https://myblackface.wordpress.com/feed

Do I think that everybody should have an opinion about everything?

No.

I think everybody having an opinion about everything and feeling the need to voice those opinions is one of the reasons why we’re in such a mess in the first place. 

But maybe I’m changing my thinking on this.

Because really if there were ever a time for people to start having opinions on things, and being really vocal with those opinions, its probably fucking now.

I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer, but honestly lots of things are a bit of shit right now, and we can either just let it happen, or we can scream and shout and basically kick off about it.

I’ve been delivering some DEI workshops for trainee psychologists for the last couple of years, where I’ve been talking about bias and prejudice and discrimination. And we always end up talking about how there’s a certain privilege associated with speaking out against injustice or unfairness or bigotry.

Like if you’re just starting out in the workplace, maybe you don’t want to speak out against things that you see as unfair because you don’t want to risk your reputation or your future career prospects or whatever.

I think “would 20-year-old me have been brave enough to speak out and challenge racism, or would I have stayed quiet because I didn’t want to make things difficult for myself?”

Or maybe, and I think this is a particular issue in Psychology, there’s a perceived need or a want to stay neutral somehow – politically neutral – to not take a side or have an opinion, so that you’re not alienating a potential client base. So maybe you end up compromising your values and staying quiet, for the sake of your own career.

And I’ve usually agreed that yes, that’s somewhat understandable, and yes, there is some privilege involved, and that maybe it’s easier for me to speak out than it is for somebody who’s just starting a career, or looking for opportunities, or who’s building their reputation and doesn’t want to be seen as a troublemaker.

But I’m changing my mind about this. I think “would 20-year-old me have been brave enough to speak out and challenge racism, or would I have stayed quiet because I didn’t want to make things difficult for myself?”

And then I think yes I absolutely would have challenged it, and I know that I would have because I did exactly that when I worked for the Home Office after I graduated. I called it out, reported it, kicked up a stink, and I walked into that office every day afterwards with my head up and my chest out. Planet Mike would be proud.

You’re gonna have to get off the fence. It’s pointy and it will hurt your bum.

There are some things that we’re going to have to start having opinions about.

Like, just for example, either you think that trans people exist and have a right to exist, or you don’t.

And if you don’t, I honestly just don’t want anything to do with you, I don’t care if that upsets you, and I don’t care if that loses me work, or opportunities, or friends either.

But if you do think that trans people have a right to exist, peacefully, going about their own goddamned business … you’re gonna need to start saying so.

Either you think that genocide is a bad thing (*in quiet voice* even when the ones being bombed, murdered, and starved are brown people), or you don’t.

And if you don’t, I don’t want anything to do with you and I don’t care about the consequences of that. But if you do think genocide is, you know, generally speaking a bad thing… you’re gonna have to start saying it.

And yes, at exactly the same time, in exactly the same brain, either you think that anti-Semitism is a bad thing or you don’t.

Either you think that violence against women and girls, and misogyny, and the rise of online shithead masculinfluencers is a bad thing, or you don’t.

Either you think that Black lives matter, that all black lives matter, or you don’t.

Either you think that people fleeing persecution, war, genocide, and seeking refuge and a better life are human beings worthy of compassion… or you don’t.

Either you think that literal fucking Nazis are bad… or you don’t. And if you don’t, you need to have a good hard look at yourself… preferably from inside the bin you’ve just put yourself in.

There are no grey areas here. You can argue that there’s nuance and levels and shades of grey to consider in all of these things, but honestly, when it comes to people’s basic right to just exist, I don’t think there’s a fence to sit on.

So yes, it is about time you started having some fucking opinions actually.

But those opinions must be based on thought, and rationality, and science, and reason, and not on the latest set of memes that your Aunty Barbara posted on Facebook after a couple too many gins.

Because when we just take the time to actually stop and think about things, our opinions become informed opinions and they have weight.

Research is absolutely clear on the fact that vaccines DO. NOT. CAUSE. AUTISM.

Science and medicine are absolutely clear on the fact that biological sex is more complicated than a simplistic male and female dichotomy, and taking the time to just look into it for like five fucking minutes, means that you can see and understand and effectively argue that defining manhood and womanhood based on chromosomal biological sex at best just doesn’t make sense, and at worst is harmful and damaging.

I know, you can’t reason someone out of an argument they weren’t reasoned into… apart from when you can.

There is no research that shows a correlation between amount of melanin and IQ… or aggression, or criminality, or civility, or compassion, or parenting ability, or any other fucking thing… maybe seasoning ability tbf.

And I know, I know, I know, you can’t reason someone out of an argument they weren’t reasoned into… apart from when you can. Because if you couldn’t, no one would ever change their minds about anything.

So yes, absolutely, now, when the world is on fire, when the bombs continue to fall, when politicians are eroding the basic human rights of the most vulnerable and the most persecuted, when billionaires are launching rocket shaped dicks filled with celebrities into the sky instead of feeding hungry children… now is the time for us to have opinions about things – to have really fucking strong opinions about things, based on evidence and fact and reason, and then to act and talk and walk through the world as if we actually believe in them.

Because if we don’t… then we’re all fucked.

If you enjoyed reading this article, please consider supporting the blog by buying me a coffee. Click the button below!

buy me a coffee!

Becoming a parent has made me a more patient person. For anyone who knows me in real life, I fully appreciate that it’s hard to imagine what a less patient version of me would look like, but honestly I am comparatively fucking zen these days. 

One of the most annoying things about children is that they want you to stop what you’re doing every 0.7 seconds to watch them attempt what I think is supposed to be a cartwheel.

Now as much as I love watching kids fall over, it does make completing ordinary tasks quite difficult. It also makes thinking about things really taxing.  

Imagine trying to think through a problem, or work out something tha… 

Sorry. Imagine trying to think through a problem, or work out something that’s actually quite complicated, when your train of tho…

Sorry. Imagine trying to think through a problem, or work out something that’s actually quite complicated, when your train of thought is constantly being interr… 

For fuck’s sake. Sorry.

Generally speaking, most people don’t just “decide” to go out on a Saturday to set fire to a hotel full of asylum seekers. For most people, there’s a train of thought that would pretty quickly nip that idea in the bud. But, quite typically for Britain actually, that train was cancelled, and in two UK towns (Rotherham and Tamworth) we ended up with literal lynch mobs out looking for blood.  

A few days earlier, three young girls, Bebe King and Elsie Dot Stancombe, aged seven, and nine-year-old Alice Dasilva Aguiar, were tragically killed and several other children and adults critically injured when a 17 year old boy, carried out a vicious knife attack at a children’s party.

We still don’t know why. 

Despite living in Lancashire, being born in Cardi…

Sorry. Despite living in Lancashire, being born in Cardiff, and not being Musli…

Sorry. Despite living in Lancashire, being born in Cardiff, and not being Muslim, misinformation suggesting that the killer was an “illegal” immigrant and linking the killings to Islamic terrorism was suspiciously quick to emerge, amplified by the usual dickheads right-wing agitators, and spread quickly online.

The next day, a large group of far-right EDL supporters decided to take matters into their own hands by attacking a local mosque. Which doesn’t really make any se…

Sorry. Which doesn’t make any sense.

At all.

If you actually stop and think about it.

That weekend, even though by this point we knew that the killer wasn’t an immigrant, a series of “anti-immigration protests” (aka riots) were organised across the UK. I wonder though, why one would protest immigration as a response to killings carried out by someone born and rais…

Sorry. …born and raised in the UK. Perhaps it was just the killings themselves that made people angry – that would make sense. Then again, protesting immigration and attacking a mos…

Sorry. …protesting immigration and attacking a mosque still doesn’t make sense. And if it was about the children, where was this strength of feeling when 14 year old Daniel Anjorin was murdered by dual Spanish-Brazilian national, Marcus Arduini Monzo, in London earlier in the year? Or when Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering seven new-born babies in 2023?

It’s a fucking mystery, eh?

To really demonstrate how people felt about UK immigration policies, Shoezones were ferociously attacked, Crocs and bath bombs were freed from their shackles, mobile phones were upgraded, and that well-known symbol of the oppression of the White man, the Greggs Steak Bake, was liberated from it’s high-street prison.

In all seriousness though, while some of the “riots” turned out to be five pissed up wankers standing outside Yates’s for half an hour, large groups of rioters shouted racial slurs, targeted random Black and brown people with violent attacks, flung Nazi salutes around like there was no tomorrow, and smashed shit up in cities and towns across the UK.

Conflating “dark skin” with “immigrant,” rioters in Middlesborough set up makeshift roadblocks, checking to see if drivers were White before letting them through. In Hull, another group attacked cars driven by brown people, and then… then… hotels housing asylum seekers in Tamworth and Rotherham were bombarded with bricks, racial taunts, and eventually set on fire.

brains interru…

Did people really know what they were rioting about? Immigration? Islam? Brown people in general? High-Street shoe shops?

All of this seems like odd behaviour. Even just stopping to think for even a few seconds, what these people were doing just didn’t make any… 

Sorry. …what these people were doing just didn’t make any… 

Sorry. …what these people were doing just didn’t make any sense. But how can we expect people to think logically and critically when they are CONSTANTLY bombarded by an obviously and unashamedly right-wing press, and grifters like Farage, Yaxley-Lennon, Musk and the like, are shitting their pants for attention every five minutes.

Labelling rioters and looters as “stupid” or uneducated is unhelpful too. First off, those groups aren’t homogenous. Yes there were the violent criminals and racist thugs, intent on fighting someone or something brown, and some of them probably were as dense as overcooked tofu. But there were some who were just out for a good time on the cans, some who got swept along, some who were alarmingly young and impressionable, and some with real fears about immigration (just wait… I’m not there yet).

Maybe a lack of critical thinking skills isn’t the issue. Maybe it’s a real lack of opportunity to ever actually eng…

Sorry. …maybe it’s a lack of opportunity to ever actually engage in even a rudimentary level of critical thinking. 

Labelling those involving themselves in the riots as “stupid” or uneducated is unhelpful too… those groups aren’t homogenous.

Many of the areas where the most violence and racism took place were some of the most deprived areas in the UK. Middlesborough, Rotherham, Sunderland, Hartlepool… all ravaged by austerity.

Fourteen years under the Tories have seen libraries, youth clubs, and leisure centres closed and schools literally crumbling. The NHS and related services have been deliberately dismantled. Poverty is rife, use of food banks has sky rocketed, energy bills have gone up while energy companies walk away with billions in profits every year. We all know what’s happened in the last decade and a half. We’ve watched it happen.

If you think I’m suggesting racism is a “working class” issue you couldn’t be more wrong. For one thing, that would ignore the fact that people from minoritized ethnic groups (except the Indian, Chinese, White Irish and White Other groups) are more likely than White British people to live in the most overall deprived 10% of neighbourhoods in England. Yet it looked remarkably like it was only people racialised as White that were “protesting immigration.”

But when you strip everything away from people, and then you drip feed them the idea, over years and yea…

Sorry. …years and years, that their problems are because of the brown people who are coming to live here (or who already live here), then you’re feeding their genuine insecurities with racist, Islamophobic lies.

The feelings of hopelessness and loss and fear of the future that are being experienced are absolutely real. But we can also see with just a little bit of thought, and an examination of the evidence that the resulting “legitimate concerns over immigration” are not legitimate at all.

But we just can’t have a sensible discus…

Sorry. …we just can’t have sensible discussion about it. Because it’s not about immigration.

It. Is. About. Racism.

Muslamic Ray Guns!

Rotherham is a particularly interesting case. A 2014 report carried out by Prof. Alexis Jay found that between between 1997 and 2013, around 1,400 children were groomed and sexually assaulted in Rotherham, “predominantly by men of Pakistani heritage.” The report highlighted systemic failures on the part of the police and the local authority that led to a lack of action being taken.

The emotions – the anger, the hurt, the fear – that people in Rotherham were experiencing, and the residual feelings they may still harbour are very real. But if we stop and think about things for a little while, the picture is actually much more comp…

Sorry. … much more complex than the one presented. The furore over “Muslim Rape Gangs” grew exponentially, and inaction was blamed on the police not wanting to appear racist – the “two-tier policing” argument.

But what was missed in this whole conversation was that many of the victims were British Asian girls, and both a lack of adequate training and honestly shitty attitudes towards working class, northern families contributed to how things were handled. And from a broader perspec…

Sorry. …and from a broader perspective, all of the available evidence points to the fact that the perpetrators of child sexual abuse are overwhelmingly people racialised as White.

Overwhelmingly so.

Let’s stop and think about that for just a few seconds. If you’re really concerned with grooming gangs and you’re only focusing on brown Muslims, then yo…

Sorry. …then you’re first of all barking up the wrong tree, but you’re also just inescapably racist and Islamaphhobic. But we can’t stop and think about it. 

Racism is in Britain’s DNA. It’s baked in to all of our institutions. It’s in our buildings, it’s in education, it’s in policing, it’s in sports, it’s in sports commentary, it’s in the TV we watched as kids, and it’s in the TV we watch now.

Racism is in our politics, and it’s absolutely, unequivocally, undeniably in our media. It’s in our science and our technology. Our “great thinkers” and philosophers were racist, our political heroes were racist.

But we can’t talk about any of this, because it’s impossible to have a thoughtful, genuine, cons…

Sorry. It’s impossible to have a thoughtful, genuine, considered discussion about racism in th…

Sorry. It’s impossible to have a thoughtful, genuine, considered discussion about racism in the UK because eve…

OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE, STOP IT!

It’s impossible to have a thoughtful, genuine, considered discussion about racism in the UK because every 0.7 seconds, we have to stop and look at a fucking cartwheel.

I’m utterly unsurprised that we are where we are, with race riots on the streets of the UK. Horrified, yes, but surprised? Not one little bit. Because this has been building for years and years and we’ve just watched it happen.

Until we can grow up and have proper discussions, with each other, with our kids, with our friends and families, about all of this, about how online manipulation works, about how misinformation spreads, about bias in the news and about the reporting of hate marches vs. protests, vs. riots, about how to stop and pause and think for a second and about racism in this country – until we can pat Nigel Farage on the head, say, “yes dear, very good, now play with your lego and let the grown-ups talk” – until we can do all of that…

we’re absolutely fucked.

If you enjoyed reading this article, please consider supporting the blog by buying me a coffee. Click the button below!

buy me a coffee!

If you work for almost any organisation, you’ve probably spent 20-30 minutes going as fast as you can through online Unconscious Bias training, skipping the actual content to get to the quiz at the end that asks you if hating Black people is considered rude.

Yes it is. Congratulations you’ve passed!

Unconscious bias refers to the supposedly subconscious attitudes that impact on the way people behave and think. But Unconscious bias… is rubbish. 

Now, before you get all pissy about it, let’s see if you can read more than three paragraphs before you chime in with how they give anyone PhDs these days and Psychology isn’t a real subject anyway.  

Settle in.  

What is cognitive bias?

Let’s start with cognitive bias. There’s loads of information out there in the world that we have to do something with. Think about how much information is coming into your brain at any one moment. Fucking loads, that’s how much! 

So to stop us from going completely insane, we take lots of little mental shortcuts. We call them heuristics – little rules of thumb that mean we don’t have to constantly think about every goddam thing that’s occurring at any moment.  

Like, this big piece of wood in the wall seems to fit the mental representation of a door that I have stored in memory – my prototype model of a door. With a glance I can see handle, hinges, where a door would go…  yup it’s a door. 

There loads of different things in my memory that fit the category of “door,” but I don’t have time to search through all of them to see if this thing is like one of them. And I don’t need to process everything about the object I’m looking at either. Quick and efficient thinking.  

But, to really spell it out for you, that means that we don’t search through every piece of information we have about something and we don’t take on board every piece of information about something before we make a judgement or a decision.  

We don’t have time to do that, so we might only look at the info that’s most readily available to us. You might already be able to see where I’m going with this. Keep going.  

Cognitive biases are the little or sometimes big mistakes that we make in the ways that we think about things because we’re using these shortcuts, or because we’re just not using all the information that’s available to us.   

And the thing is… these mistakes are quite predictable… because we all make them, and we do it with startling regularity.  

Is Piers Morgan really a complete prick?

There’s a ton of different ways that these biases, these little errors show up in our thinking and decision making. You’ve probably heard about a few of them already, but I’ll give some examples, you might recognise.  

We’ll start with the Fundamental Attribution Error. This is the tendency to overestimate how much someone’s personality is a cause of their behaviour.  

If someone’s being obnoxious – just for arguments sake, let’s say Piers Morgan –  we’re much less likely to think about the situational and environmental factors driving that behaviour and much more likely to just assume it’s because he’s a complete and utter prick.  

You might be thinking “I don’t do that!” But that’s another bias – Illusory Superiority (the Lake Wobegon Effect) – our tendency to overestimate how great we are compared to other people. Or perhaps your Bias Blind Spot – the tendency to see ourselves as less biased than other people. 

This is just an example for illustration, of course, I would never put it in writing that Piers Morgan is a complete prick.   

Alright. So far, so mundane. Let’s make this interesting. What do you see here?

 If you saw happy plug socket, congratulations, that’s another cognitive bias, an error (albeit a mostly harmless one) based on mental shortcuts. It’s not really a happy face, it’s a plug socket in Denmark. Obviously.  

Pareidolia is the tendency to see meaningful patterns (often faces) where there isn’t really anything meaningful there.  It’s a type of Apophenia – the tendency to perceive meaning connections in unrelated things. 

The plug socket is a crappy example really because it does look like a face! But pareidolia is why people claim that Jesus has appeared in their toast. He hasn’t really! He’s got better things to do like deciding which sports team wins the sports teams championships.

Pareidolia is our brain being really good at recognising faces (because that’s kind of an important skill), and then doing it super fucking quickly, before we’ve had the chance to say, oh no wait, this is obviously just some toast. 

Is it all about thinking too fast?

This is perhaps a good point to mention that our cognitive biases aren’t only driven by quick thinking and incomplete information. Our background, upbringing, and experiences also influence the ways in which we’re motivated to think. A deeply religious background for example, might leave you more likely to find deities knocking about in various baked goods. 

What about this – you flip a coin (because everyone on Twitter is a pedant, we can assume that it’s not a trick coin) and it comes up heads 14 times in a row. Is it more or less likely on the next toss to come up heads again? 

Well, it’s 50/50 isn’t it? Because every flip is independent of every other flip. But the Gambler’s Fallacy is a another cognitive bias – our tendency to think that future probabilities are affected by past events, when in fact, they aren’t. 1

Here’s another. It takes Jupiter 12 earth years to orbit the Sun. How long does it take Mars? 

Well, the Anchoring Bias is the tendency for our judgements to be influenced by a reference point (anchor) usually the first piece of information we’re given. So knowing that Mars is between Earth and Jupiter, your estimate was probably somewhere in between 365 days (which you know is Earth’s orbit), and the information you were first given. 

Because you were first told Jupiter’s orbit of 12 years, this *probably* biased your estimate (which I’d guess was around 5-6 years?) to be higher than the actual answer, which is a mere 687 days. If I hadn’t told you Jupiter’s orbit, your guess would have likely been lower. 

Watch out for this when someone shows you the most expensive thing first. You’re more likely to think something slightly cheaper is a good deal even if it’s not because you’re frame of reference, your anchor, is the first expensive thing! 

And with people, the First Impression Bias is our tendency to ignore other information in favour of our first impressions. If, when we first meet someone, they go to shake our hand, slip on a banana skin, fall on their arse, then a bird shits on their head while they’re lying on the floor, it doesn’t really matter how competent and together they are after that. 

This seems pretty harmless right … Right?

Speaking of people, do you remember Alan Kurdi? No? If I showed you a picture (I won’t) I bet you’d remember. He was the 2 year old Syrian refugee who drowned in the Mediterranean in 2015. His picture made global headlines and there was, rightly so, an outpouring of public compassion. 

Yet there have been more than 20,000 reported deaths in the Med since 2015, met by many of us with a decidedly loud ‘meh’. This is Compassion Fade – the tendency to be more compassionate towards a small number of identifiable victims than towards a large number of anonymous ones. Keep this in mind when you’re watching the news in future. Using images and language, is someone else influencing who is deserving of your compassion and who isn’t? 

Swarm. Invasion. Flood. These words aren’t chosen at random.

 The Base-Rate Fallacy is one of my favourites. This is the tendency for people to ignore general information in favour of a specific case or example, even when the general information is more important, more relevant, and more comprehensive.  

The example that sticks in my mind from my undergrad days is the claim that smoking isn’t in fact bad for you, because “my nan smoked every day until she died at 97!” 

Every day on social media is a case study in the Base-Rate Fallacy.  

• “Here’s a bunch of academic research demonstrating a point.” 
• “Well fuck you, I heard of this one example where that didn’t happen so are you even a real Dr anyway?” 

What was it I said before about startling regularity? 

There are literally hundreds of theses cognitive biases and I could go on about them all day, but you should go look them up and learn about them. They are all just examples of faulty thinking, based on going too quickly and not using information that we actually have available.  

One more, then I’ll get to the point.  

Affinity Bias is just the tendency to prefer people who are like us. This can be based on any number of things, age, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, background, sense of humour, level of education.  

It’s likely that your close friendship group is made up of people who are largely similar. Same age, background, etc. Some of this is down to geography, but just ask yourself when you walk into a room of strangers, who are you drawn to and WHY? 

It’s only natural to have an affinity for those like ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with it at all, but when it becomes limiting, when we’re closed off to experiences because of it, then it’s worth examining.  What is your gut instinct about a person telling you? Where is that gut instinct coming from? What is it really? 

What about stereotypes then?

Stereotyping is another cognitive bias – the expectation that a member of a particular group will have certain characteristics even though we don’t actually have information about that individual. 

An experiment for you. I’m going to ask you to think about all the stereotypes you know about a particular group. It doesn’t matter if they’re positive or negative, whether you agree with them or believe them or not, just ones that you’ve heard of or are aware of.  

Think of all the stereotypes you know about Black men…  

Whether you believe them or not, I’m sure that you were able to come up with something that you’ve heard of… probably pretty easily. And the fact that those stereotypes come so easily to mind suggests that they’re not exactly unconscious.  

They’re right there, readily available to you. And I could have asked about any group – middle aged White women, primary school teachers, taxi drivers, neurosurgeons – and you’d have fairly readily available and entirely conscious stereotypes. 

The nonsense of Unconsious Bias

Unconscious bias is a misnomer. It’s not that the bias is unconscious, it’s that it’s based on information that IS available to us IF we choose to actually access it properly.  

But, and here’s the kicker, that information is an accumulation of everything we might have taken in during our lives, INCLUDING THE WAYS THAT COMMENTATORS DESCRIBE PARTICULAR GROUPS OF ATHLETES!!!! 

But IF you slow down and inspect it properly looking at ALL the available information, a preference or disliking for people of a certain ethnicity doesn’t actually make sense, because you KNOW that everybody of that ethnicity doesn’t share all of their characteristics.  

Thinking that someone has acted in a particular way because of their ethnicity, or expressed gender, or hair colour, or place of birth, also doesn’t make any sense IF you can slow down and actually access the information that you have available. 

The problem is that we don’t slow down enough. We’re used to taking mental shortcuts because we simply can’t process all of the information we receive, and we can’t search all of the information we have available. Shortcuts serve us well, so we allow our thinking to be influenced by these biases.  

I’ve already mentioned lots of the potential causes of these biases – going too fast, not using information, environment and background, the experiences that shape us – but we’re also emotionally driven.  

What do I mean by that. Well actually slowing down and examining your own thinking, examining the logical fallacy of your racist (or otherwise bigoted) beliefs might come at a cost.  

If your friends are all racist bellends , then examining your own biases and realising that racism is actually pretty daft might cost you your friendship group. That’s a big thing! Perhaps you stand to lose family. Again, this isn’t an easy thing to do. So we’re emotionally motivated to hold on to some of these biases.  

We might even stand to lose our sense of self if we’re forced to examine the biases that underpin some of our deeply held beliefs about the world. Like asking JK Rowling to stop hating trans people would mean giving up her entire personality. That’s quite a big ask! 

This is perhaps where things like Confirmation Bias come in – seeking out information that confirms our world view. Or the Backfire Effect – the tendency to double down and actually strengthen our beliefs in the face evidence that contradicts them. 

So Unconscious Bias is a mislabelling of the cognitive biases we ALL have, and are motivated to hold on to for several reasons. Biases are, in effect, lazy thinking. And that’s not an insult, it’s just how an efficient brain works. It’s efficient, but deeply and regularly fallible.  

Labelling bias as unconscious does two things: 

First, it absolves us of responsibility for our own decision making, behaviour, and attitudes. It gives us a get out, and it allows our institutions to avoid dealing with things like actual racism, by essentially suggesting people are blissfully unaware of their own prejudice. 

Second, it minimises or ignores the very real and very conscious biases that people have and very often express towards other groups of people, as we see playing out every single day in the news and in our own lives.

---

1. For the inevitable pedants, there is some evidence that there is a slight bias in coin tossing. ︎

If you enjoyed reading this article, please consider supporting the blog by buying me a coffee. Click the button below!

buy me a coffee!

You know, it’s always in times of darkness that you’re really reminded about the importance of connecting with other people.

The OceanGate tragedy, unfolding before our eyes for those four days in June, really did bring people together… to have a massive fucking barney and start throwing metaphorical shit at each other on social media. So that was lovely.

If you somehow missed the ghoulish 24 hour, worldwide news coverage, replete with CGI animations and ‘oxygen remaining’ countdown timers, the story of OceanGate’s Titan Submersible, which went missing en-route to explore the wreckage of the Titanic, dominated headlines for nearly a week.

For four days, we watched as an internationally coordinated rescue operation tried to retrieve the lost sub and rescue the billionaire passengers on board. The eventual realisation that the sub had imploded shortly after it began its descent was somehow more comforting than the thought of being lost at the bottom of the ocean for several days, slowly running out of air.

Anyway, as the details began to surface (honestly no pun intended), we learned that safety was… well let’s just say it wasn’t high up on the “to do” list for founder and CEO of OceanGate and pilot of the sub, Stockton Rush.

Several videos emerged of him demonstrating how the sub worked, with a video games controller for steering and some shitty old pipes strapped to the side for ballast. Rush boasted about breaking rules around the construction of the sub, saying in one interview, “Carbon fiber and titanium? There’s a rule you don’t do that. Well, I did.”

Paying customers signed waivers accepting that the iron lung they were about to be bolted into and then have plopped into the Atlantic had “not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma or death.”

There was absolutely nothing about any of this that would make me think, “yes, this seems like a solid plan with absolutely no downsides whatsoever.” There was plenty that made me think “I wouldn’t get in that thing if it was in a fucking bathtub, let a lone sinking 2.4 miles into the pitch-black ocean depths.“

For any normal person, the conversation should have gone something like this:

“I’d really like to explore the Ocean, it’d be wonderful.”

“Oh cool, well I’ve cobbled together this submersible from bits of fucking old tat, ignoring any sort of safety recommendations because I think I know better. There’s a solid chance you might die if you get in it.”

“Ah, okay, I’ll probably just leave it then, thanks.”

But this isn’t about OceanGate or people with more money than sense. It’s about how we treat people with more money than sense and about how the value we place on human life really is determined entirely by our own prejudice.

What is notable here, is the stark contrast between the response to a tragedy born of arrogance and one born of desperation. There’s a double standard that you have to work really hard not to see.

The 24 hour news coverage and rescue attempts for these billionaire ‘explorers’, costing an estimated £6.5million, happened less than a week after several hundred people drowned in the Mediterranean. That particular ‘migrant boat’, which had about 750 passengers on board, left Tobruk in Libya and sank 50 miles off the coast of Greece, while the authorities were painfully slow to react.

Of course, this was just the most recent example in what has become a devastatingly long list of truly heartbreaking tragedies as people, as families, make the dangerous attempt to cross the Med, fleeing persecution and war that has ravaged their homes.

What is notable here, is the stark contrast between the response to a tragedy born of arrogance and one born of desperation. There’s a double standard that you have to work really hard not to see.

I think it’s fair to point out glaring double standards. I think it’s fair to say that christ, yes, the deaths of those billionaires in the Titan sub is awful, but also entirely avoidable and absolutely a consequence of unashamed arrogance. Icarus was meant to be a cautionary tale, not an aspirational one.

In pointing that out, nobody is saying that we shouldn’t feel empathy for the families of the billionaires who paid a quarter of a million dollars each to be locked inside a flimsy tin can and sent to the bottom of the ocean to gawp at an underwater gravesite.

What people are saying is that maybe we should also feel the same empathy for those fleeing persecution, for those abandoning their homes and belongings in utter desperation, putting themselves and their families in direct harm out of necessity, rather than hubris.

We have to ask ourselves why we are okay with standing by and watching people drown in the Mediterranean, but we scream and shout about empathy while watching an all out effort to rescue people who have chosen to eschew the risk of “physical injury, disability, emotional trauma or death,” purely for shits and giggles.

500 people were still missing in the Med, at the same time as several countries joined forces to find five billionaires with the world’s media looking on and reporting every excruciating detail.

Maybe you just don’t like it when people question why you place a higher value on certain lives than others. Maybe you don’t want to have to admit it.

Now of course we should acknowledge that rescue efforts do take place during these migrant crossings. On the same day as the wreckage of Titan was discovered, over 200 migrants were rescued near the Canary Islands.

We should also acknowledge that we would probably – mostly – all want to see an international rescue attempt if it were our family in danger. But that’s kind of the point. We’re entirely capable of empathy when it suits us.

So why do we find it easier to demand empathy for the named and pictured, fully fleshed out characters with personal histories aboard Titan, than for the nameless, faceless souls fleeing persecution? Hmmm, I wonder.

The double standard is real. At this point Venn diagram of people who say “there was a 19 year old in that sub, it’s so tragically sad” and people who say “those migrants don’t look like children to me, we should have gunboats patrolling the channel to blast those cockroaches to smithereens,” is a damn near perfect circle.

There are of course parallels with the vastly different ways we thought of white refugees seeking shelter from the war in Ukraine and brown refugees from any of the other countries that we’ve helped to create refugees in. And the response to people pointing out that double standard was just as racist (and misogynistic) as it was here.

If you refuse to acknowledge those blindingly obvious double standards, you have to start to think that maybe the issue is with you, not the people pointing them out.

I don’t know, maybe you just don’t like it when people question why you place a higher value on certain lives than others. Maybe you don’t want to have to admit it. Maybe it’s easier to not have to confront your own prejudice, so you just shout and scream and throw insults instead.

I mean, I thought you said #AllLivesMatter.

Or were you just full of shit?

If you enjoyed reading this article, please consider supporting the blog by buying me a coffee. Click the button below!

buy me a coffee!

I like silliness.

I’ve always been a big fan of silly things. The absurdity of the everyday. The ridiculousness of the ordinary. The opportunity for silliness intensifies exponentially when national events roll around. And in the UK, we are especially good at being absolutely fucking ridiculous.

So imagine my utter delight at the potential silliness on offer during the coronation of King Charles III.

People finding celebrity faces in food is possibly my favourite genre of internet and good lord, there were faces aplenty – from the spotting of Princess Diana’s face in some ham to the artist who rendered King Charlie’s marmite visage in 42 slices of toast.

There was plenty of other silliness on offer too, as homemade coronation outfits were crafted, knitted orbs were … knitted, and amateur portraits were painted in readiness for the big day.  

And of course we haven’t even mentioned the thousands of people flocking to that London for a night or two of voluntary homelessness in an attempt to watch the newly-appointed head of a cabal of international jewel thieves ride through the streets in his golden carriage, waving at the peasants. 

The silliness of the apparently “scaled back” £100 million pound ceremony itself was, of course, outstanding.

Huw Edwards opined about the Kings choice of trouser, while Lionel Ritchie and Katy Perry waited inside for things to kick off.

A room full of people were totally fine with Prince Andrew strutting around in ceremonial robes (for some reason), almost as if he wasn’t a regular visitor to his convicted sex-offender pal Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Paedophile Island’, and almost as if he hadn’t been sued for the sexual assault of a 17 year old and settled out of court for millions. Still if Andrew was nervous about the public reaction to his presence, at least there was no chance of him breaking into a sweat.  

The Champions League music* blared out inside Westminster Abbey and Ant and Dec waited patiently while Charles stripped off behind some giant screens to get oiled up by four priests.

The new King was asked to swear an oath to “stop the growth in inequity” as he sat in his golden cloak next to a table of bejewelled swords and clearly unearned Wimbledon trophies, squeezing his sausage-fingers into a ceremonial glove as people brought him a variety of bejazzled sticks and a holy hand grenade of Antioch. 

At some point, someone involved in this Royal Edition LARPing must have looked at what they were doing and what they were wearing and thought, “fuck me, what the hell are we all doing here?” 

Of course this new and updated version of the coronation was also one that embraced diversity. Our first Asian PM, Rishi Sunak, really quite creepily delivered some lines about God or something – I don’t really know, I zoned out. Floella Benjamin was invited to carry one of the more expensive sticks. And a gospel choir sang to what can only be described as an audience of entirely non-plussed white people who weren’t quite sure what to do with their faces.

And just to really cement the new and improved coronation’s commitment to diversity and to avoid controversy, some of the jewels stolen from Africa were replaced with other jewels… stolen… uh… yeah, they were stolen from Africa too. Uh… yeah, never mind.

But look, I imagine it’s a big deal, becoming King. I’m not saying don’t celebrate at all.

It’s just, you know, maybe invite your family round to your house. Get a few friends round too. Maybe get some sausage rolls in, a few baguettes, and a fruity Wensleydale… you could go all out and get some of those Moroccan spiced falafel from Lidls and one of those olive medley things, you know the ones with feta cheese in as well. Get some cans in. Maybe some party rings and a Colin the Caterpillar for afters … or a Wall’s Viennetta if you’re feeling posh. 

I understand that there’s a place for the preservation of tradition and ceremony, but at the same time, I also wonder at what point those who would happily spend £100 million to put a new hat on an old man’s head might realise that doing so could be considered ‘a bit much’ for some people to take. 

I guess it’s not when almost 3 million emergency food parcels were distributed by the Trussel Trust in the last 12 months, an increase of 37% from the year before.

I guess it’s not when choosing between heating and food isn’t just hyperbole, but is a genuine reality for an ever increasing amount of people.

And I suppose it’s not when thousands of nurses, doctors, teachers, rail workers, and many others have all been striking for fair pay and conditions after suffering decades of real terms pay cuts, while the richest among us have steadily increased their wealth.

Of course for many, the idea of spending millions on a hat-fitting party is abhorrent at any time, but it’s the seeming inability to read the room when many are struggling to survive that I think some people find really difficult.

But those who are bold enough to try and suggest that this is all a rather silly expense might well find themselves in the back of a police van before they’ve actually done or said anything. 

The continuing erosion of our right to peaceful protest and the increase in police powers to limit our right to protest should be very alarming.

And that’s not an exaggeration either. It’s what happened in the hours before the coronation, as Graham Smith, the chief executive of anti-monarchist group, Republic, and several other would-be protesters were stopped, searched, and arrested.

Whether you are anti- or pro-monarchist, whether or not you agree or disagree with the message, a crackdown on the right to hold those in power to account, a “low-tolerance” policy on the right to peaceful protest against the status-quo, should of course be somewhat worrying to all of us.

If I told you about a place where the police went around arresting people because they might shout some hurtful things about the monarchy or criticise the government, you would say, “yes, yes, that does sound a lot like authoritarianism now you mention it.”  

But this isn’t another country. This is 21st century Britain. It’s literally happening right here, right now.

Many of the freedoms that we enjoy today were fought for and won through protest and the right to speak truth to power. The continuing erosion of our right to peaceful protest and the increase in police powers to limit our right to protest should be very alarming.

But we don’t really care about it, do we?

Because look!

Look! The King’s got a new hat!

__________________________________

*Yes. I know.

If you enjoyed reading this article, please consider supporting the blog by buying me a coffee. Click the button below!

buy me a coffee!

When you think about whether or not Golliwogs are racist, the phrase ‘obvious even to the thickest of the thick’ springs immediately to mind.

But it seems like we’re giving terminally thick a smidge more credit than they deserve, because apparently there are legions of die-hard Golliwog fans out there, who need it explaining step by step… preferably with pictures. 

Some of you might think calling people ‘thick’ isn’t nice.

First, I do not care even a little bit. And second, as Obi Wan Kenobi famously said, “when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth – these people are thick as shit.” 

Anyway, in April 2023 Christopher and Benice Ryley, the landlord and landlady of the White Hart Inn in Grays, Essex, made the news after their pub was raided by police looking for Golliwogs, which is a real sentence that I just typed.

Now, I’m not really concerned with whether or not the police raid was over-the-top. Nor am I concerned with Christopher Ryley’s penchant for hanging his Golliwogs from the bar, making jokes about lynching, and spunking far-right propaganda all over his Facebook page.

I’m more interested in the legions of die-hard Golliwog fans from the first paragraph, who leapt, arse-first, to the defence of this deeply (and obviously) racist caricature of Black people.

Although I really thought we’d already done this, it’s important to explore the reasons people seem so willing and able to defend Golliwogs… and then to ruthlessly and mercilessly pull those arguments to pieces and shit all over them. So let’s go, yay!

It’s just a toy, Barbara!

The first line of defence is that golliwogs are just harmless childrens toys. A popular myth is that they originated in Egypt where labourers working for the occupying British soldiers (Working On Government Service) were referred to as ‘Ghuls’ (the arabic word for desert ghosts). The children of these workers apparently (and somewhat conveniently for this contrived load of old shit) played with black dolls and gave them to the British as gifts. Thus ‘Ghuliwogs’ were born.

Now this is clearly bullshit, and it doesn’t seem to matter that absolutely nothing about this story makes anything better! But why let the truth get in the way of a good yarn?

Let’s say we do get to the truth though. Racists will happily tell you that the actual origin of the Golliwog lies with the illustrations of Florence Kate Upton from her 1885 book, ‘The Adventures of the Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg (sic)’.

“See! It’s just a children’s book Barbara! It’s not racist. The Golliwog is the hero, Barbara, so it can’t be racist.”

What’s conveniently left out of this origins story is that Upton’s Golliwog, described in the books as “a horrid sight,” was based on one of her childhood toys – a black minstrel doll. Now, you’d have to be a fucking idiot to try and argue that the minstrels were anything but horrifically racist.

If you don’t know, and I’m sure you do, minstrel shows began in the early 1800s and featured white entertainers in blackface, singing, dancing, and acting in ways that were meant to mock and caricature Black people.

The acts, performed for white audiences, were meant to dehumanise Black people, portraying them as stupid, lazy, hypersexual, and able to tolerate pretty extreme violence. The whole point of this ‘entertainment’ was to paint Black people as less than human, to perpetuate notions of white superiority, and to justify continued violence towards and subjugation of Black people as actual slaves.

So while Upton might well have meant her Golliwog to be a loveable character (while at the same time, “a horrid sight” and “the blackest gnome”), it is based on a horrifically racist caricature of Black people.

But what about my childhood, Barbara? My Childhood!

The truth of the Golliwog’s origin story doesn’t slow anyone down from screaming on Facebook about how an attack on Golliwogs is an attack on the their childhood, as if nostalgia somehow trumps racism. And calling them Gollys, Golly toys, or Golli-dolls, doesn’t erase their racist associations either.

But even if it did, the nostalgia these people are pining for, the nostalgia that they somehow think *checks notes* the preservation of Golliwogs will keep alive forever, is a complete fiction.

It’s this idea that in the 70s and 80s everyone just got on, kids all played football together, ate Robertson’s jam sandwiches, played in the park till late (not having to worry about dog shit or paedos, for there there was none to be found) and rode their Choppers and BMXs home in the dark to watch Jim’ll Fix It, before going peacefully to bed, cradling their favourite fucking Golliwogs. The only things kids had to worry about in the 70s and 80s were railway lines and electrical substations.

There was no racism in the 70s or 80s. There was no National Front throwing bricks through the windows of my family home. There was no racism towards Black footballers. Golliwog or its derivatives were never used as racial slurs. There was no racism in education. There was no racism in policing. There was no racism in housing.

The keener-witted among you might have sensed a touch of sarcasm just now, because of course there was racism in all of those areas. So nostalgia for ‘the good old days’ is nostalgia for a time when the days honestly weren’t that good for everyone. And the evidence for that is clearly there for anyone who cares to look.

Golliwogs really just remind people of a time in the past where they could be as racist as they liked without all of this nasty do-gooder fuss. That’s the truth. Say it with your full chest. Don’t hide your racism behind your insatiable appetite for marmalade.

Both of the main arguments for why we should at all costs preserve the Golliwog are, upon close inspection, bollocks.

Either you are choosing to remain ignorant to protect your weird nostalgia for all that lovely racism we used to have, or you are, by process of keen deduction, thick as shit.

But look, there are far more important things to think about these days, than Golliwogs in pubs, right? Yes, your’e right. Absolutely right. Let’s get to those more important things.

From Conserve to Conservative

See what I did there? Did you see what I just did there!?

You’d be forgiven for thinking that here, almost a quarter of the way through 21st century, long after after the Civil Rights movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Great Racism Book Club of 2020, and that Sainsbury’s advert with the Black family in it, that even for the hardiest of racists, phrases like “all white men should have Black slaves” might be best kept under your Klan hood.  
 
But apparently not, because, in the same week as Golligate, Tory Councillor, magistrate, school governor, and *checks notes again* self-employed hairdresser, Andrew Edwards, was recorded casually remarking:

“I think all white men should have a black man as a slave or black woman as a slave, you know. There’s nothing wrong with skin colour, it’s just that they’re lower class than us white people.”

Like me you’re probably thinking, “that can’t be right. He can’t have actually said that out loud. Even a complete and utter thicket with the IQ of a box of broken hammers and the face of a semi-retired garden gnome wouldn’t be dense enough to say that out loud.”

But, like me, you’d be dead wrong.

There’s very little point in discussing whether or why what was said was racist… I hope.

But we should consider the fact that a person who holds and is happy to casually express these sorts of views, has responsibility for making decisions that will have a real life impact on real people’s lives. 

As a councillor, this man who thinks Black men and women should be white people’s slaves is responsible for listening to the issues of the community he serves and reviewing and developing council policy that affects those people.

As a magistrate, this man who thinks Black men and women should be white people’s slaves is responsible for deciding whether or not people are given a criminal record for minor offences.

As a school governor, this man who thinks Black men and women should be white people’s slaves is responsible for school finances, hiring and firing of leadership, and steering school policy.

As a hairdresser, this man … okay, no one with any self-respect would go to this man for a fresh trim. I think we’re safe from his white supremacy in that particular sphere of influence.  

Golliwogs really just remind people of a time in the past where they could be as racist as they liked without all of this nasty do-gooder fuss.

But there’s no way anyone who would openly state that Black people should be slaves would let that thinking influence their judgement, right? And anyway, it’s not like having a criminal record, or a difficult school experience negatively affects anyone’s life chances.

Look, this is more important than Golliwogs, for sure. But what I think a lot of people are missing here is the point. So I’ll connect the dots for you. 

It’s 2023. There is no plausible way that anyone, given the available evidence and even just a handful of brain cells, should still believe that there is a racial hierarchy, in which white people are somehow innately superior to Black people and other people of colour. These myths have been thoroughly debunked.

So it really leaves you to ponder where someone might get the idea that Black people are inferior. Where might that seed have first been planted in our Andrew and other animals? How was it nurtured, right here in the 21st century where information is available at the tap of a phone screen?

Where, oh where, might these ideas come from?

Where…

Would…

You…

Get…

An…

Idea…

Like…

That? 

If you enjoyed reading this article, please consider supporting the blog by buying me a coffee. Click the button below!

buy me a coffee!

You can say what you like about the Queen, but you can’t deny that she had a great eye for a nice hat. And anyone who appreciates a good hat is okay in my book. 

Indiana Jones, Frank Spencer, Porkpie off of Desmond’s, Jamiroquai*, Ghengis Khan… the list goes on. 

So it is a little sad that just as children across the land laughed, played, and thoroughly shit-housed their way back in to school playgrounds in September 2022, one of the greatest porteurs de chapeaux this country has ever seen fit to house in a 240 bedroom/78 bathroom palace, shuffled off this mortal coil at the ripe old age of 96… led away into whatever comes after by Paddington Bear apparently. 

Curiously, this means that Paddington Bear is either dead or Death, but that’s a conversation for another time. 

Even before the news had officially broken, Huw Edwards had changed into the most sombre of his black suits, and then soon after, fast food outlets, joinery firms, and bus stations had tweeted their condolences, and both Lidl and Asda had run completely out of toilet paper.**

Predictably, pro-monarchists cried and wailed and gnashed their teeth, while anti-monarchists cried and wailed and gnashed their teeth. A good time to be a dentist.  

Under normal circumstances, I’d be writing about the racist backlash against anyone who dared to express an opinion about colonialism and empire. I’d be writing about how it was largely Black people, Black women especially, who seemed to draw the most fire for daring to speak their truths. Or I’d be writing about the disgusting, continued, racist hate campaign directed at Meghan Markle.

But these aren’t normal circumstances, so I’m not even going to mention any of that. I won’t be saying anything at all about Trevor Sinclair or Uju Anya, I won’t certainly won’t be carrying any eggs around either, and you won’t see me walking anywhere with even lined paper, let alone a blank piece of paper. Do you think I’m mad!?

No, no, dear friends, this is about grief and silliness. 

I’ll preface this by saying that grief and the grieving process are complex. There is no right or wrong way to feel following the death of a loved one, and the emotions and feelings we experience are many and varied, and can be difficult to process.

And for those wondering why people might grieve for someone they don’t even know, it’s actually perfectly normal to mourn the deaths of celebrities.  

We shouldn’t be hypocritical about it either. Some of the people who were in floods of tears at the death of Bowie or (ironically) Prince will now be deriding others for shedding tears for Her Maj and that’s a little unfair. It’s not our place to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t feel when someone dies. 

Look, whatever you think of Queen Bet, whatever you think about the members of her family, whatever you think about the monarchy as an institution, the death of the only monarch most of us have ever known was always going to bring with it a certain level of faffing about.   

As a nation, we are great at faffing about in silly hats, silly wigs, and silly costumes, and pretending it’s all very serious. We bloody love it.  

But alongside the expected traditional and ceremonial faffing about, there was some other, perhaps less expected, localised faffing about that really did fall very definitely into the realm of silliness.  

Let’s begin with the cancellations.

Warning: Mild to Moderate Silliness 

For some reason it was deemed disrespectful to play sport following the announcement of the Queen’s death, so football, rugby, cricket, horse racing, boxing, golf, and cycling all suffered cancellations of some sort or another. But while most sports sort of moved things around a bit, football decided to go the whole hog and cancel any “football-related activity” including grass roots football for the whole weekend. Nothing more disrespectful than kids having fun, I guess. 

The silliness only got sillier as two amateur football teams, Sheffield International FC and Byron House, faced an investigation for playing a friendly game that weekend. A full statement was released by the Sheffield and District Fair Play League, condemning the “disrespectful and despicable behaviour.” 

Preventing kids from getting exercise and/or having fun seemed to be the most respectful course of action all round as the Junior and Mini Great North Run events were also postponed. The organisers argued that it wouldn’t be possible “to deliver the kind of event experience that children and their families would expect and still ensure it is an appropriate tribute to the life of the Queen.”

Then it got really silly.

Warning: Extreme Silliness 

Bicycle racks in Norwich were cancelled.

Happy Meals were now Sombre Meals.

The BBC genuinely had to ask people to stop leaving marmalade sandwiches in parks.

Bing was gagged.

Bus stops mourned.

Phone boxes dressed in black.

Guinea Pig Awareness Week was postponed. No, really.  

And Morrisons decided that beeping was disrespectful.

Which sort of makes me wonder what other noises might be considered disrespectful in a period of morning.

Squeaking maybe? Snorting? Honking? Hooting? Should there be a nationwide ban on owls for two weeks?

Bellowing? Surely bellowing should be banned?

Some chose to go in a very different direction. I mean what says respect more than discount deals on laser hair removal?

You could argue that people are driven to do strange things by grief, and you’d be right.

But none of this was driven by grief. This was like a grotesque piece of nation-wide performance art, a flash-mob of mourning, catching us unaware as we walked through silent supermarkets in which staff were told not to speak to customers… because of sadness. 

And let’s not even mention The Queue.

When I lost my own father in 2008, I was very sad. Really, honestly quite sad about it all, you know? In hindsight, I can say that I was probably experiencing depression. 

But at absolutely no point during this cognitive funk did I think that an A0 sized portrait of my late dad in amongst the baked beans display in my local Tesco Express would be a fitting tribute.  

The performative grief just got sillier and sillier every day. And while I love silliness, there was a not-so-silly side to this. An actual real life impact.  

Bank holiday for the funeral… no problem. Centre Parks closing and telling people with holidays booked to find alternative accommodation for that night… bit harsh. 

Closing foodbanks that people rely on for, you know, food… slightly more of an issue. Cancelling hospital appointments and surgeries and treatments for cancer patients… yeah, so we’re entering the realms of the significantly problematic here.  

I think it’s okay to question some of this. I think it’s okay to stop for a second and think, “who is all of this for?” Is any of this really out of respect for the Queen, or is it about demonstrating to everyone around us how mournful and deferential we are? A can-you-top-this game of who’s the most respectful?

Can we look at ourselves and honestly say “well… it’s what she would have wanted”?  

There comes a point at which I think it’s absolutely fair to look around and say “this all seems a bit much really,” and that point is when our displays of reverence for the dead are actively harming the living.  

Or when they’re just really, really silly.

Sadness is one thing, and while we might wonder why people want to mourn an old lady they never met, we know this is actually an important process for a lot of people. 

However… what we saw in the days and weeks after the Queen was taken across the River Styx by Paddingt(char)on the Ferryman, was performative grief of the very silliest variety.  

And at silliness, we excel.  

*I know it’s JK from Jamiroquai, but pretending the man’s name is Jamiroquai is much funnier than writing JK from Jamiroquai, so that’s why I’ve referred to Jamiroquai as a person even though I’m fully aware that Jamiroquai is the name of the band, Jamiroquai.  

**Not even remotely true.

If you enjoyed reading this article, please consider supporting the blog by buying me a coffee. Click the button below!

buy me a coffee!

The Met Police have been compiling their Greatest Shits album for some while now, and with the addition of Child Q, not a quarter of the way into 2022, ‘Now That’s What I Call Some Racist-Ass Bullshit’ is already shaping up to be an absolute banger. 

The case itself is a pretty tough read. Child Q was a Black teenage girl, who in 2020 was subjected to a deeply traumatic and entirely avoidable ordeal while in the supposed care of her educators. 

The police were called by teachers who said they thought Child Q might have had drugs on her, because she apparently smelt of cannabis. Two female officers conducted a strip search in the school medical room. The Local Child Safeguarding Practice Review, published in March 2022, noted that:  

“The search, which involved the exposure of Child Q’s intimate body parts, took place on school premises, without an Appropriate Adult present and with the knowledge that Child Q was menstruating.” 

So probably about 38,275 safeguarding failures already at this point, but let’s continue. The police didn’t find any drugs… because there weren’t any. And importantly, the review also noted that: 

“The disproportionate decision to strip search Child Q is unlikely to have been disconnected from her ethnicity and her background as a child growing up on an estate in Hackney […] racism (whether deliberate or not) was likely to have been an influencing factor in the decision to undertake a strip search.” 

As usual, the people who need to read what I’m about to say probably won’t. And even if they do it will no doubt be met with some eloquent, well-constructed rebuttal, like “Bollocks!” or “what about Muslim rape gangs?” And I’ll slink back to my corner with my tail between my legs, considering myself well and truly telt. 

But on the off-chance that it might strike a chord somewhere, I will persist. Because it’s all very well and good to say “this wouldn’t have happened if the girl was white,” or “this is a clear example of yet more racism,” but I think it might be important to explain how and why we know that to be true, rather than just repeating it over and over again.  

Or maybe not – the backfire effect is a pretty powerful thing, but there is reasoning and a whole lot of evidence to support these claims of racism. Again, people who like to shout “Bullshit!” when presented with evidence and facts as if that somehow settles the matter, I’m sure will remain unswayed, but here we go anyway.  

Adultification 

We know that Black children are much more likely to be perceived as older than they actually are. I can testify to that from personal experience, but no one cares about that. We want facts and evidence, remember?  

Actually no, we don’t because we know that doesn’t work. The backfire effect is a particular quirk of human thinking that sees people routinely dig their heels in in the face of any evidence that contradicts their world view. So instead of just presenting the facts, let’s see if we can think things through a bit.  

Do we really need to stop and think through the implications of assuming that young girls are older than they actually are? I mean, the answer is yes, some of us clearly do.

Evidence suggests that Black boys as young as 10 are more likely to be mistaken as older. So what do we think are the consequences of that? Well if you think a child is older than they are, what assumptions might you make about them? 

What do you feel when you see a group of 10 year olds walking toward you in the park versus a group of 15 or 16 year olds? Is your reaction different? Probably. 

So if you see a group of 10-year old Black kids, your reaction is different than if you saw a group of 10-year old white kids. Not because you’re Enoch Powell, but because you are probably assuming the Black kids are older than they are, and your response to that becomes different. This is adultification, and it is racism in action.   

Being perceived as older, the research here suggests that Black boys are also more likely to be perceived as guilty and face police violence if accused of a crime – and are more likely to be accused of a crime in the first place, which we’ll get to a bit later.  

What does this have to do with Child Q? Well, stop for a second and think about what this might mean for Black girls who are also perceived as older than they are.  

A report from Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, Girl­hood Inter­rupt­ed: The Era­sure of Black Girls’ Child­hood, found that adults viewed Black girls ​“as less inno­cent and more adult-like than white girls of the same age, espe­cial­ly between 5–14 years old.” In comparison to their white peers, Black girls were per­ceived as: 

• need­ing less nur­tur­ing, pro­tec­tion, sup­port and comfort; 
• being more inde­pen­dent; and 
• know­ing more about adult top­ics, includ­ing sex. 

Do we really need to stop and think through the implications of assuming that young girls are older than they actually are? I mean, the answer is yes, some of us clearly do.

But the fact that this is more of a problem for Black girls, means that they are more likely to suffer the potentially devastating consequences. 

Rebec­ca Epstein, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Center on Poverty and Inequality and one of the authors of the Girlhood Interrupted report, outlined some of these implications, saying “if author­i­ties in pub­lic sys­tems view black girls as less inno­cent, less need­ing of pro­tec­tion and gen­er­al­ly more like adults, it appears like­ly that they would also view black girls as more cul­pa­ble for their actions and, on that basis, pun­ish them more harsh­ly despite their sta­tus as children.” 

So when children are thought of as adults, they are treated more harshly by teachers, the police, judges, and anyone else who is supposed be providing care. And it is Black children who are more likely to be thought of as adults and therefore more likely to be presumed guilty. 

Jahnine Davis co-founder and director of Listen Up, and PhD researcher at Kingston University, argues that racist stereotypes lie at the heart of adultification. Let’s think about this. There’s the fetishisation and hypersexualisation of Black women, the Strong Black Woman trope, as well as a number of studies that demonstrate the prevalent, yet entirely false belief that Black people are less sensitive to pain. 

It is the interaction of all of these racist tropes and more that combine to result in Black girls being thought of as adults and “need­ing less nur­tur­ing, pro­tec­tion, sup­port and comfort.” 

What else is going on here? 

Adultification works in tandem with the clear racial discrimination that we know exists within the education system.  

For example, anger bias means that teachers are more likely to perceive Black children as angry than white, which can lead to Black children experiencing unfair discipline and receiving more suspensions from school than white children. Black Caribbean students in English schools are excluded at a rate up to six times higher than white students. There are obvious consequences to this.

Maybe Black children are just more unruly? Well, that’s racist. But we can look into that a little more as well if you like.

In many schools, uniform and hairstyle policies have unfairly discriminated against Black children, meaning they’re more likely to find themselves in trouble for… having hair. Behaviour policies have also unfairly targeted Black children by punishing things like ‘kissing teeth’ far more harshly than say tutting. 

So up to this point, we have Black children being thought of as adults and more likely to face harsher punishments than white children, and we have Black children facing discrimination within the education system. Again, rather than just relying on facts, stop and actually try to think through the consequences of all of this.  

But what about the drugs, she smelled of drugs? 

Ok, let’s assume she absolutely fucking reeked of weed. Go back to the beginning, read all of this again, and tell me that what happened is a proportionate response to a student smelling of weed. 

Ah, good, you’re back. Still not convinced? Well here’s some stuff about drugs that we can think about too. A report launched by LSE and Release found that in the UK Black people were stopped and searched for drugs at almost seven times the rate of White people, BUT Black people reported using drugs about half as much as white people (4.7% compared to 9%). 

The report also found that Black people are more likely to receive a harsher police response for possession of drugs. Figures from 2009/10 showed that 78% of black people caught in possession of cocaine by the Metropolitan Police were charged, with 22% receiving a caution. Only 44% of white people were charged for the same offence, with 56% receiving a caution. 

And just for cannabis alone, Black people caught in possession by the Met Police are less likely to receive a warning and five times more likely to be charged than white people. 

Eesh! 

“So when children are thought of as adults, they are treated more harshly by teachers, the police, judges, and anyone else who is supposed be providing care. And it is Black children who are more likely to be thought of as adults and therefore more likely to be presumed guilty.” 

Let’s keep going for a just a bit longer and see if we can work through this.  

According to a Ministry of Justice report in 2018, Statistics on Race and the Criminal Justice System, 40% of prisoners aged under 18 were Black or Mixed ethnicity, despite the fact that those groups represented just 17% of the entire prison population.

Children from minoritised ethnic groups also had a higher proportion remanded in custody, a higher custody rate, and received longer custodial sentences. Adultification in action. Racism in action. You’ll find a similar pattern repeated across the atlantic too. 

Bringing this all together 

It’s really easy to dismiss claims of racism and just shout “Bollocks!” when you isolate specific and very small pieces of a particular incident. But if you can be bothered to start piecing things together and look at the much broader picture, it’s possible to understand things a bit differently.  

The case of Child Q is the result of a complex tapestry of racist stereotypes, assumptions, and practices, that resulted in a very long list of failures to adequately protect a child. To call the school’s and the police’s response to a child smelling of weed ‘disproportionate’ would be like calling Jeffrey Dahmer a wee rascal. 

But whatever you want to call it, the only reason we’re having this discussion at all is because Child Q was Black.  

If you enjoyed reading this article, please consider supporting the blog by buying me a coffee. Click the button below!

buy me a coffee!

Well first of all, when you say “you people” to me, I’m just going to assume you mean distractingly beautiful, witty, talented, Psychologists. Admit it… I’m right aren’t I? That’s what you mean.

Anyway, lots of ‘things’ are happening at the moment, and it just seems like there is almost always some sort of racist crap bubbling away underneath the surface. Because there is. Because racism.

I want to write about the war in Ukraine, but I’m hesitant. I’m hesitant because I know what will happen. But I’m going to do it anyway, in the full knowledge that this will not go well.

I want to express that everywhere I look, there is another reminder that, despite your black squares on Instagram, and your Great Racism Book-Club of 2020, Black lives actually don’t matter at all. They never did, and they still don’t. The war in Ukraine has shown us all this. It’s shown us over, and over, and over again.

But how can you focus on racism, when people are dying, cities are being bombed, and there’s, y’know, a literal war taking place? Why do you people always have to make everything about race?

I’m not.

I’m just pointing it out when you are. Allow me to elaborate.

The reporting of the war across major news outlets has drawn a lot of criticism. Our tiny brains have been saturated with the message that this is all somehow different because it is a European conflict.

I’ve heard that an attack on a European country is an attack on “shared European values.” I’ve heard that the distinctly European values of peace and democracy are under threat, as if there is no peace and/or democracy outside Europe. Even Prince William got in on the act saying that for his generation (which is also my generation) “…it’s very alien to see this in Europe.”

Let’s just ignore for a minute the small fact that Europe has not only seen violent, bloody war and conflict throughout its history, including the last 40 yrs, but has also been directly responsible for much of the conflict seen around the globe, both historically and currently.

The constant reference to civilised Europe reflects and feeds into the deeply colonialised narrative that is seeping into and out of our racist hive mind. While apparently nobody at all said that Britons were more used to seeing conflict in Africa and Asia, the implication is still clear.

The events unfolding before our eyes are framed as more shocking and more newsworthy than those in other countries, and that Europeans (a racist dog-whistle, used as a proxy for “white people”) are more deserving of our sympathy.  

Such conflicts are merely to be expected in “uncivilised” countries in, for example, the Middle-East or Africa, right?

The impact of this?

There’s a real intense double standard, which I hope should be fairly clear once it’s pointed out, but that’s not actually what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about our responses to all of this. I want to talk about our thoughts, our ideas, and our actions in response to what we hear and see of these events.

I want to express how all of this feels as a person of colour, and honestly, this bit is important… it’s not because I want to make it about me, and it’s not because I want to make everything about race … it’s because it is important to notice how the world around us works, how our thinking is impacted by that, how that influences our behaviours, and why we might want to look at that just a little bit more closely.

In the weeks following the outbreak of war, I went out, very aware of my privilege, to buy something for lunch. An entire section of the building in which I work had been taken over as a sort of fundraising atrium. Cakes for sale, people doing charity cycles, the whole place decked out in Ukrainian flags, with blue and yellow bunting draped from every possible surface.

The self-service machines in the shop nudged me twice during the transaction to donate money to help Ukrainians fleeing war.

I turned on the news to find our government offering money to people to house Ukrainian refugees (we can get into that another time!) and then changed channels to find an ex-Blue Peter presenter being interviewed about opening up his own home as part of this scheme, explaining how important it is to help people when we can.

A child has his hair dyed blue and yellow … in solidarity?

Sainsbury’s changes the name of Chicken Kievs… because… I don’t know.

All of this is great. All of this is wonderful. Some of it is ridiculous, but mostly, it shows what we can do when we come together to support fellow human beings who are in a terrible situation. This is absolutely lovely to see. It is definitely a good thing.

But what I can’t say out loud, what I have to just internalise, what I have to think about, is … “WHERE THE HELL IS THIS ENERGY WHEN IT’S BROWN PEOPLE!?”

That and “how the hell have we got so much Ukrainian bunting at short notice? Do we have this shit just lying around?”

But seriously though, I can’t say any of this out loud. Because there’s a war happening. I just have to sit quietly as I’m reminded that while white refugees are welcomed with open arms, it wasn’t that long ago that Syrian refugees were violently forced back from the Polish border and left to die in the cold.  

I’m left wondering why almost 100,000 people would sign up for the government’s ‘Homes for Ukraine’ scheme, when not only would no such scheme ever be considered for refugees from Syria, Yemen, or you know, countries where brown people are suffering the consequences of war, but also that we know what the response would be if it were.

Absolutely none of this is meant to detract from the horrors unfolding in Ukraine right now (which include the horrific treatment of Black and brown refugees) or the fact that we should, quite rightly, be extending our sympathy and support. 

It is, however, meant to point out that words are important, and there is a broader narrative at play, reflecting a deeply ingrained racial and cultural superiority. 

And it’s okay to point that out, because we can hold more than one idea in our pretty little heads at the same time, can’t we?

Can we ask ourselves, in the midst of all of this, if, why, and how, our reactions to what’s happening are influenced in a way that reinforces our racist beliefs?

Can we ask ourselves, in all honesty, if we notice a difference in our reactions to conflicts in Europe to those elsewhere? And then ask ourselves why that might be?

Can we ask ourselves how we respond to the victims of those conflicts and whether it’s different because of what they look like? Would we be as open to the idea of hosting a refugee from Afghanistan as we are one from Ukraine, and if not why not?

These are really important questions.

Why do you people always have to make everything about race?

I’m not making everything about race. You are.

I’m just pointing it out when there’s a war happening and you feel the need to constantly frame it as shocking because of how civilised we are in Europe compared to Africa and the Middle East.

“This isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan […] This is a relatively civilised, relatively European city”

Charlie D’Agata, CBS

I’m just pointing it out when there’s a war happening and you aren’t allowing Black and brown refugees to cross the border.

I’m just pointing it out when there’s a war happening and you are saying that it’s different because these refugees look like you.

“What’s compelling is looking at them, the way they are dressed. These are prosperous, middle-class people. These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from the Middle East […] or North Africa. They look like any European family that you’d live next door to.”

Peter Dobbie, Al Jazeera

I’m just pointing it out when there’s a war happening and you are more compelled to be sympathetic because those affected are white.

“It’s really emotional for me because I see European people with blonde hair and blue eyes being killed.”

David Sakvarelidze Deputy General Prosecutor of Ukraine speaking on the BBC

I’m just pointing it out when there’s a war happening and you are bringing out the secret stash of Ukraine bunting when there was no such response to genocides in, for example, Ethiopia, Yemen, and Myanmar.

So look, I’m not the one who’s making everything about race. You’re doing that all by yourself.

You just don’t like it when I show you.

If you enjoyed reading this article, please consider supporting the blog by buying me a coffee. Click the button below!

buy me a coffee!

Anyone who works in academia (and probably a lot of people who don’t) will have heard the phrase “decolonizing the curriculum.” Oooh, scary! Generally speaking though, we have a pretty poor understanding of what it actually means. So we put some pictures of brown people in our shitty powerpoint slides and give ourselves a lovely pat on the back for being inclusive.

But nothing meaningful changes. We keep doing what we’ve always done in the ways we’ve always done it, just with some added colour. I stole the title of this piece from a symposium that I was part of the other day (Thanks, Dr K!), in which I was asked to talk about what meaningful change can look like? This is mostly what I said…

I have been studying and teaching psychology for over 20 years now. It’s a subject with deeply problematic past… like, really fucking dark. Occasionally, we might flirt with the troubling history of psychology our teaching, but it’s really down to individual lecturers who might or might not be aware of it, might or might not feel comfortable discussing it, and might or might not choose to bring it up with students.

“What do you mean by psychology’s problematic past?” I hear you cry. Well, settle the fuck in and put your seatbelts on.

The American Psychological Association (APA), recently published an apology to People of Colour for their role in “promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism” in the U.S. Along with it came a detailed historical chronology explaining exactly how psychology has contributed to the belief in racial hierarchy and kept the good ol’ inequality train a-chugging along. You want some examples? Of course you do.

• In 1869, Francis Galton, often considered the father of psychometrics (measuring stuff), published Hereditary Genius, in which he ranked the “comparative worth of different races” and concluded that “the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own.” Nice chap.

• In 1897, George Stetson found that Black children outperformed white children on a memory task. Naturally, he concluded that this was down to the greater mnemonic ability of Black kids’ “primitive brains.” Lovely.

• In 1916, G. O. Ferguson published “The psychology of the Negro,” Ferguson linked performance (on various reasoning, association, memory, and intelligence tests) with skin color, suggesting that Black people are more emotionally volatile, unstable, and less capable of abstract thought. Ferguson also proposed the “mulatto hypothesis,” the idea that the mental characteristics of Black people were greater among those who had a higher proportion of “white blood.”

• In the 1930s, psychologist Raymond Cattell said that Black individuals have “contributed practically nothing to social progress and culture.” Cattell argued that these individuals should, for their inferiority, “be brought to euthanasia,” which I personally think is a bit strong, but each to their own, I suppose.

• In 1958, Audrey Shuey, published The Testing of Negro Intelligence. Among her conclusions were that white people are innately superior to other races. I mean there’s a bit of a pattern emerging here, no?

• In 1985, J. Philippe Rushton published, in Personality and Individual Differences, the first of more than 150 articles claiming that Africans evolved to have lower intelligence, have more children and care for them poorly, and have a greater tendency to commit crime than white people.

Okay, okay, we get it, psychology is hella racist! True story, bruh. True story. And trust me, this is just scratching the surface.

But the point isn’t just that psychology has, historically, been a bit iffy. It’s that we are still feeling the impact of it in the world that we and our students are trying to navigate.

Like I think of the hundreds of Black children sent to special schools in the 1970s because teachers saw Black children as “intellectually inferior,” and were worried that too many Black children in a class would drag the white kids down. Why were they worried about this? Because psychologists like Hans Eysenck, one of the most well-known psychologists of the the 1970s convinced them of it. Side note: the fact that he literally opened his 1971 book, Race, Intelligence and Education, with “I’m not racist but…” is genuinely hilarious to me.

“I am not a racist for believing it possible that negroes may have special innate gifts for certain athletic events, such as sprints, or for certain musical forms of expression.. .. Nor am I a racist for seriously considering the possibility that the demonstrated inferiority of American negroes on tests of intelligence may, in part, be due to genetic causes.”

Eysenck, H.J. (1971). Race, intelligence and education (p.11). London: Temple Smith.

But the 70s was a long time ago. Things have changed, yes? Well… nope. To calculate payouts for brain injury and dementia-related concussion lawsuits, the NFL used a neat little algorithm. They stopped using that algorithm this year. Yes, in 2021, the NFL stopped using that particular algorithm because it was based on the idea that Black people have a lower baseline level of cognitive ability than white people. I’ll just wait here a second while you read this paragraph again.

Anyway, the APA’s apology made me think about how, as someone who teaches a subject so deeply enmeshed with racist ideas, I could make real change.

I could develop a brand new module! A module to properly explore psychology’s historical and continued contributions to racial inequality! Much exciting!

It didn’t take long, there’s an absolute shit-ton of material to work with, but creating the structure and developing ideas for content was the easy bit. How to make meaningful change is the hard bit. There are obstacles.

1. The ‘stand-alone’ problem.

Should critical, anti-racist discussions of a subject really sit within a single module, or should they be integrated into every element of a course? Obviously it’s the second one. Those discussions should take place within each and every module, but the problem is that they aren’t, and never will be unless, for example, they are systematically built in and every module leader has to demonstrate exactly how they are addressing anti-racist and EDI issues within their teaching and assessments. And honestly, who wants that paperwork?

So again it comes down to individuals, and their willingness and ability to discuss this stuff. Somewhat counterintuitively, having it sit in a single module allows an abdication of responsibility. “Hey look at how woke we are, we have a module on psychology and racism… Pete has this covered, so I don’t need to think about it at all. Hurrah!”

2. The ‘making a rod for my own back’ problem

I have a big mouth. I talk about racism a fair amount and am pretty vocal about it… because having brown skin means I have to be. I don’t have the benefit of it not being my problem. I don’t have the privilege (yeah, I said it) to be able to say, “it doesn’t’ really impact on me, it’s not my fight.” So it just sort of becomes my problem, the thing that I talk about, almost by default. And when it comes to making changes at work, the question then becomes, does it live and die with my personal effort?

If I hadn’t proposed this new module, would anyone else have? Would any of my white colleagues have considered it? Maybe. Maybe not. I have no idea. Again, people are busy, and doing nothing is easy.

3. The ‘will any of this even make a dent, given that the entire system is one that’s set up to maintain white supremacist structures’ problem.

Okay, this last one needs a bit more explanation. But it’s important so go with it.

When asked what meaningful change can look like, my honest answer is “burn it all down and start again,” which I’m not sure is the answer that most people in academia are looking for.

But let’s look at some of the constraints around developing a new “Psychology is Hella Racist” module (I think that’s what I’ll call it), and again think about it in terms of the current system upholding white supremacist structures.

Okay time-out. I know that me saying things like “white supremacy” over and over again might be uncomfortable, but just go with it. Notice how you’re reacting to it, your thoughts, your bodily sensations. Do you want to stop reading? Keep reading? What happens to you when I keep saying that academia is an institution that perpetuates white supremacy. Lean into it. I promise you, it will be okay.

Right, where was I?

Uh… okay, let’s start with diversifying reading lists. It’s a start. Academic journal articles are horrible to read. Let’s not pretend that they’re not. They are and we all know it.

So I don’t just want to make sure that the dull as shit articles on my reading list are written by people of various skin colours. I want films, documentaries, podcasts, poetry, in my course material. Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a radical suggestion, people do this all the time.

But the problem isn’t in what we get students to engage with, it’s that peer-reviewed academic journals articles are still considered the gold-standard when it comes to “evidence.” How many of us in academia have told our students about the hierarchy of evidence that they should cite in their essays? Peer-reviewed journal articles at the top. Anything else is not up to scratch.

But what we’re doing is legitimising some forms of knowledge (ones which we as the academic institution decide are legitimate) and are delegitimising others. But let’s dig a little deeper here, cos there’s more.

Steven Roberts and colleagues examined the editorship and authorship of six top-tier psychology journals from 1974 to 2018. During that period, only 5% of editors were people of colour. Moreover, an editor-in-chief’s race predicted the publication of research that highlighted race. So when editors were white, about 4% of all publications highlighted race. When editors were PoC, the publication rate for articles highlighting race almost tripled.

They also found a clear overrepresentation of white authors in top-tier psychology journals – which, before you start, could not be explained by either the quality of the research or by the quantities of researchers. 

Academia is whiteness – and it is kept by and for white people. And by delegitimising forms of knowledge other than peer-reviewed academic journal articles (which are disproportionately written by white people, with more white people reviewing and acting as gatekeepers), we’re giving our students that message too.

Academia is, by it’s very nature, an exclusive club. Students have to read material that is written and presented in certain ways, they have to write in certain ways, use certain types of language, cite research in particular ways, and express themselves via very prescribed methods – and all of this merely serves to exclude.

Yes we’re a bit better these days with inclusion policies and accessibility options, reasonable adjustments, and so on. But we have inclusivity absolutely ass-backwards. Inclusivity doesn’t have to be and shouldn’t be about helping people to do things in the way that we tell them is acceptable and palatable to us.

It is about people being able to bring their full selves, their histories, their forms of expression, and us (the institution), embracing all of that, rather than saying, “no do it this way.”

Why does academia look the way it does? Because we say it does? Because it always has been that way? Because we are the gatekeepers? We are the ones who decide that academia, for all it’s inclusivity, is still the domain of upper-middle class white people and that’s the way it should stay.

There are several reasons why, despite our apparent ‘wokeness’, we are stuck.

First, doing nothing is easy. Change is not. Change requires introspection and difficult work. It requires an admission that we might be getting things wrong, that we’re fallible, and jeeeez, but don’t we have a natural resistance to admitting that we’re wrong about stuff?

I don’t just know stuff because I’m Black. It doesn’t come naturally to me like basketball and adequately seasoning food. I’ve had to read about it, learn about it, understand it, think on it, think about what I can do differently and do better. If you think it’s something that’s actually important, then you can do that too.

Second, change requires bravery. Who’s brave enough to give a 1st to a piece of coursework that doesn’t include a single peer-reviewed academic journal article?

Who’s brave enough to instigate change, knowing full well that there will be resistance, that some of your colleagues might well hold the very racist ideas you’re trying to challenge? Who’s brave enough to make meaningful changes?

Who’s brave enough to burn it all down and start again?

If you enjoyed reading this article, please consider supporting the blog by buying me a coffee. Click the button below!

buy me a coffee!