There are quite a lot of layers that build up how you play a key role in racism. Family, friends, and colleagues, on the one hand, and institutions and structures you make use of throughout your life, on the other one. No matter what kind of role, be it passive or active, against or in favour - You have always been part of it.
It took me a while to understand racism is not a conversation that catches you off guard in a pub, hanging out with people who just happened to chat about the last match between Arsenal and Liverpool: sneaking out of the drama is as easy as saying: -sorry, I don’t follow the football thing- (as if you were sorry).
No. The impact of reducing racism to a conversation among people barely sober, where you can have a ‘say’ or have a ‘skip’, goes beyond our knowledge. Sure - everyone is (or they should be, in some states) entitled to their freedom of speech. No one word in this text is saying otherwise. But hey, the pure act of playing football does not kill human beings. The role you play in racism is, on the other hand, different in that matter.
For most of my childhood -and shamefully, some teenage years I still refuse to acknowledge- I grew up hating my physical self. I just couldn’t accept the pigments I had: their colour was the result of a black father and a white mother. How come? I used to say. People in my circle were labelling me as the little black boy. And I hated it; I didn’t hate them; I hated myself because I thought they were right.
About what? I don’t know; I genuinely don’t know why I believed they were right. The labelling was so overwhelming that in my language, I started to reinforce the “white” side of me and “erased” my black history, the one I didn’t feel proud of. They saw that, and they challenged me. I was told that as I grew up, my skin would turn darker and darker. I cried my eyes out, insisting my skin was, and would always be, pink. Just like Karen.
Something I was good at was pretending everything was fine. Giving time to the time would just fix everything for me. With time, the bullying and the hatred can disappear -at least from the surface-. As childhood comes to an end, thoughts find somewhere to fit in the new stages of life. If you are conscious enough to face them, they can easily find a way out before you grow up (physically).
When that’s not the case, those uncomfortable thoughts find in the unconscious a dangerous, safe place to stay, waiting for you to decide later in life how to sort out the storage capacity. But they have a limit. Your thoughts can’t wait forever. All those memories packed with racism stayed with me quietly, but then, in my mid-twenties, I moved to England.
If anything, England helped me to let it all out. It made me face my traumas. It triggered that side of me, waiting to unpack all the memories and thoughts on racism and start a really heavy conversation. It was, from the beginning, a conversation fed up by British institutions: work, education, government, communities, society, all those spheres that structure England and the United Kingdom.
From the moment I arrived at Heathrow Terminal 2, there was an overwhelming feeling of belonging to a country that, in a matter of minutes, was no longer foreign to me. Passengers and staff had all different ethnicities. They looked differently from each other, rushing from one terminal to another. So it was the tube. The streets. They would never stare at my face; no one single soul was interested in looking into my eyes. They didn’t care what I looked like or who I was. What can you wish for a 24-year-old who wants to be unnoticed? London. Of course.
That feeling of belonging was never wrong. At first, it seemed to me that it didn’t matter what you looked like or where you came from; it mattered what you could contribute to society. Some of you may be tempted to label such an interpretation as an illusional and unrealistic perception of the UK. If that is what you’re thinking, you may want to give a second read to the structure within the institutions.
It doesn’t matter what you look like or where you came from so long as your intentions of belonging remain in mopping floors, changing beer barrels, and whipping out the toilets.
It doesn’t matter what you look like or where you came from, so long as your intentions of integrating with society were reduced to being the target of jokes linking your ethnicity to cocaine production and war -and having to find that funny too-.
It doesn’t matter what you look like or where you came from so long as you don’t make use of the system.
My aspirations in this country were different. I wanted to meet with people from around the UK and the world; I wanted to learn about communication, marketing, and consumer behaviour. I wanted to interact with a society that doesn’t link me to cocaine and violence. My aspirations in this country helped me understand -and remember- the pigment of my skin. And the historic role that black people have played in the world. It helped me understand my Black Latin ethnicity, the one that is not listed in most of the forms you fill in.
Regaining access to your past, which you hid for too long, is difficult. What made it easy for me was my new approach when acknowledging my ethnicity. I was black, I was Latino, I was Queer: I was different. The UK is a world-leading economy because it embraces differences as no other economy does. They know how to find value in what is different. On this island, I found the healthiest possible way to acknowledge who I was and how being different could be an advantage, more than a victimised person.
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