LAST week, four days after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a friend living just outside Glasgow told me a story which took my breath away. Thirty-five years ago, in his first job as the office newbie, his boss called him into his office. There on the desk were two piles of job applications.
One, his boss told him, was from people of one religious group and the other from people of another. (He could apparently tell because of the schools attended). As my friend looked on, wondering if this was some sort of weird initiation ritual, his boss cleared one pile straight off his desk into the bin below. Stage one of the selection process was complete.
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Two things immediately struck me about this story: Firstly, the utter unfairness of his boss’s action. Those trashed applicants would never be given the opportunity to blossom, to shine, to do great things for that company. Secondly, although my friend was no doubt shocked and confused at what his boss had done, he might have also felt a stab of pride and privilege that he, presumably recruited in the same manner, was part of the "club". I wondered what, even unconsciously, as a 20-year-old man starting out on his career, he might do to protect that privilege.
As the week unravelled I reflected again on the injustice, the unfairness and the privilege of discrimination of all kinds – racial, religious, gender, class. As the world watched as video emerged of a white police officer, hand in pocket, smirk on his face, kneel on the neck of George Floyd for 9 minutes until his windpipe was crushed like a plastic straw and his oxygen-starved brain started to shut down, I thought specifically about the racism faced by the majority of black people in the US and the UK who wake up every morning to find their job application has been, metaphorically, binned.
That application is more than a piece of paper. It represents hopes and dreams, plans and aspirations. It represents a chance to contribute to society, to make both community and country a roaring success. It offers choices in life that most of us take for granted: What sort of new car? Greece or Spain this year? Flat screen or slightly curved?
If you knew, or even suspected, that your form wasn’t getting seen, how upset would you feel? How outraged? How angry? If, on top of that, you and your kids were name-called in the street, stopped and searched, racially profiled at airports, and asked where you “really” came from, you might just feel the resentment build.
If your ancestors had been stolen from their countries and bought and sold like livestock so the profits could be used to build majestic townhouses, art galleries and places of learning in your owners’ names and then you found out that the compensation paid for the ending of that trade was paid to the owners and not to your ancestors or their families, I think you would be fuming.
On YouTube, over and over you watch another man who looks like you, who could be you, having his last breaths squeezed from his body in a Minneapolis street and the rage explodes in a fevered paroxysm of raw emotion. You would protest, you would speak out, you would demand change. You might even riot.
And the rest of us would berate you. We would criticise you, call you thugs and criminals, seek to divide and dominate you, spread lies about you and smear your message. We would use everything in our armoury – social media, television, rubber bullets and tear gas – to eviscerate you. We would pretend to be offended that you accused us of discrimination. We do this because we seek to protect the privileges we have – whether consciously or unconsciously.
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What if some of us were as outraged by the binned applications as my friend was all those years ago? What if we decided that we were going to speak out loudly and publicly about unfairness and discrimination wherever we saw it, and not protect our privileged positions any more to the detriment of anyone else? What if we chose to understand how discrimination has held back black lives and created a system in which black people can unlawfully die on the street?
What if we recognised that what happened in Minneapolis happens in the UK: the murder and police mishandling of the Stephen Lawrence case, and the death in a police cell of Sean Rigg in Brixton in 2008. Here, the death in police custody of Sheku Bayoh on a Kirkcaldy street in 2015 will be the subject of a public inquiry into whether racism played any part.
What if we stopped feeling so offended by the word racism and racist and actually did something to destroy it.
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