After Floyd
If we were to calculate the number of pages written after George Floyd died in Minneapolis in book-equivalent terms, nine digits would not be enough. There has been a Pompeii-style eruption of the racial volcano, not just in America, but around the world. Many were incinerated by surprise. But the magma had long been boiling in the bowels of society.
Under the apparent calm, under the ash of the old eruptions crackled explosive material that the Floyd spark detonated with the impetus that was seen in the port of Beirut a few weeks later. Is it unconsciousness or a deliberate strategy to leave so much explosive potential in the social and civil body of a community? History will tell which of the two was in action in Minneapolis and Beirut.
Of the things we've read, or simply skimmed over, the contribution by longtime Financial Times reporter Lucy Kellaway seemed to be the best read on the issue of the culture of race. Better for many reasons that go beyond the intellectual depth and consolidated experience of the well-known journalist.
Better, above all for his point of view, that of education, a central issue in the whole racial issue and not only in that.
Better for its truthfulness, as it candidly relates his feeling in a story of daily ordinariness experienced firsthand, as a teacher, in a school in an ethnically diverse London neighborhood.
Better for his sincerity, there is no hypocrisy in his story, no hiatus between thought and behavior as happens to many politically correct progressive left, but rightly discredited for its behavioral duplicity.
A contradiction that tears
Speaking of duplicity. Then we marvel at the populist drift!, as happens to Anne Applebaum in her latest interesting book, The Twilight of Democracy. To understand the drift of the polarization of consciences, one must not look in the populist camp, as Applebaum does, but in the opposite one. That's where the disaster happened that fueled populism.
How can someone traveling by limousine and helicopter with a progressive agenda think of becoming president of the United States and handing over the metro card for a propaganda tour on the New York subway to his bodyguard because he doesn't know which slot in the turnstiles? insert it!
How can progressive ex-presidents or vice-presidents receive 6-figure bills for trivial half-hour speeches in front of the world's powerful? Conservative presidents have always done so without any need to hide or justify themselves, in line with their vision of society. People who don't need to justify themselves for what they do.
But for progressives these fees are real bribes, they are vitriol in the face of their people, who are not naive because they live in real society, not that of clubs, academies or foundations that want to change the world, but for now he's fine with what's there.
The speech would be broad and can be closed with a quote from "The Economist", the most advanced liberal think-tank in the world: "Liberalism has changed the world, but the world has turned against it". The enormous strength of Greta Thunberg is the great coherence between ideas, personal actions and political program. Something that has been lost all over the progressive world at all levels. Do we really need a Savonarola?
Who is Lucy Kalloway
But back to Lucy Kalloway, who is a far cry from the hypocrisy of so much progressive thinking.
Lucy Kellaway, a top-ranking Financial Times reporter on a salary likely in the six figures, left the paper in 2017 after 32 years to pursue teaching at a Hackney high school.
Known for her salacious and satirical style in formalizing the limitations of corporate culture, she also dedicated herself to fiction writing a first parody-epistolary novel (in email form) entitled Martin Lukes: Who Moved My BlackBerry. The second novel Office Hours of 2010 also highlights Kellaway's properly narrative talent that the satirical slant of her previous work of "amusing, truthful and biting satire" - to use the words of the Sunday Times - had left in the shade.
A good example and a good read. Here's what Kellaway writes
Amarcord
The photo was taken on a sunny day in 1968 on the playground of Gospel Oak Primary School in north London. I'm sitting cross-legged in the front row, wearing a pink and orange floral apron. There are 35 of us and, apart from the girl sitting a few meters from me who had an Asian parent, we are all white.
From Gospel Oak I went to Camden School for Girls, a state high school a mile from where I lived then. I'm holding a photo of the school from 1976. I'm in the back row, since I was finishing high school by now. Out of 700 students, I only see two colored faces.
Next, in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, is the same scene, only in a more ornate setting. After some rummaging, I found the matriculation photo and I see myself there, wearing ridiculously strange academic cap, trying (and failing) to flaunt my difference from girls, mostly educated in private schools who were around me. We were all white.
Same scenario
I don't have a group photo from my year at JPMorgan, the investment bank I worked at after I got out of Oxford. But I don't need it. I remember well what the group was like. In my training program there were nine of us. All Oxford, all white.
I was the different one, not because of race or background, but because I was the only woman. When I joined the Financial Times a few years later, I discovered that journalism has always been a little more feminine than the banking sector, but no more ethnically diverse.
By the time I left the FT I had spent most of my life almost exclusively with people who had been to top universities, were in elite jobs, and were all white.
At times I felt embarrassed by this lack of diversity in the workplace but I never thought it was my fault.
I was just the product of the class, generation, education and profession I was in.
After Minneapolis
The police killing of George Floyd, and the protests that followed, made us all think about the issue of race. White liberals everywhere have begun self-examination of their own behavior for signs of racism.
For me, this uncomfortable verification began not with the killing of a black person in Minnesota, but three years earlier when I started teaching a Hackney school.
At the age of 58, I went from a world where everyone was like me to a world where most people were different from me. My pupils' families came from all over the world. They were first, second, and sometimes third generation immigrants from Nigeria and Ghana, the Caribbean, Turkey, Bangladesh, and Vietnam.
The difficulty of diversity
My ignorance of these communities came out humiliatingly the first time I tried to roll out. There were 32 names on the computer screen in front of me. Of these I could effortlessly pronounce at least 10. I could almost say Yusuf right. But Kujoe, Igbekoyi or Djimon?
They were names I mispronounced. She felt like I was wearing a big sign on her head that said, "This woman is a complete idiot." And almost certainly, I might add, a racist too.
As time went on, I got better at names (and now I can't remember why I found them so difficult), but I've made other, even worse mistakes.
In my second year, I was teaching an economics class and was talking about ethics in business. “Corporations,” I explained to the class, “are desperate to prove to the world that they are whiter than white.”
The class gasped. A couple of students exchanged glances. The phrase, a bit old-fashioned, seemed harmless to me at the time. Instead it was ugly and wrong the moment it came out of my mouth in front of that kind of class.
In the next fraction of a second I thought about it. I asked myself, should I stop class and apologize? Or could this gesture open an entire Pandora's box?
I decided to proceed as if nothing had happened. Since the school is very strict, no one felt like challenging me directly, but I was still shocked. It's a phrase I will never use again.
Because politically correct is indeed correct
That same evening, I called an old journalist friend and told him about my gaffe and how stupid I felt doing it. “How ridiculous,” he exclaimed. “Whiter than white is not racist. It's an advertisement for a detergent. It amazes me that you, who are the least politically correct person I know, are racking your brains over this."
There hadn't been any "wracking up," I just lost control. It wasn't about being "politically correct." The point is simple: if I'm saying something that offends someone, I have to stop right away.
Underlying all of this is a big question to which I don't know the answer. When I'm teaching, do I have to think about race constantly or not at all? Until recently I would have said the latter of the two. What I'm paid to do is teach economics and convince students that a positive externality is a wonderful thing.
If I do it right, I help all my students, both the boy who shares a one-bedroom apartment with his Bangladeshi mother and five brothers and sisters, and the girl who lives in a large house in Victory Park with her father who is a senior executive in the BBC.
The issue of quotas for ethnic teachers
In my first year of traineeship as a teacher, I volunteered to help out with the after-school club debates. I thought I was in my center. I may not have taught well yet, but I knew how to hold a debate. The club was run by a young teacher who liked to pick sensitive topics for discussion.
One day he chose this topic of discussion: "Should there be quotas in this school for teachers belonging to ethnic groups other than white?". This was a particularly sensitive subject given that, at the Hackney school, students of colour, Asians and ethnic minorities made up around 75 per cent of the total, while the vast majority of teachers were white.
I had been given the job of coach, but no great contribution came from me. Without my intervention, my team debuted three strong arguments. One: Ethnic teachers are a better role model for ethnic students. Two: Ethnic students feel more comfortable working with non-white teachers, who are more likely to understand some of their problems. Three: The only way to get more ethnic teachers is through quotas, otherwise racism gets in the way.
Creeping racism, in fact
I listened to the debate (hands down won by my team), with a sense of growing unease. It's not that I felt embarrassed about being white, but I wondered if I could be as helpful a teacher in this school as I hoped to be. Later I asked two black teacher friends what they thought.
They both said that racism—the sneaky and otherwise kind—had got in their way, and both told me that black students often came to them to complain that they got more punishment than white students.
This made me doubly uncomfortable. First, since I've never had to deal with racism, I tend to play down other people's accounts of racist incidents. Second, it occurred to me that the kids who sit in my classes are mostly non-white kids.
I'm sure every boy I've grounded has broken one of the many school rules. But are there also white kids who broke those rules that I have somehow deferred punishment? I hope not, but how can I be sure? Here's another thing that's bugging me.
Unconscious biases
I suspect that, like everyone on earth, I have an unconscious bias complex. I know my heart is in the right place when it comes to race, but I also know my heart is something irrelevant when it comes to navigating this minefield. I need to learn.
I realized how bad things were a few months ago when I was judging a public speaking competition open to all secondary schools in Hackney.
Each school lined up two XNUMX-year-olds who gave a speech on a topic of their choice. I sat at the jury table in a public boardroom and listened to two dozen teenagers talk off the cuff. It should have been an uplifting experience, but I left feeling more demoralized than when I entered.
Eight of the finalists were black girls. The premiere of her made a very strong speech about how she, as a young black woman, felt left out. The next girl gave a speech about how female beauty ideals didn't include non-white beauty. Six more speeches with similar topics followed. The performances ranged from so-so to thrilling, but the theme was always the same: discrimination
What matters is now and here
The contest took place about 200 meters from where I live, but it felt like I was entering another world. I guess I assumed that racism in London was less of a problem than it was a generation earlier, so it was a shock to find that racism was the only topic the girls wanted to talk about.
Now I understand that what happened is irrelevant to these young women. What matters to them is the present — and their narrative of the present is heartfelt and agonizing.
I don't know what the answer is in political terms. I don't even know what I can do in my class — other than trying to avoid embarrassing gaffes.
In the absence of better ideas, all I think I can do, for now, is:
Listening to my students talk about their world, while still talking to them about mine.
I am teaching them and they are teaching me.
