The Politics of Supremacy: Feeling the Fourteen
Notes: On the evening of the 14th of June 2017 I remember watching on the BBC News that the Grenfell tower was on fire (Various, 2019). That was a shock. It was a shock as I know that part of London so well. I have raved there, had friends living around the tower, and spent a lot of my childhood hanging out in some of the estates around there. Yet, I was not surprised when in the days after the death of 70 people, Teresa May and her Tory Government of the day had done little to nothing to support the majority others who lived in that tower block. I have, since then, driven past that scene many times on my visits to London, and it always brings a tear to my eye to see that manmade burnt-out matchstick still standing tall over Notting Hill.
On a rain-soaked day, the 22nd of May, Rishi Sunak called a General Election for the United Kingdom to be held on the 4th of July 2024. The announcement caught so many of us by surprise, myself included, whilst for others there was a instant flurry of activity to start to get ready for such a momentous moment in our history. The Global North has lurched to the right in recent years, confirmed by the recent European Elections, and with a coming election in France as well on the 30th of June, the changing shape of power, be it liberal or populist is being formed before our eyes.
Yet, if I make this blog more personal, I am a Man of Colour. I am a person who has walked through the cultural and racialised inferno of a last fourteen years of Tory rule. Fourteen years marked as much by the fear it has engendered within myself as a Person of Racial and Cultural Difference, as it has been the changes that this populist driven experience of othering has led me to engender, has led me to become.
This blog then is a brief reminder of some of these racialised landmarks which have propagated within the journals of this period, together with how they have influenced myself. It is also an invitation to the reader, no matter what your background or otherness, be it racial or another intersectional identity, to take a look at the psychological impact of these and any other historical landmarks which would have shaped your psychological identities.
Notes: My life changed when George Floyd was murdered (Various, 2020). That May 2020 night was one of the longest of my life. That realisation that my life, that the lives of so many other black and brown people, was going to be forced front and centre worldwide, hit me even then. I wanted to hide. I wanted to stay in my bed, sleep the deepest of sleeps, and hope that when I woke up, that none of this had happened. But it had. A man, a black man, a family man, a father, a son, had been choaked to death in broad daylight, his murder filmed and displayed like the slave lynchings of old. ‘Notes: My life changed when George Floyd was murdered (Various, 2020). That May 2020 night was one of the longest of my life. That realisation that my life, that the lives of so many other black and brown people, was going to be forced front and centre worldwide, hit me even then. I wanted to hide. I wanted to stay in my bed, sleep the deepest of sleeps, and hope that when I woke up, that none of this had happened. But it had. A man, a black man, a family man, a father, a son, had been choaked to death in broad daylight, his murder filmed and displayed like the slave lynchings of old.
Grenfell hurt me. Noting how long it took for Teresa May to even come out and speak to the Emergency Services, let alone acknowledge the pain of that community, it was obvious how little care there was for the survivors, let alone compassion for those who were deceased. Yet, this was in the days before Floyd, so myself, like many other persons of colour, as we kept our heads down we shook them negatively, acknowledging to self and each other the repetition of racism which sat core to this experience of invisibility. We sighed into ourselves as we remembered the added intersectional classist dismissiveness by power, a dismissal which continued over the following months, years, which is with us until today.
Floyds death and the subsequent collective outpourings by varying intersectional groups of love and anger was heartening to witness though. That recognition of our suffering, that calling to arms of the racialised others against the structures of supremacy being a clarion call for change, reminded myself and many others that our moral obligations to the other(s) sat a way outside of the political morality which drove to silence any discourse around this difficult period. As our government chose to wave an impotent parental fist at the toppling of statues, totally missing the historical point which was being made. I watched capitalist companies performed solidarity to win over the Brown and Black Pound (or whichever currency for wherever you are), before race-washing their hands of Black Lives Matter and returning to their previous racial exploitations of the cultural and racialised others. And all the time I watched as Persons of Colour got up and left situations, organisations, and relationships where their black and brownness was not acknowledged or respected (myself included) . Their recognition, the remembrance, that their safety was now only in their own hands a massive part of this period, of Grenfell, of Floyd, or this fourteen.
Notes: I was in the Turner Gallery in Eastbourne last December when I encountered an exhibition by Barbara Walker, titled Burden of Proof, and the eventual winner Jesse Darling, entitled No Ribbons, No Medals (Rutherford, 2023). Both exhibits spoke to the Tory Government’s Hostile Environment policy and the Windrush scandal. As I saw there observing the exhibits, feeling them even I was reminded of when the government brought in the Hostile Environment Policy, and could feel the fear in the gaze of my parents of Caribbean origin (Various, n.d.). Both of them had been here for years, and whilst they both had their papers in order, they both knew many others from the former British Empire who had, for whatever reason, lost their papers over the years. Like them, they had served this country, paid taxes in this country, raised families in this country. Yet, all of a sudden this painful Burden of Proof that they were British, nay English, no let’s call it as it is, that they were white, had fallen upon them.
When Sunak made the political mistake of not staying for the 80th Anniversary Commemoration of the D-Day Landings, the statement made by Farage, that ‘doesn’t understand our culture, I smiled (Lloyd, 2024). I smiled as there is a distinct irony which sits in the experiences of all Persons of Colour who wished to be accepted as British, as English, as White. I smiled, because, and my parents experienced this, Farage’s comments were that subtly-racist reminder that we will never be like them. That we will always be an outsider. That we will always be seen as less than.
That there will always be a racially driven burden of proof in proving that we as Persons of Colour are acceptable. That any gaff will be scrutinised to infinity, not matter how small it might be. Even if you are the Prime Minister, you wont quite measure up enough (and I freely note that as a former serving member of the Royal Air Force, Sunak’s mistake was a monumentally large one, so even I find it hard to forgive him this one). My point here is that no matter if you played your party in World War II, or if you helped shape the National Health Service as part of the Windrush Generation, or if you ended up as a Prime Minister, the spectre of racial separation and inferiority would always be raised by someone who saw themselves as superior. And it is this superiority which has driven some of the horrors we have witnessed over this political period.
I will therefore never forget how shaped I have been by these fourteen. I cant. They have both broken me, psychologically and alchemically, my tears the solutio, my rage the calcinatio, of Jungian transformation, of Jungian individuation, of racial growth into being who I need to be. I know of so many intersectional others who have suffered so much during this period as well, be they Trans/LGBTQ, feminists/women, the neurodiverse, or those with severe mental health issues. All have been ill served by these fourteen. So, I urge them to review, to remember, to reply. To respond through the pains of their marginalisations, of their objectifications and otherings, to speak their own painful truths to supremacy’s systemic and political power. To do what you feel is right, right borne out of your own painful experiences of these past fourteen, as we all go to the polls on the 4th of July.
Notes: That the War on Woke is also a war on blackness, has not escaped my attention (Harriot, 2022; Unknown, 2022). When we remember that the phrase Woke has several roots embedded in the civil rights fights of black and brown people (with origins which go all the way back to the bible), then, much like the war on political correctness post its feminist origins was a war on a woman’s right to self identify outside of the male gaze, the war on woke is a war on the rights of black and brown people to step outside of the colonising shackles of whiteness and tell our own stories, to be our own people, to own our own identities.
To speak with our own political voice!
References
Harriot, M. (2022). War on wokeness: the year the right rallied around a made-up menace. Guardian Online. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/20/anti-woke-race-america-history
Lloyd, N. (2024). Rishi Sunak criticises Farage’s claim that PM does not understand ‘our culture.’ Evening Standard. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/newslondon/rishi-sunak-criticises-farage-s-claim-that-pm-does-not-understand-our-culture/ar-BB1nWodP?ocid=BingNewsSerp
Rutherford, N. (2023). Turner Prize 2023: Windrush and Covid pandemic inspires nominees. BBC News Online. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-65410375
Unknown. (2022). Kemi Badenoch: Anti-woke “darling of the right.” BBC News Online. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62176280
Various. (n.d.). Hostile Environment. Liberty. Retrieved June 10, 2024, from https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/fundamental/hostile-environment/
Various. (2019). Grenfell Tower: What Happened/. BBC News Online. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40301289
Various. (2020). George Floyd Death. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cv7wlylxzg1t/george-floyd-death