Black and white of it
I have never written about the multicoloured roots of my life. I have never spoken about racial equality when given the chance.
I never wanted to be that white person who speaks because of her ‘proximity’ to Blackness.
But I once looked around a table and realised there was not one single Black person there. That was the first time I really saw it.
I was raised by many Black hands, as were many of us poor, working-class white kids from where I come from.
Black friends. Their plastic-covered hallway runners. The special front room used only on special occasions.
The food of the Caribbean filling the South London air.
All of that was normal to me. My friend’s mother was the first person to notice and talk to me about women’s stuff.
It hurts me every day to realise that my whiteness gets me into spaces that my far smarter Black girlfriends are still not invited into.
I had children with a Black man. He was home to me for many years. Black men had felt far safer to me than the violent white men I was born of.
I will never speak as though I know the lived experience of Blackness. But I was there. I saw things. I heard things. And, as an adult, I soon realised that rooms filled only with white people were very unlikely to be rooms for me.
I challenge. I stand in solidarity.
But more than anything, an attack on a Black person feels like an attack on my family. An attack on every Black hand that helped raise me - this white woman.