What I’m writing, reading or thinking and what other people have written or thought, painted, made or designed: things I would love to have made, in a parallel universe where time is infinite and all things are possible.
In the Bleak Midwinter – words by Christina Rossetti and music by Gustav Holst (it has to be Holst for me) – is my favourite Christmas carol. I have a memory of singing it as a child beside my father in the gallery of the church we used to walk to. It always makes me cry because it’s so very beautiful – the giving of our hearts – and because of that long-ago memory.
Rossetti called it, simply, A Christmas Carol.
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone.
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter long, long ago.
Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain.
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter, a stable-place sufficed
Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.
Enough for Him whom Cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay.
Enough for Him whom angels fall down before
The ox and ass and camel, which adore.
Angels and Archangels may have gathered there
Cherubim and Seraphim thronged the air.
But only His mother in her maiden bliss
Worshipped the Beloved, with a kiss.
What can I give him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would give a lamb.
If I were a wise man, I would do my part.
Yet what I can, I give Him, Give my heart.
By Christina Rossetti
Public Domain. Source: The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine vol. 3 (Scribner & Co., 1872)
Elsewhere Richardson talks about wild and stubborn hope. I love that phrase.
A friend of mine sent Blessing when the World is Ending to me a few days ago. It feels right for our times.
Blessing When the World Is Ending
Look, the world
is always ending
somewhere.
Somewhere
the sun has come
crashing down.
Somewhere
it has gone
completely dark.
Somewhere
it has ended
with the gun,
the knife,
the fist.
Somewhere
it has ended
with the slammed door,
the shattered hope.
Somewhere
it has ended
with the utter quiet
that follows the news
from the phone,
the television,
the hospital room.
Somewhere
it has ended
with a tenderness
that will break
your heart.
But, listen,
this blessing means
to be anything
but morose.
It has not come
to cause despair.
It is simply here
because there is nothing
a blessing
is better suited for
than an ending,
nothing that cries out more
for a blessing
than when a world
is falling apart.
This blessing
will not fix you,
will not mend you,
will not give you
false comfort;
it will not talk to you
about one door opening
when another one closes.
It will simply
sit itself beside you
among the shards
and gently turn your face
toward the direction
from which the light
will come,
gathering itself
about you
as the world begins
again.
October is Black History Month in the UK. But obviously Black History should be taught and celebrated every day of every year in history lessons in our schools, in everyday conversation, in stories, in music and song, in any way at all, everywhere in our lives.
The theme this year is Reclaiming Narratives #reclaimingnarrativesbhm : there are many reclaimed narratives here, including the fact that many many Black people were killed by Hitler and the Nazis during the Jewish Holocaust. It’s written by Charmaine Simpson. She’s the Chief Executive and co-founder, with her husband Mark Simpson, of Black History Studies.
Since 2018 the brilliant and fearless Nova Reid has curated and run her life-changing, heart-and-eye opening anti-racism course, Becoming Anti-Racist with Nova Reid which educated mostly-white folk like me about racism, about becoming anti-racist and about so-often-white-erased Black History and Black Narratives. Recently, and very sadly, she decided to let her course go – unless you’re part of an organisational team. If your team genuinely wants to engage consistently with anti-racism work, see here.
Earlier in the year, Nova asked me to do a series of interviews called Student Confessions with graduates of her anti-racism course. They make inspiring reading. But when she decided to let her anti-racism course go she asked if I’d do one last interview, with her. It’s from her heart. You can read it here. Among many things, including how Black people have had to, Understand you – a collective white you – in order to survive racism (when I asked how come she knew us so well and I, to my shame, knew Black people so little). She also said:
I’ve loved reading about the impact of the course through Student Confessions … it’s been profound and I am very proud – but in that time I also realised this chapter has ended for me. I’ve given so much of me, it’s time to move on, give myself the space do something else. Something more generative. I am excited!
So … you can’t sign up for Nova’s anti-racist course now, but you can sign up for Charmaine and Mark Simpson’s Introduction to Black History Studies Course. To begin to better understand the Black Narrative, and Black History. To bring it out from the shadows that we white people have consigned it to.
You could also read any and all of these:
PS: Added at the end of October: if you’d like to support Black-owned-and-run businesses in Black History Month – or at any time – this list of Black-owned-and-run businesses in the US, the UK and the Netherlands might help.
It’s been an uphill battle to convince policy-makers to act and to convince the public of the truth of human-influenced climate-change since Stott began work at the Hadley Centre in 1996. Along the way, he and his fellow scientists have been ambushed at a conference between Russian scientists and British scientists to discuss climate change. The Russian scientists were marginalised while the British scientists were confronted by climate sceptics who accused them of, among other things, behaving like the scientists in Nazi Germany, who supported eugenics. They’ve been rubbished in the media: in the Daily Mail, David Bellamy wrote that global warming was ‘a load of poppycock’. George Monbiot wrote about that here. And much more denying has been going on.
But since Peter Stott joined the Hadley Centre in 1996 he and his colleagues have looked not only at future weather patterns, but at what has happened in the past. By simulating past temperatures, including all the possible factors that could expain climate change, like El Niño, if they left greenhouse gasses at the concentrations they were in pre-industrial times and took out all human factors, they found they got nothing like the actual observed warming. It was only when human influences were included that global warming could be explained. Still they faced denial. But as Peter Stott listened to the climate deniers he realised they were far better storytellers than the scientists. Climate-change scientists often lost their audiences in a maze of depressing facts and figures, while the climate deniers convinced their audiences with wrong, but entertaining, stories.
So Stott decided to tell stories too. He learned to write popular science – where the story and the characters are just as important as the scientific details – and published a book, Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial. He writes about the process of telling the story of climate change here and he and his wife, Pierette Thomet, created Climate Stories where people sing and write poems and make music about the climate and most importantly how they feel about climate change. Stott realised when he set up Climate Stories that scientists also needed to think about how they feel about their science, as well as thinking about the science itself.
The more heartfelt climate-change stories we tell, stories that include the science that explains how we humans have caused climate change (the evidence is incontrovertible now) and how we feel about it, the quicker we’ll understand what we must do to adapt: whether it’s how we travel, what we eat or how we heat our homes. And more. We can make these small changes and make a very large difference.
This, one of the many poems, stories and drawings in the Climate Stories book, made me think and feel about what I can do to help restore our planet. See what it does for you.
If you haven’t seen ORIGIN – Ava DuVernay’s film about Isabel Wilkerson’s life and why and how she came to write CASTE – I urge you to. If you have seen it, I’d love to know how it made you feel, what it made you think and, most importantly, what it made you do or think about doing.
CASTE – in case you don’t know – is about the hidden caste system, the rigid hierarchy of human rankings that underpin any and all forms of human-imposed superiority over other humans, including the demonisation of the Jewish race that led to the holocaust; the dehumanisation of Black people that is racism and the dehumanising Indian caste system. But Wilkerson’s thinking is based on caste (not racism) because, as she says in the film:
Racism as the primary language to understand [the imposition of inferiority / superiority] is insufficient.
When Wilkerson went to India she witnessed the imposition of superiority and inferiority among people whose pigmentation is similar. She witnessed caste.Here’s DuVernay talking about the film, about Wilkerson and how her thoughts and ideas ‘could be formative to us, especially in these [run-up to the US election] times’ and how DuVernay made ORIGIN so more of us would become aware of how Wilkerson is thinking and more of us would ask ourselves ‘What can I do?’
DuVernay suggests – as Nova Reid does – that we use the skills we already have when we’re asking ourselves what we can do about racism, the caste system or any form of human-imposed superiority. DuVernay makes films, so she made ORIGIN to spread Wilkerson’s ideas. I write so I write here about what I’m discovering about my own racism and how to dismantle it (Nova Reid’s course, Becoming Anti-Racist with Nova Reid, and her book, The Good Ally, have been instrumental) and I find ways to stand in solidarity with Black people against racism through organisations like Stand Up to Racism among other things.
A couple of weeks ago some friends suggested we see ENGLISH, by Sanaz Toossi, at the Kiln Theatre. It’s finished its run now, but if you see it advertised anywhere, go.
This is its effect: ENGLISH shows how it feels when you don’t belong; when you feel ashamed you can’t manage another language; when you can’t express yourself easily; when you want to talk to your own family in another language and they stop talking to you, because you can’t speak the other language well enough. ENGLISH shows how humiliating it is when other people laugh at your attempts to speak a new language; how much courage it takes to speak another language; what an omnipresent and potent instrument language is and how small and futile, how useless, how homesick you feel when you can’t speak let alone think fluently in a language different from the one you were born hearing.
Characters in the play speak English always, except at the very end, but when they’re speaking in their native Farsi, their English is fluent and quick, exasperated and funny, natural and we understand who they are; when they’re speaking in English their words are accented and halting, the phrases they learn often have little subtle meaning (they’re in a class to learn basic English) and it’s very difficult to get a sense of who they are.
ENGLISH shows how it feels to be homesick for your own language; how it feels to need to migrate but how the new language alienates you before you even arrive in the new country; how it feels when your name is mangled by people who can’t be bothered to learn to say your name properly (one character says, ‘Our mothers get to name us. Not foreigners’); how the loss of language is also the loss of land and family and culture and jokes and the ability to express yourself easily without being laughed at for the wrong reasons: for making mistakes in a language that you haven’t yet got to grips with, but the people listening to you don’t allow for that. How you forget who you are in a different language; how sad, how infuriated, how helpless you feel when you can’t make yourself understood but you long for connection.
Find ENGLISH. It will break your heart and show you that the person who doesn’t speak the language you speak fluently is just as complex, just as heartbroken, just as loving and lovable, just as funny and full of insight, just as thoughtful and full of longing to communicate as you are.
It takes 25 minutes to watch this video. It takes a lifetime to remain committed to anti-racism. But this person’s journey from white supremacy to anti-racism shows us just how essential it is that we all begin that journey.
Here’s an extract from the book’s blurb: This is a thoughtful, insightful, and moving account of a singular life, with important lessons for our troubled times. R Derek Black can trace a uniquely insider account of the rise of white nationalism [white supremacy], and how a child indoctrinated with hate can become an anti-racist adult. Few … have ever made so profound a change.
But many must. And one of the ways we can begin our anti-racism journey is to sign up for Nova Reid’s wise, compassionate, kind, thoughtful, well-researched and totally transformative Becoming Anti-Racist with Nova Reid.
At this time of year I often post about RMS Titanic.
Last year’s post remembered the Welsh Able Seaman, Thomas Jones, who captained Lifeboat Number 8 – the lifeboat that carried my great-grandmother, Noël Rothes, and twenty-four others to safety on the terrifying night when Titanic sank.
But when I was invited by Fred Olsen Cruise Lines to do my Titanic talk on board the Borealis this month, I didn’t think I’d be posting about it because I didn’t think I’d be doing the talk. If I was a passenger on a ship, I wouldn’t want to hear about another ship that sank with the loss of more than 1,500 lives, while I was sailing.
But I was wrong.
The Borealis’s first port of call was Belfast and many passengers planned to visit Titanic Belfast while they were there. Just as many came to hear my talk the day before we arrived.
It was confirmation of what I’ve realised over the years I’ve done this talk: many other liners have sunk and many people have died as a result, but the reason the Titanic disaster looms so large in our memories and people want to hear about it again and again and again, is that it’s a perfect storm of arrogance (on the part of the White Star Line management, Titanic’s owners, who believed Titanic’s design could withstand collisions and couldn’t sink); complacency (of the White Star Line Chairman, Bruce Ismay, who dismissed a boat-deck design that would have carried enough lifeboats. He said the extra lifeboats would, ‘Clutter up the beautiful open expanse of the upper deck where first-class passengers would want to stroll’); carelessness (with which passengers, particularly third-class passengers, were treated: there was never a safety drill so, after Titanic hit the iceberg, third-class passengers – who’d been kept locked down in their quarters to comply with an American immigration law – didn’t know their way up to the boat deck, and many of them were emigrants so they didn’t speak English well enough to understand what they were being asked to do); and hubris (how dare a shipping line declare its liners unsinkable? And what on earth made other shipping lines, whose ships could have come to Titanic’s rescue, think closing their brand new Marconi (radio) rooms at 11.30pm was a good idea? Titanic hit the iceberg at 11.40pm).
No Titanic passenger was immune from the White-Star-Line-created perfect storm: the unimaginably rich died beside emigrants travelling to America full of hope for a better life; teachers died beside stokers; engineers beside cabin stewards. And the vast majority of the 1,500-plus people who died were men, 1,350-plus of them: men who’d been asked to stand back so that the women and children could board the far-too-few lifeboats first.
‘They were brave men all,’ as my great-grandmother said, ‘who stood back so that the women should have a chance to live. Their memories should be held sacred in the mind of the world forever.’
Titanic had approximately 2,240 people on board and 16 lifeboats that could hold 1,178 human beings. Borealis had around 1,995 people on board and 16 lifeboats that can hold 2,400 human beings. As they say, do the math.
A master mariner commented, after my talk on board Borealis, that the fact that the White Star Line calculated the number of lifeboats Titanic should carry based on the tonnage (10,000 tons) written into law at the time, instead of Titanic’s actual tonnage (46,000 tons) was arrogance personified. If they’d used her actual tonnage they’d have carried enough lifeboats for every single person on board.
I could go on, but I won’t.
The only good thing that emerged from the tragically high and absolutely avoidable number of deaths, was that Maritime Law was changed very soon after Titanic sank. This means that the mortal sins committed by Titanic’s owners (and other shipping lines) can no longer be committed, without breaking the law and facing prosecution.
I took part in Nova Reid’s series of Student Confession Interviews after graduating from her deeply affecting, life-changing course: Becoming Antiracist with Nova Reid. The Course altered the way I live my life and transformed my attitudes and my core beliefs about racism. I discovered and dismantled so much both internally and externally, including the fact that racism is invented. White men from Linnaeus to Blumenbach and de Gobineau categorised human beings by their skin colour, and ascribed moral qualities to those colours. But as Nova’s Course shows us, not only is that nonsense, but we’re all descended from the same Black woman:
Mitochondrial Eve lived between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago in southern Africa. She was not the first human, but every other female lineage eventually had no female offspring, failing to pass on their mitochondrial DNA. As a result, all humans today can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to her.
You can read my Student Confession conversation here, or an introduction to it here on Nova’s Instagram page. There’ll be more of these conversational confessions with graduates of Nova’s Antiracism Course on her Student Confessions journal in the coming weeks.
As I wrote here, for anyone wanting to become an ally to People of Colour, I highly recommend Nova’s book The Good Ally, but even more importantly, for white people who don’t know where to begin with antiracism work, who may even be afraid of beginning antiracism work (I was) Nova’s kind, compassionate, never-shaming, never-blaming, mind-and-heart opening, collectively-healing antiracism course about why the white race wrongly became the default race in so many parts of the world, and why so many of us well-meaning white folk still carry subconscious-but-enduring racism inside us that harms People of Colour, and how to unlearn our subconscious racism, Nova’s Becoming Antiracist with Nova Reid is an essential mind- and heart-opener. A collectively-healing course for every single one of us.
Becoming Antiracist with Nova Reid https://novareid.learnworlds.com/
The Good Ally https://www.novareid.com/the-good-ally
I don’t know about you, but I feel Spring begins when it starts to feel a little warmer and when the
are beginning to come out. But according to those who measure these things, it’s not quite that simple.
There’s Astronomical Spring which depends on the tilt of the Earth in relation to its orbit round the sun because, of course, the seasons are connected with temperatures. So, this year, Astronomical Spring begins on 20 March and ends on 20 June. But then wouldn’t you say that mid-June is very close to mid-summer, on 23-24 June?
Is based on the annual temperature cycle and measures the meteorological state, as well as coinciding with the calendar to determine a clear transition between the seasons.
So that’s temperature, forecasting and … calendar. But:
The meteorological seasons consist of … four periods made up of three months each … making it easier for meteorological observing and forecasting to compare seasonal and monthly statistics. By the meteorological calendar, spring will always start on 1 March; ending on 31 May.
But if the dates of the seasons are set, how can they be seasonal?
And then of course there are the Equinoxes (and the Solstices) – which fall on almost but not always exactly the same dates as the Astrological Seasonal dates:
The Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere occurs twice a year around 20 March (the spring equinox) and around 22 September (the autumn equinox).
All the links above are to Meteorological Office websites.
I think I’ll stick with what’s flowering when, and how the weather feels. Don’t you?
There are studies that show what happens to couples on Valentine’s Day: the less attachment-avoidant among us fare better, as you might guess, and some of us break up. But what if the relationship is between a person and an emotion?
My shame and I have been strongly-attached for decades. But now we’re breaking up. I know my shame will always lurk in the shadows, but what shame hates is the spotlight, attention, being talked about, kindness, understanding, empathy and love. Shame doesn’t want to have a reasonable, let alone a kind conversation with the person it’s attached to, it only wants the blaming judgemental kinds of conversations. And shame absolutely doesn’t want a public conversation of any kind. Which is why I’m breaking up with my shame in public.
I didn’t realise shame and I had such a strong attachment until shame began to detach: until I began to feel more clearly, speak more clearly, hear and see more clearly, without shame blurring my focus and making constantly negative judgements. Until I began, as Nova Reid would say, to get curious about the causes of my shame. But because shame and I have been bedfellows for so long, shame’s detachment has been a long time coming.
I have Nova Reid to thank for my recongition of my relationship with shame: in her life-changing antiracism course, Becoming AntiRacist with Nova Reid, and in her book The Good Ally, she addresses shame, because shame and racism, shame and white supremacy, are inextricably bound together. Nova writes, in The Good Ally, in Chapter 6: ‘Moral Monsters: Racism and Shame’:
The relationship between shame and racism is clear. At the root of racism is fear of the other and fear of social rejection. [And later in the chapter]: Are you [white people like me] personally responsible for slavery and what your [white people’s] ancestors did? Absolutely not. However, it is this barbaric history, these acts of dehumanisation and consciously, wilfully and continuously not challenging these events that maintained white supremacy, which remains a social issue. Which you [white people like me] will, by default, because of what you have inherited, continue to benefit from. Without question, this realisation will lead to deep-rooted feelings of individual and collective shame.
Chapter 6 of The Good Ally is also full of ways to acknowledge and face shame, and ways to build shame resilience, including talking to others on their antiracism journey, but with the caveat that I never try to speak about shame with random strangers, or anyone who isn’t safe because they may, in turn, shame me. And that I will never ever speak – without explicit permission and crystal-clear boundaries – to a Black person or a Person of Colour about the shame I feel because of my racism.
Nova got me recognising and talking about my shame. Thank you, Nova. Beginning to talk about shame is the beginning of releasing shame, the beginning of breaking-up with shame. It sounds obvious, but it isn’t easy to talk about shame because shame makes me feel bad so why on earth would I want to talk openly about feeling bad? Shame’s been banking on my silence for a long time. Just as white supremacy has. But my shame for my silence about racism, which is itself racist, got me recognising how shame has kept me silent in so many aspects of my life. But I won’t be silent any longer.
But if, she says, you put shame in a petri dish and dowse it with empathy it can’t survive.
So, on this Valentine’s Day, I’m sending my shame my empathy and my love ? knowing that, for you, my shame, that’s the same as saying, ‘You’ve taught me so much and I thank you for that. And I understand your desire to stay in touch. But ours is a dysfunctional relationship and so, dear shame, I’m breaking up with you. ’
Being kind on a regular basis can also improve happiness and reduce symptoms of anxiety. Mosley said:
Being kind to others has a profound effect on our own health and wellbeing as well as on theirs. In a 2023 study scientists randomly allocated people with mild depression, anxiety or stress to three groups. One group did three acts of kindness for five weeks; another group were asked to be more sociable: a final group did a written form of CBT. The scientists found that doing acts of kindness had the biggest effects on mood, significantly reducing anxiety and depression. They concluded that acts of kindness resulted in greater wellbeing benefits than established CBT techniques.
Brain scans show that when someone decides to be generous or to co-operate with others, an area of the brain called the striatum is activated – the same area that responds when we eat good food or take addictive drugs. Activating your striatum is believed to be the basis of the warm glow we get from being kind … but brain scans also revealed something rather surprising: kindness can relieve pain. Donating blood hurt less than having blood taken for a test, even if the needle was twice as big.
She’s discovered, incredibly that it can reduce chronic inflammation.
In two different studies, Inagaki told Mosley, people who gave help or support or kindness to organisations or family members had their blood drawn to assess an inflammatory marker called interleukin 6 or IL6. The studies found that being kind to more people and organisations – so friends and family but also volunteering – but not receiving kindness from those people or organisations is associated with lower inflammation.
It’s all about giving. It’s not about receiving.
The type of inflammation they looked at, systemic, chronic, inflammation predicts all the commonly-known diseases: cardiovascular disease, cancer, arthritis, type 2 diabetes and even stress and depression. There are also some larger epidemiological studies which show that those who give more live longer.
The things Inagaki’s studies recommend giving are small, and certainly not financial. Things like writing a note to a friend who’s going through a difficult time; baking something for a neighbour and leaving it on their doorstep. The kinds of things you’d like to receive yourself when times are difficult (or even when they’re not). The kinds of things that cheer you up. The kinds of things … .
And certainly not self-sacrificing things. This article, which references Inagaki’s two studies, warns that:
If you are too giving to others and you neglect yourself, then that could actually detract from your well-being.
So don’t sacrifice yourself. And don’t spend lots of money. Give small, and often, to help others. As I’m sure you do. But now we know that our giving, our kindness, helps us as well.
In all my 72 years I’ve never made a Christmas cake. When I was a child I was lucky enough to have them made for me but also, often, we bought them. And I’ve bought them ever since.
Always used dark rum from Guyana (her birthplace) … for a rich fruit cake that lasts a long time.
On 20 November I soaked 450g mixed dried fruit in dark Caribbean rum (you have to start early – but any seasoned Christmas-cake-baker would know that). The smell has been temptingly delicious and I did taste some – just the smallest amount – to make sure the fruit mixture was properly soaking, you understand … .
On 11 December I made the cake.
But you could leave the fruit soaking for another week.
And sometime between now and Christmas I’ll decorate it and we’ll eat it.
And I know – by the smells – it’s going to be delicious. Thank you, Helen.
On Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd October, in London, a conference to discuss Afrikan Reparations and to address the legacy of the trafficking and enslavement of peoples of Afrikan descent, of colonisation and colonialism, was held. I went, at the suggestion of the leader of the White Allies Network. I was humbled, informed, heart-broken and uplifted by what I heard.
When white people think about reparations or reparatory justice for people of colour, we tend to think about money. But although money is extremely important, it was rarely the first thing the speakers or delegates wanted.
This account of the conference doesn’t cover the vast array of subjects discussed, nor the rich and varied contributions made by the speakers and some of the delegates, because there were seventeen breakout sessions and each delegate could only choose four. But it is a digest of what I heard.
Reparative justice has to go much further [than financial compensation], it has to go towards equity, repairing all the damage that was done as a direct consequence of the trafficking and enslavement of Africans.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Labour MP for Streatham
Each morning, in the main hall, djembe drummers welcomed us and accompanied the speakers. Each day opened with a plenary, followed by smaller breakout sessions. The subjects covered ranged from: the law and reparative justice to cultural redress; faith, NGOs and reparatory justice to pan-Afrikanism; women’s rights; media and social transformation; community regeneration; heirs and allies; environmental reparations; political economy and social enterprise; international relations and geopolitics; education; racial justice and intersectionality; and more.
Many Black luminaries, young and old, spoke of the need for education of their own people about their own history before the damage could be undone. (There’s an agenda for the two days here which includes all the speakers’ names and titles. Diane Abbott was unable to attend the first day.)
Kimani Nehusi, a Professor at the Temple University College of Liberal Arts in Philadelphia, said:
If we don’t know how we suffered and how we continue to suffer, then we don’t know how to correct the damage.
Kobina Amokwandoh from the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Youth Forum said:
Everyone in this room has been miseducated … . There’s been historic opposition to us educating ourselves. We need that knowledge. We need to educate ourselves … . Young people around the world who look like me are killing each other because they don’t know who they are … . Education is preparation for reparations. Let each one teach one.
Education (and healthcare) was high on the list of essential reparations, education about Black history. On the second day, in the plenary session, the historian, Robin Walker told us how Afrikan expertise was stolen by white people. He said, ‘Enslavement didn’t just steal brawn, it stole brains.’ He said people of colour should know that Jack Daniels, Peter Rabbit, the combine harvester and the smallpox vaccination, to name a few, were all originally invented by Black people. But riches from these inventions have descended to white generations while poverty has descended to black generations because these inventions were attributed to white people when in fact they were invented by black people and appropriated by white people.
We are injured physicians who have it within ourselves to heal ourselves. We are our own liberators. No matter how sincere our allies, we must liberate ourselves. It is our duty to know our past and honour it; to know our present and forge it; to know our future and [work for it].
On the first day, in the plenary, Esther Stanford-Xosei, of Stop the Maangamizi (the Afrikan Holocaust, the genocide of enslavement; the Kiswahili term for the continuum of chattel enslavement, colonialism and neocolonialism) demanded reparations ‘On behalf of our ancestors’. She also talked, as Kobina did, about the difficulty of demanding reparations when you don’t know your roots. She quoted Marcus Garvey: ‘A people without knowledge of their history and culture is like a tree without roots.’ She talked about the Maangamizi Educational Trust and how the Maangamizi must be named. She said, ‘History is the bedrock of everything we’re doing. But,’ she said, ‘historicide is being committed: the erasure of the illustrious works of our forebears.’ The education system in the UK must recognise the Maangamizi.
Discussing Cultural Redress, Wangui Wa Goro, Professor of Translation Practice at SOAS, said, ‘We lost our tongues [our languages] at the hands of the oppressor. So we lost the ability to remember … . We were removed from our cultural systems.’ She said Liberated Zones, little pockets of reparations and reparative justice must be created, through language. She urged delegates to learn at least one Afrikan language.
At a Community Regeneration session, Nana Kojo Bonsu [Kojo], a delegate, but also the man who led the libation and the blessing on the conference at the beginning of the first day, said land and access to the land is so important. He said, ‘Without land you can’t develop. The restoration and restitution of land is essential. Anyone who offers financial compensation and not land, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.’
It’s impossible to talk about environmental justice without talking about cognitive and reparative justice.
She said, ‘We need to tackle climate change through system change – and reparatory justice.’ She said people must reclaim their land, and when they do that, or try to do that, it must be recognised that they’re not terrorists.
At the first plenary session, Kwami Kwei-Armah, Artistic Director of the Young Vic, talked about the importance of narrative. He said, ‘Narrative controls us, but Afrikans are perceived as inferior and the system supports this. This inferiority is bred into us. There’s a subconscious inferiority among black people.’ He grew up feeling ugly and that, he said, is narrative. ‘Narrative gives or takes power, gives or takes strength.’ He said enslaved people, after they landed on American shores, were ‘seasoned’, by the oppressor. He said, ‘They took away our names; they took away our culture; they took away our spirits; they took away our everything.’ He also said he wanted to make sure the reparations cause is fashionable, young, hot and revolutionary. To get and keep young Black people committed.
The Convenor of an education session, Preparation for Reparations, Dr Oli Harrison, said: ‘Schools in the UK are incapable of dealing with questions of reparatory justice [but] … we’re here today to bring forth the contradictions and to find harmony and ways forward towards reparative justice.’
Malik Al Nasir said, ‘Reparative Education must be taken [not given or requested].’ He said, ‘We need to work together to make a new approach to education. We need to popularise APPG-AR by lobbying our local MPs.’ And in the final plenary, among many other speakers, Esther Stanford-Xosei, who is also a member of the APPG-AR secretariat, said:
This project is not just financial – it’s an emancipatory and liberatory project. Reparations cannot be made only by a mere transfer of funds from the oppressor to the oppressed. Reparatory Justice must be driven by Afrikan Communities.
So, before money, came self-education and self-knowledge: Kobina’s, ‘Education is preparation for reparations’; education to counteract mis-education. Languages and narratives must be reclaimed; land must be restored; there must be equity and debt relief and the return of stolen artefacts and human remains. Governments must apologise for enslavement, and there must be financial reparations. For a sense of the reparations that were discussed at the breakout sessions I couldn’t attend, see the agenda.
Not everyone agreed on the order of reparations but, at the end of a Pan-Afrikanism session, a panellist said:
APPG-AR is the place where we can disagree collegiately – we need to create these spaces where we listen to each other and reason through our perspectives, if we are to become a force.
Appg-ar.org will be releasing footage from the conference soon. Here’s a link to videos of various conference sessions.
I’m sure the pursuit and enactment of these reparations will take time. But they must be enacted, if our world is to become a fairer, more equitable place.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy closed the conference with a vote of thanks to all who sponsored and supported it. She ended by reading the Conference Statement.
October is Black History Month in the UK, but David Olusoga, historian and broadcaster, and many many others, including me, think it’s well past time that British history included everyone who’s part of the UK’s history wherever it’s taught, read or written about. Our history is a shared history, a history that belongs to all of us. Olusoga writes:
Nobu was led onto the RAH stage by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonia Orchestra’s conductor, the hugely talented Domingo Hindoyan, but the kindness and tenderness with which he led Nobu to the piano and his gentle attention to him throughout the performance (and afterwards, when Nobu played a gloriously jazzy encore) was what struck me. Hindoyan’s combination of admiration and affection for an outstanding fellow musician was almost as moving as Nobu’s performance.
I don’t know how many of my tears came from the Concerto’s Russian melancholy and how many from Nobu’s courage, attack, virtuosity, sheer delight in playing and the fact that he’d learned this notoriously difficult piano concerto without being able to see the score. My other half looked up the way Nobu learns: other pianists record a work for him, left and right hands separately, onto cassette. They also record markings or codes or instructions from the composer. Nobu listens and learns from the sounds. He calls the cassettes, Music sheets for ears.
Concert pianists almost always play without a score – they memorise it – but to learn a piece without a score seems to me to be verging on the miraculous. Nobu had a way of moving his head rhythmically to the left when he wasn’t playing, when he was listening to the orchestral parts, as if he was the music itself. He’s a shining example of achieving what might seem, to many of us, impossible.
Flowers that find their way through stone or rock (or any apparently impenetrable surface) always touch my heart. They manage to flourish in the most (apparently) inhospitable places.
I’ve been rewriting a novel I thought I’d finished last autumn. But when I couldn’t sell it I did what I should’ve done before I tried to sell it: I asked fellow writer-readers to tell me, honestly, what wasn’t working. What they said showed me how angry I was about my subject matter. Anger is good, it can fuel action, but I’d failed to allow any flowers to find their way through the stone of my anger and give the novel the heart and the hope, the love and the compassion it needs.
I hope it won’t be too long before that novel, like these daisies, finds itself flourishing.
Thirteen Colonies were no longer subject (and subordinate) to the British monarch, George III, and were now united, free, and independent states.
Freedom from a colonial power and freedom from a monarch who lived thousands of miles away is a good thing. But what kinds of freedom did the Declaration of Independence offer the citizens of the states united by it?
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? … I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me.
Frederick Douglass, taken in the 1840s. From here, a site that suggests reasons for the number of photographs of Douglass that exist.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour forth a stream, a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and the crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
James Baldwin also believed in the need for fire. In The Fire Next Time, published in 1964, he wrote:
The American Negro … was once defined by the American Constitution as ‘three-fifths’ of a man. [A man] who, according to the Dred Scott decision had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. [The Dred Scott decision was an 1857 ruling, in the American Supreme Court, that held that the American Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent.] The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes … that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that … Americans have always dealt honourably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbours or inferiors. Baldwin ends the book with: If we – and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others – do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfilment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!
The song was Oh Mary Don’t You Weep, and the line that Baldwin ends his essay with comes from this verse:
God gave Moses the rainbow sign
No more water, but fire next time
Pharoah’s army got drownded
Oh Mary don’t you weep.
Two prominent men. Two prominent American men. Two prominent American Black men. With two dissenting points of view about American Independence.
Seventy-five years ago, on 22 June 1948, HMT (His Majesty’s Transport) Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks, on the River Thames. She was named, as many empire ships were, for a British river, in her case the River Windrush, a small Thames tributary. Windrush brought 492 passengers to Britain from several Caribbean islands including Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.
Photograph from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) here
The British government asked the Caribbeans to come, to help with post-second-world-war labour shortages. The hope-filled expressions and the excitement on the faces of those in the prow of Windrush breaks my heart, because we white people gave them a horrible reception. We met the Windrush Generation (those who arrived from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1971) with racism, dismissal and deprivation, instead of the jobs they were qualified for and the new beginnings: the prosperity and the equality they rightly expected from the Mother country.
And as if our white refusal to rent houses to the Caribbeans, our injustice, and our delegation of the worst jobs to them wasn’t enough, (for example, trained nurses cleaned toilets and mopped hospital floors instead of nursing) in 2012 the British government came up with the dreadful idea of making a hostile environment for immigrants without the required papers. This meant that many of the Windrush Generation, who’d arrived as children on their mother’s passports, or simply with landing cards, found themselves facing deportation back to Jamaica. Because, by then, the Home Office had destroyed thousands of landing cards and other records, so many [of the Windrush Generation] lacked the documentation to prove their right to remain in the UK.
The British state wrongfully detained or deported 164 people, with more leaving ‘voluntarily’ following repeated pressure from the Home Office – despite having a right to stay. The true scale of who was affected is still unknown. The independent review, chaired by Wendy Williams, an inspector of constabulary, says the scandal affected “hundreds, and possibly thousands, of people” who had their ability to work denied and their access to vital benefits or treatment wrongfully removed. At its most extreme, people “were deprived of their liberty.”
It’s like saying to your relations, ‘Come live with us, work with us, make new lives with us,’ and then saying, ‘Actually, we didn’t mean with, we meant for.’ And, after decades of treating these new relations appallingly badly, saying, ‘Actually, we didn’t even mean for. We meant, we don’t want you anymore.’
Here’s a short video of London teacher, Sara Burke, leading a Windrush Scandal protest in 2018. She’s the granddaughter of Jamaican immigrants who came to Britain during the Windrush era.
Despite all this, Jamaican-Britons have survived and thrived and contributed magnificently, beautifully and enduringly to Britain’s arts and culture, to academic life, to political life, business and the law, to fashion and invention, religion and sports, entertainment, writing and journalism. Here’s just one list.
In 1948 Andrea Levy’s father sailed from Jamaica to England on the Empire Windrush … her mother joined him soon after. Andrea was born in London in 1956, growing up black in what was still a very white England.
That comes from Andrea Levy’s website (sadly she died in 2019) but she was a wonderful writer who wrote poignantly-funny, thoughtfully-honest novels about the black British experience. One of them was Small Island, a novel set in 1948 and beyond, in Britain. It tells the stories of a family of black Jamaican-Britons and a family of white Britons and how welcoming (or not) the white families were to the black ones.
Image from Authors’ Lives, Andrea Levy, British Library here
Levy gave an interview to Sarah O’Reilly, an oral historian at the British Library for the library’s national archive series, Authors’ Lives in 2014. Among many recorded pieces, Levy said, in the one linked to the image above:
If you’re English, you have a sense of who you are, it comes to you … through the culture in which you live. When you’ve come from outside, or your parents have come from outside, that sense is lost and so you either take on this majority culture and say this is mine, or you have to seek out the one that has been lost to you. You have to seek it out yourself because nobody’s going to tell you the history of Jamaica in this country [Britain] … I’m still seeking it out.
In the Authors’ Lives interview O’Reilly describes Small Island:
It was inspired by Levy’s parents’ experience of moving to England and explores how migration shapes both those who travel to a new country and the people they come to live among.
It’s a wonderful novel, and also a play. I highly recommend both.
Lenny Henry (now Sir Lenny Henry) came to Britain from Jamaica on his mother’s passport, aged eight. In 1975, aged sixteen, he won New Faces and since then he hasn’t stopped working. He’s a writer, a philanthropist, one of Britain’s best-known comedians and an award-winning actor.
Between 28 April and 10 June, Henry directed and acted in his one-man show, August in England, his debut as a playwright. It’s about August Henderson, who, aged eight, comes to Britain from Jamaica with his mother, on her passport. It’s about his life, his loves, his children, his work and, tragically, about how the British government hounded him in later life and threatened to deport him, because, they claimed, he didn’t have the required documents to remain in Britain. August in England ends with filmed testimony from three Jamaican-Britons who were evicted from their homes, lost their jobs and suffered devastating and ongoing trauma as a result of the British government’s abject failure to admit they had caused the problem when they destroyed the landing cards and other records of the people they’d asked to come to Britain to help get the country back on its feet after the second world war.
The only way that we can make good on all those well-meaning statements about Black Lives mattering, is if the Establishment goes out of its way to empower those black lives and all those other minorities. True diversity is diversity of colour, diversity of experience, diversity of being … . When you get all those people at the table, there will be arguments, there will be banging of the table with fists, there will be walkouts, but oh my God, the brilliance that will come out of those conversations will blow you away … . And I assure you, when we get a big win, I will do a naked streak down Pall Mall! Watch this space.
Professor Robert Beckford, Professor of Black Theology at The Queen’s Foundation, together with his wife, Jennifer Beckford, have made a four-episode programme for BBC Radio 4 called Windrush, A Family Divided. She was born in Jamaica and then came to Britain. He was born in Britain, to Jamaican parents.
Professor Robert Beckford and his Jamaican-born wife, Jennifer Beckford. On their programme they argue the pros and cons of Windrush 75 years on. Image from here
Beckford and Beckford have argued about whether the Windrush Generation benefitted from coming to Britain or not, for twenty-three years. In the first episode, Jennifer Beckford argues that, ‘Excellent people were syphoned off from the Caribbean’, and that the people who came to Britain, ‘Should have stayed at home – or gone back – to create a vibrant and economically sound Jamaica.’
In an interview, in the first episode, with an uncle and aunt, Ken and Estelle, Robert Beckford hears how Ken was helped by his employer to buy a house (he couldn’t rent because very very few white people would rent to a black person). Beckford says to Ken, ‘You faced adversity and you overcame it. Windrush is a story of overcoming and striving and being successful.’ But there are also stories of people who ignored the call from Britain, stayed in Jamaica and have been just as successful.
Both the Beckfords agree that the Windrush generation had to do the heavy-lifting in Britain, so they didn’t have to: by heavy-lifting they mean paving the way, facing the kinds of discrimination and difficulty they never faced in the Caribbean, and, in some cases, being wrongly deported from Britain back to countries they barely remember or never knew. At the end of the first episode Jennifer Beckford asks, ‘Don’t you think our children and our children’s children will fare better in the Caribbean?’
Find out how their discussions develop in subsequent programmes on Mondays in June, at 11.00am here, or on BBC iPlayer anytime, here.
National Windrush Monument, a bronze sculpture by Basil Watson at Waterloo Station, London.
All the people described above are radiant planets in the Jamaican-British firmament. But until the day when every single Jamaican-British person (let alone all those whose families and ancestors originally came from other countries) … until the day when every single one is seen (August in London vividly shows how it feels not to be seen), until the day when every single one feels at home in Britain, feels welcome in Britain, is free to work, live and thrive in Britain, is empowered in Britain without any kind of hindrance or racist restriction or microaggression, white people must never stop working to make all British systems, the establishment, particularly, and every white person individually, antiracist.
And a PS: it’s looking more and more likely that Jamaica will decide to become a republic, perhaps as early as 2024. To paraphrase Lenny Henry, watch their space.
a lack of self-centredness … the ability to empathise with other people, feel compassion … and put [others’] needs before your own. It means … sacrificing your own well-being for the sake of others. It means benevolence, altruism and selflessness, and self-sacrifice towards a greater cause — all qualities which stem from a sense of empathy. It means being able to see beyond the superficial difference of race, gender or nationality and relate to a common human essence beneath them.
top: David Tennant, Ami Tredrea (in Good & The Good Person of Szechwan)
below: Florence Pugh & Morgan Freeman (in A Good Person)
below them: Ivanno Jeremiah (Retrograde)
David Tennant’s character, John Halder, changes chillingly from book-loving academic to book-burning SS officer; Ami Tredrea’s character, Shen Te, is given a large sum of money that she schemes and deceives with, in order to survive in a capitalist world; Morgan Freeman’s character, Daniel, is a recovering alcoholic who wants to help oxycontin-addicted Allison kick her habit (Allison is played by Florence Pugh) and Ivanno Jeremiah’s character is an imagined Sidney Poitier who, in reality, faced black-listing by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, but who, as his imaginary self in Retrograde, is presented with a contract by a big Hollywood studio which includes a clause that requires him to denouce Paul Robeson (his real-life much-admired friend).
All four characters are faced with temptations (power, money, alcohol and fame in that order) but all in the end resist and do the ‘good’ thing. Except John Halder, whose moral detachment and complete lack of empathy allow him to be seduced into joining the Nazi Party.
Shen Te realises she can’t be good all the time but she can be better; Daniel will always be tempted by alcohol but, because he knows exactly what it’s like to be an addict, by example he shows Allison it’s possible to recover, forgive and rediscover your better self. Sidney Poitier is subjected to abhorrent racism and emotional blackmail and, under severe racist pressure, considers signing the contract. But in the end he tears it up: he will not denounce his old friend for the sake of Hollywood fame.
None of these characters are good by default or by mistake. They’re all faced with complex dilemmas and they’re all tempted to do the wrong, the bad thing. But only one succumbs. What the three who come good have in common is that they, eventually, unearth the courage and the empathy to ditch their selfishness and put other people first.
I didn’t realise shame and I had such a strong attachment until shame began to detach: until I began to feel more clearly, speak more clearly, hear and see more clearly, without shame blurring my focus and making constantly negative judgements. Until I began, as 
