Michaela and I had just had dinner at Toni Macaroni, a stone’s throw way from our hotel. We shared the hotel lift with an elderly white couple. They existed on the second floor. As they were in the corridor, the lift still open, the gentleman said to the lady: “he’s dressed nice, but he is a monkey”.
Yesterday I was reminded of that fateful night. Incensed by that incident and other multiple racial micro-aggressions I was subjected to during my time as a waiter at the Loch Long Hotel in Arrochar, a glass collector at Pearl Lounge and a waiter at the La Tasca Restaurant in Aberdeen, I began familiarising myself with literature on race and racism. I would continue finding comfort in documentaries, lecturers and books.
I learnt that individual racism is usually an indicator of structural racism, the scarier one.
That racist man in the lift might have been a judge, a teacher, a doctor, a professor, a manager, a policymaker… going way beyond silly talk.
Although the UK’s racism is often wrongly portrayed as a white working-class people problem, the media, the middle class, and the elite encourage and perpetuate it.
Indeed, the 2015 #RhodesMustFall Movement reawakened some of us. But it was not until attending the inspiring 2016 Decolonizing the Academy Conference at the University of Edinburgh that our anger was validated. Boy did we learn how to name our experiences!
The other pictures are of me when I graduated with a Masters in International Business from Robert Gordon University in June 2015. I wore a kilt to pay homage to Scotland!
Thank you Scotland.
P.S.
Some of the very first books that helped me were: I write what I like by Steve Biko; Black as I am by Mandela & Magubane; Who are we and doesn’t matter in the 21st century? by Gary Younge.
Later additions:
The good immigrant edited by Nikesh Shukla; Brit(ish) by Afua Hirsch; Natives: race and class in the ruins of empire by Akala
Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race by Reni Eddo-Lodge; Rhodes must fall: the struggle to decolonise The racist heart of empire by Oxford Rhodes Must Fall Movement; & Back to Black: retelling Black radicalism in the 21st century by Kehinde Andrews.
Blessing Kgosi e tsile Kgasa 