Radioactive Dreams

Something that happened to me once ages ago and made me feel super uncomfortable but barely told anyone about cause I felt weird for feeling uncomfortable about it

Last Halloween, as I was sat in some stranger’s kitchen drinking beer, rolling a cigarette and hoping for some better company to turn up I was approached by a young man asking for directions to the toilet. Always happy to help someone in need, I put my beer down and turned my gaze away from my cigarette to meet his face and to my simultaneous disgust, amusement and surprise it was painted entirely in black, except for his lips and eyes which had a white outline traced around them.  Up until this point blackface was something I had only read about in history books, it was symbolic of an entirely different generation of people’s struggle with racism – It was old school, vintage.  Racism with a capital R – if institutionalized racism like the “glass ceiling”, Daily Mail articles, The Bell Curve and dodgy crime statistics  were Stephen King, then this one man minstrel show was H.P Lovecraft.  

I didn’t really know how to react, I’ve dealt with racist abuse before in the past, I’ve been called certain words, chased down alleys, beaten up for being the wrong colour at the wrong time in the wrong place…that sort of stuff is easier to deal with in a sense, because you know exactly where you stand, you know exactly what those words and actions mean and you needn’t search your mind for an explanation as to why. Situations like the one I had found myself in that night occupy a this sort of grey area in my head where I’m not entirely sure of the person’s intentions, I start to wonder whether he means to cause offense or if he’s simply unaware of what his ‘costume’ symbolizes and represents. A billion questions float around in my head: Is it a joke, is this irony? Am I supposed to laugh at this, am I a square if I don’t laugh at this? One of those black guys you see in films who gets offended over every little thing? This is post modern, right? This is Post-Obama ™, right? This is post racial England, right?

 I’d love to live a world where that guy’s costume wasn’t the stupidest thing I’d ever had the misfortune to see, a world where I could just laugh the whole thing off.  I’d like to live in a world where the words “post racial society” didn’t sound like the opening lines to a synopsis for a film or book set in a distant future or alternate reality,  a world where racism really was a thing of the past – some archaic set of misinformed ideals that no one but a few misguided fools ever took seriously or that are looked back upon with the same shame and  astonishment one might experience when looking at photos of a younger self going through a “goth” phase. “Did I really think I looked good in a white sheet? Did people  really think it was okay to say those things?”  “How garish were swastikas, eh?”  We’d all say as we gathered round a coffee table copy of ‘The Big Book of Atrocities and Societal Ills’, we’d all point at glossy pictures of marching Klansmen, full colour 8 x 10s of lynch mobs and pull outs of  Emmet Till‘s brutalized and unrecognizable corpse and laugh our heads off because incidents like that would be so far removed from our  futuristic and enlightened view society that we just had no frame of reference and laughter was the only reaction we could think to dignify such absurd images with.  

The fact of the matter however is that we live in a country where a race that only happens to make up 3% of the population accounts for 15% of police stop and searches, where there are five times more black people  than whites are in prison (New Statesman, 2010)  and where if you’re ever so unfortunate to as to be the victim of a racist murder it could take as many as ten years for a potentially corrupt police force to get around to bringing those who killed you to justice.