for all of you at the exact same moment. When it’s your moment, your joy, but everyone else’s at the same time. The feeling of being so much a part of something, so very alive, of knowing you will always remember that You Were There, and so will everyone else. Those shared human experiences when being part of a crowd is like being part of a body, a single organism, one blissful beating heart.

Now, locked away, those moments feel more precious than ever. Each memory holds a bitter-sweet poignance, sharp with the not-knowing when we will ever again be able to return to those hallowed, socially-sacred spaces. The danger of closeness now means something so different. We turn our faces, our bodies away from one another, the newly-omnipresent fear of germs bearing down on us like a constant dull brain-ache. Just one of so many ways this disease has shifted life from colour to monochrome, another shade sucked from the rainbow of our existence. By separating us physically, reducing our shared experiences to shakey out-of-synch Zoom conversations, taking away any real physical sense of closeness to strangers, some essential threads of human connection feel lost, broken. The privacy and safety of home is an island, a walled castle, a lonely, reductive space where we separate ourselves and become less like or liking of everyone else. Our suspicion of contact, fear of contamination, divisions over how to behave and what our priorities should be right now feel like a psychological war zone, new and seemingly-insurmountable social and cultural barriers rising high on top of the literal physical danger of the spreading pandemic. Outside of our household bubbles, intimacy feels like a thing of the past. The ability to commune in a crowd, as a crowd, to speak with one voice, move with one motion, to be something larger, more powerful and more fulfilling than oneself through our physical and – in the moment – psychological closeness with strangers is a dear, precious recollection, a whisper of a dream. And I realise I’m more afraid of losing that intimacy forever than I ever was of standing in a crowd.

11^th September 2020

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The absence of safe spaces when you don’t belong

Where do we go when we need a break from the constant tussle, the emotional and psychological pressure of living in a world where everything is some kind of battle? Mental retreats, or safe spaces may exist in the shape of a family unit, a close group of friends from school or college, a religious community or political organisation. But what if there isn’t a space with your name on it? What if you’re the person who slips between the margins, neither fish nor fowl, and there’s nowhere you can just exist without question?

I’ve written a lot here about the need for tolerance and acceptance, and those are exactly what the world needs right now to get back in order to re-establish some kind of sanity in our political and social relations. But putting tolerance and acceptance out there all the time is hard. It’s tiring. And sometimes you just ache for a space that’s yours – a space of agreement and mutual understanding where you don’t have to calmly fight your corner, where certain givens can just go unsaid. More than the constant, relentless bad news and divisive decision-making surrounding the pandemic, the daily car-crash-bombardment of international horror stories leave me yearning for a place to shelter, a place to not be questioned, not have to explain myself.

The disjuncture of having no one in your life whom you grew up with, whose experiences match your own and whose opinions can be relied upon as a safe place of agreement, a shelter from the storm of divisiveness we’re constantly battered by in this ever-fraying world. For someone like me who exists without tight bonds to family or community, without a strong, well-informed racial or ethnic identity and no ties to my past or where I grew up, there is no such safe space. The constant sharing, deep, intense bonds of adolescence give way to the constant uncertainties of adult friendships and relationships, and nothing is safe or certain among people of differing backgrounds. Tiptoeing around subjects, or full-disclosure honesty at the risk of confrontation, rejection or both are exhausting ways to interact. The absence of a safe space where the soul can rest and recuperate was bad enough before the world started going completely to shit. Now it’s a gaping hole in my psyche (another one) that I have no other option than to just suck up, another thing I need that I just have to manage without. Whether it’s climate change, having children (and how the two are related), taxation, education, gun control, unemployment, abortion, the police, the military or any other contentious topic you may think of, the lack of a space I can enter where there is the safety of having at least a basic form of agreement feels like yet another tax on just not belonging anywhere.

I was good at being a young person. I was good at sharing. I was good at pontificating on the ways of the universe late into the night, setting the world to rights, exclaiming yes, yes, I totally get that! And oh my god you just read my mind! The squeals of mutual understanding, the sense of being seen, being heard, the heart-lifting realisation that you are not actually alone in your thoughts and beliefs, that there are others, that you are a part of something, not a lone crouton on the edge of a soup bowl, sinking ever-deeper into a viscous mass that’s trying to subsume and destroy all the things that make you you. Those are moments, the places, that make living in the world more bearable, yet as an adult without ties and connections that run old and deep they are virtually absent, found only at the bottom of a bottle, or something stronger. Feeling out of step with the universe, feeling out of place and disconnected are not new feelings for me, but that doesn’t make them easy to live with. Seeing people huddle in their tribes, hunker down with their cliques is hard, especially after being unceremoniously rejected from so many of the aforementioned social sets for being too bloody different. When Oscar Wilde said ‘Be yourself, everybody else is taken’ he clearly had not encountered a gaggle of White upper-middle-class women from the English Home Counties. Just saying.

I envy and despise in equal amounts the rich White men in their gentlemen’s clubs – their safe, private spaces where they can close the door on the modern world, pat each other on the back and bitch about political correctness gone mad and how much better things were way back when. The egregious irony of them not only continuing to hold all the power but having enviably comfortable, socially acceptable private spaces of their own in which to bemoan any small inroads the rest of us may make into the world is not lost on me.

I’m sick of reading magazine articles extolling me to ‘find your tribe’. Do these people not understand how frustrating it is to be shown a prescription for loneliness that seems to work for everyone else except you? Has it even occurred to them that some people just don’t have a tribe, and it’s not their fault? That due to circumstances beyond one’s control, it is possible to have a set of beliefs and experiences that will set you apart in one way or another from virtually everyone you will ever meet. That you must live your whole life on guard, waiting, expecting to disappoint anyone whom you’re honest with, that one stray comment will get eyebrows raised, invitations rescinded, doors slammed in your face or worst of all, elicit peals of mocking laughter. And that you have to take all that with no one to run to, nowhere to go to say fuck, those bastards, they just don’t get us, because there is no us, there’s just you, out on the limb that is your life. Disconnected in every way and battling through another day on your own. No tribe, no family, no safe space, shared history or ideology. It’s all so tiring, each micro aggression more draining than the last. Running on empty with nowhere to refuel. Yes, this may seem like a small thing to moan about when the whole world is falling apart and people have much bigger problems, but it’s my blog and I can cry if I want to. Being different sucks, whether there’s a pandemic on or not.

13th August 2020

There is no cure for insomnia. I know this because one of the things I do at 2am, 3am, 4am is search for cures. And there aren’t any, not yet. Certainly not for the kind of insomnia I have, the kind so deep-rooted it can outperform strong sedatives without even breaking a sweat. In the Insomnia-V-Diazepam-Celebrity-Deathmatch that plays out in my mind every night, the drugs don’t stand a chance. If the mind is a tool that can be trained, sharpened, then mine is certainly a broken one, a wheel without an axel, too deeply damaged for repair. Mindfulness and self-hypnosis are about as much use as getting under a table during a nuclear attack. And yes, I’ve tried Melatonin – it passed through my body in complete silence, like a gliding condor. Sleep has developed the status of God in my mind. Something amazing that almost certainly does not exist. Something powerful and healing. Something so deeply desired and made even more desirous in its absence. I daydream about sleep.

The fact that, on the rare occasions that I do get real organic rest, I have insanely vivid, filmic dreams with plots even the most abstract-creative coked-up Hollywood producer couldn’t summon up only adds to the mystique. On those special, joyful nights, I awake fresh and bright and ready to take on the world, filled with the warm satisfaction of someone who has enjoyed a grand adventure. I used to write these tales of derring-do into a small shiny notebook, but stopped when our current reality made me prefer those other worlds so much more than this one that it became counter-productive to dwell on those exciting times lived entirely inside my head. Indeed, the depth and pull of the few dreams my body permits me never fail to remind me of the power of the human mind. The rich detail, so carefully imagined and almost always completely fictitious, must be created out of something. If only I could find a way to mainline straight into the source of my dreams, I would be able to write the most vivid, blistering fiction. Either that or I’d end up in an asylum, hallucinating uncontrollably. I think it’s a risk I’d be prepared to take.

I can just about remember not having insomnia. A time when going to bed at night, falling asleep and waking up in the morning were normal things, natural and unquestioned. I remember more clearly the time when that rhythm got lost. When fear, stress and anxiety imposed such a heavy burden on my psyche that I lost the ability to switch off. When the quiet of night time morphed from offering the peace of sleep to a bitter window of solitude in which my screaming brain forced me to revisit the day’s indignities, agonising over each stabbing word, each jeer and taunt. Next would come the heart-pounding dread of the dawn, not knowing what fresh hell my tormenters had in store for me. The night would be spent praying, wishing, bargaining with a non-existent omnipresent entity for some kind of respite, some means of escape, some tool to empower me or disempower them. Fruitless soul-searching born of despair. And so the insomnia took hold, the customary links between night, bed and sleep severed forever. Instead I found myself dozing off at my desk, in the car, in front of the television, minutes of broken, ugly, disorientating unconsciousness snatched in compensation, in desperation. I learned to live with exhaustion, learned to study and work in a zombified stupor, learned to always carry a toothbrush. I began to accept that the power of sleep, real sleep, was lost to me.

Sometimes, when things are better and I’m not constantly worrying, I may get a full night of rest. Sometimes my body may gift me one randomly. The current situation is taking its toll. The nights of freewheeling exotic dreamworlds are becoming fewer and fewer and the long, ragged slog through the hours of darkness increasingly inevitable. The immediate relief of unconsciousness that I feel when my weary body collapses into bed is broken agonisingly quickly as the power of anxiety pushes its way to the front of my brain, dragging me, groggy and defeated, back into reality after a mere hour or two. What was 4am is becoming 2am as pandemic-related worries spawn and multiply, amoeba-like, in my mind. Uncertainty becomes panic as financial worries build on career difficulties which compound social anxiety and my physical issues. I read, immersing myself in the glorious otherness of the page, but as soon as I try to rest, to reset my mind, to focus on a place of peace and safety, one errant thought will scurry into my brain, the ant in the sugar bowl, and I will be wide awake again. This cycle can repeat itself all night. Honestly, I am exhausted. The tiredness, the worry, the wretched uncertainty all feeding into one another, short-fusing my brain and eating up the little energy that I do still have, leaving me foggy and unproductive, eyelids constantly drooping, hoping against hope that sleep, that elusive white tiger of the mind, will graciously treat me to twirl of its tail.

15th July 2020

My experience of racist bullying and PTSD growing up in Britain

Right now I’m crying. I’m crying over scenes happening on the other side of the world. I feel sick and panicked. I feel helpless and furious. Why should I be crying because of a bunch of ignorant fascist thugs proudly proclaiming their racist jingoistic ideology on the streets of London today? Why not just shrug and ignore them? After all, they’ve always been there. Why ruin my day, my husband’s day over a group of stupid nasty bigots on the other side of the pond? Tune them out, forget about them, move on to the next thing.

Except I can’t. Every time I see those faces, those gurning, leering sneers I know so well or hear those vicious bitter chants filled with hate I go back in time. I go back to when those same faces, those same voices were targeted at me. Targeted day in, day out. A permanent ringing in my ears, a pounding in my head. A presence I could no more ignore than if I’d been beaten with a stick, which I sometimes think might have been preferable. There was always a distance, an otherness. I wasn’t invited around for tea like the other kids were. Little comments, funny looks. Sitting on my own in the playground. Teachers always saying my name wrong. But it was in Year 4 that it became something else. We weren’t allowed to move seats during the school year, so once my colour became a target there was no escape. I was nothing more or less than a baited bear, chained to hot coals and dancing in agony for the amusement of the audience. Constant, relentless persecution. If I didn’t react, they pushed harder. If I did, they laughed and started again. No respite, no way out. All day and every day.

I stopped sleeping. I became sick with the fear of what awaited me the next day. I sat at the foot of my bed praying all night for it to stop, for something to happen, anything that would free me. I still have that raging, painful insomnia. I binge-ate chocolate for just a moment of distraction from the sheer misery of my life. I hated myself. Every time I looked in the mirror all I saw was my brown skin – the disgusting thing that made me different, the thing I couldn’t change. The marker of my grotesque otherness I would have to carry with me for the rest of my life. I was terrified. And I wasn’t wrong to be. It never let up. I got used to my daily dose of being called gross and hideous. I internalised that no one would ever love me because I was so dark and ugly. I expected to be referred to as poo if it was a good day, otherwise worse. Of course I could never have a boyfriend. Obviously I’d have to take the odd punch. Anyone who spoke to me risked guilt by association. I was pitifully grateful for the few manipulative, abusive pseudo-friendships I had.

How can you grow a sense of self-worth when the root of your soul is constantly being pissed on? How can you believe in yourself when everyone around you is telling you that you don’t deserve to be alive? How can you love yourself when your ugliness is shoved in your face every day? And how can you possibly fight against the smug pervasive certainty, the confidence, the absolute cast-iron self-assurance emanating from all of your assailants and their silent allies that they are one hundred per cent in the right? There is no room for argument, no space for dissent – they know in their hearts and their minds that they are right to hate you because, after all, you have dark skin. You are the one who is different, who is other, who is therefore inherently lesser. They know it, so it must be true.

When I see images of proud British racists, I see those same faces 30 years later. They’re probably in the crowd. No one has told them they’re wrong. Quite possibly no one ever will. They are the beating heart of racist Britain-undiminished, unsilenced and triumphantly enjoying themselves. They still believe that people like me are worth nothing. Me crying about it isn’t going to stop them, but sometimes I can’t stop myself. Because their attitude stretches beyond the bullish neo-Nazi minority. They are enabled by the middle-class British establishment that has successfully kept ethnic minorities at arm’s length, limited our participation in arts and culture, kept us off the national curriculum and ensured that we have enough visibility to pay lip service to diversity without ever having to change anything. Racism in the UK is so structurally embedded that when the thugs rear their ugly heads the establishment shrugs and ignores them. They refuse to acknowledge that they are merely the head of the snake, because to do so would flag their own complicity. The children who did those things to me weren’t just the kids of NF extremists. They were the kids of doctors, lawyers and journalists. And they were all in it together-the great equalising act of bullying the brown kid. Oh, and don’t even get me started on the complicity and latent prejudice of the teachers. And if you think that things are better now, think again. Look around you. The white British stranglehold on everything from history to fashion may be being questioned right now, but in a few weeks when this all dies down how many kids will there be being told that they don’t belong in Britain?

13th June 2020

Why we need protective legislation to enforce justice and equality

This week, the sheer raw anger, the exposed rage that was so fresh and bitter has steadily simmered into something less agonising but equally potent – a huge, resounding call for systemic change that will not be silenced, will not be ignored. Millions of people have taken to the streets worldwide, affecting real change in the defunding of the Minneapolis police department and the tearing down of statues commemorating slaveholders in the US and the UK. But as we continue to push forward, the White far right are pushing back: KKK vigilantes have attacked protesters in Seattle and Virginia and threatened to bomb protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, while protesters have been killed or hospitalised by police across the US, including here in Austin. Yes, progress is being made but this is not the time to take our foot off the pedal. White supremacists are angry and frightened by the gains we have already accomplished, but anyone who has encountered racism first-hand knows that these are structures that won’t just go away.

I keep thinking about why. Why some White people just cannot seem to understand the basic concept of equality? Why they get the same cold, hard, dehumanised expression on their faces when confronted with People of Colour asking for their human rights, how they can justify the violence of their language and their behaviour when encountering other human beings who are a different colour from them? How can some White people not understand or at least imagine what it feels like to be judged, bullied, rejected, persecuted and murdered because of the colour of your skin? How fighting back is the only possible means of survival. Surely this is obvious? But it isn’t. Privilege, it seems, often has an inverse relationship with empathy.

Because if the beneficiaries of that privilege open themselves up to empathy, if they really enable themselves to feel what it’s like to be oppressed, to be threatened, and ultimately to be killed because of the colour of their skin, they would have to confront the reality of giving up that privilege, and they do not want to. By shutting down their empathy, burying their heads in the sand, the White far right are silently acknowledging how hard it is to give up that privilege, that they know what’s at stake and they will fight with all the cold-hearted ignorance they can muster. And history shows us that this is not going to change by itself. We can’t just sit back and wait for every racist White person to become friends with a Black person who single-handedly overturns centuries of bigotry and prejudice, the way that Hollywood would have it. In real life racist beliefs are harboured and cherished and passed down from generation to generation as principles to live by. How else could we still be living in an such a deeply racist society in the year 2020?

Racist structures and beliefs offer a sense of place and power. How can we possibly incentivise the White far right to give that up voluntarily? We are asking them to relinquish every inbuilt advantage society has offered them. To retrain their thought processes to challenge structures of bigotry that are deeply ingrained into their history, their culture, their psyche, solely for the benefit of others. We are asking them to exercise empathy. But they don’t want to hear it. This is completely counterintuitive to the entire ethos and ideology of the White far right. Empathy is not in their playbook. And once you take empathy out of the equation what you have is one group of people clinging to an idea that allows them to believe they are worth more than another group, and they like that sense of worth, they like how it makes them feel and who it tells them that they are.

Every act of aggression, every misplaced denial, every word spoken without empathy shows us that the White far right want to keep perpetuating the same old tropes of cultural superiority that allow them to exert their status over those whom at some point in history society deemed to be inferior to them because of the colour of their skin. That they will not give up without a fight. That they will manipulate and reframe the debate to portray Black people and their allies as the aggressors, that they will literally try to Whitewash history. The journey towards a truly global and egalitarian world where everyone is equally valued and recognised isn’t going to happen out of the kindness of their hearts. Those are hardened fast to protect their social and economic advantages, in the same way that capitalism has always been able to profit – by dividing the working class by race, gender or religion and pitting them against each other to jockey for the little bit of power so generously handed down to be squabbled and fought over. The White far right have staked their claim and they are not giving up on it.

Legislation, and only legislation can affect real change, although even supposedly watertight legislation like the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments have been circumvented, abused and misinterpreted. But the stronger, more powerfully and more completely we legislate the less scope, the less space there is for the White far right to reassert its agenda. We need to make racism illegal. Really illegal. On a Federal level, an unchallengeable level. Behaviours may not immediately alter attitudes and perceptions but they guarantee safety and offer means to recourse in a way that no moral argument can.

I think a lot, write a lot, about my own complex relationship with my own race, my experiences of racism and the deep, complex structures that legitimise racism in our society. I get lost in my own thoughts, caught up in the narrative of the things that I know, that when confronted with a situation that I do not know, I have not lived, I don’t always know what to do. I might not always do the right thing or say the right thing. I might be clumsy or insensitively over-conflate my own experiences. I hope not. This isn’t about me, but I’m in it as much as everyone who has ever been the victim of any kind of prejudice is in it. Those of us from other minorities should not be detracting from the focus of this fight and should not be co-opting the agenda. We need to act as allies, as does everyone who cares about breaking down the institutional structures that are oppressing Black people and protecting the perpetrators of racist violence. Being an ally means seeing and recognising these structures and patterns and confronting them wherever we see them. It means challenging, pushing back against every assumption, every action that’s lacking in empathy. It means utilising our own experiences of prejudice, bigotry and racism to understand and support the fight that’s on our doorstep, exercising our own empathy to help highlight its absence among those who continue to subjugate and silence Black voices.

These base acts of white supremacist violence are not going to stop, and the belief and value systems that enable them are not going to dismantle themselves. This is now a pitched battle on both a physical and ideological level and we can’t be intimidated into giving up. We cannot back down and allow the status quo to be reintroduced. Whether or not empathy can be learned and hate can be unlearned feels like an academic question, because quite simply this has not happened. The battle for hearts and minds goes on, but the structural change that will bring down racism and White privilege has to come first.

June 9th 2020