Maya Angelou: ‘Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.’ Photo: Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
‘Part of that oppression’: Hoonie Feltham describes Oxford Meeting’s approach to resisting racism.
‘A question struck me: “Am I racist?” The inescapable answer was “Yes”.’
As I walked away from my first Black Lives Matter demonstration at South Park in Oxford, a question struck me: ‘Am I racist?’ The inescapable answer was ‘Yes, of course you are’. I admitted for the first time that I react differently as a white person when encountering a black person. Feeling alone in my shame I wondered who I could share my feelings with. Then suddenly I knew – Quakers at our Meeting! I approached two Friends to help me explore my discomfort and help me find a way in which we could share our thoughts and feelings on this important subject. Ellen Bassani, who is blind and a disability equality trainer, and Tas Cooper, who is autistic and a member of the Book of Discipline Revision Committee, helped me put this article together. I felt their experiences would be relevant to exploring attitudes to difference.
Oxford Meeting holds monthly evening discussions, called ‘Fridays with Friends’. We were invited to use this time and booked three consecutive monthly sessions to explore our racism. What assumptions did we hold about difference, probably without knowing?
At our first meeting, we looked at the untested, unconscious assumptions that people lay on others who are different to them. These assumptions may come from the media, family background or other social pressures. Prejudice arises from not challenging these conditioned assumptions. Ellen and Tas, who experience ‘otherness’ in different ways, discussed what that means to them.
Ellen feels that just walking down the street with a white cane is enough to trigger powerful feelings within observers. In her experience as a trainer, sighted people presume that the loss of sight means the end of their useful life, and assume the same for her. This in turn triggers relief that they are not blind, guilt over feeling that relief, and so on. Tas finds other people sometimes consider him different because of difficulty giving off the ‘proper’ social cues.
Both have experienced the burden of being seen through other people’s attitudes, with their own uniqueness overlooked. There are similarities between this and how, for example, people of colour are often stereotyped as dangerous. White people mostly grow up with white people, often either blinding themselves to people of colour or seeing them as threats. We wondered whether all of this is down to a primitive fear of difference – and in the case of racism, probably unconscious fear of retribution for slavery.
Ellen has sought the help of many strangers, unable to respond to skin colour or other visual differences. She says: ‘Without the barrier of noting skin colour, I know how wonderfully alike we all are. I try to treat people as my brothers and sisters.’ Ellen and Tas’s openness encouraged participants to discuss what attitudes we all dump on people because of their skin colour.
In our second session, on white fragility, white supremacy and becoming anti-racist, we invited our participants to answer questions from a recent Woodbrooke course: ‘Think of a time when you witnessed racism. What did you do? Could you have done it differently? Ask yourself: What injustices push me to act? Who are the people I surround myself with? What roles do they play? How can I widen this community? When I make mistakes how do I acknowledge them?’ These questions are important because in Oxford Meeting there are only a few people of colour out of a couple of hundred members.
We also discussed how even non-white communities can be coherced to uphold white supremacy. This was illustrated by a podcast extract we played, in which Benjamin Zephaniah talked about his mother’s internalised attitudes towards her native Jamaica. She excused her experience of being undervalued and often insulted during her lifetime’s work in the NHS, out of deference to the imperial ‘mother-country’. Her mind, apparently, had been colonised.
In our third session, we discussed what it means to be an ally. To help us in our discussion, Ellen shared what allyship feels like for her: ‘That I am respected as the expert in my own condition, and for accumulating a library of knowledge which could be useful to the sighted world.’ In the same way, people of colour are the experts in being not-white. The facilitators of our workshop are all white: we realised that it was our place to educate ourselves, and examine our own privilege, rather than asking people of colour to do that emotional labour. But we also recognised that we might have benefited from the perspectives of people of colour. Ellen believes that being an ally is quite simple: each of us must address and admit to our assumptions, which can be condescending and entitled. We should not presume that we know what people of colour need, but simply ask ‘How can I help?’ We discussed the difference between performative and authentic allyship. We came up with a list of responsibilities for every one of us:
• to feel grief and outrage at racism
• to sit with our own discomfort
• to examine our own privilege and use it to help
• to de-centre ourselves
• to educate ourselves
• to take action not to look good, not out of tokenism, but out of genuine commitment
• to take risks and hold ourselves and others accountable.
The twenty-four participants told us the sessions had been thought-provoking and useful. As facilitators we also learned a great deal. I am hugely grateful to have started exploring my racism among loving, non-judgemental Friends. It has been a productive, enlightening journey of discovery – and I trust it is just the first step.
I pledge to live by the beautiful words of Maya Angelou: ‘Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.’
