I started out thinking I’d write a piece every week relating to the Black Lives Matter theme. Then it became mentally overwhelming because there was simply so much information to process, and emotionally overwhelming as I saw people I love glaze over when I tried to engage them in conversation about it.
Doing the work of unpicking where our institutional and systemic racism comes from is at times painful but can also be simply fascinating. Our learning may come from the sources we intentionally seek out for this – the specific ones like White Fragility, Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, Me and White Supremacy – or it may come from unexpected voices.
Last month, our TAWN Book Club book of the month was Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit. It’s a big book, there’s science in it, there’s marketing, sport, addictions, Rosa Parks, wait what? Yes, Rosa Parks. The black woman who refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white woman and in doing so sparked the civil rights movement in America. That Rosa Parks.
I learned more about Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement from a book about habits than I had thus far from anywhere else. Did you know that she was not the first woman arrested for doing this? I didn’t. Did you know that she as an individual was the reason that the bus boycott happened at all? I didn’t. Did you know that Martin Luther King Jr was effectively manoeuvred into his leadership role by other people who chose him for it? I didn’t know that either.
The key thing about Rosa Parks that made her perfect as a catalyst was her social networks. She was friends with the rich white ladies who knew they could call upon her to make last minute alterations to dresses for cotillion dances and weddings. She was friends with the congregation of her church. She was on committees and was not just well known, but a woman who was held in high esteem by all who knew her. This was what made her so important in the sparking of a movement. So many people from all different sections of Montgomery society knew her and liked her and didn’t like to think of her being humiliated this way. Carefully managed peer pressure didn’t just draw a crowd to stand outside while she was in front of the judge, it also built and maintained a bus boycott that went on for months.
The next revelation? The same “weak ties” that made people who knew of Rosa Parks join the movement whether they actually knew her or not are the same weak ties that see us recommending people we hardly know (because they’re an acquaintance or friend of a friend) for jobs and projects.
I let that sink in before I started on my next read. Our July book is Do Less by Kate Northrup and I finished in it a couple of weeks, giving me a window to start something else. I had a look at the titles I had recently added and chose Black Tudors.
Having studied the Tudors at A level and read a fair few books set in the period, the title grabbed me when I saw it on a friend’s facebook post of her favourite books. Sure enough, it turns out there were a number of notable black Tudors that school taught history has all but erased. One area has particularly surprised me, and that is around the famous pirate, Drake.
When Bristolians toppled the statute of slave trader Edward Colston, it inspired other people to look at who their towns and cities were honouring with statues, squares, roads, halls, schools and so on.
Down the road in Plymouth there was a very swift acknowledgement that honouring John Hawkins, England’s first slave trader, with a square named after him was no longer appropriate. It will be renamed Jack Leslie Square, after one of the first black British footballers. Jack Leslie was a star at Plymouth Argyle but denied an England cap because of the colour of his skin. There is also a crowdfunder campaign to have a statue of Jack erected outside Home Park.
In Tavistock, our main focus was on the statue of Sir Francis Drake. People who defended him seemed to focus on his sailing prowess, so I pondered on whether the statue of him could be moved a museum and we could have a nautical sculpture on the plinth in the roundabout instead? Maybe individuals, being three dimensional characters with flaws, were simply problematic?
And then Black Tudors… I am not even halfway through the book, but I have already met Diego, a black man who sailed with Drake for most of the circumnavigation as a free man receiving pay. Drake is by no means painted as a saint – he basically abandoned a pregnant black woman and two black men on an uninhabited island as part of the same voyage – but he seems a good deal more nuanced than the “slave trader” tag might imply.
There are many shades of grey in people’s characters and in history. The more we listen and learn, the more able we are to see them. I look forward to the next revelations in this book and the other titles in my audible library.
What have you learned that surprised you recently? Xx
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