I seem to have missed out on the discussion of white privilege over the last nearly twenty years. I have always been aware of racial discrimination and followed the black power movement and the fight against apartheid. However, I really saw these issues as completely out of my area of influence. I believed they had nothing to do with me. They were out there; of grave concern to the world, but not something for which I was personally responsible.
I do remember that, in 1990, in my last year at Carleton University, I was bemused by some black students wanting to focus on racial prejudice. We had just spent the best part of two years reconfiguring the world into a feminist paradigm. I was not going to be around for the next challenge of fitting racism into my world view. I had a new job and had to get settled into a new community.
Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.
As with the early feminists, new concepts need to have a new point of view as a starting point. The, “problem which has no name” was a much debated concept in our early discussions towards the development of Feminism.
In many ways Peggy Macintosh in her seminal essay, “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, “did this towards understanding the concept of white privilege. She was very aware of the white
person’s oblivion to their privileged position. No wonder a black writer once, “dismissed white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.”
Childhood Influences.
How was my idea of racial relations formed? I was brought up in rural Scotland and have no memories of people of colour from that time.
I do remember as a small child being shown a map of the world where so many places were coloured red. It was explained to me that all these places were the British Empire and the Dominions, “were not all these people lucky in their association with Britain?” What else was I to believe when I was surrounded by people who believed this simplistic nonsense? Even at that time in history the so called British Empire was in process of swift dissolution.
A little later as I began to learn to read I fell in love with the story of Little Black Sambo.The book was small, the illustrations enticing, and the text an easy read. As with many of my favorite stories I memorised it and hardly needed an adult’s help to understand the narrative. Of course, I was not really aware that Sambo had a different colour of skin than mine. He came from India, and there were tigers, and his mother cooked with ghee. The fact that he was brown did not impinge on my understanding. I was very happy when he got his clothes back and the tigers duly melted.
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I really do not think that this story could have produced the beginnings of a racial prejudice on my part. However, to read the commentary on the web, the story has been vilified as one of the most prejudiced children’s books of all time. The next piece of children’s literature, with a possible racist theme, that I enjoyed was the Jungle Book BY Rudyard Kipling. There is no doubt that he had a well established colonial outlook. No one who could write a poem like, “the white man’s burden”, could possibly not be a racist as we would define it today.
However, did I catch this idea from reading about Mowgli and all the animals? I find it difficult to think that these stories, as understood by children, could have anything but a subliminal effect on any concept of racism.
The present day opinion about whether Kipling was a racist, as we now understand it, is still an open one. One writer,KatherineTrendacosta feel that he is an out and out racist in that he believed, “the poor white is doomed to the hard work of going to foreign places and raising up the local savages into civilised society.”
Another writer, Edward Sikov writes, “Rudyard Kipling was a writer of his time and place, just as we are. He could not possibly have written outside the social cultural box into which he was born.”
My next most favourite book, The Secret Garden, starts in India. Mary, is discovered in a deserted house by Army officers. They are very dismissive of all the servants who have run away from an
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outbreak of cholera. Poor Mary’s parents are dead, and Mary presents a difficult problem. Without very much attention to Mary’s needs or wishes she is sent to her Guardian in England with a rather reluctant caregiver. At Thitlethwaite, her new home on the Yorkshire moors, Mary struggles to make sense of her new surroundings. As she grows and develops and makes friends with Colin and Dixon they all depend on a belief in “good magic”. This belief seems to stem directly from Mary’s ayah’s magical stories from India. This was the only belief system she had been exposed to in her short life. She had no concept that her ayah’s belief system was, “savage.”In actuality the ayah’s stories were probably based on Hindu Myths, from one of the oldest religions in the world.
A world devoid of racial differences.
Until I was nearly an adult, my personal experience of a real live person of colour was absolutely nil. There were no such people in our rural Perthshire environment. Although we met some American Troops I do not remember any of them being black. I was exposed to German prisoners working on the farm. Also my parents entertained many of the Free French, Dutch and other European officers from a nearby Hotel, which was designated as a rest home. They all looked remarkably like us!
Certain incidents did enter my consciousness. There was a clip I remember from Movietone News showing Gandi in his dhoti visiting a cotton mill somewhere in the midlands. The women workers were giving him an enthusiastic welcome. I wondered
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why he wore such unsuitable clothing in a cold and changeable climate like Britain’s. Were those women aware that their cotton spinning factory had completely decimated the local spinning and weaving of cotton in India? I very much doubt it. This consequence of British Imperialism did not even surface for me as an issue, until well after Independence.
I also remember looking through the family albums. There were ever so many pictures of martial looking chaps on well groomed horses. They had, “served their country” in all sorts of exotic places and been, “leaders of men”. These pictures often included some white men seated, surrounded by a large number of obviously brown men. Some of these were described to me as, “plucky little Gurkas”. What on earth made them “plucky”? Much later I realised these were seasoned fighters of the North West Frontier and probably knew a lot more about fighting than their officers.
The only people that I remember who were singled out as, “different”, and this only by Nannie, were the Irish. How was it that Nannie had such a hate on for the Irish? When we went to stay with her family in Bothwell, she never ceased to complain about the Irish family who lived in the same tenement. They did not take their proper turn washing the stairs and hallways. They were noisy and loud and their children were rude, and most of all they were Catholic!. I had to learn a great deal more about Scottish History before this attitude was explained. There was no way I could distinguish who was Irish. To me we all looked the same.
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However, I was very much more aware in those years of the strong class division in the society where I was raised. This did not require a difference in skin colour. The way you talked, the school you went to, the friends you made, the books and movies you preferred, were all much more relevant to your place in society than the colour of your skin.
The intervening years.
After leaving my rather awful boarding school at aged just sixteen, I spent two years at crammer college in the winters, and two summers abroad. These episodes deserve their own chapters and will be developed later! During these times I certainly was exposed to many different people, but they were not usually of a different race.
University of Edinburgh in the 1950”s.
I think I went up to University in the fall of 1955. I had spent the previous summer in Karlsruhe Germany staying with my mother’s friend Brigitta. The mothers seem to have made a plan that I would do a summer exchange with Brigitta’s daughter Steffi. I went to Germany in the summer of 1955 and she would come to stay with us at a later date.
I got home from Germany to find I had been accepted into Edinburgh University and that my mother had already made arrangements for me to go and stay in her old hostel. This was just as well as I really was not very independent in those
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days. I did not seem to think it odd to rely on my mother to make all the arrangements for me.
The East Suffolk Road hostels had been built to house young women going up to university and to teachers college after the First World War. During the Second World War the facilities were used by the Army to house troops.
My mother was there in the 1930”s and seems to have had quite a reputation. She describes being brought before one of the don”s who asked her,” Miss Mackay, do you intend to do work enough to get a degree!”
When I arrived I was very impressed by the surroundings. After a dormitory at school, having my own room was a lovely luxury. There were, what seemed to me ,very few rules. You were meant to keep your room tidy and make your bed. You were expected to be quiet after 11pm.No men, except on the weekend and then you had to keep the door open!! The only chore was to make breakfast toast for everyone once every two weeks .Curfew was eleven on weekdays and midnight on weekends. The grounds were lovely, and you could get a bus or a tram to the university very easily.
My first real exposure to people of colour happened in hostel. In those days, Scottish Universities, along with most in the country, were open to people from all over the Commonwealth. This was particularly true in the case of teachers training. So our hostel was home to quite a number of women teachers from Ghana
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and Nigeria as well as other parts of Africa. Looking back, I remember having very little interest in these women. Most were much older than we were, and already had a number of children at home. The youngest babies came with their Moms and were fostered during the week. They visited on the weekend and our place was enlivened by their laughter and play. These ladies loved to show us pictures of their other children back home, who were being cared for by extended family. I remember, with regret, that we were not particularly interested in there people beyond a superficial and limited attention. We were only late teenagers and much younger in life experience than these mothers. We had many more pressing interests vying for our attention.
Looking back now, I can imagine what a culture shock coming to Scotland must have been. Houses were even colder then. The food must have been inedible, and being surrounded by immature and self-centred women like us, not much of a help.
The men from this group lived at the British Institute, and in an effort to introducing a somewhat sociable environment there would periodically be Dances between our Hostel and the men from the Institute. This, I am sure was instigated by the staff, and did not happen at the request of either the African men or ourselves.
I remember these as being very painful occasions. Although these were the days of Rock and Roll, we had been taught the waltz, the tango, and other ballroom dances at school. We pushed each other around in obedience to the dancing mistress, but had no hope then of ever participating in anything more
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grown-up. The thought of dancing with a real live man was quite another thing. At these dances we would huddle at one end of the room, trying to look nonchalant, and then when someone got up enough courage to come over, we tried to make polite conversation.
One of these dances resulted in a very awkward situation for me. One man was very persistent after a couple of dances and insisted on taking me home to Hostel in a taxi. I tried to politely refuse, but trying not to be rude, I gave in. Then, of course he started to grope me, and I prayed for a speedy arrival home.
I thought this would be the end of the matter until a very elaborate dressing table set arrived by post, with a fervent message of eternal love. I really panicked, and had no idea what to do. Luckily my good friend, Judith, came to my rescue and we wrote a polite note of refusal and returned the present. I obviously had a lot to learn about international relationships!
My time at Edinburgh deserves a number of different individual chapters. There were many different dark skinned people attending the university in those days. I think it was once pointed out that at least 37 percent of the student population were from abroad .However this does not seem to have made much of an inroad into my understanding of race relations. The struggle continues to be a theme throughout the rest of my life .The most important incident, of many, involving people from other cultures.
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One of the most memorable, was the student response to the Suez Crisis in 1956. This was my first exposure, in political terms, to the very obvious posturing of my own government. The University student body exploded in a riot with many of our Egyptian students leading a quite justifiable protest. This demands its own episode and coverage in a separate chapter, See the Suez Crisis 1956.
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