Michael Ernest Nwah: Check Your Racism

I am a middle-class white man, born and raised near London, England, and I have found life to be hard to navigate. I have found it hard to navigate, despite living in a system that has been created and established by people who look like me, for people who look me, over a period of many hundreds of years.

So, if I’ve struggled to get by, and to make sense of it all, what must it be like for people who don’t look like me? What must it be like to navigate this life when the very structure of the society we live in is not only not designed by people who are different to you, but in almost every circumstance it has been designed to make things harder for you, and have even profited and exploited that difference?

Furthermore, what if it has been built with the sweat, blood and broken bones of your ancestors? Ancestors who were brutally taken from their homelands against their will, and treated little better than cattle, and whose descendants have only been offered, at best, nothing more than a passing acknowledgement of these injustices. And at worst resentment and aggression for daring to be, or worse, to be vocal about it.

And what if, every day, you had to live a life where you were victimised because you are not a middle-class white male who looks like me? Opportunities taken away. Assumptions made about your character, your intelligence, your intentions, based on what you look like. 

I can’t even come close to understanding. But I want to try. And since the Black Lives Matter protest that have hit the streets around the world, if felt like I couldn’t avoid it any longer. It’s been too easy for me to hide behind my lack of perspective, my lack of knowledge on the subject. Call it white fragility, but I’ve been wary of being called out for not being clever enough, for not having educated myself enough, to have those conversations.

It’s easy, as “well-meaning” white people, to voice our objections to the obvious hate that we see manifesting in the media, in racially motivated crimes, in politics. But what about our own racism? What about the biases programmed into u, by a biased education system, a biased culture and a bias society from very soon after birth? 

Can any of us really say “I’m not racist”?

So, I reached out to meditation and yoga teacher Michael Ernest Nwah. He has been speaking about how we need to check ourselves for our own prejudice, identify where we are revealing our racism through microaggression, and start being part of the solution rather than part of the problem. 

If we, as white people, want to see a just society, where everyone is treated equally, we need to stop being afraid of the R-word. We need to accept that, in all likelihood we are racist. If we don’t, how do we ever hope to be the change we 

I hope you find this conversation useful.

To find out more about Michael and his meditation and yoga classes, follow him on Instagram at: www.instagram.com/micernest.