White Rules and ‘Little’ White Lies— What Has Changed?
When I came upon the true story about the 6 Chinese survivors of the sinking Titanic, by Andrei Tapalaga (see bottom of this page) I was kind of shocked. The story and, its suppression really affected me on many levels. First and foremost, the treatment of the Chinese men exposes the depths of the life-draining nastiness of white entitlement. When we hear of the atrocities of police brutality against people of colour and the recent shooting by a white man running wild and targetting ethnically-Asian women at work, when we hear of the far higher death rates of ‘minorities’, in the white-dominant societies, during disasters such floods, tornadoes, or currently, in the midst of the Covid health crisis, we can see evidence, clear as daylight, of the vicious inhumanity and ‘othering’, encountered by the Chinese survivors, is really really absolutely, continuing to this day. But wait. Is it continuing to this day? Apparently not, asserts the report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, led by Tony Sewell.
I think the account of the Chinese travellors, migrating to America, caught my attention by virtue of the fact that when we consider the thousands of articles and history books, not to mention the world famous film, about the sinking of the Titanic, the treatment faced by the Chinese passengers has been kept buried. I think these kinds of acts of ‘forgetting’, lie at the heart of how white power and it’s covert forms of supremacy, have been maintained, decade after decade.
So, according to the logic of white rule, these young men from China, who had bought tickets (and therefore were legitimately travelling on the Titanic) should have willingly let themselves drown because ‘obviously’, white Europeans are more deserving of life and should have been survivors, in their stead? Each of the Chinese men should have said to themselves, “Oh Great White Person, I should drown and die before you do. Please, take my place on the lifeboat.” I ask you, is this expectation not idiotic?
It seems that the heritage of enslaving, exploiting and policing of people of colour, lies only one hair breadth away from the Hollywood/London-shaped veneer of being a democracy. How many films glorify the white male fighting against the odds for freedom etc etc? This creates the mirage that the Anglo-American empire ‘obviously’, respects human rights. Look how, time after time, the weary white man has to heroically go to the rescue of something or someone, in these ‘tin-pot’ dictatorships. These are the nations full of Black, Brown and slant-eyed people, that Amerikkka mocks, yet whose dictatorships she (secretly) supports. How else are they going to sell their weaponry and obtain thousands of kinds of foods, minerals and that black gold, oil, so essential to the Western populations’ over-consuming lifestyle?
On the same day that I read Andrei Tapalaga’s article, I happened to watch a film set in the 1960’s called, ‘The Black Klansman’. The film includes an elderly black man describing to Black students how he, as a teenager, witnessed his friend’s lynching. Hearing about his young friend being tortured horrifically on the streets, white children being let out of school to see the spectacle, of his testicles being cut off, petrol poured over the tortured boy, how he was burnt slowly, deliberately, in order to prolong his agony, to death, as photographs were taken and then, these photos being sold as postcards … just made me feel physically sick.
Honestly, the more I learn about the hidden history of whites in general and white Anglo-Americans in particular, the more despicable they become in my eyes.
Hang on, though, it’s not really history is it? The extra-judicial killings of Black people and other people of colour, on the streets of Amerikka, just go on and on and on. Rest in Peace George Floyd. Here in the UK, we do get similar things happening. While the horrific case of the teenager, Steven Lawrence, waiting at a bus-stop and being killed by a white gang, gained publicity due to the heroic efforts of his family and friends, sustained over many years, there are killings that occur under the radar, quite regularly. There will be a short paragraph in the news, and then beyond the immediate family, it’s quickly forgotten. I think it’s fair to say, that minoritised communities in the U.K are less organised and more atomised and divided, than in the USA. But all across the Western Empire, unless your family is exceptionally courageous, articulate, and well-connected, your death at the hands of the police or a racist gang, is soon forgotten.
But somehow, Black Lives Matter protests also broke out in solidarity, here in the U.K last summer. I welcomed the exhilarating sight of young people of every hue, cooperating together to pull down the statue of a slave trader in Bristol and throw it in the river. Glorifying mass murderers, setting up memorials to them in public spaces, was part of a shameful history of exploitation. Could it be that finally, this perspective was now, no longer just that of the powerless few wierdos, hippies, and commies, at the margins of white society? What was the reaction of the government of the UK government to the street protests? Boris Johnson set up a commission to look into institutional racism.
That hand-picked set up, dignified by the name, ‘Commission’, has concluded some nine months on, that the U.K should serve as a beacon to other white-dominant nations, for its exemplary improvement in establishing equality for the BAME communities in the U.K. (BAME = Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic). The report even suggested that, given it was white working class boys who achieved the least academically, it was really time to give them more support. Thankfully, there are still people of integrity and honesty, of every hue, who dared to speak up and describe how this entire report is an ugly gaslighting, a suppression of the truth. From trade union leaders, to teachers in education, journalists in the media and representatives of the medical profession, people over the past few days, spoke out. to express their outrage. Many voices called the report, ‘an insult’.
Coincidentally, the very week that the report was published, a documentary had been released about the high maternal deaths of Black women in the U.K. Despatches revealed that Black women are four times more likely to die during or soon after childbirth. Also, in the same week, children of colour in London, had been protesting about school rules that humiliated those with Afro hair, and other instances of institutionally-driven harm.
On hearing the report’s results, I myself was speechless with anger. It was a mistake listening to summaries of the report on the news late in the evening, for I woke up in the middle of the night, in distress. My breathing was suffering. I lit a candle, took the inhaler, and made myself a hot drink to try and calm myself. But I could not stop recalling all the times I had been humiliated, slapped in the face and punched in the guts by white rule seeking to maintain its supremacy. All the times I had been disciplined and dismissed for opposing white managers’ poor treatment of students of colour. How, more than once, an unqualified or under-qualified white male, was given all my classes at college and I was made to feel redundant, unwanted, rejected. Yet, I was the one with the undergraduate degree in philosophy and social anthropology, a further degree in teaching and a Masters in Education, specialising in socio-linguistics. More importantly, studnets turned to me for support in relation to their experiences of racism. Because they felt I could be depended upon to represent them, I was more popular with the students than the white staff, year after year. And that was a problem, for the institution. Leaving my experience aside, I recalled the black manager, absent from work for months, with stress-induced illnesses, finally being placed on suicide watch. I could go on, sharing the experiences of my students from all over the world. Then there were the black colleagues who shame-facedly, ‘kept their head down’ fo rthey had children to support and I did not. it was easier for me to be ‘confrontational’. I hae spent the lockdown year, in recovery mode, very very quiet. Now, I was thinking, how could I continue to be silent in the face of this tortuous marginalisation and erasure of the experience of Black people and people of colour as they encounter entitled whites?
It’s the Internet that has brought something new to the equation. We are still in many ways, barred access to newspapers, journals, academia and publishing houses that are 95% white. But with websites like Medium, we are able to share our research and our life experiences.
Collaborators Sought
I have made a decision to honour those people of colour and seekers of justice of whatever complexion, including white allies, all of us who have been written out of the history books. I am going to write every single day for the rest of April, about the racism in the UK as I have directly experienced, or observed it. Perhaps, with the right collaborators, this will all come together in the form of a play or a book. Collaborators definitely needed!
Interesting word, that. It’s got two very distinct meanings. According to Collins dictionary,
- A collaborator is someone you work with to produce a piece of work, especially a book or research.
- A collaborator is someone who helps an enemy who is occupying their country during a war. In this sense, it means ‘a traitor’ or ‘turncoat’.
I want collaborators who seek to join hands to expose and dismantle white supremacist rule(s), not the kind of collaborators/commissioners of reports/writers of articles, printers of books and makers of films who clap and declare gushingly, ‘The Emperor has got the most beautiful clothes on’.
It’s true, something has changed since the sensibility that barred entrance to America to those Chinese survivors of the sinking Titanic. But it’s not the view that they did not deserve to live; we know that white lives are still valued more than Black lives and the lives of all other people of colour. While the Chinese as a nation, have recovered from the cruel, opium-induced weakness applied by the British, they are right now, facing a tide of hatred and increasing calls for sanctions. And see how the West is crying tears for the Uygur Muslims, that allegedly suppressed minority. Meanwhile, the torture and killing of dissenters, no matter how horrific, by the West’s puppet leaders in nations, like Saudi Arabia, matters not at all.
We know what will be next, English-speaking experts along with shipments of weapons will be covertly sent to that region of China. How many other regions of the world have been exploited and civil wars deliberately fomented by the white supremacists, under the guise of ‘human rights’? The tragic truth is that the manipulation of divisions between people, goading them into civil wars is a long -honed skill developed over centuries, by the Western colonial/imperialist powers.
Over the past decade or so, these manipulations and the arming of opposing factions, has resulted in the desperate migration of millions of people, out of Africa and the Arabic nations. At the same time, out of necessity really, the rewards and the space which White rule has always given to treacherous collaborators, both within and outside of its borders, has grown quite a lot.
My hope is that we who are not craven, opportunistic cowards, seeking a little comfort while the rest of the planet faces near unfathomable levels of catastrophe, on land, sea and air, we can join hands to erode the power of white supremacy. The life of the planet itself, depends on putting an end to the entitled greed that has manifested over the past four centuries of Western domination. It has become a life-threatening disease, percolating into an all-poisoning consumerism that ensures want and starvation everywhere else. In this, the average white person, part of the infrastructure, running schools, hospitals, the media, the police and other government bodies, is complicit. That’s what we call ‘white privilege’.
