A never ending journey

I grew up comfortably middle class. The ‘merchant class,’ I suppose you could call it, in that parts of my family were the sort of people who ran local businesses, who knew other people who ran local businesses. So your name would be recognised in certain shops — “Oh, are you related to …” and a holiday job would be pretty easy to come by.

We weren’t rich, by any means, but nor were we destitute. And it was, I suppose, the sort of life where, because you never have to deal with Social Security, you believe all the stories about people being on the fiddle. Because you never have to deal with the police, unless you summon them to help you, you never pay any attention to those labelled by the Daily Mail as “rabble rousers,” who probably got what they deserved anyway.

And no one thought they were racist. Racists were those skinheads with the boots, who went on marches through Southall, or shouted the N word at people in the street, and demanded they go home.

We didn’t do those things, so we couldn’t be racist. We were decent people, and we were grateful to the immigrant doctors who helped when we were born, and we were friendly to the “Indian” lady who ran the Post Office, never mind that she may well have been from Bangladesh or Pakistan. What’s the difference, really?

And yet… and yet people would happily sing the praises of their elderly gardener by saying “He’s a marvel. Works like a black.” Corner shops would be “paki shops” and Chinese takeways would be the chinky. Jokes would be made about Indian people, putting on the fake accent of Peter Sellers in “Goodness Gracious Me,” or pretending to be Chinese and saying “I am velly, velly sorry.” And we read the papers, and we thought “Nelson Mandela was a terrorist.”

And we — I — believed ourselves not to be racist. Because we didn’t throw bricks. Because we didn’t march for people to be sent home. And if we refused to sign a petition against Nelson Mandela — reader, that was me, once upon a time– we did so in the belief that what we had read was the true and right version of events.

And that was where my journey began. Comfortable, white, middle class English. Surrounded by attitudes every day that shaped who I was to become. Even at university, those attitudes were still there. The place where I studied, Imperial College, was pretty right conservative back then, with both a small and a capital C.

University was a little more diverse than home, and I learned there the sheer awfulness of “some of my best friends are…” but there was still plenty of reinforcement of those original attitudes. Plenty of “Hang Mandela” types amongst those involved in politics, and a student prospectus that said, essentially, if you were gay, you should probably have picked somewhere else to go.

In 1991, there was a bump in the road. A bump, in fact, on the back of my brother’s head, just behind his ear. It happenned when he left a police van through the rear doors, just as it started moving, and hit his head on the curb. An injury not dissimilar to that inflicted on a 75 year old man in Buffalo, in fact.

My brother died. His brain injuries were fatal. And my journey took an unexpected fork. A fork where, because I’d missed signing on when he was in hospital, I lost the benefits I was living on, such was the determination to stop scroungers. A fork where the police officers refused to answer questions at an inquest, and the report was confidential, so we’ll never really know for sure what happened, and what mistakes were made.

“The British Police are the best in the world / I don’t believe one of the stories I’ve heard” sang Tom Robinson, in “Glad to be gay.” It’s the attitude I used to have, before my brother died — and before I came out.

And I came out, newly alert to how the police can behave, into a world where friends would tell of officers covering their badge numbers as they harassed gay men. Where queer bashing was not uncommon, and where people from many different backgrounds would mingle in the few gay bars we had back then.

These experiences too are part of my journey, from unquestioning acceptance of the status quo, to a better understanding of how the state and their agents can impact upon people who are just trying to go about their lives.

Another fork in the road was a conversation with a door man at a London gay bar. A black door man, who heard the story of my brother’s death and said “That shouldn’t happen to you. You’re white.”

And that, perhaps, is one of the saddest, most shocking things that’s ever been said to me. Something that implies an acceptance that, if you’re not white, awful things happen. And they’re not supposed to happen to nice white people with proper accents.

That conversation was a long, long time ago now. But perhaps, brief though it was, it turned out to be one of the most important in my life.

I can’t say that it ended every racist thought I ever had, that it banished from my mind the ideas that I once held, in a flash. That I never talked after that of the “paki shop” or felt uneasy as I saw a group of black men walk towards me on the street.

But perhaps it’s fair to say that in terms of making me more aware, it was the junction, between pootling along on the comfortable A roads of complacency, and moving on to the motorway towards a better understanding.

Each of us is on our own journey, and only the foolish think they’ve already reached their final destination. Many people grew up with backgrounds like mine, but without the sudden shocks that force them to challenge the views they inherited.

We have to try and reach out to those people. They might be brothers and sisters, neighbours, aunts, school friends. We may never be able to change the views of a hardened racist, but a lot of racism is softer than that.

Black Lives Matter. The me of thirty years ago would never have typed that phrase. But, I hope, I am now an ally. Imperfect, still learning, but an ally.

And as allies, it is our duty to help. We can help by going on marches. We can help by challenging racism. We can help by voting.

We can help by sharing a map with those we know. We can help by reaching out to those we grew up with, even when we find it exasperating and frustrating. We can help other people on their own journey.

It is a neverending journey. And we must rise to the occasion.