Revd Chris McDermott, Lead Chaplain for the University of Sussex

Some years ago I published a poem that celebrated my fashion preference of long black coats. (Historical footnote: this fascination with such haute couture predated the Matrix films!) Here it is:

The black coat

I’ve hung my dream on a long black coat
like the one that Nicholas Cage wore
in the film, “The City of Angels”:
a coat to turn “black” upside down
reclaim it for heroes and
steal it back from the dead:
a spin doctor for black, you might say:
a coat to turn “black” on its head!

I want a long black coat, more black
than a star-shorn moonless night,
with black seraph folds to hide in:
black to make the angels sing,
black that turns in upon itself,
black so black it shines!
I want it black like that!
I found my dream slung on a rack
in a high street shop the other day,
all pristine black, cut long and fine
but for a price outside my range:
yes, I found my dream coat one black day,
but gave it up and settled for grey!

At one level it is just a naïve celebration of my love of long black coats; but it also touches on our occasional tendency to settle for less. (The long grey coat just wasn’t the same!)  

But in addition, the poem touches something that goes a bit deeper: viz. the symbolic values we attach to things. In the poem it is a call for the reversal of the meaning of the colour black. There is something facetious in this in the context of a coat; yet when it comes to black bodies, there is nothing facetious at all.

During Black History Month – hopefully, a way station on the way to acknowledging that the story of Black peoples’ contributions is a part of all of our history – much will be written to mark the occasion. Some of it by sympathetic white guys like me who have been untouched by the oppressive forces that have shaped the story of people of African descent here and in other countries.

The risk is turning it into an exercise of ‘being woke and keeping with the times’, making sympathetic noises and tributes that are, nonetheless, abstracted from the historic experience of black bodies chained and sold as slaves, lacerated by whips, lynched by racist mobs or shot with impunity by police, as if ‘we get it’. We like to think, ‘we get it.’

I grew up in mixed neighbourhoods – initially on a sink estate for poor whites and black families in the infamous Love Canal area of Niagara Falls (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal) and then in the north end of the city where my primary school and junior high hosted almost equal numbers of black and white students. But in retrospect I could see that my white skin gave me an advantage that my Black friends did not have – though I did not fully appreciate this. 

Awareness began to grow within a couple months of arriving in southern Africa, where I lived from 1976–1983. It was then that I first discovered introduced the work of Stephen Biko. Biko was murdered in a jail cell in Pretoria, South Africa, by the police. In those days such things happened with impunity in South Africa during the era of apartheid –rather like the lynching in the American south during the Jim Crow era. At times it seems that things are not much different: black people are shot by police – too often with impunity. Stephen Biko was an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. A student leader, he later founded the Black Consciousness Movement, which would empower and mobilize much of the urban black population. One of its key agendas was to reverse the symbolic meaning of ‘Blackness’ for Black people and ultimately for their oppressors.

No doubt a part of this transformation was the acknowledgement by White people of their complicity in that oppression. No hiding behind the saying ‘All Lives Matter!’ as a reaction to the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’: no one questions that the former is true, but until we come to terms with the historic suffering of Black people and the complicity of White people in it, those racist ideological narratives spun to justify this suffering (for economic reasons) will continue to haunt our public life and political discourses. (What does ‘Make America Great Again, actually infer?)

All lives will not deeply matter until particular lives matter: nor does redefining the meaning and value of Blackness happen in a void, disconnected from the meaning of other bodies: people of colour, poor whites, women, LGBTQIA people, etc.

The film ‘Populaire’, through its story line about a woman who aims to be the world’s best typist, satirises the view of women as empty receptacles for reproducing the thoughts and words of men. The economic incentive behind this symbolic value of women gets noted at the end when, the woman having achieved her dream, stands on the stage with her man, receiving rapturous applause for having won the world title for typing while her manager stands before the stage shaking hands with an executive from IBM on a deal to use her fame to sell the latest model in typewriters.

Andre Dussel, Argentine philosopher, speaks of "the negativity of the oppressed". Perhaps this is what he means: the passive or even resentful yielding of our bodies to be tools for someone else – a tyrant, global capital or just some other person – who then defines our value.

The deepest violence we experience is when we accept someone else’s definition of who we are and then intro-ject that image as our own. 

Stephen Biko knew this.