The sound of it filtered into my dream, woke me up. That recognisable heavy rattle of long-awaited rain after weeks without. The weather turned this week: welcome, if uneasily warm sunshine filled April, then May. The warmest on record. The pale shadow of where my watch sits on my wrist has arrived too early this year.
Eyes tight, body still, I listen to it gratefully, thinking that the smell on the balcony will be good, the smell in the woods better. Petrichor. When water from the sky stirs the earth. Scientifically found to elicit a calming effect on our brains. I want to take great huffs of it; I didn’t leave the house yesterday.
As this week has progressed, I’ve been wondering how we’ll remember it in history. The week when people took to the streets in the midst of a pandemic to protest the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, and the rest of the Western world joined in. In a decade of being paid to publish writing on the internet - and working in offices set up for that purpose - I have never known a week like it. Never has one story dominated to such an extent.
I wonder if we’ll remember it as a moment of far overdue reckoning. I hope so. I’d like to think, of course, that I had been conscious of my white, able-bodied privilege for a while: I knew it enabled me to slide into the elitist, closed world of journalism; that it allowed me to sit easily at a university where nearly every student in my lectures and seminars looked like me; that it meant my intentions and ambitions have rarely been questioned. And still, too often, I took all of this for granted.
That’s the thing about privilege: it surrounds you, blanket-like, in a comfort that those without it aren’t granted. I have been buffered from countless difficulties I’ve been fortunate enough not to know. Crucially, being white has allowed me to access nature, to garden, to write about both of these things, without ever thinking I’ve not been welcome. I’m ashamed I didn’t recognise - let alone acknowledge - that earlier.
This week has felt like a downpour. For those of us privileged enough to only have to learn about, rather than experience, racism, the horrific events unfolding in America have forced us to raise a mirror and acknowledge what we’ve benefitted from at the expense of others’ suffering; to realise that this all started with decisions made in the UK centuries ago. There have been black squares and all-company memos; I’ve not had a single meeting or conversation where generations of institutional racism, and how to address it, hasn’t inflected the matters discussed. Emergency re-prints issued of anti-racist literature (there’s a list below) that has climbed to the top of the best-seller list. It has all felt woefully overdue.
I hope the rain keeps falling. The puddles have returned to their familiar spots in the car park outside, but the ground is still far too parched for early June. Short, sudden showers run off baked land. The water burbles in the drains, the roots are hardly touched. We need something more constant, more persistent, to enable proper growth.
Links
The Black Lives Matter website
The UK Black Lives Matter crowdfunding page
Brit Bennett on Good White People
Leah Penniman’s presentation at the Oxford Farming Conference
Yomi Adegoke on online activism
An interview with Corina Newsome, co-organiser of Black Birders Week
Victoria Alexander’s anti-racist reading list
