DAY 69 25/05/2020
Dear diary,
I remember when I first heard about the death of George Floyd. I was in bed and it popped up on my sky news alert. Honestly, I didn’t think people would care. They never cared about black people dying in the past, what made this any different.
Honestly, I think the fact that there’s a pandemic going on helped more than anything. Everyone’s forced to actually stay at home and listen, research, educate and stand up for your black neighbours’, friends and fellow humans. And they did, for a few days. Black out Tuesday became a huge trend, one I didn’t take part in. Because I knew the real change that was coming came after the black screens on Instagram and after it stopped trending.
But if I’m being honest with myself, the first few days I was really just numb. I gave a presentation two years ago for my GCSE English class about police brutality from the point of view of America mostly in the 90s, early 2000s. Never in my wildest dreams did I think it was something that could happen today.
I felt so lost, so sad.
Black people only make up 7% of the UK. This was a fact I found so astounding because I grew up in one of the most diverse boroughs in London. But in those few days after George Floyd’s death, I never felt so small, so insignificant. So insignificant that someone that looks like me could get killed in broad daylight.
DAY 89 19/06/2020
Dear diary,
A video of a girl from my school saying the n word exploded on the internet in response to the black lives matter movement. This obviously caused a lot of back slash for my school; it started a chain reaction and caused a lot of people to air their grievances with them. This started me thinking about the things I experienced at school. Being a black girl at a predominately white boarding school definitely caused a few issues.
When I was at school, I never really had full blown racist comments said to me. Because of this I never thought too hard about to smaller comments that I had to deal with on a regular basis. The first and most common one being the “I’m just going to touch your hair without your permission phenomenon” From year 9 to year 13 I would always have people randomly coming up to me and touching my hair commenting on how nice it looked. I never felt like I could complain because they were being nice about it however it always made me uncomfortable having random people just start touching me.
Also, I was the only black girl in my year, and there were only two black girls in the year below me; in a different house. So, I always found it so annoying and infuriating that people, usually staff would call me Rebecca, constantly. And it would always come in the form of “wait, don’t tell me, I remember Rebecca, right? No wait it’s Abi?”
Another common one was “where are you from?”
“London”
“No but where are you from originally?”
“Nigeria”
“Oh really, my family went on holiday to Kenya”...
I always found these conversations absolutely bizarre and never understood the point of them. It always felt as though people felt as if they needed to prove how cultured they are.
I even had a visitor from a 30-year reunion tour come up to me and say “so what exotic part of the world are you from?” And then proceed to tell me how he thought Nigerian women were so loud and super hard to understand.
Also, I remember asking my history teacher once why they didn’t teach black history month and they just said there wasn’t enough space in the curriculum and I always found that bizarre because at my last school and all the other state schools in the area they carved out the whole of October to talk about black history month and always put on a black showcase at the end of it. The only time black history was mentioned was when we learnt about nelson Mandela and South Africa. I remember the whole time we were learning about that my history teacher always looked at me throughout the lesson as if to say “I’m teaching this accurately right?” It always made me feel singled out and reminded that I was different to everyone else.
Again these are micro aggressions and I think things like this can be easily changed and solved. However, the worst thing that ever happened to me racially was when i was class and had my natural hair out and when I scratched my head some of my hair fell out and the boy next to me said that they looked like pubes. He half-hearted apologised afterwards when he could tell it upset me but the fact that it happened in the first place and it’s something I still remember to this day shows how scarring words can be.
This isn’t me saying my school is racist and I had a horrible time there I really enjoyed my time at there and made really good friends for life but there’s definitely room for improvement to make people feel more welcome.
Morola Oyefesobi