Dear Ms Understanding,
I work in heritage in a rural area and am a minority in my workplace and local community. I really love living close to nature and what I do for work, but I feel that I don’t belong here.
I grew up in a nearby rural county where we were the only Black family. Race was almost never mentioned by the white people around me, but I now realise I was treated as an outsider my whole childhood.
I have over the past couple of years – after reading up about anti-racism – started to challenge the everyday racism that I had previously ignored. This has caused a massive backlash against me professionally with the resulting victimisation hounding me out of a job I loved at a large heritage organisation. I have learned the consequences of speaking out on racism and discrimination is to have your life and livelihood destroyed.
I really like the advice you have given in your previous columns but feel that, in the current climate, even encouraging people of colour to gently challenge and assert their rights will ultimately lead to victimisation and dismissal at work. I can’t keep fighting when I am the minority in every area of life. I feel as if I am constantly under attack.
Dear Minority Voice,
I am so sorry to hear about what you’ve been through. Your exhaustion and sadness are palpable, and I would urge you to seek help for all of the effects on your mental health. Racism lodges itself into our bodies and so it can quite literally kill us. Though you may not feel this way now, your grit and wisdom leap off the page. Your question and comments articulate the conundrum that sits at the heart of what it means to live with and against injustice.
When you write about being hounded out of a job you love due to racism, my heart breaks, because I know personally that it is an incredibly harrowing experience. Similarly, when you describe growing up in an alienating environment in which you were always a minority, my heart hurts. Despite the exclusion you faced, somewhere along the way, you learned to decode the unspoken and speak back to those in power, and this is no easy feat.
And so, when you ask about the ethics of telling “people to challenge racism when the power balance is so skewed that challenging may result in greater harm to the individual”, I hear this not as cynicism but as exhaustion. So many of us have been wounded by our attempts to stand up to racism that it sometime feels unwise to continue. What you are asking (as many of my readers ask), is, “why should I continue to fight when the costs seem so high, and when I am almost guaranteed to fail?”
You are under no obligation to bear the burden of fighting against racial injustice. Throughout history there have been Black people who have participated in struggles for dignity and there have been those who have not. Some have fought for social change in spurts, or episodically, based on social context, while others simply considered that survival itself was a form of resistance. It is important to think about these options for yourself. You don’t owe anyone anything.
One of the sadnesses of modern life is that, as James Baldwin has said, it can feel like, “your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world […]”. And yet of course, despite the many problems facing Black people around the world today, history tells us that nothing we are experiencing is new. Though it may be tiring to constantly argue, and to face the reality of deaths in custody, police shootings and everyday slights, it is important to remember that historically, none of the problems oppressed people have faced would have been addressed if we did not fight. Remaining silent may be a good strategy for some but cannot be the approach for everyone.
Your concerns fall within a long history of debates about hope among Black activists and intellectuals. There have always been questions among Black people about the utility of hope in contexts in which there seems to be little reason to be hopeful.
Writing in the context of Australia, Mununjali, Yugambeh and South Sea Islander woman Chelsea Watego argues that, “To survive, some of our mob have thought they needed to cling to hope. Hope is the most ridiculous strategy for Blackfullas in the colony precisely because it doesn’t do anything – for us. It relies upon a false sense of respite from the reality of everyday racial violence … and demands that we suspend all logic and cling to hope, a waiting for a future good while living in a permanent hell. It tells us to wait, that one day we will get our turn. It tells us that we aren’t worth fighting for right now, but what it doesn’t tell us is that day never actually arrives”.
I have found this critique of weaponised hope to be helpful because it stops me from censoring my own “negative” feelings about the difficulty involved in challenging people and systems. It helps me to understand that, the chances of success in a given scenario may be minimal but I will fight anyway — not out of a sense of misplaced hope but out of a sense of dignity.
Ultimately, dear reader, what I want for you, is what I want for everyone in this world. I want you to know that you are right: “Anti-racist action is likely to result in further rejection, alienation and victimisation” and that this makes it all the more important to nurture in yourself a sense of ambition for dismantling racism. I want you to recognise that challenging power doesn’t always have to be as dispiriting as it has been for you. I want you to see that not all of your battles need to involve losing your job. You can fight anonymously so that the blows are not so hard next time, or you can fight by testing the limits of “allyship” and asking others to speak up when the risks are too significant for you. To be honest, if it were feasible, I would advise you to move. As a next based option, you should definitely join some online spaces that take you out of the isolation of your community.
You say you feel like you are the minority in every area of life, and I can understand why. It’s because you have been minoritized — that isn’t okay that you have been rendered a minority by virtue of processes of domination that place you at the bottom of the social ladder. I hope that knowing this helps you to feel less alone. Given your profound experiences of isolation it is so important that you begin to understand that your place in the world is large, not small.
I hope too, that you recognise that challenging racism is not just hard, it is also wondrous and generative and life-affirming. Remember dear reader, it isn’t just our adversaries who take notice of our efforts, we are also heard by those who – just like us – most need our courage.
I wish you all the best.
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Sisonke Msimang is a Guardian Australia columnist. She is the author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018)
