Reflections on this week

Ok, so that’s a wrap for the week! In September 2024, I will have completed 11 years in the UK. In all this time, I’ve never once had to content with my physical and psychological safety, because believe it or not, even though I am of a South Asian persuasion, I have always felt incredibly privileged. I have always believed that in a world where so many people go without, I was definitively in the camp of people who won the ovarian lottery of life. I had a wonderful and safe childhood, an excellent education, and an international upbringing that gave me a unique perspective – that people everywhere are people. WE all want the same things – the love, companionship, and unfailing loyalty of family and friends, the respect of who we include in our broader community, and the ability to live a happy, dignified life, and contribute productively to society.

So with that blissfully ignorant mindset, I was slow to the realisation of the horrors that started to emerge over the weekend, until my very Indian-Italian-British-Camden-born-Hendon-raised- husband mentioned the protests emerging in different cities, and the risk it could pose to my physical safety as I go about my daily life. And just like that, I found myself to be a potential target. Someone who could hold this perspective in their head, who could go as far as try to take your perspective into consideration, yet in an instant, everything changed. You gain new sight, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Is this what it’s like to get out of the proverbial cave in Plato’s Republic, and gaze directly into the sunlight? I don’t know.

In recent years, as racial strife and hate has spewed out into the open, like an ugly festering wound left unattended, I have always found solace and comfort in the music of Nina Simone or sifting through my favourite passages of ?James Baldwin to make sense of the world; but today I feel compelled to share an author I’ve recently spent more time reading, Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, and her powerful TED talk on the danger of a single story.

Ok, hear me out. I know it’s easy to dismiss the people who committed the awful acts this week as THUGS. However, if we are being objective, we ought to call their behaviour thuggish, anti-social, and criminal. The danger we create for ourselves by othering these individuals as thugs is that we get to pretend that this sentiment and resentment only exists among this small group of so-called-thugs. When we need to zoom out and recognise the structural and systemic forces that created the condition for these individuals to behave like THUGS:

• Our toothless regulatory regime that allows social media organisations to shirk their responsibility and obligation as a responsible corporate citizen to ensure fair broadcasting standards and an ethos of harm reduction, aka, fix your algorithms and learn to make money on positive engagement instead of hate and fear.
• The socio-economic and political choices made by the governments in recent times and the systemic exclusion it has created for people, i.e., reducing the ability of people to participate fully in this society and crucially, feel as if they belong.
• The people in power, troublingly in some cases, the people of colour, who have espoused some truly hateful and ugly rhetoric about immigrants, and the ad hominem attacks on anyone deemed as ‘other’ – and the list is long – lawyers, environmentalists, political protestors, etc. etc.
• The increasingly complex and volatile world we live in and how only four years ago we experienced a once in a century pandemic event that re-ordered so much of society, how we live, and accelerated forces that has exacerbated wealth inequality.

It’s not easy for me to try to maintain my empathy and remain objective and neutral when I feel so personally targeted. I cannot, do not, and will not excuse the behaviour of any single individual who participated in the events this week, and I am so sorry for all my fellow brethren who have suffered this week – whether finding yourself or your family become a target of the assaults, or mentally anguished by the events – I am so so sorry we find ourselves here. I just know that what matters most as we reflect on this week and look back, is that we turn our helplessness into positive action and engagement. ?

I’m not going to be prescriptive and tell you where and what you should focus on. I’m just saying don’t lose your humanity, maintain your curiosity, be a role model, help build that bridge towards a greater understanding, and apply your unique talents on how we build a better, more inclusive society for everyone.

We are all of us more than one single story or narrative about us.

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