Oops.

I remember sitting on my sofa one cold, dark January afternoon in 2009, watching Barack Obama being inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States of America. I squeezed my infant daughter and howled with bursting joy, tears streaming down my face, at the hope and goodness this seemed to offer us all. The world seemed brighter the next day. It felt like millions of people had all done something good at once, and that choice would make life better for millions more people.

It was wonderful.

This, now, is not so good. Despite Clinton winning the popular vote by more than 630,000, the American people now have someone noooooooot greeeeaaaaat due to move in to the White House in the next few months, someone still wholly focused on criminalising abortion and deporting immigrants. Not only that, the Republican party have control of the House and the Senate. Here in the UK, Theresa May, she of the “Go Home, Immigrants” vans is powering through the process to trigger Article 50, despite the EU Referendum being explicitly an advisory, rather than a binding, referendum, because I guess 38% of the voting public saying, ‘Yeah, let’s get the fuck out of this madhouse where an innocent man isn’t even allowed to tell a few harmless racist jokes?’ is evidence enough to ignore a sweeping majority of economists, environmentalists, business leaders, charities, party leaders, and the governor of the Bank of England etc etc. (I know, I know, that’s how democracy™ works. I know.) And the opposition ahaha opposition hahaha the opposition, Labour, are hahahah… well. Their position is best summed up here, I think. 

BUT! But. I have had a revelation. And like all my revelations, it was someone else’s first. This thread by Marco Rogers is both brilliant and accurate: we white liberals are to blame for this. And I know that blame isn’t in short supply right now, and it doesn’t do a whole lot of anything on its own, but bear with me, because this is important to accept before we begin more productive work.

Our white liberal gang learnt, eventually, that racism and misogyny and homophobia came in all shapes and sizes, could be internalised and institutional, could be your aunt and uncle at Christmas, could be the security guard following your black Twitter friend around her local department store. We listened to these stories, and we gradually, piece by piece, started to begin to be able to slightly conceive of what life is like if you aren’t white, straight, able-bodied, let alone male etc etc. Turns out: straight white people, collectively, often treat everyone else below them on the ladder of privilege pretty badly. Surprise!

But it’s hard to address police racism. It’s tricky to question why your company seems to promote only young men. It’s difficult to get parliament to answer why ethnic minorities are three times less likely to crop up as MPs than as average British citizens. But it is easy to stop visiting your racist aunt and uncle. You can go drinking with someone other than the uni friend who still makes ironic jokes about women in the kitchen. You can avoid the parents in the playground who make reference to ‘Gyppos’. It’s easy. And ahhhhhhhhhhhh, doesn’t it feel better? Isn’t it nice to be on a high-horse, unsullied by relationships with those ignorant, bigoted, Torygraph-reading stress-triggers? Ooooh, that’s good.

The trouble is, as Marco Rogers said in his brief and pithy tweets: it doesn’t actually help. In fact, it makes things worse.

If you’re engaged with gently by people you trust and respect — the People Like Us of the white world :( — and you share conversations, and anecdotes, and are shown different ideas, and asked, quietly, privately, to imagine the life of someone very different to you, and it’s pointed out to you very softly to name the last black UK party leader, or the last panel show that featured more than one ethnic minority at once, or to look at the way newspaper front pages frame and feature white middle-class people compared to working-class, or Pakistani, or gay, or disabled, or women, or eastern European, and you start to talk about immigration history in your family history, maybe — JUST MAYBE — you might start to absorb little tiny fractions of new ideas and thoughts and feelings. Maybe.

On the other hand, if you’re constantly told you’re racist, and misogynist, and homophobic, and all the other tropes and memes that might well be totally true, but whatever, because would you listen? Would you google that meme to even get the facts hidden in it? Would you engage thoughtfully and with an open mind to your Facebook pages filled with friends and relatives spitting bile and fury? And I get it, I really do. I feel that bile and fury, and I burn inside with the injustice of the world, but still. It’s our fault.

Because it’s not the job of those who are suffering to comfort those stamping them down. It’s not the job of the people who systematically or individually get paid less, arrested more, are offered fewer opportunities, and receive more physical and verbal abuse, to educate the white Western world about how shittily we behave almost all the time. It’s our job. To talk to our friends, our neighbours, our family, those people we’ve fenced ourselves off from because they say things we morally disagree with — we need to start talking again. Our echo chambers do nothing. It makes us feel good, but it doesn’t actually change minds. We need to rebuild our communities, and make them inclusive, this time. Of everybody. ♫We, white liberals, don’t get to walk away from this♫

And — side note — every journo publishing a piece about how we’re heading into WW3 and all its attendant horrors: we might WELL be, yes, god, probably, but do you know what fear does? It paralyses. It makes us unable to think properly, to make sensible, long-term decisions, it makes it harder to put others first, it makes our brains freeze and nothing gets changed. Instead of focusing on the echoes of the 1930s, why don’t we put our heads together to work out how we can do things differently! Talk to our neighbours about what we’re scared of! Let them talk about what they’re scared of! Even if it’s nonsense! Build up a relationship! I know it’s draining but it’s a hell of a lot better than strengthening our bubbles and calling out ‘Hope you minorities are ok out there!’ while we raise solidarity fists through the walls!

And — new but related side note — I love Twitter, I love it, but I also think that for the last year or so, it’s not the greatest place in the world in which to hang out. It’s wonderful for raising awareness of big, sweeping issues like #BlackLivesMatter, and for trivial, wonderful, hilarious things like the Olympics opening ceremony, and Eurovision — my god, Eurovision on Twitter is everything good in the world — but Twitter is 140 characters per tweet. Even if you link tweets together, you’re still standing on a street corner with a megaphone. Which sometimes is great! Sometimes that’s what those situations demand! But in terms of nuance, and debate, and subtlety, and learning something completely contradictory to your previous beliefs, it’s not ideal. It’s the same behaviour that makes me want to weep when I watch PMQs, or Question Time, or even just the news these days. Stop shouting just to show you’re cleverest! Stop confusing one-liners with communication! Stop trying to win this conversation! And again: I’m guilty of all of this. Retweeting articles that made me furious. Laughing at bigots. Unfollowing or blocking Tories in my timeline. And in my life.

It doesn’t actually make sense.

I don’t know. I’m exhausted, and frightened, and angry, and my hope sometimes feels like naivety, but come on, guys: passing around articles about the awfulness of our enemies doesn’t seem to be working for anyone, does it? If you’re in a position of privilege, at any level, use your spider senses and admit that with that great privilege comes great responsibility. And maybe it’s time to accept ours.

This Remembrance Day, I am thinking of all those who lost their lives in war, but particularly the Muslim soldiers who fought alongside Britons in both the world wars, the Sikh forces who did the same, the Polish airmen and spies who helped the Allies against the Nazis, the black GIs who faced death to fight for their country but had to fight racism from their own troops first, the Mexican citizens who kept German boats from US soil, worked to keep American industry going during WWII or the half-million who joined the US army, the women who served as pilots, army officers and naval officers in WWI and the 80%-90% of woman who were conscripted by 1941 for WWII. You will not be forgotten. 

I’ve been genuinely successful in distracting myself from the US election for the most part – I’m off twitter, away from the frantic TV news-cycle, trying to concentrate on work I need to do. But someone on Instagram captions their pic that they’re flying home from the US this evening, leaving without knowing who has won, and landing in the UK tomorrow to the news of the next president. I wonder whether my dad (who captained commercial US routes frequently) would have made an announcement mid-flight, as soon as he knew. I wonder whether it would cause a riot on board. I wonder when we’ll all remember it generally suits more of us across this small planet if we support kindness and generosity rather than the promise of lower taxes and no damn strangers in town. 

Taking vast swathes of the summer off means various work tasks and deadlines have piled up, and I only get to bed at 5.30am. My alarm wakes me two hours later, where one child is standing fully dressed for school, teeth brushed, book in hand, and reporting that the other two are downstairs just finishing their breakfasts now. I feel that I am a terrible parent who has also done something terribly right. Comme ci, comme ça. 

By noon I have fallen asleep on my laptop on the living room floor, halfway through a freelance job. The doorbell is ringing. My friend is at the door, travelled from far distant lands, and come to take me to lunch in his mother’s borrowed soft-top, glinting outside in the sudden sun. We head out of town, towards a pub where they bring us tiny salted fish and roasted dates, pigeon and scallops and venison and fondant potatoes. We have bloody Marys, cherry soufflés, and I discover he hasn’t ever read The Secret History, or Prep, or I Capture the Castle, or even the Dark is Rising series, and I am filled with a great joy that those discoveries are lined up before him. 

Back in the car, he says we can go anywhere but Ikea. I pick a vague direction, then we follow signs to any village whose name takes our fancy. There are tiny post-office-and-general-stores; dusty-looking pubs with men outside smoking and frowning at us; new builds like old cottages; old cottages like melting stone, which have crept so close to the road I worry they’ll keep flowing, blocking off those higher up the road altogether; chip shops full of children on their way home from school; lichened gates to weedy country house drives; a woman brushing horses in a field; an old stone cross, all passing, slide slide slide, no slowing, no stopping, no reasons. 

We sing Christmas carols (I do the descant, when I can remember it; he does the bass, when he can) and I let the wind knot my hair and whip away our laughter. We scream at each other when we choose a bad song. We both feel sick from too much food, too much laughter, hairpin turns in a car which is part sun-lounger, part 3D-ride. I cannot stop laughing. 

We drive straight to school to collect the elder two, and their faces as the roof slides back makes me hope they’ll remember this, how much they love it (for once, not Will they remember me, which is a nice break from my usual morbidity). For our final performance, the two of us sing In the Bleak Midwinter to the two of them, silent in the back of the car, dazzled by the sun and the car and the two adults who haven’t really changed since before these babies were born.