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notes on how to be a Black woman
for Cole

 

Image sketch of black woman twocross purposes

The national flag of England is a symbol of deep pride for many English people, but for a myriad of Black British citizens, this red cross on a white background will always be a symbol of bloody nationalism and violent xenophobia.

The accessory of choice for many violent domestic terrorists during the so-called ‘summer of madness’, Dionne St. Hill reflects on the emotional turbulence the English flag generates.

Author: dionne st.hill 

Read time: 11 mins

I walked to the beach this morning; it’s about a two-and-a-half-kilometre journey; this is my time and space, after nearly an hour’s drive, to think and disentangle my thoughts before I find my spot amongst the pebbles and get lost for a while in the surge and retreating whisper of the water.

It was on my walk to the sea, that I noticed a flag post in a garden, there in the neglected flower beds of this inconsequential house, sprouted a worn and faded St. George’s Cross. The flag seemed to hang forlornly, folded in on itself and unable, it seemed, to ebb or flow, no matter the strength of the wind that may catch it.

I imagined shame had frozen it there, rooted in a bygone time, but that fantasy feels like wishful futuristic thinking, for this relic is still here, faded and stuck, but still here.

 

wishful futuristic thinking

 

A symbol of national pride and historical significance for many, maybe flapping in the wind for a St George’s Day celebration or perhaps hoisted in hope and anticipation of England’s presence at an international football tournament.

But now the only element that has the power to determine this flag’s movement is the hot air that blows the tweets, posts and messages of misinformation and disinformation into the minds and broken hearts of those that entangle their sense of disenfranchisement into blame, hate and violent attack.

Long appropriated by far-right and nationalist groups in England, the St. George’s Cross has become wrapped around the myth of White supremacy.

 

hate and violent attack

 

The stranglehold of suboptimal energy, odium, vehemence and arson feels painfully familiar, encoded in the body and resurfacing amid a hypervigilance not consciously noted for decades.

I am a 54-year-old Black woman born and raised in London; I will always loathe the St George’s flag. A duo-coloured symbol beloved of the assemblage of hate-festering groups and individuals hovering under the standard of the far right – a messy, diverse, dangerous and sometimes surprising mix of fascists, neo-Nazis, xenophobes, Islamophobes, misogynists and anti-immigration proponents with an orgy of illegitimate concerns.

The Far-Right groups that used to exist, like the National Front and the English Defence League (EDL), seem to have been replaced by a much looser network of connections. The EDL was formally disbanded around 10 years ago, but the set of beliefs they held has not faded away.

 

suboptimal energy

 

Dissolved into a decentralised form of activism, the hate that was once wrapped around organised groups like the EDL, Football Lads Alliance and Britain First, now occupies a completely decentralised space.

Rather than become members of specific groups, individuals susceptible to the rhetoric of the so-called ‘Third Position’ follow high-profile far-right leaders on a range of social media platforms.

Many poster boys of the far right have emerged over time in Britain; they include, but are sadly not limited to – Laurence Fox, Dan Wooten, Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage, Paul Golding and Calvin Robinson – these men, and there are many women too, often attach, wrap, twist and fold their social and cultural distortions into the St George’s Cross.

 

wrap, twist and fold

 

The Far Right has become a broad umbrella term for clusters of groups that define themselves through the prism of Islamophobia and Racism. The factions, who are usually fighting amongst themselves, include Counter-jihad, sometimes known as Cultural Nationalists, White Nationalists who seek mass deportations and White Supremacists, among them Neo-Nazis and those that identify as Aryan and Anglo-Saxon. I feel like the St. George’s Cross will always belong to this chaotic constellation.

Over recent times I feel like I have entered a Tardis. I am a child again in the seventies; I recall the high street marches, the skinheads, the National Front, the bomber jackets, the DM’s, those tight turned-up jeans held up with braces, the sharp, neatly pressed shirts, the swastika tattoos and the freshly shaven heads. That flag – the St. George’s Cross – is a portal to those vivid memories and fears.

 

chaotic constellation

 

I’d love this flag that I pass on my way to the beach, to be a poetic symbol of the impotence of the myth of White supremacy, a relic of the British Empire and its colonial audacity, but the ‘Summer of Hate’ – which began on July 30, 2024 following the heart-breaking murder of three little girls dancing to the benign tunes of Taylor Swift – with its indiscriminate violence, rioting and the rising heat of Domestic Terrorism makes it clear, any poetic symbolism is imagined rather than real.

It was beautiful and almost dreamlike to see seas of people holding placards, standing their ground, protecting their communities and forcing many of these hateful brutes to retreat to the safety of their homes and their phones, knowing many of them were awaiting arrest, charge and incarceration.

But that giddy undulation of events and supercharged flow of justice, doesn’t mean as much as many would like it to. Fear and violence may no longer be defined by the tatters of an old, faded flag or the ignorant brutes that wrap their beliefs around it, for the prejudice poisoning our times is insidious.

 

poetic symbolism

 

The poem is incomplete, for there is potency in the brandishing of culturally and socially motivated aggression filling newspaper front pages and television screens, or the passive or micro aggressions found where we work or send our children to school. The proof that this outrage and hate was not restricted, despite this liberal assertion, to the seasonal confines of summer surround and suffocate us.

I think of the eggs that have been thrown at me from a fast-moving car as I walk along the path in the Surrey village I live in, the venom of a White man giving me the middle finger, because I had the gall to take my right of way, whilst driving, rather than acquiesce to his encroaching aggression; the vague, but lingering memory of being called a Black bitch, by an angry stranger, suppressed, but not buried deep enough to forget.

Then there is the recent memory of a man with a huge Alsatian dog I would run toward every morning during my daily run; I see the darkness of his smile in the rationed light before sunrise as he lengthens his lead as I approach, his top lip, seemingly overlapping the bottom part of his mouth, an attempt to suppress his smile, as the huge dog jumps up toward me, nearly as tall as me on its hind legs.

 

lingering memory

 

I know this dog keeper extracts joy from my fear; I am angry with myself for not staying the course, running into the gutter, rather than staying true and on the pavement.

I am a Black woman running before dawn on an empty street, approaching a White man with a dog that is ready to attack. In those moments, it feels safer to drop down from the kerb into the gutter; but I don’t change my route.

Every day, we entered this long silent dialogue; I wanted him to know that perhaps I could be cautious, self-protective, indignant, fearful and fearless all at the same time.

Over time, I felt the Alsatian keeper soften, or perhaps he became tired of this unspoken game.

 

silent dialogue

 

Even though I had not left these pre-dawn streets to him, I know I had not passed some kind of White supremacy test; I held my breath every day until I passed him; I imagined every morning that one day he would let go of the leash altogether.

The streets were empty; he was assured of no witnesses to his crime, but still, I returned every day, facing the fear, succumbing to it, rising above it, trying to hold my spot on the street, but giving in every time, out of fear and a commitment to always finding a way to keep myself safe.

This mish-mash of courage and fear still feels like a conundrum to me, trying to read this man’s face, watching every move of the dog, hearing his bark as soon as he spotted me, or smelt my fear, moving around in trepidation, trying to work him and his dog out, before my day had even begun. I realise this maze of possibilities was more exhausting than the run.

This recent publicised rise of White hatred has me thinking about that conundrum again, the simmering hate, just waiting to come to the boil given the right conditions or heady mix of misinformation and readiness.

 

courage and fear

 

I imagine what I unconsciously packed every morning before I opened the door on the world and ran, ‘… it makes for an agitated body and mind. When you always expect a demon around every corner,’ Cole Riley writes in her beautiful book Black Liturgies, ’your most mundane moments still feel like a risk’.

This is what it has come to, hyper vigilance in readiness for, not necessarily what you may expect, but what you fear. Nobody can promise us it will be fine anymore; our lives will never be the same again. How we think, feel and act are now informed by the rise – violently, politically, socially and intellectually – of the Right.

‘Sometimes’, Cole writes ‘Our fear is the most credible emotion we have access to. Sometimes we have everything to fear.’

What do we do when our fears are in fact rational? When fear and wisdom are enmeshed? When we would be foolish not to fear? More often than we realise, fear is a protective intuition… We don’t have to demonise our fear to survive it.”

 

fear and wisdom are enmeshed
Cole believes that it is important to embrace the power of our fear without succumbing to the need to overcome it. “I have an aversion to language of ‘conquering’ our fears’, she writes. ‘We are not at war with ourselves; it is better to listen with compassion.’

I have found ways to protect myself over my 54 years, but this feels sudden and out of step for my boys, who are 16 and 13.

When my eldest son asked if he could go out to Southeast London with his friends recently, my first thought was how likely it would be for him to come across White brutes who may attack him.

So, my immediate response was no, I thought of the history and reputation of some spaces in London; I remembered my fear of skin heads when I visited by Aunty in east London as a kid, the NF graffiti on the concrete walls, the spray-painted hate and engravings in the wooden tree house and slide, where I played with my cousins.

Our rapid departures from the park, if we spotted anyone that was male and White with a closely shaved head.

 

listen with compassion

 

I wonder about the closeted racists, now perhaps emboldened to loosen the leash on their hatred, and I felt a different kind of fear, another one to add to my cluster of concerns around my boys being stopped and searched, robbed, or attacked for inadvertently stepping into a protected post code. I gave him permission to go, despite my fears.

As a child, I was often told, there was nothing to be afraid of; I knew it to be untrue then, and I know it to be false now. We are navigating a swamp of hate in real-time, and when I see that flag, the St George’s Cross, be it new and bright or faded and worn, I am reminded that there is nothing new to see here, I was born in 1970, and far-right nationalism is as ugly and putrid as it has always been.

 

For Cole, track on rotation:

Sun, Moon & Herbs

Venna, JVCK JAMES

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