Privilege Beyond Whiteness: On Surviving Public School
In light of the resumption of the Black Lives Matter movement after the recent spate of murders at the hands of United States police departments, people have been asking me about my own experiences of racism. After all, I do spent an awful lot of time talking about race both in its contemporary and historical contexts. I have spoken about the past and present violences that come with it, but I have been purposely vague in being specific of what happened to me in my own experiences of racism, racial discrimination, whatever you want to call it.I have been told by local community members that my opinion means something? I still have yet to be convinced.
However, to anyone that knows me, “Tré Ventour” and “vague” is not something that often comes in the same sentence. A juxtaposition if there ever was one. I pride myself on trying to be direct (sometimes too much) and specific where I can. What people don’t seem to realise is that racism is trauma, and to unpick that scab it a big deal. Unleashing Pandora’s Box where not even Hope survives. In all honestly, I don’t like talking about myself; but
but in the spirit of Black Lives Matter and my passion and interest for the subject of race, I will try to tell a story where I aim to be as specific as possible, and this is an active choice; not expectation that should be made of all Black and Brown people in our society.
Growing up, my family spoke of their lives like they were snippets of Andrea Levy’s Small Island or the lyrics of Gregory Isaacs, Bob Marley or Alison Hinds songs — the rhythms of the West Indies scorching the hallowed turfs of Britain as babylon comes calling. Whilst my family spoke and acted like their authentic selves, I was episodes of The Crown — ‘Windsor’ and ‘Wolverton Splash’ in the tint of ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ because that was what my youth was. Smoke and mirrors. An anomaly. That whilst seemingly living in the more townie areas of Northampton, I was also very village.
I spoke like the ruralaties Northamptonshire is known for. In popular imagination, especially amongst Black people, I spoke like “a white person.” At eight years old, in going to private school just off the Bedford Road on the way to Brafield-on-the-Green, I had seemingly run away from my community. It was an exile in a way, formerly of the Black community… stereotypically “to speak well” — “to play cricket” — and that ugly shamrock green school uniform. My home was in Northampton Town but I grew up in the countryside, the shire’s villages like dropping off the edge of the world.
Between the ages of eight and thirteen, it was as if I came to embody whiteness. Very much in the thought of psychiatrist Frantz Fanon in his seminal text Black Skin, White Masks. It was here where I really found out properly what racism was. I had an idea but it’s here where it reared its ugly head and snarled its teeth. It was here I was made to identify my Blackness to be wrong as well as everything I knew about my heritage. That my grandparents carried across the Atlantic Ocean in 1960 in those heavy suitcases they carried from the Caribbean full of memories and history.
At school, I was white; at home, I was a Black. In the summer, I donned those cricket whites the colour of Morant Bay, Berbice and Demerera like eleven million winter roses laid at my feet for the Africans lost to enslavement. I ate “English” food and dressed in their uniform and I was The One. So, I was “cherished”… adored, made a spectacle of. I suppose at times, the word fetish comes to mind. At school, I was white until I wasn’t; until nigger tittered from their lips like waterhoses in a Jim Crow South. As white racism chewed through Black-brown young, fickle flesh at slow pace.
On the cricket field, I was an honouray white. Quite rightly, you are thinking, how can a Black person be an honouray white person? Why should I be an honourary anything? What is so terrible about what I am? The wicketkeeper from the other school starts “You”, followed by “are a nigger.” There were many situations like that and have been on my mind these past 10 to 15 years. To play down my Blackness in those structures was to be safer. However, that was a mere perception and many children did think I deserved to go back to whatever “Brown country my family came from.” I can tell you I nor my parents and grandparents have been to Africa.
I told those bullyish children that “I am English”, that “I am British” but they do not see me. Erasure is more than history and after all, the racism I experienced was skin-deep and my skin colour walked ahead of nationality. To my family, I was The Crown and Jane Austen novles; to the bullies who thought they could catch “my Black” and working-classness, I was Kunta Kinte, Heathcliff and Oliver Twist. Regal and classy-sounding one day and pestilent peasant poor in the next. I started to personify the coloniser and the colonised; the powerful and the powerless; the rulers and the ruled.
That is to say that public schooling hijacked my identity, including the way I spoke and gave me the tools that now today make me “one of the good ones” for when white liberals want to say they have a Black friend. I can round my vowels, cross my t’s and dot my i’s at a moment’s notice. At networking parties, I can work a room of redbrick-educated moneyed-up socialites with ease because these old white men were akin to my colleagues’ parents at school. Whilst now, people say I’m “articulate”, and speak “good English” (despite the racist connotations), as a child I was even more pronounced.
I developed my English, not among the glades of Abington Park or outside the Polish shops of the Kettering Road but with children who hailed from Olney, Mawsely and Yardley Hastings. I didn’t wag my tongue to the sounds of binge-drinkers on the Welly Road, grime, or drill music and Northampton market stalls or Black barbershops (well not that much), but to the litany of Shakespeare and the stuttered syllables of Latin, with Odysseus and company, on a strong wind to Ithaca. My English doesn’t mesh with Patois but is quite agreeable to poetry’s vernacular of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
My identity is infested with the privilege I actively lambaste but it also flows to the histories of West Indian migrants, and my parents’ peers who took that language and turned it into UK garage. Yet, in Black communities, still, I often find I am more comfortable in an identity that is not mine. Like nature, whiteness finds a way. I am not white, I think to myself. I am Brit(ish). I am Black/Mixed-Race. But I speak in a way that is often allocated to white men, enjoying things that were once tools of British colonial power.
Now, twenty-four years old, I see bigotry dressed as my public education and I weaponised it on the class that gave it to me. Taking up space and committing to anti-racist work. Yet, it was this same weaponisation that saw me shot in the back multiple times during the last year by institutional violence, advocating for race equality. Social justice activists are the adrenaline shot in the veins of hostile environments, unready for radical change. I spoke in a way that meant I was seemingly “one of the good ones”, though ready to motivate students to take up space as well.
To think this Black-white, white-Black Mixed-Race boy was swallowed up and created by the same system that made Rhodes and Churchill born from a Britain that shouts “we defeated Hitler and fascism” while still a major colonial power stepping on the throats of the colonies. The same Britain that perpetuates colonial history as afternoon tea and good table manners. With that thought in mind, I cast you back to where I basically rejected my Blackness. That the skin I was born into was deemed not good enough.
What I want to know is that despite my skin colour, if I spoke in a different voice would people still take me seriously? If I sold people minibags of cannabis on a council estate, would people see me as “more Black” because that’s what society expects? If I grew up in the West Indies as my grandfather did, what then? I’m not white, I’m Brit(ish). A friend tells me “you are Black”, another tells me “you’re not Black Black”, an American says “Black Brits in America are Black but they won’t get no hassle from police.”
Though, whiteness has tried to claim knowledge for itself, likewise to position Islamic, African and other non-white non-European thought outside of reason, the inclusion of the limited number of Black people in British private schools poses a question of race and rank in the elite class. The Black Studies professor Kehinde Andrews said “whiteness is a psychosis”, this statement made me question the whiteness within me as someone that went through the public school system and also has a degree, (soon to have his second).
Where there is a hierachy of race; where there is a hierachy of Blackness, I am still that frightened child on the cricket field running in the terror of Morant Bay, Christmas and Demerera. At school, I was Black; at home I was white. White lives don’t matter as white lives but I know pushed to the wire I’m no Trevor Philips. And I would be stopped and searched by Cressida in a heartbeat. Now, I know because of my race I am “a problem”, doubly so with my education history and the privilege my education bought me.
