Tears have no colour…

I don’t do this. I don’t write articles, I don’t protest much, I have my opinions that I generally keep to myself, but there is one subject which is very important to me and that is racial equality.

It is hard to write about a subject that one has little direct experience of, and so I’ll start under the banner of equality. Equality, or should I say inequality, has been a part of my life for a very long time. I served in the military as a gay man while it was illegal to be gay in the military. I served for 10 years pretending to be someone that I was not. I was lucky, my appearance suited the role I was employed in. My face fit.

I know what it is like to suffer in silence, to listen while others ridicule an existence they do not understand and know nothing about, because ignorance allows them that privilege. I know what it is like to suffer at the hands of a hater, to be harassed and abused for simply existing.

But, I can only imagine what it is like to experience racism. I can only imagine the pain, the suffering, the fear of living in a world that sees me yet could never understand that world through my eyes. I can only imagine these things because my skin is white.

I have a story to share with people like me who can only imagine. It’s a story of exploration into a past that white ancestors wrote, promoted and benefited from in many ways. It is a story about the exploitation of one race by another, driven by greed and hate. And it is a story I am deeply ashamed of.

If you don’t quite understand ‘Black Lives Matter’, or maybe don’t get all the fuss, or maybe think well white people suffer too, then just hear me out. Try to imagine.

Imagine being forcefully taken from your home along with your family, transported to an island on a river, being stripped of clothes, your belongings, dignity and your identity. Imagine it for a moment.

Imagine being put in chains, being shackled, being thrown into a small cell with many others like you.

Imagine being put onto a ship, diabolical sanitary conditions, with just enough food and water to keep you alive if you’re lucky.

Imagine not understanding the languages spoken to you, while the disease, the smell of death, faeces and vomit from these inhumane conditions surround you for weeks.

Imagine not knowing when that will end, and what that end will look like.

Imagine never knowing freedom again.

Imagine never knowing equality again, your children never knowing equality and their children never knowing equality again, if indeed you are fortunate enough to live long enough to have children.

I’m asking you to imagine, because you will never truly know that experience.

In 1997 I visited James Island as it was then known, a small island in West Africa on the Gambia River. On this island stood a small ruined fort and a jetty reaching out into the river. From a distance it looked like paradise, and indeed stepping onto that island it felt like it too. A few steps further and paradise becomes tainted, the remains of iron fixed into stone, with the purpose of holding people captive. The realisation soon came that this ruined fort was a prison, a holding pen for humans. Humans who had been captured or traded, and later would be shipped off to other worlds and sold on as slaves.

Visiting a place like this, it is hard to visualise a reality created by my white ancestors, yet what makes it all too real, sickeningly real, lies beyond the fort. Scattered amongst the pebbles on the shore is the forgotten freedom of a race. Dipping a hand into the water it was possible to scrape up a handful of gravel, but if you raise that handful of gravel to your face and inspected it further, you find something very different. Tiny beads and shells, each with tiny holes bored through them. These were the last known belongings of human beings, necklaces and beads stripped from local citizens by a so-called civilised race. I carefully studied each, holding them and gently washing them back to where they came from. Had I been religious I would have prayed, but instead I offered my apologies on behalf of the people who committed these crimes. With my sadness, tears rolled down my face, no doubt joining millions before them. I wiped them away with the same wet hand that seconds earlier held those forgotten belongings, I realised that tears have no colour.

Twenty three years later I still cry when I think of that place, I’m crying now, for the injustice, inhumanity, brutality and abuse that took place there then spread. Spread across a world of misguided ignorance and self-importance too stubborn and twisted to even comprehend the crimes it was committing to fellow human beings. A world where supremacy was white.

Years later that injustice, hate and inequality still exists, there is no place for it, there never was. It is your responsibility to make sure that Black Lives Matter, because there was once a time when they didn’t, and we need to own up to that shame and injustice, we need to wake up to it and make up for it.

I can only imagine, can you?

© K R Harter  2020.