Black Lives Matter

I was racking my brain to try and think of the first black person I ever met. I went on holiday to England when I was ten and there were certainly a lot of Caribbean’s living in the streets around my Aunt’s house. My brother also had a Nigerian friend in college who called down to our house once or twice and sparked off lots of ‘behind the curtain’ curiosity from our neighbours.

Then I remembered a story my Mother used to tell me about the moment of my birth. She loved regaling her five kids with tales about stitches in places sons didn’t want to think about and blood soaked sheets. In my case, the main point of the story was that Mam had paid for an expensive doctor who was supposed to be present at my delivery. But I popped out early and so the first person I saw in this wide old world was an African midwife as I dropped into her welcoming hands.

I wish I knew her name. I wrote to the hospital when I was 18 to ask for the details of my birth. I spent the first three weeks of my life there and wanted to find out what was wrong. It turned out to be pretty mediocre but what struck me was that it mentioned the white middle aged male Doctor who never showed up, but not the black midwife who did all the work.

I like to think that I’m pretty ‘woke’ in respect of Black Lives Matter. I’ve certainly tried to avoid racism and treat everyone equally. But I don’t pretend to be perfect.  When I was twenty two I left the mono culture of 1980s provincial Ireland and headed for the bright lights of London. I got a job with an Insurance Company on the outskirts of the City. There were 120 of us in the department, including twenty Accountants who held all the management positions. All twenty (including my then young self) were white males. There was a smattering of Asians among the general staff but only one black person. His name was Leroy and I became quite friendly with him. He HYe

 He had an easy going manner and a sense of fun that mirrored my own Irish personality. He was also a big hit with the ladies on our regular social outings and I clung to him then in the hope that I might gather some of the crumbs that fell from his table.

I have to say that I envied him in some ways. He was relaxed, cool and better dressed than anyone else on our floor. But I ended up sitting beside him at lunch one Friday, just after the annual promotions had been announced. He wasn’t his normal ebullient self and I made the mistake of asking what was up. I didn’t get up for another hour or so as Leroy downloaded centuries of racial oppression and how it stopped him from ever getting a promotion. I tried to be as empathetic as possible, but I’ll admit that inside my opinions were mixed. I was a young Irishman who grew up in a working class background and fought hard to qualify as an Accountant and to get to the position I held in work. I figured if he’d worked a bit harder he could have achieved the same.

If I was charitable, I could argue that I didn’t see his skin colour and thought he was just the same as me. But time has taught me that the world isn’t that straight forward. I faced a few hurdles growing up as a working class lad in 1980s Ireland. But it was still a world where an Accountancy office was willing to offer an apprenticeship to a seventeen year old from the poor part of town. And when I got my qualification and headed to London, my social background was unknown to those I met. I could hide my thick tongued accent if needed and even when I didn’t, a rough working class background held a certain cache in the burning embers of Thatcher’s reign.

Leroy couldn’t hide his colour and looking back now, there were lots of idiots promoted at that company, when he was stuck in the same role for years. He faced the challenge of being working class and black and that meant he had all my challenges and many more.

Class and classism has always been a burning issue within me. I used to think that if we could solve inequality and class discrimination, then racism and sexism would be automatically fixed too. But poor white people don’t get stopped and searched by the Police and don’t get their necks knelt on by the cops. Skin colour and sex are physical manifestations and can trigger responses on sight. Discrimination based on class usually starts with your address or the school you went to. A well-dressed working class person can often pass for middle class. It’s harder for a black person or a woman to hide their true selves. Not that they should have to anyway.

I have to accept then, that while I grew up with a sizable chip on my shoulder based on my social class, that truth is that I am now a middle aged white man with tremendous privilege. I have lived in five different countries and never once questioned my entitlement to live in any of them. I can go wherever I like at whatever time of night I like and not be accused of bringing harm on myself if anything happens to me. I’ve earned some of this privilege by studying and working hard, but I have to accept that I was born with much of it.

When I popped out of Mam into the welcoming arms of that African mid-wife I was a certified white male, born into a western European country. She had none of those benefits and that’s not right and needs to change.