30 DAYS WILD : THINKING WHILE WALKING - BLACK LIVES MATTER

Warley Drain

Thinking while walking . . .

One of the challenging things about being on Twitter is that you get to know about events before they appear on the news. People caught up in wars tell us they are being bombed. People we've never met die; we grieve. Photos appear of forest fires, landslips, oil spills. We often know little of the context. We don't know how to judge the truth. Old news turns up as if it's only just happened. And sometimes there's silence in the media about things we 'know' and we don't know why that silence persists. Sometimes it's lonely. Sometimes it's bewildering.

It was on Twitter I first saw the video clip of George Floyd being murdered, before I had any context for it. Most of his body was concealed by the police car. A worried looking policeman was acting as a sort of intermediary between concerned members of the public and his colleague who was nonchalantly kneeling on Mr Floyd's neck. Immediately I wondered what I would have done if I had been there. Would I have said something? Done something? Intervened in some way? I didn't know what had been happening immediately before the clip began. Had the man on the ground been incredibly violent? Was he exceptionally strong? What would happen if the policeman removed his knee? It was in another country, another culture. Even those present seemed to be floundering. Later, another clip showed there were two more policemen kneeling beside his body, hidden by the vehicle. And, it turns out, he was handcuffed. He was well and truly overpowered. I see it over and over again in my bewilderment and feel complicit because I have no idea what I would have done, what I would have been able to do, had I been there.

Single, pink flox-glove flower opening.

I am English. I am white. I am very English. Very white. By the names in my family tree it seems there may have been some Welsh ancestors. When I was a child, the possibility seemed exotic. I think my grandparents had relations in Scotland but I don't know how closely I was connected to them. That's the limit to my non-Englishness! Of my friends and acquaintances I find it hard to think of anyone more culturally narrow. I am university educated. I drink lots of tea. I enjoy eating crumpets with butter on. I have a non-posh but middle-class English voice without a regional accent. Feel free to think of me in stereotypes. Some of them will probably fit! I have experienced housing insecurity (terrifying) but have only twice found myself without shelter by nightfall and that was when I missed train connections. There's always been a job or a friend to go to. I have been short of money. Even within this last year there was a period when I could only afford to eat oats for breakfast and potatoes with onions for my evening meal. But that was ok. I would shake at night and wander round the house worried because I was so poor and so ill but I like oats and I like potatoes and things got sorted in time so I never went hungry and never had to ask for the internet to be cut off (I still had you lot!). I was ok.  I grew up when there were still restrictions on what women could or could not do but somehow I didn't feel these had anything to do with me. I anticipated that I would find ways to work round them. By the time I was an adult they had fallen away. My experience of the police has been mixed. I have been arrested twice (for protesting about nuclear weapons). Some police I've met are 'really good eggs'. Some you'd definitely want to avoid. But apart from some rather rough finger-printing I've been ok. And even that was merely sensing there was a nastiness which could be dangerous rather than actually being harmed. Everything has seemed surmountable. I am comfortable in my skin.

So what would it be like without this sense of 'belonging', of . . . let us say . . . superiority? 'Superiority' in the sense of thinking one will inevitably be able to rise above whatever happens? What if the colour of my skin made everything different? It's hard to imagine. The closest I can get is . . . it's a trivial example but it's one of the few things to have rocked me at the time . . . 

I was in my mid twenties, at a conference in Italy, having an animated discussion with a Methodist minister. Suddenly he said 'You are beautiful when you are angry. Your eyes flash.' Since then I've realised this is a terrible cliche but no-one had ever said anything like that to me before in the middle of what I thought was a sensible discussion about something that mattered. Until then I'd always felt I had been treated with respect. It was the first time I had been stopped in my tracks by having my female-ness turned against me. In that moment the world changed. It was less of a place. I still get angry when I remember this. It's the nearest I can get to imagining what it would be like to have the world against me all the time, to feel I am being diminished because of something unchangeable about the way I look. To have to put up with this non-stop would be unbearable.

30 DAYS WILD
Today's Random Act of
Wildness is to
be aware of what it is to
be human.

I'm telling you all this because it's my way of being at one of the 'Black Lives Matter' demonstrations without actually going. If I lived in one of the big cities I would find it hard to keep away, even though I am shielded. Part of me wishes these demonstrations weren't happening. We have a pandemic. If people going to the marches were now to fall ill because they have been near each other, it would be yet another evil, another disaster piled onto a mountain of disasters. Yet I know why they went. I understand that. Millions of my fellow citizens, in this country and around the world, have the wind taken out of their sails, their wings clipped, their lives diminished every day for no reason other than their skin colour or their culture. But someone with a phone who captured the murder of one man at the hands of police in a country far away and not my own turned that moment into a MOMENT; and such MOMENTS have to be seized if we can gather the collective will to change, or be pushed to change. A moment turning into a momentum. The opportunities don't often come round.

 Tweet