How would you improve your community?

No offence but…

I’m not racist but…

I’m not sexist but…

I know this isn’t politically correct but…

We all do it… I know I do. Even though I know it’s often a preface for something at least mildly offensive, sometimes downright rude.

We all do our very best to be decent humans who treat others fairly and equally which is as it should be. Also, we know we might be judged for saying the wrong thing, and this can encourage us to be that little bit kinder. This is good. Occasionally though, things happen and you want to make an observation, but you don’t want to make a faux pas. You worry that your words could be misinterpreted. You therefore have 2 options: stay silent; or start your sentence with ‘no disrespect, but…’ and then justify why your observation is neither sexist nor racist or anything else -ist. Look, the whole concept of wokeness arose decades ago to call out racism, and even today, used correctly, it calls out all sorts of bad behaviour which has got to be a good thing. I’m very much in favour of using language that doesn’t offend others, even if occasionally it might require a bit more thought. We don’t bat an eyelid any more when we say ‘spokesperson’ for example and that’s not a bad thing. Yet insisting on excessive sensitivity can be a real barrier to communication. I’d even argue it can facilitate bad behaviour.

Take the Rotherham scandal, for example: it seemed rude to point out the many of the offenders were of Pakistani origin, after all we didn’t want to seem to be suggesting that all Brown men were grooming young girls. Because of course, they weren’t. But the girls in question might have benefitted had the connection been made and acknowledged much earlier.

 We are all a bit racist. A bit sexist. A bit ablist. There, I’ve said it. We don’t mean to be. We try hard not to be. We are even trained not to be (although the need for training suggests that perhaps we have something still to learn). And while it’s not OK, acknowledging this is the first step towards eradicating the problem. You cannot address a problem if you refuse to see it. We want to believe we are colour blind, but it’s simply not true, nor should it be, as evidenced by the Rotherham grooming. Jen Hamilton, an American labour and delivery nurse with a big Instagram presence very bravely put out a post stating very clearly why she doesn’t treat black women the same was as her white clients. It’s because she knows, as we all do, that black women are significantly more likely to die in childbirth EVEN in developed countries. EVEN when they are wealthy and famous (I’m thinking of Serena Williams, who nearly died because she wasn’t believed when reporting symptoms of a pulmonary embolism a day after her emergency cesarean birth) Knowing this, I cannot, in good faith as a midwife, ignore a woman’s ethnic origin. I absolutely have to spend more time, gaining trust, explaining that she will be cared for, taking her symptoms seriously, and *shock, horror * acknowledging that she may be more susceptible to certain conditions, such as gestational diabetes which needs to be taken very seriously indeed. If you don’t make her feel extra welcome, why would she engage with a system that has been steeped in racism for several centuries?

We do see colour, and how we deal with that is important. When Kate Clanchy wrote about her experiences teaching in a less privileged school,  she needed to describe the kids to convey their ethnic background because it was relevant and because she could see that skin tone wasn’t any more invisible to the children as it was to the adults. And that, whether we like it or not, it matters. She got cancelled.

Which is crazy because police are more likely to stop and search and arrest young black men, juries convict them, judges sentence them harshly, and they are over represented in prisons. All this matters and it shows that whether on purpose or not, racism is real. Blaming the problems on poverty is tempting (anyone can be poor, right, poverty is colour blind, surely…) but unhelpful. Poverty is the result of racism (if you can’t get a decent job, because you didn’t get a decent education because your parents live in a poorer part of town devoid of decent schools, because that’s where all the other migrants lived, unintentionally segregated but still segregated, doing the poorly paid jobs that migrants tend to do) then poverty persists through the generations because racism quietly but pervasively prevents upwards social mobility. Even when people of colour reach the top, having worked 4 times as hard as their white counterparts to get there, they are often the first to forget/underplay the barriers they, or their parents faced. Suella, Pritti, Kemi, Shabana are very convenient exceptions for us (not least because they are women), because we can look at their success and congratulate ourselves that there’s no problem while letting them do the racist work for us. Kinda like when you get a woman CEO who decries the need for mat leave because she managed just fine without it, and also, what sexism? If she made it, so can all the other ladettes. Acknowledging racism and sexism doesn’t mean implementing uncontrolled positive discrimination though, it just involves seeing (and then working to dismantle) the barriers that you never had to negotiate because they simply weren’t in your way.  Think of it like making cities wheelchair accessible. If you’ve never had to worry about how impossible it is, you would be forgiven for thinking real progress has been made. Thing is, you’d be right. And yet, if you really paid attention to the hurdles, say you were accompanying someone in a wheelchair, you would cringe because the problem is still very real. Getting from A to B takes a great deal of planning and simply cannot be taken for granted. But just because most of the barriers are a consequence of totally unintended thoughtlessness, not malice, doesn’t mean they aren’t very real.

One example of uncontrolled positive discrimination which caused untold harm was when Stonewall, originally an organisation promoting LGBT rights, took things to a crazy extreme when it ran an exceedingly effective campaign to determine how we all needed to speak and behave about transgender women, effectively placing the rights of a minority of LGBT people over everyone else’s. It was so successful that nobody dared to speak out. Apart from the courageous JK Rowling who took a principled stand and pushed back against the madness (https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/) If you haven’t read her piece, you should. It’s extremely nuanced, and totally respectful and if that makes her a TERF, so be it.  For a while, the fear of being labelled a TERF (the ultimate insult, applicable only to cis gendered women who dared to speak up) meant that no female athlete could object to completing against (and losing to) a trans woman. Which is particularly sucky if you’ve trained all your life to be the best female in your sport, but you have to settle for the silver medal. And male offenders who self-identified as female could be sent to women’s prisons where they could abuse vulnerable female inmates with impunity because to complain was transphobic. Look, I know it didn’t happen often, but still, it happened and, since people “didn’t see gender” any more, the problem was allowed to persist.

Ok, so you can be too woke. But not being woke enough is just as bad. Somewhere in the middle, loyal reader, lies the answer.

Neither race nor gender are invisible and people (rightly or wrongly) react to you based on what they see. So instead of “I’m not sexist, but… ” we could try “I see gender, and…” Because women are still paid less, and they still do most of the care work for free. And I think we can all agree that a trans woman will face many difficulties and prejudices, and we can also agree that she should be allowed to live her best life, free from abuse.

Instead of “I’m not racist, but…” we could say “I see colour, and…” Because we should show a person of colour the same consideration, namely to acknowledge that they will face prejudices that they shouldn’t have to face.

We need to stop pretending that everyone has the same opportunities as a straight able-bodied white male because currently, that’s just ludicrous.

Let’s make it happen. Let’s use our eyes (and our common sense) to celebrate difference, while making necessary adjustments to ensure fairness.