Commuting as a person of colour
As a person of colour, public transport, stations and airports are, what I would consider, some of the most terrifying places for a person of colour. In London, we spend approximately 84 minutes commuting, and British workers would typically spend around 492 days of their lives travelling to work. It's a considerable amount of time to spend in motion in our day-to-day lives.
Since the onset of the pandemic and the lock-down, it has been a pleasant relief not to be bombarded by people's sniffles, cramped in a train, hearing someone scream "can you move down a little please" and then a secondary scream "just two steps please", along with the silent screams of attempting to survive the commute to and from work. People have talked far and wide about things that have liked and disliked about the pandemic, and upon reflection, the one thing I remember most is decreased anxiety I have commuting on a train during the 'rush hour', because as a brown man, it's particularly terrifying.
Commuting can be a chore when on public transport, the trains can be delayed, stations have only one lift or escalator working, busy conditions, engineering works and the classic 'signal failure' of a Transport for London announcement. As a South Asian man, there is additional anxiety, fear and apprehension of using public transport.
It's the way in which people will stare at you because you have a beard and a backpack on. The way in which people will move away from you to the other side of the carriage because they are afraid of you. Even if you are secretly listening to a pop mega-mix of Madonna's greatest hits. There have been instances where a group of people used another door to get onto a train because they did not want to use the door I was stood by, despite it being an empty carriage. A most memorable event was seeing a fellow passenger immediately praying as soon as I had stepped onto the train carriage to go home.
Stations also exacerbate anxiety and stress, the many times we see police with guns in London Terminals is truly concerning. Having been to Manchester for work, you know that as a brown man, you immediately become more noticeable to the forces. You spend your entire time in the station hoping your platform number would be confirmed, not because you are tired of standing in a busy station, but because as soon as you make it to a train, you increase you're likelihood to make it home safely.
Racism pervades public transit and urban design highlighting that "from funding, planning and infrastructure, to design and policing, many transit agencies essentially have built two systems with different standards for “choice” and “dependent” riders (that is to say white and Black)" (Spieler, 2020). This in addition to the rise of wider hate crime and verbal abuse to people of colour on transport, particularly on buses (Tidman, 2020).
When the time comes for people to go to a workplace, interview or a meeting, do we need to do more to protect people from harm to work and live? When you ask a person of colour how their commute is, perhaps you’ll recognise that people and particularly women of colour are at risk of experiencing these abuses even on the shortest journey to the workplace. When you invite a candidate of colour for an interview, have you accounted for the fact their experience to getting there may have done them harm. Being mindful of these unique experience highlight the issues people of colour are at increased risk of exposure to, and can shape how we recognise and act to be in solidarity with people of colour, even when in transit.
If you do experience hate crime, do report it to the relevant contacts to ensure that change happens, which you can do here.