2 Having difficult conversations about race

Having conversations about race, racism, anti-racism and anti-Blackness can be really uncomfortable! So why do it? The next video is why!

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Transcript: Video 3 Christian Foley

CHRISTIAN FOLEY:

It doesn’t sound frightening does it, a 10-year-old boy writing a poem entitled, Black Lives Matter? Do you know how many people were frightened by that to the point of hate and death threats? Many.

That is the country that we live in, and it’s a country that is kind of like a parallel world. You might not even know it exists. This is one of the best things I’ve ever read. One of the most necessary pieces of work that’s been written. We have to share this. It’s sad that it’s had to have been written, especially by a child.

We were even getting comments on BBC Bitesize, which is a website for children, by white supremacists who would come there, specifically to write these long essays. I learned a lot about white supremacy by responding to these comments. They were talking about the wildest theories I’ve ever heard and attacking a young boy because they were scared of him. And it showed every single point that he was trying to make about the racism that he felt and experienced growing up. It completely proved his point.

End transcript: Video 3 Christian Foley

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Video 3 Christian Foley

As Christian passionately says, a 10-year-old Black boy received hate mail and death threats from white supremacists for writing a poem entitled ‘Black Lives Matter’. Racists want to shut any positive conversation about race down and this is normally done with real or imagined threats of violence.

After the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, with many organisations posting black squares in solidarity, Wilson and Jones’ article (2020) ‘Dear senior university leaders: what will you say you did to address racism in higher education?’ [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] directly challenged what is mainly white senior leaders of universities on what they would do to tackle institutional racism when the global light no longer shone on the horrors of George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests.

Black feminist writer Toni Morrison (1992) describes the invisibility of whiteness as a fishbowl that contains fish and water. The fishbowl itself provides meaning as ‘a fishbowl’ as it is the ‘thing’ that contains the water and the fish, but one invariably focuses on the fish swimming in the water, and not the constraints or structure of the fishbowl itself.

Although George Floyd’s murder was in the US, anti-Blackness is universal. Statements are often made such as: ‘What has slavery got to do with me/the twenty-first century?’ and ‘What has George Floyd got to do with the UK? It’s different here’.

You’ll next watch a video clip by George The Poet, who challenges the view that racism is worse in the US. Reflect on the example that Christian discusses in the video that you watched earlier in this section.