We already know racism is rooted in ignorance. What we need to address is how our society only creates more ignorance.

In light of recent events in the United States and here at home, it is undeniable that of late I have felt myself heavily burdened by the weight that people like me have been laden with for centuries – the evil known as racism.

Oh don’t get me wrong – racism is nothing new to me. It was at the tender age of nine that I first realised that there was such a thing as racism. It was in 2005 that Anthony Walker, an 18-year old black student, was brutally murdered in an unprovoked racist attack. This was also the year in which I moved school, finding myself in an upper-middle-class, almost exclusively-white town where I was the first black pupil the school had ever had in its 101-year existence. So trust me, I’m used to being different. Following in a similar vein, at my secondary school, which at a rough guess was about 1400 pupils strong, I was one of about thirteen black people. In my year I was one of two. By the time sixth form swung round I was the only black student in my year group. Now at Oxford, I’m the only black student in my college studying languages, the only black person in the college choir, and in the university at large, I’m definitely in the minority. That’s not an issue for me.

What I do take issue with, however, is the fact that black people like me (and, more generally, ‘people of colour’, if you will), have to come up against a lot of injustice just by virtue of the fact that we’re black. And it’s something we know, too. Parents often tell their kids: ‘Work twice as hard at everything you do, because it’s going to take twice as much effort for you to get as far as a white person’.  

I am glad to say that for the most part, the people with whom I relate abhor racism and hence racism is not really a part of my own personal life. But sadly there are still a lot of people who have a problem with people like me. There are people who will turn the other way when they see a black person like me approach. There are people who will clutch their bags tighter when a black boy walks down the road in their direction. There are those that cry: “Go back to your country!”, their voices curdled with hate.

Britain and Racism

Britain is a multicultural net of people which has only achieved its status in the world because of the labour of non-white people over many centuries. No doubt that truth right there will hurt the ears of the BNP (British National Party) and those countless UKIP (UK Independence Party) members who insist upon repatriation.  

Victoria Ayling of UKIP © Mail Online

It’s the insidiousness of racism that’s starting to make me worried. UKIP is predicted to secure 25% of the vote in the 2015 General Election. For a party that’s in the news every week because yet another member has uttered some deeply racist remarks, like those that claim certain people were ‘intended by nature’ to be slaves and were ‘marked out for subjection’ from birth; a party whose leader thinks it is OK to say that he would be worried if a Romanian family moved in next door to him; a party leader who excuses his racist party members’ behaviour with phrases like they were ‘tired out’, it had been a ‘long day’… The thought that a party of this ilk might be supported by a quarter of the national population – well, needless to say, that worries me.

This makes me realise that I’m probably not as welcome in Britain as I’ve spent most of my life believing. I used to think that it was just people in the world ‘at large’ that could hate me because I am black, not specifically the people right outside my front door. I comforted myself by thinking, Well, my friends are great, hardly anyone has those views any more. My friends may be great, but I've realised that racism isn't as rare as I had grown up to believe. 

Lots of things have changed my mind: things like someone I know being told by his 10-year-old classmate at school that he ‘didn’t belong in this world because you’re black’; things like my black male friends being stopped and searched by the police because supposedly they are planning to commit a crime; things like my friend being likened to ‘a monkey’.  These sorts of things have changed my mind. These sorts of things make me realise that actually, Britain isn’t as open and accepting as we might like to think.

You might be surprised that these things are still going on in the 21^st century. You may be startled to learn that virtually every black person I know has their own stories (yes, that was meant to be plural) to tell of racist abuse. In fact, people are actually surprised when the opposite is true: when you haven’t ever been struck with a dose of racism. I ask you – should it really be the case that going through life without racism should be so rare? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t racism be rare? Or better yet, non-existent?

I have developed my own theories on racism and what we need to do to root it out.

The Role of Ignorance 

I’ve found (and most would agree) that racism is a result of ignorance. The people that are scared when they see a black person approach or believe that Africans ‘scavenge for food’ or that ‘Jamaicans don’t study’ (all courtesy of real life experiences) feel this way because they don’t know any better. Let me tell you why.

In the media we are used to seeing young black males represented as criminal thugs who steal and kill and are part of gangs. We are accustomed to seeing adverts of Africa which reduce it to one big, backward country (do you know Africa is a continent with 54 countries?). 

Let me give you a typical conversation which demonstrates this kind of ignorance:

I went to Africa for my gap year.

Oh, did you? Where in Africa?

Namibia.

Oh, so you just went to one country then.

Imagined typical conversation over. Who says ‘I went to Europe for my gap year’? Nobody. No, because you would say ‘I went to Spain’, or I went to France’, or I went to whichever specific country it was. But Africa’s all just lumped together as the poor, poverty-stricken, disease-ravaged land that needs help.

No wonder so many people want to stay away from black people. For them, black as a race means ‘poor’, ‘uneducated’, ‘criminal’, ‘dirty’, ‘like animals’ (and in many cases, ugly, as I’ve already addressed – see Why the World's Definition of Beauty is All Wrong).

The National Curriculum

The education system only propagates this erroneous mind-set. Even at school we’re used to seeing black people relegated to second-class status. The only black history I ever learnt at school was America’s role in the slave trade and the prominence of the Ku Klux Klan, with a bit of Martin Luther King’s pacifism thrown in Religious Education. Oh, and there was a black dude in Of Mice and Men.

What’s the problem with that? You may ask. You should be happy that black people are being featured in the education system. I am. But all the black history we’re taught further connects black people with negativity. Black people are only sewn into the tapestry of history in the education system as people who had little or no rights and suffered because of it. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were great people who fought against injustice and they should be recognised for it. But they fought against things that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. The Jim Crow laws and segregation should never have been a thing. Neither should the Ku Klux Klan. Or the slave trade.

All I was ever taught as regards black history at school was that black people have always suffered. I was never taught about black people who did great things. I was never taught about Mary Seacole, the Jamaican-born nurse who attended to the wounded in Britain during the Crimean War. Interestingly, though, I’d known about Florence Nightingale from a very young age. Unbelievably, I only found out about Mary Seacole this year. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has revealed that he only discovered her in 2005: she ‘seems to have been such a megastar that I find myself facing the grim possibility that it was my own education that was blinkered’. Amazingly, despite all this, the former Education Secretary Michael Gove this year uncovered plans to completely remove her from the curriculum, a curriculum which only made the inclusion of black history compulsory in 2008. The Tory’s plans were quickly scuppered by a petition by Operation Black Vote, with the creator of the petition asserting:  “To my reckoning, Mary Seacole is the only person of colour talked about not through the sole prism of racism.”

Olaudah Equiano’s another name that sadly I only discovered this year. A former slave born in what is now southern Nigeria, Olaudah worked hard to buy his own freedom, eventually playing a significant role in the abolition of slavery and writing a noted autobiography. Michael Gove wanted him off the curriculum as well.

It’s very unfortunate that black history was made compulsory only after it no longer applied to students my age. But as well as what I’ve already stated about the little that I did learn at school, something else I find striking is that all the black history (which was all negative) we were taught was to do with America. We learnt about America’s bad, naughty, awful role in the slave trade. We learnt about the horrific lynchings in the deep South and tarring and feathering by the Ku Klux Klan. We learnt about the heroic deeds of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks in taking a stand against these atrocities. Never did we ever learn that black people who immigrated to Britain in the 50s on the Windrush were treated not unlike black Americans in the 60s. We learnt about World War 1 more times that I can list and the Holocaust featured in our lessons - but we never learnt about Britain’s colonisation of 102 countries around the world and its role in the holocaust that was the slave trade. We never learnt that these same subjugated colonies gave their lives for the British cause in World War One: India alone sent some 1.5 million men to fight in the war. On the 11^th November this year, just like every other year, the world didn’t remember this.

The stately homes and English Heritage sites that we prize and treasure, were quite literally, built on the blood, sweat and tears of slaves. Hundreds of rich British families gained their wealth from the plantations they owned in the Caribbean, and even when the slave trade was finally abolished in Britain, the owners gained thousands of pounds in ‘compensation’ for the ‘loss of property’. These thousands would equate to millions in today’s money. 

The biggest single pay-out of this vein would equate to £65m today. The Prime Minister of our country, David Cameron, is one of the many families who still profit from this ‘compensation’ today. That’s why it’s a problem to say that we should ‘forget the slave trade’. It definitely still impacts upon the present. Much of the racial stereotypes and racial subjugation we see today can be traced back to slavery.

I met Baroness Doreen Lawrence this year, the mother of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence who was murdered in an unprovoked racist attack in London in 1993. What beggars belief is that his killers (and not even all) were only convicted and imprisoned 19 years later. Doreen and her husband Neville’s tireless campaign for justice has brought about real change in the UK, in that it revealed the prevalence of institutional racism, particularly within the police force. Institutional racism that we can see is also rooted in the American police force and judicial system.  I asked this extraordinary lady what she believed needed to be done to efface racism. Her answer was: “We need to teach black people about their history”. Her words have since doubtless inspired me. 

After a chat with Baroness Lawrence at the Oxford Union

This summer I set to work on this task. I wanted to learn about the black history I’d never been taught. I wanted to find out about the lives of black people in Edwardian and Victorian Britain. I sought the evidence that black people have not always been second-class citizens and slaves. Finding this, I could educate others, and show the world at large that black people are worth it and have achieved great things. If more people knew this fact there would surely be less of this ignorant, racial stereotyping that goes on all over the world. 

The evidence of the all-out task I set myself this summer

Well, with a packed summer and a long reading list to get through for my university degree in that time, I sadly didn’t get through all the books on the self-educating reading list I set myself but I did manage a few books, and those books have taught me much about black people in Europe over the centuries and the positive contributions they made to society.

Black History Month: Celebrating some of the achievements of Black People

After seeing the light, I’ve become very passionate about black history. This year’s Black History Month I made the utmost effort to attend anything I could that would inform me on the topic. I didn’t even know about Black History Month until a few years ago, and it certainly wasn’t given any attention at my schools, so it largely just seemed like a name to me, like World Siblings Day or something like that. But this year I made it count. The most enlightening event I attended this October was the ‘Dark Matter’ event organised by our university’s African and Caribbean Society. The special guests were poets Anthony Axanagorou and Akala, who rapped on deep-seated issues like racism and gender inequality. I myself also spoke at the event, addressing the issues you can find in my previous post.  

But it was Akala’s brilliant presentation on the contribution of African people to civilisation that really did it for me. From him I learnt:

• the early Egyptians were black like me ( post-mortems have in fact revealed they had more melanin in their skin than the average black person today)
• that they discovered 'Pythogoras’ theoreom' before Pythagoras was born
• they were the first to discover that the Earth revolved around the Sun
• About the Walls of Benin (built in what is now Nigeria), which spanned the incredible distance of 10,000 miles. They were sadly destroyed by the British during colonisation.
• About the astounding intricacies of the architecture of historical buildings in the vast continent
• And much more!

If you'd like further information on these aspects of history, Akala's reading list may be useful: http://illastate.posthaven.com/black-african-history-month-reading-list

Through Akala we learnt that black people have history too!! Black people also achieved incredible feats which have contributed to civilisation as a whole. Black people are part of world history. The only reason Black History Month exists is that black people are excluded from the rich tapestry that is global history. So we’ve had to make our own tapestry. I long for the day when we don’t need to be a separate entity because we’ll be included. I long for the day when we don’t have to have civil rights activists because we will all have the same rights we deserve.  

Nobody is born racist. Racism is an evil that is diffused by those whose power it sustains. What we need to do is educate people so that they don’t live their lives with this ignorance and make lives horrible for others. If you want to be filled with hope for the next generation and be assured that not everyone holds these malicious views, then you may like to watch this video: Kids React Cheerios Advert

And finally, if you believe that what I’m standing for is worth any value, then please sign this petition to educate people on black history! 

https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/60635

Thank you.