Colonial Thinking

I was going to stop being political. I keep getting headaches from all the eye rolling I’m doing but I turned on the TV, so that scientists could reassure me that the government know what they are doing (where have they hidden the scientists?) and there was Priti Patel being smirkingly awful. She talked about thuggery at the protests and said,
“Your behaviour is shameful and you will face justice.”

Since the death of George Floyd, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about an inquest my daughter reported on at the beginning of her career. There was something about it that smelled wrong and we would chat about it every night. The man, Philmore Mills, had died in hospital and the autopsy showed that he had hypoxia at the time of his death.
https://www.sloughobserver.co.uk/news/14263734.wexham-park-hospital-nurse-was-frightened-by-uncharacteristic-aggression-from-philmore-mills-which-could-have-been-caused-by-confusion/
Seeing how the police restrained George Floyd has made me question this case. Without any video evidence it is impossible to tell whether Philmore Mill’s hypoxia and death was caused by the restraint or by his illness. However, if he hadn’t been black I wonder if a security guard would have been called to restrain an old man with lung cancer, no matter how much his eyes bulged.

With the constant language of ‘the violent black man’ we are conditioned to believe that we are in danger. Therefore, it is acceptable to be frightened or to respond with ‘reasonable force.’ If we are honest, we’ve all thought it. It’s important not to deny that. It’s not your fault. It’s how we’ve been conditioned. I’m sure it comes from our slave trading days. If we told people that black men were violent then we could legitimately restrain them in chains and irons. They could never protest about being sold, transported and beaten. They could never free themselves. They were never safe. If a black man was free in society, people were conditioned to believe they were dangerous and so society helped to enslave more black men. However, those days are over. We realised they were wrong.

Now it’s time to recognise that those ideas are old. We have no more to fear from a black man, than we do a white man, or an Asian man, or a Muslim or a Jewish man. The colour of the skin doesn’t cause the violence.

Priti Patel was wrong to make so much of any violence that happened at these protests. There are always smatterings of violence at any large protest and the Police in this country do a brilliant job of trying to protect life. It’s time to stop pitching one against the other and recognise that it is our past and old thinking patterns that is keeping us stuck.

It would also be great if men could stop being violent.

The world is very strange at the moment. We are living in turbulent times but I’m glad we are starting to have conversations about our involvement in the slave trade,  that there is one less statue of a white man and racists are confused that tea companies, who built their product on slavery, are refusing to back them. #solidatitea is an unusual hashtag but it’s a start.

William Hogarth - a harlot’s progress

 (part of the V&A collection about the links between slavery and tea)