Maybe I Don’t Belong Here

Speaking about my own struggle seems to have rung a bell for many Black people in the UK, giving them permission to talk and to acknowledge the pressures we are under that can break us. Things go wrong if you’re not taking care of yourself and not sleeping or resting. I am genuinely astonished at the proportion Black people in the mental health system in the UK. I have only recently discovered how overrepresented we are. In a way, knowing the context makes it all the more extraordinary that I managed to survive and go on to build a successful career. So many Black people suffer poor mental health as a result of the grind of surviving in a space that seems to act against you, undermining you, pushing you aside, sometimes unconsciously, making you feel as if you’re living in a different reality. Rather than listen to what Black people have to say, they are shouted down, their experience is denied, and it becomes too exhausting to address the ignorance. This may be the most ‘open and tolerant’ country, but tolerance isn’t enough when it comes to racism. People need to call it out or at the very least acknowledge its existence or we will be speaking with a completely separate set of facts. Being challenged on the existence of racism is tiresome, psychologically debilitating, and deeply depressing. I’m not surprised that so many of us break down living here in the UK.

Race and slavery represent an open wound in American society that bleeds to this day and I marvel when the scars and injustices of the past, such as the recent uncovering of mass graves in Tulsa and story of the white mob that massacred hundreds of innocent Black residents of the town of Greenwood, are openly acknowledged and memorialised. Pain and injustice acknowledged. In England, it would seem such acknowledgement isn’t necessary because it’s not supported by the data. Keep calm and carry on. And yet it is race that continues to shake the foundations of England’s institutions as its imperialist history comes under new scrutiny. You’ll send police to guard your statues from me should I have the temerity to climb upon them and look to tear them down, the apparatus of the state employed to check my passionate expression. And when the stately homes of England’s green and pleasant land choose to tell you the truth about what you’re appreciating, how it was paid for, you’ll complain and say it’s unnecessary. You do not want to hear this truth and will throw furious denials back in my face, the ‘whataboutisms’ hurling past me like West Indian fast balls whistling past my ears. You will not hear this. It appears to drive you mad. It seems to me that though ‘race’ sent me crazy thirty-odd years ago, it’s sending many of you crazy now, as you wrestle with this new understanding that maybe, Black lives have mattered for centuries. It’s just that you had no idea.

Until recently in the UK any talk about the issue of race and racism elicited angry denials and distraction. The UK government’s recent Sewell report drives that point home. People challenging the existence of a problem at all were seen as gaslighting. I’m familiar with people telling me they can’t even see what I know to be true. Blanket denial is one of the main reasons why Black people find it difficult living in the UK, which has a system from which they have to protect themselves and one in which they are confronted with daily micro-aggressions and experience a sense of powerlessness.

Travelling has helped me see the limitations of life in the UK.