Racism is a topic I think about nearly every day and have done for most of my life. As a white male, it is impossible for me to truly understand its devastating impact. But I hope that by sharing some of the situations I have observed or been involved in over the last 50 years, I can encourage more people from all communities to stand together and defeat this long-living virus.
Moving from a busy, more urban part of London in the late 1960s to a suburban district of Reading in Berkshire, the key differences were a lack of tube lines, absence of graffiti, and a predominance of white faces on sleepy, tree-lined streets.
One of the first black boys – a son of Caribbean islanders – to join my primary school arrived soon after a slowly modernizing United Kingdom moved to the decimal currency system in 1971. He was immediately subjected to appalling racism from his predominantly working-class white classmates. On the playground or football pitch, he was typically addressed as “n****r”.
Not a single teacher admonished the children for this persistent racial abuse. Only one dinner lady, a local tough but fair battle-ax named Miss Whitfield, of whom the kids were petrified, ever brought the perpetrators to book. She would line the ragged eight-year-olds against the wall and yell at them not to use “such horrible and rude language.”
At around this time, during the political bearpit period of the 1970s, I heard some kids – from apparently respectable families, heavily involved in the Church of England and local community – say their parents were voting for the extreme right and racist National Front. I asked them why and they told me it was to give “English jobs to English people, not foreigners.”
Being of Ukrainian parentage myself, and regularly bullied for this, I quickly realized my allegiances lay with the foreigners. Many people look back at the 1970s through rose-tinted spectacles. Let me assure those of you who were not around then that the U.K. was a miserable place.
Not only was society much poorer economically, but also culturally. Vegetable portions were typically limited to frozen peas and sparse salads of lettuce, cucumber, and tomato, adolescents drank cans of warm beer in bus shelters and racism was rife everywhere, with people of color abused daily in the street. All of us foreigners were frequently told to “go back to your own country,” especially when speaking our various home languages.
The town of Reading, by this time, hosted thriving Afro-Caribbean and South Asian communities. We came together in regular festivals where my Ukrainian folk troupe danced, alongside the Caribbean steel bands and Indian performers. At the youth club, my fledgling “crew” were befriended by many in the local black community, who shared their dance moves, organized parties and educated us in the soul and reggae classics.
There were many such magic moments during these times, yet this was not a pretty period when it came to racial intolerance and violence. When being welcomed by Asian boys playing football in one of the playgrounds close to the town center, I noticed other white kids were reluctant to join in. Both adults and youngsters regularly used racist rhetoric and ugly slurs. Thankfully many of us youngsters were given voice by the Anti-Nazi League, a political movement promoting solidarity against the racists, who still seemed to be in the majority.
Skinheads were an established youth cult in the 1970s and early 1980s, defined, not just by their striking sartorial appearance and musical tastes, but often by their dislike of and violence towards immigrant communities, Asians in particular. From the time I joined secondary school, I did my best to defend ethnic minority friends when they were harassed or intimated by aggressors, although there were one or two times I failed because I feared for my safety.
After graduating, I worked several stints at the local authority in Manchester during the 1980s. During one of these, a black female friend was marginalized by colleagues. She asked me to intervene on her behalf. The management held some heavy-handed hearings, calling all parties as witnesses. After these, I was also marginalized and eventually transferred to another department. These experiences began a cycle of depression for this talented young lady, who later committed suicide.
I had also worked for an engineering company in Reading, employing a young, vibrant, racially mixed workforce. Unfortunately, we witnessed the constant, viciously racist rants of an aggressive white boss. When I refused to contribute to a collection for the boss’s birthday, due to his unfair treatment of black and Asian employees, this got back to the boss, who bullied me for the remainder of my time in his team, before I was eventually moved to another department.
Soon after joining the media in the late 1980s and encountering a paucity of ethnic minority journalists, I was co-opted onto a committee to address this problem. It became clear that most employers spent time drawing up equal opportunities charters and employment policies, but did very little to enforce them.
Through the 1990s and 2000s, regular racial discrimination in the workplace continued, although this was not as obvious as in previous decades. Employees would claim certain colleagues only achieved promotion “because they were black” and part of a progressive, “politically correct” liberal agenda, which ignored the “talents” of white workers.
However, this was a time of a vastly improving British society, during the optimistic decade of Tony Blair’s Britain, from 1997 onwards. The world was moving in a direction many of us felt more comfortable with. An expanding European Union was opening up to a post-Soviet Central European space. Mixed race relationships were becoming more normal. Racial insults on the streets became less common.
This “end of history” moment, where we thought liberal democracy had triumphed over authoritarianism and populism, described by political philosopher Francis Fukuyama, was however all too brief, shattered by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, then avenged by U.S. and U.K. governments, acting on inaccurate intelligence and propelled by neo-conservative forces.
A global financial crisis of 2008, which led to increased inequality and a renewed populist undercurrent soon followed. At the time of the 9/11 atrocities, I met Carlene, who came to the U.K. from the Caribbean islands of Trinidad & Tobago, to follow the West Indies cricket tour and ended up staying, studying Social Anthropology at the University of London, while working at the Financial Times.
Our mixed-race courtship and marriage did not seem controversial. I expected trouble at the Ukrainian Orthodox Church parish in Acton, west London, where I worship, but there was little. The worst I heard was a notorious harridan saying: “So he couldn’t find himself a white one?” I laughed, thinking, if that is your worst, this won’t be too difficult.
We visited Ukraine on many occasions. When I first introduced my wife to relatives in eastern Ukraine, she greeted them in Ukrainian, which she had also been learning at evening classes (without my knowledge, to surprise me.) One of my cousins looked her up and down and again I feared the worst, but she said: “So why have you taught this lovely girl to speak the village language (Ukrainian), instead of Russian?”
Carlene has also lectured on journalism at the Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts under Professor Mykola Tymoshyk and was embraced by welcoming students, who were delighted that a Caribbean emigre had learned the Ukrainian language.
Unfortunately, as a family, we have had a very different experience of society leading up to and after Brexit. During the referendum campaign of 2016, we saw hugely offensive, racist graffiti daubed on houses in west London. The behavior of many, particularly some middle-aged and older, white people towards us has also changed significantly. Even during the lead-up to Brexit, Carlene had been subjected to a monkey dance by an employee in a Polish delicatessen and accused by the owner of a shop, where she was a regular customer, of taking goods without paying. Naturally, we have since boycotted these shops. During her visits to one local shop, the assistant always puts on a recorded message, warning “shoplifters” that they will be punished. This never happens during my visits.
My sons are also affected by the changing mood. There is a local news agent that I have frequented for many years without a problem. But when my mixed heritage older son enters, he is immediately shouted at by the suspicious shopkeeper. Several weeks before the lockdown, my sons were waiting for me by our car and were shouted at by a local middle-aged white man, accusing them of trying to steal the car. Just before Christmas, a black family friend, who is a sports coach and mentor to my sons, was manhandled by police and arrested after a minor domestic dispute. He was refused bail and spent several weeks on remand in Wormwood Scrubs prison, before being released with all charges dropped.
My wife has educated me about this racism and I have seen her and my sons endure it and suffer the upsets. Although I do not experience this racism personally, I feel for them and share their pain when they see the mistreatment and killing of black Americans arrested in the US. It brings to the fore all their previous experiences and they fear that a further polarisation will divide UK society in the same way as the US.
They say fish rots from the head and it is clear that President Donald J. Trump is using racism as a weapon to increase his own popularity, casting a false narrative that the White House is under attack from killers, arsonists, and looters, adamant on destroying the American system.
But human rights protesters in 350 American cities not only saw a fellow countryman, George Floyd, dying on May 25 after being held face down for nearly nine minutes by a law enforcement officer, they have also seen a disproportionate number of their compatriots perish among the 100,000 COVID-19 fatalities presided over by an indifferent, populist President. This is a man who encouraged prosecution and incarceration of the Central Park Five in New York and refuses to acknowledge their innocence.
To add further insult to injury, Trump has concocted a racist black-Jewish power grab conspiracy for his support base, claiming protestors are bankrolled by Hungarian-born, financier and Holocaust survivor George Soros. Sadly, this ludicrous tale is also given a regular airing by panelists on Ukrainian TV talk shows.
U.K, prime minister Boris Johnson also inspires little confidence. Firstly, he is a self-professed admirer of the incompetent, dishonest, corrupt, and racist US president. Secondly, the prime minister’s own racially-loaded pronouncements show he does not represent all ethnic groups.
Yes, we have fault lines running through U.K. society, just as the U.S. does. But we have seen in the past that identities and popular views are fluid and can change over the years. We must carry on the debate about the type of country we want to live in. Should this be an inclusive, open, modern society, where we can trade with the world, exchange scientific innovations such as vaccines, medicines, and oncology treatments, and embrace workers from other cultures? Or should we live in a confined, closed, inward-looking, poorer economy, where we are back to a monocultural view and see foreign workers as visitors with restricted rights, who are here only for a limited time?
Through experiences with family, friends, and workmates, I am convinced that the more diverse a society, the more wealthy it is in terms of skills, ideas, and growth potential. My parents suffered hugely, forced to leave their families when their native Ukraine was occupied by both the Russian-led Soviet Union and Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Before this, my mother’s village society in central Ukraine was destroyed by Joseph Stalin’s forced collectivization, starvation, and racist cultural genocide of 1933, leading to more than five million deaths.
The passing of this memory through the generations has contributed to my empathy with oppressed peoples and I will continue to do everything I can to fight racism. My family has seen first-hand how authoritarian leaders using police and military force discriminate against and murder those in other ethnic groups, described as “an enemy within.” The story today is a different one, but has similarities, because it is about preserving human dignity and lives. In today’s environment, world leaders are indifferent to black lives. So we must remind them that we want racial justice, that #BlackLivesMatter.
Yuri Bender is editor-in-chief of Professional Wealth Management at the Financial Times.
