On race, place and privilege
As a white kid growing up in rural West Wales, racism wasn’t on my radar until the murder of Stephen Lawrence. The Met Police’s response told me there was a lot more going on than I had seen or understood.
In the last few years Brexit, Trump and the political fight for power has meant that the battle lines have been drawn in the culture wars. There are those who see nationhood as being drawn from a range of people and experiences, and those who seek to exclude others that they deem as being unlike them. As someone in the former camp, some of the rhetoric we have heard from the latter has been scary to behold.
Attachment to place
At the Research in Practice Leaders’ Forum, Jessica Prendergrast shared the excellent work that the Onion Collective have been doing in Watchet. Her work on Attachment Economics outlines our attachment to place, people and time. This made complete sense to me, yet my privilege came into focus when I read “Wales: Plural.”
Durre Sharwar shares her experience of growing up in Wales and pulls on the work of Irwin Altman and Setha Low. She writes about place attachment as “the ways in which people connect to various places, and the effects of such bonds in identity development, place-making, perception, and practice.” She shares her own experiences and the way that her family was made to feel in rural spaces:
“The unspoken bond between family members would let me know their discomfort and the stares that we got — that we often still get — as people of colour in green spaces.”
As someone who was once told that I was the “Welshest person in the world,” this feeling of disconnection from place really highlighted to me the advantages that I have when experiencing the environment of my community.
It really feels like there is no safe haven at the moment. My Twitter feed has become increasingly toxic over the last couple of years, so I can only imagine what online spaces feel like to minoritised colleagues. There have been campaigns to bring White Ukrainian refugees to the country, yet there has been endless debate around who gets to call themselves British, who gets to live here, and who gets deported to Rwanda.
Changes to how we work
Whilst the right have been using “woke” as a swear word, many inclusive approaches are starting to inform how we live and work together. When I first emailed Ahmina Akhtar, I noticed that her email signature shared how to say her name phonetically. I’ve now added it to my signature too. As a result, some people who’ve been saying my name wrong for years are now getting it right.
I’ve added my pronouns to my signature too. My name is unfamiliar to most people, and they often find it hard to picture who they’re corresponding with. This step has helped people to connect with me. But it’s also made me realise how often we put the burden of unpacking information at the door of minoritised colleagues. This tiny example showed me how much extra work our colleagues do to educate us, but the responsibility for the learning really lies with us as white allies. This post from Nour Sidawi contains so many useful resources to help us to educate ourselves, and there are some many other resources available at our fingertips. Twitter may be a hellscape, but it can also help us to see the world through other people’s eyes.
Our system is horrifically prejudiced when people like Child Q are degraded in the way that they were. As Nimal Jude said at the Research in Practice partnership conference earlier this year, the best time to start the change was yesterday, but the second best time is now.
