Thought for the Week: Windrush exploration
Alison Leonard reflects on national self-worth
With great absorption and considerable shame, I’ve been reading stories of the Windrush generation: how they were called to serve the ‘mother country’, and how that turned out. Why ‘shame’? In 1965-66, I was a child care officer for the London Borough of Hackney, where many West Indians settled after coming over in the previous decade. I visited Afro-Caribbean families in their rough terraces and windblown high-rise flats, and, qualified by nine years in a girls’ boarding school and four years at university, I had the power to inspect their child care practices and, if necessary, take their children into care. The social work profession was in its infancy, and it took only my decision and that of one senior officer to embark on such drastic action. I’d had one day’s training in ‘West Indian culture’. I knew nothing of slavery and little about patterns of migration. I was terrified.
Fast-forward a few years, and I discovered Quakers and joined them. Brought up in a staunch Conservative family who believed in king/queen, country and empire, I now met people who interpreted the swathes of pink on the world map in terms of unbalanced power relationships, and took steps to right some wrongs. In the following years I met such heroes as Adam Curle, Diana and John Lampen, and Friends who worked for Quaker Cottage and Quaker House in Belfast, the Quaker Bolivia Link, the Quaker Congo Partnership – so many things. I learnt what racism was, and found it in my background.
In the last two and a half years, I’ve seen racism in Britain rediscover its voice. One member of my original family has gone UKIP; a dear neighbour, after I’d confessed that I came from a family who thought English people could run other people’s countries better than they could themselves, said, well, sorry, but he agreed with my family, not with me.
So, this is Brexit. The UK government’s position is embattled at every turn, wracked with ignorance even of the details of its own border with Europe, in Ireland. No one has any idea of the outcome. But I guess that in the long term it may usher in, for Britain, an era of humiliation. Our politicians’ proud stance will reveal itself as the hutzpah of a few has-been islands off a minor western continent, as the real power moves eastwards – that is, if climate change has not wrought a more global resolution.
How can we, as a spiritual community, respond to this shift in our national self-worth? We may dread the social upheaval it will bring, and the loss of our treasured liberal values. But were these not largely a mask, while colonial realities still power our smartphones? I think we’ll need to start with that most difficult of spiritual virtues: humility. Our culture, during the last 500 years, has exploited other cultures and lands for its own purposes. We must step back, and let others try their hand. It will be extraordinarily painful, but it needs to be faced. I will start with my Windrush exploration and hope to go on from there.
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