The day we solved prejudice

The workshop that finally cracked it

#25. Anti-Racism Workshop

Racism is bad. I think we can all agree?

But all this recent ‘how to decolonise your racist white baby’ stuff is a bit much, no?

I’m a white person - do I really need dismantling? My best friend at primary school was a Japanese kid called Akihiro, and he didn’t speak a lick of English (I think that’s why I liked him). I have an Indian wife and, on average, one Indian child. A DNA test told me I’m 1% Spanish for goodness’ sake.

No, while I know the intentions are good, I can’t say I get all the obsessive anti-racism stuff.

But I really wanted to try to understand it, with empathy; I wanted to see the world from a different perspective. Since my two boys are half-white, I needed to know, how do I half-decolonise them? Do I decolonise one and not the other to balance it out?

So I signed up to an anti-racism workshop to find out.

There were surprisingly few to be found online, and none of them were free. In the end I shelled out £259 for the pleasure. Worse than that, they sent me homework beforehand - one day before the workshop, I was given an onerous activities pack, including listening to a podcast, and scoring my privilege on a set of quiz questions like, ‘The leader of my country is also a person of my racial group.’ (N.B. Rishi Sunak.)

A young woman welcomed us to the course. Her name was Jade and she was nice. She explained how we’d be learning about implicit bias, allyship and the legacy of the barbaric slave trade.

‘Can I just say, “barbaric slave trade” is an interesting choice of words, because the word slave is derived from Slavs, white Eastern Europeans who were kept as slaves, while barbaric comes from the North African Berbers who were not white and who operated a cruel slave trade of their own, suggesting that, while the trans-Atlantic slave trade was unquestionably abhorrent, maybe the whole topic of the race and power could be a bit more complex than one might at first suppose,’ I said quietly, deep inside my own head.

You see, I had decided to keep my opinions to myself. I wanted to be a fly on the wall and get the authentic experience. Also, and more importantly, I’m a coward.

I’ll admit I was terrified going into the session. I was doing it with an open mind, positivity, and the intent to learn others’ perspectives – yet my heart was racing and my hands were sweaty. On Twitter at least, anti-racists do not seem particularly tolerant and open-minded. My only hope was that there would be lots of people attending, so I could blend into the anonymity of the crowd and have minimal interactions.

My first task was to introduce myself to the four other people on the call, so we could prepare for all the group breakout sessions we would be having.

There was Linda, for instance, who’d angled the webcam to stop at her first chin. Linda, like everyone else there, was white. She had a background in EDI and the arts with a specialism in neurodiversity. She was also part of a long Covid support group which was disappointingly full of middle-class white women. ‘Edinburgh is so white,’ she lamented.

There was Stevie too, who also worked in performing arts and was training to be an intimacy coordinator. He complained that ‘puppeteering is very white’.

‘Well, the most famous puppet is Kermit, and he’s green,’ I thought but definitely didn’t say.

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