It is very unsettling to witness apologists for slavery in real time. I see them casually tweet excuses for the sale and purchase and horrifying transport of human beings and I think “my God, I thought I *understood* how it happened, but now I *see*”.
The most striking thing in the last few days has been the frank admission from so many people that they understand exactly how grim the problem of racism is, but that until now their attitude has been “tough luck, you’re on your own”.
The last few days have truly changed me, because I have come to see that many of my fellow human beings are far more *consciously* cruel than I ever imagined; that they merely pretend not to be enlightened, since it is too shameful to admit they are being deliberately ignorant.
A friend asked me the other day “what would our lives be like if we weren’t always fighting this fight?” and I said, you already know that, just look at the lives of your deliberately ignorant friends on Facebook. That’s devastating, she said. I shrugged, and I agreed.
Living in Berlin I often think about the Holocaust. I think about the days when the German authorities came for Jewish people, and of the silence those people heard from their lifelong neighbours as they were loaded into vans. I wonder if it was the silence that hurt most of all.
I wonder what it must have been like to be dragged from your flat and never seen again, to look back at your apartment block, your home, hoping even to see a flicker of a curtain to acknowledge your departure, but seeing nothing; and to think, “my God, we never even mattered.”
I have been thinking so much about the simple and beautiful power of the verb “to matter”, and what it means to be someone who has always mattered, as opposed to someone who in a historical sense has not. How light the spirit must feel, how free. It must be the opposite of this.
There is a certain density to knowing you do not matter to much of your world, a tangible weight. I feel it most when I walk through the parks in Berlin and nod at the African men who are just trying to make a living. How casually this society tries to discard black people.
I didn’t go to the huge #BlackLivesMatter protest in Berlin. I was called just before by an activist and dear friend who said, please tell me you’re not going, you’re one of the darkest-skinned men I know; you will be a particular target for the far-right, for racial profiling.
I didn’t go to the protest and so I missed out on a glorious gathering of thousands of people. I would probably have been absolutely fine but I was advised not to risk it. And so after a week of writing and speaking on this subject I didn’t get to enjoy the euphoria of community.
I am never going to forget this week, and I am glad of that. It has given me greater focus, and taught me not to engage with those I suspect do not truly care, because they almost definitely don’t. It has been lonely and uplifting and exhausting and liberating.
This week of #BlackLivesMatter has taught me that black lives matter to fewer people than I had hoped; but to those people to whom we matter, we matter utterly, that to them we are fiercely and deeply beloved, and that is enough. It always has been so, and it always will be. /end
