This is who we are

In this ‘longer read’, I reflect on the recent far right riots in the UK, describe how the same sentiments play out across society on a daily basis albeit in more subtle and insidious ways, how this manifests in the workplace and what we might do to create new more humane patterns of interaction.

Confusion

A few weeks ago, I was on a Sufi retreat in Lincolnshire when far-right anti-immigration protests and riots erupted across the country. Upon returning to London, I had plans to go out with a (white) friend on the same day far-right groups were scheduled to stage rallies nationwide. My friend cancelled, citing health reasons, though it seemed the far-right protesters also called off their plans. I couldn’t help but wonder if my friend feared what might happen to me. I might have been feeling defiant, but I also questioned whether I was in denial, unable to fully connect with the weight of the situation that others, like Aarti Kapoor, felt as she found alternative routes to the airport, or the exhaustion Steven Gilbert shared, or the fear and uncertainty Nims Dhawan expressed as she asked whether it was safe to be outside.

I welcomed the posts by Oxfam which provided guidance on what people could do amid the racist violence being perpetrated, while the post by Richard Claydon expressing his pride in people coming out onto the streets to defend communities made me smile. I appreciated Mohammad Ali’s analysis that what we saw was an acting out of toxic masculine energy that had built up and had nowhere to go. I appreciated the calls from the likes of Fozia Irfan, who urged funders of civil society organisations to do more to tackle inequality.

But the post that really resonated with me was one written by John Amaechi who suggested that “…many of us have known for years that this IS who we are”. I realised I was most likely experiencing a sense of melancholy, which the school of life says is an acceptance of the fact that life is inherently difficult and that suffering is at the heart of the human condition, and (which it doesn’t say) that some humans due to their lack of privilege are likely to suffer more than others.

Those who were visibly different had to face the fact they could be confronted and beaten up. Physical violence however, is not how conflict usually finds expression in our society today. As the sociologist Norbert Elias says, this has been replaced by shame. While every so often this breaks down resulting in violent outbreaks, as many of us saw, pain is sadly inflicted upon and incurred by those with less social status across society, in groups, teams, organisations, communities, often in more subtle and insidious ways. But as Ta-Nehisi Coates says, over time, the actions that people take and the words people use, lands in the body just the same.

So why do we discriminate? From a psychological approach, we are hard wired to do so by virtue of being human. We tend to split off the darker (or unwanted) aspects of our pysche and project them into those who we see as the ‘other’ (in order to contain our anxieties). We might assign a role to them (unconsciously) informed by certain stereotypes. At the same time, the structures of our psyche reflects broader structures of society where historically, for instance, in Europe the term ‘white’ was associated with goodness and ‘black’ with evil. This isn’t a natural development – e.g. race was invented to create inequality and make a distinction between the ‘haves’ and ‘must-not-haves’ – which is crucial to the functioning of many of our societies.

Social dynamics

This took me back to a brilliant workshop at the IGA called Working with Racism in Groups: Integrating Intersectional Ideas convened by the marvellous Anne Aiyegbusi and Anthea Benjamin in May 2024. The day comprised a social dreaming matrix, a panel presentation, small group work and large group work. It reminded me that one’s experience in work, and in life more generally depends on our position in the social and political network we are embedded in.

These positions are determined by various aspects of our identity, including but not limited to:

• gender

• sex

• race

• eurocentrism

• sexuality

• education

• social class

• wealth

• whether we have a disability

• mental health

• age

• appearance

• language/accent

• skin tone

• whether you’re a Jew

• whether you’re a Muslim  

• fertility

We also bring into groups less visible factors, including our own and ancestral social experiences, networks of origin, and unprocessed generational trauma. These characteristics intersect, with for instance, sexism having a racial dynamic and racism having a sexist dynamic, shaping our compound privileges and oppressions.

At the IGA event I was reminded of various metaphors coined by Kimberley Crenshaw. The traffic intersection was one of them with the basement another. The latter really struck home - its full of people standing on the shoulders of people below. The people on the top layer of shoulders can reach the ceiling of the basement and climb or be pulled through.

Conventional rules and norms now provide a hatch for those who are just below the ceiling to climb through. However, these norms leave those who are disadvantaged on multiple levels, that much further from the ground floor. Not only are they still far away from the hatch, but they don’t even have someone with a view of the hatch to report back.

Coloniality in groups

Societal norms, cultural values, and historical factors—what group analysts call the foundation matrix—influence how individuals interact within groups. But there’s also what actually happens within a group, which has the potential to reinforce, amplify, or disrupt these dynamics and create something new – the dynamic matrix.

The event provoked several questions in me, including what happens in the teams, organisations and networks I am a part of, especially when stress levels rise, given my identity of being a British male with south Asian heritage, how is white supremacy re-enacted and how might I be complicit?

I wondered coming from a group often seen as the “good immigrant,” I had been pulled through the hatch at various stages in my life, granting me a degree of privilege. At a national level, during Conservative rule, the UK home office, run successively by women of Asian heritage and daughters of migrants, became increasingly hostile towards immigrants, deprioritised the Windrush compensation scheme and dropped recommendations intended to repair some of the harm done to the Windrush generation.

To what extent were they being used as the plaything of the UK Conservative party to do something white males would find it hard to do themselves? Was this the quid pro quo of being pulled through the hatch? I recalled Mahmood Mamdani’s imagery of an Indian manager, brought in by British traders and civil servants to run a plantation in sub-Saharan Africa, extracting the last ounce of labour from an African child. History was seemingly repeating itself again and again. I wondered how I myself might be a counter signatory to what was happening and contributing to anti-black racism (sexism and other forms of discrimination) in my interactions with others in and out of the workplace.

In order to fit in, we might use ‘his masters voice’ or wear a ‘white mask’. This made me think of my accent. I was told recently that I sounded quite posh, like I was middle/upper class and came from the Southern counties in the UK. This was weird as I grew up in Northwest London as the child of immigrants who kept their head down in fairly precarious economic circumstances. I guessed as a teenager, I had unconsciously chosen to speak posh as a way of masking who I was and where I came from, which would have aroused too much shame in me.  And as a young adult in university and in the workplace - the international development sector – I perceived it would help me fit in.

When I drop the mask, I notice that whenever I say something that might draw attention to a particular dynamic, there’s a lot of mental gymnastics going on inside me. Before I speak, I question whether I should, what the consequences might be, and often convince myself that someone else has probably said what I intended to. Even when I do connect with the authority to speak, I later question if I said the right thing or if I should have said something else instead. Taking space is tricky too. Many times, when I’m about to speak, someone else begins to talk, and I often cede to them. When I do get a chance to speak, I find that I’m often interrupted or not fully heard, perhaps because what I’ve said is too challenging.

Initially, I thought these were coincidences, but over time, I’ve realised these dynamics persist. I wonder if, at an unconscious level, I’m being silenced—from within and without. For instance, in the final large group discussion at the IGA event, I found myself becoming the “passive Asian,” an observer unable to find my voice—a familiar feeling during my youth.

At some point during the workshop, we discussed the need to adhere to certain standards. I wondered if I felt the need to meet a standard and experienced fear of saying something that might not meet it, that could be interpreted as a mistake. I questioned who has the privilege to make mistakes and who doesn’t. How much time do we spend wondering if we are good enough for others? Can those with multiple privileges even meet these standards themselves?

What expectations do we have of certain group members? People from ‘minority groups’ are more susceptible to specific (inhumane) stereotypes and expectations. Often, these are polarised. For instance, Asian men and women might be seen as competent technocrats or managers, good with money and administration but also subservient. They tend to be valued for their minds. In contrast, Black men and women are often viewed as fun and caring, but at the same time aggressive. They tend to be valued for their bodies.

When people do not conform to expectations, others react through ‘micro-aggressions’ (which can often manifest in surprise and shock). Trying to avoid reinforcing stereotypes makes it difficult for those who lack privilege to be present and keep hold of what they think and feel. I know one man racialised as black who consciously tries to be kind, funny and positive in a new group context before saying anything remotely challenging given an expectation that people will associate his being with aggression and may not hear what he has to say.

I wondered who gets left with what when stress levels rise? When it comes to consultancy work in the international development sector, where large funders have considerable power and consultants end up putting in more time than they are paid for, it is usually women, younger people and people of colour who are often expected to take up the brunt of the (emotional) work and left more stressed than others. However, they rarely have a forum to share their experiences, and if they did, others might see them as complaining, affecting their employment prospects. All this often goes unsaid and unnoticed, especially with the increasing trend of working from home.

For instance, during a recent evaluation of the influencing work of an international organisation, I was part of a team of four—two white men and a younger white woman. The team, working mostly virtually, faced several challenges, including a heavy workload, a constrained budget, a lack of an integrated approach to the task, and poor communication, which led to numerous one-on-one discussions and a somewhat disjointed draft report. The younger white woman played a crucial role in coordinating efforts to improve the report’s cohesiveness.

As an Asian man who has often been told I look younger than my age, I wondered if there was an unspoken expectation that I should remain subservient and refrain from saying anything too challenging. When no one else addressed the 'elephant in the room,' I felt compelled to speak up. However, my efforts seemed to go unheard, perhaps because they conflicted with the expectations others had of me. In doing so, I was perceived as the troublemaker—a role I’ve found myself in all too often recently, and subtly dropped from their informal professional networks.

Creating new more humane patterns

Arbie Baguios points out that efforts to reform groups and organisations focus more on formal policies and procedures and less on what people do together. As Patricia Shaw says, organisational and group life tends to unfold through communication and conversation among its members. Changes in the practices of a group or organization are likely to start with changes in these conversations. We need to talk about power and privilege and hold up a mirror to our interactions. But is there space in organisations to think about these sorts of issues? Good mirrors aren’t cheap, and the “master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Talking about power and privilege is tricky to say the least. During the social dreaming matrix at the IGA event, people shared material which provided rich metaphors for how they were feeling. This included fear, not being in control, not knowing where the conversation would go, the potential for bombs to go off, the potential for finding shit and not knowing who was going to clear it up.  One member talked about a car being driven with a child at the wheel.

There is the anxiety about being implicated leading to denial and defensiveness, or the fear that talking about it will lead to a re-enactment of racism, which can re-traumatising. But it can also be hard because people tend to take a politically correct tone, with racism often seen as something that is in the process of being defeated rather than something that needs to be struggled with continuously. The problem with this is that it reduces the complexity of the issue and freezes a group’s ability to think.

The challenge with these sorts of conversations is to stay in our adult selves, rather than regressing to our child states, to stay with our own feelings, such as anger passivity, rather than projecting them into others and to stay in the room even as conflict arises. Furthermore, it’s easy to engage in ‘Whataboutism’ where during a discussion on race, we might say what about gender or sexuality or some other dimension, as a way of avoiding challenging conversations.

In discussions about power and privilege, a split often occurs where white people are seen as clumsy and poorly educated about race and racism, while people of colour are viewed as the experts who must educate them. There’s also a tendency for people of colour to unite in opposition to white people (however subtly) and to clock-watch, waiting for the session to end. So how can we take up our roles differently in the group to create a new dynamic?

To what extent might people of colour, for instance, need to forgive those racialised as white? Those with more power and privilege have arguably lost a part of themselves – a form of self efficacy which rests upon a sense of maturity - which leaves them fragile and is itself painful. Difficult as it is, this may require the oppressed to ‘give back’ something to the ‘oppressor’ in the form of forgiveness, but only if the oppressor is open to receiving.

One way to organise around this issue is to organise affinity groups, organised by, for instance, how people identify themselves racially, before bringing people together in a larger group to make connections between sub-groups. But then this isn’t necessarily straightforward as people don’t always fit into neat boxes. And while affinity groups might provide a safe enough space for people to ‘go deep’ they can also reinforce divisions.  

Nevertheless, if people don’t talk about power and privilege (and the history that underpins this), however clumsily, they won’t be able to think about it (differently) and will forever go on thinking and acting in the same way — both individually and as organisations. This reminded me of the excerpt that was included on the flyer for the IGA event written by Audre Lord 1978:

“And when we speak, we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive."