If you are a black or brown person in this country, being told that living in Britain is a cakewalk, as everyone from the Prime Minister to senior Cabinet members insisted this week, can make you feel like your body is shutting down. It starts with the sighing. Maybe your blood pressure rises. Or perhaps it’s your mental health that declines.
Whichever cocktail of strain you experience as a result of being a black or brown person here, suggestions that living in Britain is a universally positive experience are hard to stomach.
That’s in part because dealing with racism does have an impact on health. In 2020, research published in BMC Public Health found that non-white people’s experiences of racism led to “greater psychological distress and poorer mental functioning two years later”.
In addition, non-white people were “more likely to rate their physical health as poor and to report having a limiting longstanding illness, regardless of their health at the time of the discriminatory experience”.
Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch’s declaration this week that Britain “is the best country in the world to be black because it’s a country that sees people, not labels” is a perfect example of what the writer Nels Abbey coined as “racism laundering”.
In a recent article for The Guardian, following Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s efforts to shore up her inhumane Rwanda policy, Abbey wrote: “A potent cocktail of moral licensing, commerce and identity politics, racism laundering is a process in which the skin colour of an ethnic minority appears to facilitate policies, practices and narratives that would otherwise be condemned as bigoted… whatever the motivation, the effect is that they become a defence mechanism against clear instances or accusations of racism.”
Badenoch’s words perfectly encapsulate this. I could spend pages and pages delving into why that’s so hurtful, particularly in light of research published last week that showed 93 per cent of young black Britons “do not feel supported by the Government in relation to the challenges they face”, while 39 per cent wish to leave the country.
Badenoch’s statement was a tried and tested method for shutting down a legitimate problem. It forces those of us who aren’t in denial to contort ourselves to explain, much like Toni Morrison observed in 1975, our “reason for being”, distracting us from the real issue at hand.
But there’s something fascinating about how inherently contradictory this tactic is. Other than being an utterly ridiculous sentiment, it betrays exactly why figures like Badenoch and Braverman can’t escape the very beast they spend so much of their careers denying.
If, as Badenoch insists, it’s so easy to be black in this country because no one notices the colour of your skin, she (and many other Tory MPs of colour) would not be almost exclusively tasked with denying racism in the first place.
Yet in a country – and a party – that doesn’t just “see” colour, but is consumed by it, it’s the biggest trump card figures like Badenoch have. And it’s perhaps the only way figures like her can ascend to the “higher” echelons of society. Or at least, believe they can – until someone else who’s willing to do a more extreme job comes along.
But the fact remains that in playing the racism denial game as a black or brown person, there is no escaping being racialised. The only difference in this case is whether you play it hard enough to get racist white people or delusional people of colour to momentarily trust you. Momentarily, because the minute people in these positions mess up, that adoration can very quickly give way to vitriol and – shock, horror – racism.
It has never felt “easy” to be a black woman in this country. It has never felt “easy” to be black in any part of society. It colours everything in my life, and not because I’m obsessed, but because I’m confronted with it everywhere I go.
Unrelenting racism is the reason I’ve had mental health breakdowns. It is why so many people like me struggle with a sense of belonging in this country. Especially those of us who are black members of LGBTQ+ communities – in particular, black and trans people, as well as trans people in general, who are facing record levels of hate crimes in part due to this relentless spewing of prejudiced bile, from the Government down.
Being a part of a marginalised group is a heavy burden to carry in British society. Some of us think we can escape it by denying ourselves entirely. Some of us succeed, for a time.
But look even just slightly under the hood, and it’s clear that for those who are happy to do it, laundering racism is a poisoned chalice.