…but Cool for Cats
Some people close to me have been white supremacists and racists. So I can speak about them with personal knowledge, so far as that’s possible. It remains true that none of us can really know what it’s like to be someone else. For example, I’ve lived with Karleen for a dozen years. Close as we are in myriad ways, I cannot truly know what it means to be her, and what it means to be black. When we’re together or surrounded by her relatives, I scarcely have any consciousness of what it means to be white. But then I walk down the Desborough Road, and do know what it means; also how many classes of white there are, how many classes of black. We detect those qualities in our own way. From my perspective, black and white stand in a kind of mutual admiration. We complement one another. We enrich one another’s cherished cultures in various ways that I could enumerate, but why bother? Why analyse? Live big, stand proud, love yourself, feel the caress of your body in your clothes and in the world; make a joyful noise. That’s some of the stuff I never learned from my own family.
My mother died many years before she could meet Karleen; her sister, my aunt Peggy, refused to meet her at all. Thus I could never see her again, though we’d got on well for sixty years. She’d been in Kenya, her army captain husband was posted there. My grandmother went out there too. She thought the heat would help her painful arthritis. She was fond of the Kikuyu—as servants and idlers who sang and laughed under a tree at the gate of their bungalow. She used to sit sketching them—such sweet people! Then the Mau-Mau rose up. They are widely seen today as freedom fighters against the colonial masters who had stolen their land whilst otherwise behaving with kindness and consideration. The white settlers, encouraged by the British Government, now saw the Mau-Mau as a
savage, violent, and depraved tribal cult, an expression of unrestrained emotion rather than reason. Mau Mau was ‘perverted tribalism’ that sought to take the Kikuyu people back to ‘the bad old days’ before British rule.
Wikipedia’s account closely resembles what I heard first-hand from my grandmother and aunt, who had no reason to doubt such scaremongering propaganda.
My mother could also be called a white supremacist. She’d spent the entire Thirties in Singapore, where each ethnic strand had its place in society. Your syce (chauffeur) would be Malay, your cook Chinese, and so on. Chinese millionaires would have to be respected, they were the best clients of her dancing school. When the Japanese came, and she fled to Australia, her Dutch husband remained, went missing presumed dead. My Australian father was in the jungles fighting the Japs. She was grateful to the atomic bombs for ending the war, had no pity for the Japs. Nobody in those days struggled against their own prejudices. Speech was free and often cruel. As a child, I learned from several cases how white supremacism and forms of racism can blight someone for life.
My mother’s friend Margery was in Singapore too, married Goh Sin Sitt there. She was one of those bold passionate women who don’t give a damn what people think. At the war end, she brought him and their child back to England. Pat was my childhood friend till she became a professional dancer—another girl beyond my reach, like Christine Keeler. Sinsitt was a Confucian of good family with exquisite manners. The only job he could get was rent-collecting for the Council, at which he had to endure verbal abuse and being spat upon. In those days, before the Race Relations Act, there was nothing to be done about it.
I had a great-uncle Arthur. This is all I know about him:
Arthur Elphinstone Sanger-Davies. b. 28/9/1885 San Basilio, Tunbridge Wells. Second son of Rev. Joseph and Harriet Anna. On 13.8.1907 sailed to Penang to take up post of Assistant Conservator of Forests, Federated Malay States. Married in Malaya. 5 children. 3 girls and 2 boys. Captured and imprisoned by Japanese at Changi Prisoner of War Camp, Singapore. Died 1942 approx. during internment.
great-uncle ArthurWhat this doesn’t mention is that his wife was Indian or perhaps Malay. He probably met her when touring rubber plantations, which were invariably white-owned with teams of Tamil workers. After Uncle Arthur’s death the children still had their mother, but (some?) were taken away to be educated in England. Not only did they suffer discrimination but the stigma extended to their children too, as I know at first-hand. There’s a peculiar thing in the old British Empire, that if you were mixed-race, half-caste, you were treated as a second-class white, who must be brought to “civilization” to redeem the better part of your heritage. Yet somehow you must suffer for your father’s lapse, his fatal weakness of “going native”.
I had a friend at my first boarding school* called Clark—first names were not used, so I don’t recall it. He lived with an aunt in the local village but boarded nonetheless. His father had died in Burma during the war, perhaps before he was born. Not only was he taken from his native mother, it was done before arrangements had been completed for him to be lodged and schooled in England. So he was looked after by a succession of amahs, who, if I have it right, amused themselves by interfering with his person. In consequence of which we had some interesting conversations, resulting in both of us losing a whole term’s privileges and having to keep apart, to cure us of suspected latent homosexuality. It worked for me (!), but I lost touch with Clark. I’m sad for him, forever the “black sheep of the family” & who probably never saw his mother again, like uncle Arthur’s children.
At that same school, we occasionally had other non-English boys sent from the Empire by parents with means, so that they could learn to talk and think like Brits. I recall a Chinese boy called Hung, who suffered what I suppose would be called bullying these days, but may have then been considered as part of the necessary process. I can only recall that he didn’t smell right, probably because he regularly wet the bed, poor chap. There was also a rather princely boy with the syllable Raj somewhere in his name, who sported an enormous gold signet ring, black hair, brown complexion. He was too princely in behaviour to be seriously bullied but all the same we could not help but notice every deviation in appearance and behaviour from our tribal manners.†
I have no right to moralize or condemn. And perhaps the only virtue in this post is that I’ve done my best to stay with what I know as fact.
* Merrion House, in Sedlescombe
† My cousin Mark was sent there for a year as well; a nervy boy, a month my junior, my first friend in England when I arrived from Australia in ’46. He got picked on by boys and masters alike. They said he had “St Vitus’ Dance”. He soon hated his life there and begged to go back to an ordinary day-school in St Leonards-on-Sea. The ruling tribalism made it impossible for me to leap to his defence and protection. Or else I was a coward. I feel a miasma of guilt hanging round me to this day, but he remembers little or nothing of it.
Totally agree with you on the recent political developments in our respective countries, and the kind of broad brushes that people are being painted with. I’m pretty much on the same page with you, maybe even the same paragraph or sentence.
As for racism, I think that it’s unfortunate that the general way that it’s been handled as a cultural taboo has led more to repression of racist attitudes, rather than a genuine dismantling or rethinking of these attitudes. I mean, for some people, it’s probably led them to be more thoughtful, but those people may have been inclined to empathy and open mindedness to begin with. For other people, they don’t really change their thinking; they just lower their voice and look to see if anyone is listening.
I don’t really have a good answer or a better idea on how to handle the issue. I just don’t know if it’s healthy to build it up as this big thing in people’s minds. In the past (and I’m sure for many people still) race might be the first thing someone would notice about a person, because it marked them in their minds as someone inferior or less civilised or less trustworthy or less … anything. Now for a lot of people, race is the first thing they see, because it sets them on alert and they think, “I have to be careful how I talk to this person and how I treat them and the attitude I have towards them.” That taboo looms so large in their minds, that that’s STILL all they’re seeing. It becomes this elephant in the room, when ultimately it’s really such a silly thing when you come right down to it, superficial differences of skin tone and facial features and whatnot. In the attempt to be dominant on the one hand and the attempt to be accommodating on the other, we make it into this huge thing, for God only knows what reason.
I just hope we reach a point where we just learn to be comfortable with each other, where we just say, “Who cares? I’m a pepper; you’re a pepper. We both walk upright and have opposable thumbs, and we’re both puzzled by our place in the universe.”
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Thanks, Bryan, it’s difficult for me to know what is really going on in America, so it’s heartening to have your response.
Another correspondent is grateful for your comments and adds:
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We both walk upright and have opposable thumbs, and we’re both puzzled by our place in the universe.”. Agree..
Vincent, after reading and re-reading this post, can’t think of a concise response.
There is much that i could write about the Aboriginal issue in Australia … but would, like you, probably take about ten pages and a similar number of drafts.
Simply, i don’t really care what ‘race’, colour, sexual preference or creed – ’tis, however, some behaviours that annoy me.
Keep cheery, this planet is still a beautiful place.
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Yes, and as for the Abos …
Knowing nothing about my Australian grandparents, I once filled the vacuum with a fantasy which I felt explained a lot about who I feel myself to be.
In this imagined genealogy, there was a Jesuit posted to Western Australia, who at the age of 50 went AWOL, deserted his vocation and vows, headed off to Coolgardie (or somewhere, name your place), where he was sheltered by a lubra*. Together they produced my father, who was kidnapped as a baby, via the child removal policy (see Stolen Generations in Wikipedia). He was too young to be sent to a mission school so was adopted by a farming couple on the outskirts of Perth, where he met my mother in 1941. The rest is history, as opposed to baseless conjecture.
*
(with thanks to Wiktionary)