Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Hannah Lavery: “If we do not revise our history, then that’s dangerous”
Exeunt Magazine: On May 3rd, 2015, 32-year-old father Sheku Bayoh died in custody, after several police officers pinned him to the ground in the early hours of the morning. But this wasn’t Minneapolis, or Charlottesville, or even America. This was Kirkcaldy, Scotland, a medium-sized, post-industrial town of 50,000 people, lying across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. Not, in other words, the sort of place that many white people would immediately associate with a black man dying at the hands of the state.
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It is always interesting to read about other countries who are experiencing similar kinds of racial issues and unrest as we are in the United States. Sometimes, it feels like we are the only ones with this kind of deep rooted racism, but no, it exists anywhere there are white people. It is different of course, in disparate countries, but the underlying causes are the same. American racism is its own awful breed that is less afraid to show itself publicly than other countries may be, but I am hopeful that that means we are on the right path to eradicating it. You cannot get rid of something that hides in the shadows. It needs to be upfront and in everyone’s line of sight for us to have any chance of fighting it off. Hearing about Scottish exceptionalism is interesting, because to me, this is one of the biggest issues and causes of white supremacy in America as well. American exceptionalism does not leave room for black or brown people. It is a crazy force that does some real damage in its wake.
Stories like this one really make my stomach turn. After things like this, the effects of colonialism, and the genocide of thousands of non-white people around the world at the hands of the US and Europe, there are STILL white people who refuse to believe that they are part of the problem. And over in Europe, people are so quick to deny that racism even exists there, when in reality the roots of it began with them long ago. A key part in developing anti-racism in a society is acknowledging and understanding the racist history of this world. We cannot keep accepting taught-history that overlooks civil rights and police brutality, overlooks slavery, overlooks colonialism, overlooks the race-based harm of capitalism. Doing so is an erasure of generational BIPOC trauma. Until people understand the violence upon which white power structures are built, we cannot begin to repair society to move forward.
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