Why I support Black Lives Matter

I’ve been made rather uncomfortable recently by the way in which white middle class people have been talking about BLM and poverty – ignoring the ‘all lives matter’ crowd there has definitely been a significant amount of white middle class people in support of BLM acting as if racism is created and maintained by the poorest or implying that mass poverty would be okay if it was racially balanced. There might be a certain truth to the idea that in the upper echelons of society don’t care who you are as long as you’re a bastard, but this doesn’t mean that the entire system isn’t rigged to favour white people or that the richer someone is the less racist they are. An idea I see amongst lots of white middle class people is that the fight should be to allow BAME participation in neoliberalism not questioning the society which has created this situation or looking at the specifics of anti-black racism in the UK. We cannot fix the system by reforming it to be more ‘meritocratic’ because the idea of a meritocracy fundamentally rests on the notion that social inclusion must be earnt and hierarchical. Moreover, it is not the case that BAME individuals have been ‘excluded’ from participating in society; this country could not function and would not exist without BAME people – what we have to consider is that the areas of participation made available have and continue to be fundamentally exploitative and escaping this has further been made incredibly difficult due to significant violence at the hands of the state and others – something which has had specific effects for black people in this country.

Currently I’ve been wondering what I can do to support BLM as I’m soon heading back to live with my immediate family, two of which are in the high risk covid-19 category so I will not be able to go to the protests in London. I’ve been sharing a lot on social media, but this feels performative and like I should be doing a lot more. Especially since I have noticed people who I believe have had racist attitudes sharing and writing long posts about things – I do recognise that this could be a more positive thing for their personal development as I myself have said, felt, and believed things which I have come to believe were racist and I’m fully aware that being Anti-Racist entails combating racism wherever you find it, even within yourself. My concern is that it’s incredibly weird to me when I see people who have so far devoted their 20s to travelling to ‘find themselves’ in other (almost universally brown) cultures, or people who used to consistently shout at black people in school over anything they could writing or sharing long posts about BLM and getting loads of likes for it – are they absolving themselves of responsibility?

It became very apparent to me at sixth form that I was benefiting from structural racism when I was an average student who turned up over an hour late every day, constantly left to get high, and even turned up to lessons high yet I didn’t get in any trouble for this whilst many of my non-white peers who I believe were smarter than me did. I ended up studying Philosophy and Politics at Leeds and had naively expected people to have some kind of knowledge of these issues when I came there, but instead I was immediately put in a flat of people who would constantly go out and then come home joking about how one of them “got with a choco”. When I confronted them about this one of them said to me, despite nothing of the sort being mentioned, “can I just say that black people call each other n*gger”. Moving from an environment of high diversity to one of very low diversity was super difficult for me, and to a massive degree I regret having chosen to do so – yet there have been benefits to going to a university outside of London in learning about the ignorance a lot of Londoners have about the rest of the country but the fact that I was capable of benefiting from this is definitely privileged. I remember in school people telling me they were scared of applying to universities outside of London because of the lack of diversity, and whilst I do recognise that many of my non-Londoner friends might be uncomfortable with this I think it is important to recognise that the student body of UoL is mainly white people from the home counties and diversity becomes a massive issue when we live in a structurally racist society.

At this point it would be important to mention experiences I have had at university relating to my mother being Latina, but ultimately we are white and neither of us will ever have anything like the experience of being black in this country. I have always been able to walk through life appearing as a white English person and had the day to day benefits of living like this – I do think talking about my interactions with racist attitudes endemic to English society would be useful for helping people to recognise how even people who think of themselves as non-racist uphold such a system. In my first year at university I dated a boy for about 6 months who had taken a gap year across Latin America and studied Spanish, he on multiple occasions told me that I should shut up about my mother being from Argentina and hated the idea that I was at all Latinx because he liked to see himself as having a deep connection to that culture despite being a well off English boy from Guildford. He didn’t like the idea that I could be Latinx and not speak Spanish (or only very broken Spanish) when he could and wasn’t– weirdly pushing a whole cultural background onto language and not recognising that it was experiences of racism that ultimately led my mother to making the decision not to talk to us in Spanish as children. Other experiences would be me and my siblings having noticed that people in the UK generally believe that Latinx people are more emotional and erratic, and constant bad faith questions from other politics students about my opinion on the Falklands War when they have discovered my heritage (some individuals even asking me literally every time we spoke).

We’ve been living in very weird political times, and we all need to make sure we push for real change but remember we should be following the leadership of those fighting for their civil rights. Yes there are lots of white people living in poverty and social issues should be understood intersectionally, but it is time to follow black leadership– race shouldn’t be side-lined as a secondary issue and solidarity with BAME people shouldn’t mean adding an incredibly general sentence about race to your anti-capitalist statements. I for one have had more effective and constructive conversations with non-white people about how poverty has affected my family’s life than I have ever had with middle class white people (many of whom simply would not believe me as I didn’t fit their narrative of what a poor person should look/act like) and I don’t believe this is coincidental. Painting the poorest as racist has had untold benefits to the wealthy in this country, most recently creating a false narrative between the ‘white working class’ and immigrants to ignore the real perpetrators of economic violence. The most powerful racists in this country stand behind closed doors trying to push poorer people to be angry at those in their community who look or sound different to them for their own personal gain and absolve middle class people of any responsibility. The younger generations have been far more ready to question how democratic the UK really is, and the rise of protest movements that ignore the formal channels for political engagement prove this – we should be following those who’ve never had any reason to accept illusions about the UK’s nature.