power

It hurts living on our knees

| Sheree

This piece originally was published over on Medium with Binderful. I’m drawing this piece into the Living Wild Studios archives. Because I can!

Image credit — Donovan Valdivia

“How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another? Are the tensions, the recognition, the disappointments, and the failures that exploded in the riots too foreign?”

Claudia Rankin

In August 2014, there’s a summer of “hands up, don’t shoot” protests, in Ferguson, Missouri, in response to the unlawful shooting of Michael Brown Jr.. In November, Darren Wilson, the white Ferguson police officer responsible for Brown’s murder isn’t indicted. In December, filled with rage and helplessness, I organise the first ‘Black Lives Matter’ protest in the North of England; a political poetry reading at our city centre library. Together artists and writers, cram into a hot room on the top floor of a building made of glass, and pour out our rage and pain through our writings. Black people’s words. Our ancestors’ words.

I’m criticised by one Black woman, in particular, because I invite white poets to read. They could only read the words of Black people as this event is centring our lives. Black lives. A white people’s presence is not what this Black woman wants. She wants a safe Black only space. I respect and understand her views. We all want a safe space for Black people. But I feel we can achieve so much more when we work together, Black and white, to solve our society’s problems. 
I know where she’s coming from though; a place of pain and suffering and hatred. As Black people, for so long, we have endured so much hate and violence from the hands of white people. For far too long, we have been excluded from a share in the economic wealth our ancestors paid for with their lives to create. We’re sick and tired of being excluded from the abundantly spread societal table which our ancestors give the skins off their backs to forge. And this hurts.

In March 2017, there’s a ‘Stand Up to Racism’ demonstration in London, Miss Ella, my seven year old daughter, and I dance behind the sound system truck, towards Trafalgar Square. Crowds behind metal barricades line our route, with the Metropolitan Police shepherding us along. We shout, ‘Refugees are welcome here.’ Miss Ella, dressed as her superhero, Black Widow, looks as if she’s just stepped out of a Black Panther’s meeting. With her long brown hair blowing in the wind and her peachy fist punching the air, she’s learning long before I did how to use her voice to bring about change. She carries her homemade banner stating, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ high with pride and courage. Along the way, a white woman with screwed up face screams at us to shut up and go back home to where we come from. Disallowing our protests, devaluing our presence here.

I recognise where she’s coming from; a place of her ignorance and pain and hatred. As white working class, for so long, she’s been fed the lies that Black people and immigrants come over here and take their homes and jobs. For so long, the poverty they’re experiencing is down to these Black illegal criminal and not a capitalist system rigged in favour of a few priviledged people. We’re just as sick and tired of this too. And we know it hurts.

In May 2020, there’s ‘Black Lives Matter’, protests around the world. In response to the recent killings of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, to name just a few, the streets are talking through fire and smoke. Thousands take to the streets, Black and white, to demand justice for all our Black brothers and sisters who have been and continue to be murdered by state sanctioned violence.

I’ve grateful for their voices and bodies. This time, I protest through my words and art. As the Covid-19 pandemic still poses a real threat here in my part of the world. I’m a Black, fat woman carrying yet another target on my back. While protesting, the odds of getting molested and arrested, and not surviving the experience is higher for me than any white person. Just as the odds are greater for me of dying from the Coronavirus than a white person.

Black, Asian, and ethnic minorities in the Western world are dying at a disproportionately higher rate and number than white people during this pandemic. Many explanations for this reality have been voiced with the blame thrown at the feet of Black people. That it is our unhealthy bodies and behaviours which are spreading this disease, conveniently not addressing the inherent racism and systematic inequalities that have operated for over 400 years that has brought about this dis-ease, making our weathered bodies more susceptible to this virus.

‘We rather die on our feet than keep livin’ on our knees,’ taken from the James Brown song, ‘I’m black and I’m proud’, I feel this as we see thousands of Black people (and white people) take to the streets, even though there’s a greater risk to their lives than ever before. But I recognise where’s they’re coming from. We’ve had enough. We’ve endured enough. We’re not prepared to accept Black lives being devalued anymore.

Waiting to be allowed in

| Sheree

This piece was written back in 2020 and published on Medium. I’ve brought it over here to be part of my writing archive. I also feel that the case needed restating frequently. Did I say daily?

We queue with our shopping basket. This is the norm now. But we don’t complain. It keeps everyone safe. We’re at the front of the queue, for a change. My daughter and I. We’ve only come to the one shop. I let her ride her bike into town. She needs the exercise as she’d be happy in front of her screen all day. I probably would too, as at least she’s inside safe, connecting with her friends, and I get a moment to myself.

Front of the queue, but we hold back as the woman in front of us has just gone into the shop. There’s someone coming out at the same time. The store security guard is standing in the mix too. We allow a gap to form between us; the woman and the entrance and our bodies. Coming across from an adjacent shop, a man and woman stride. Stride into the front of the queue, ready to walk into the shop. I raise my voice just above my normal speaking voice to say to them, There’s a queue. We’re waiting to go into the shop too.

I think I’m smiling but how can they know? How can anyone tell if you’re smiling when you’re wearing face protection? By your eyes. I think by the eyes, you can tell if someone is smiling. It’s a warm, sunny day. I’m wearing sunglasses. Maybe they can’t see my eyes. They can only use my voice as means of communication.

Sorry, they say. We thought the queue was going the other way. They walk to join the queue behind us. I say, in a tone of voice which I think says I understand, No, the lady in front of us has just gone in and we’re waiting back here to giving everyone some space.

In the time it takes for the couple to walk and wait behind us, at the recommended 2 metres, the woman of the couple has already started saying in a loud enough voice for us to hear, Some people are just getting angry about the situation now, and there’s s no need for it. We walk into the shop.

Note: The angry Black woman stereotype portrays a black woman as sassy, ill-mannered, and ill-tempered by nature.

Walking back home, Ella walking with her bike, I approach what happened outside the shop, asking Ella if she heard what the woman said about people getting angry.

She was referring to me. I explained. She saw me as an angry Black woman. Do you think I was angry because you’ve seen me angry?

My daughter knows me. She knows I wasn’t angry and says so.

When you live in a society where you’re powerless, perceived as worthless and inferior, those who have power, believing themselves to be superior, spend their time telling others how they handle the situation isn’t right. They tell you that how you speak or act or response isn’t appropriate. You are wrong. They gaslight you, forcing you to doubt yourself; your actions and capabilities. You are at fault, always. You are wrong. You are silenced.

Back home, I talk to my husband, who’s a white man. I think if he’d been with us, the woman behind us, wouldn’t have uttered the angry line. He disagrees. She sounds like a woman who would have gotten annoyed if anyone had checked her behaviour, he said.

He has the right to think and say that. And maybe he’s right. Who knows? But to accept this explanation, I’d have to disallow what I feel about the situation. I’d have to make allowances once again for someone else’s behaviour, reaction and treatment of me. I’ve spent a lifetime of making allowances for other people’s treatment of me. How can I be sure that when they treat me unfairly, or discriminate against me that this isn’t how they treat everyone else? I don’t know. All I have is the way they make me feel. My lived experience as a Black woman.

All I know is that when I’m walking down the street and someone is coming towards me, it’s me who walks into the road to maintain social distancing. It’s me who walks into the gutter to keep us both safe. Would they do the same? I don’t know. I can’t take the risk to wait and find out either.

I’ve been socialised, fed the stereotype of the angry Black woman for so long, I police myself. I play my part. I don’t raise my voice. I don’t protest or question. It’s part of my make-up to check myself so I appear in society as passive and non-confrontational and unseen.

I remember my place.

Love Dimension On Repeat

| Sheree
Insight Timer

I’ve been up today since about 8am. It’s just after 10am now and I’ve had this track, Love Dimension by Beautiful Chorus on Insight Timer on repeat. It’s only 2 minutes long so I’m not going to work out the math for how many times it’s been on repeat. But let’s just say a lot.

I’ve got it running on and on in the background as I go about my morning routine. I’m feeling the need to have this reminder coming at me on repeat entering my bones, my blood, my heart and soul subliminally.

Oooooooooooooooooooo

Welcome, welcome, to the love dimension. To the love dimension. Ooooooooo

Welcome, welcome, to the love dimension. To the love dimension.

It’s Monday y’all and that can only mean Level 3 Counselling Skills today. Yeah Love Dimension is on repeat. Like a mantra. Like an incantation. Like a protective shield of steel.

At More Ease

| Sheree
Duck Pond, Tynemouth

End / beginning of another week. Depending on if you see Sunday as the end of the week or the beginning of the next.

For me it’s and/both. Sundays are usually change over day at our house as Ella goes between my home and her dad’s. Sometimes we do things on a Sunday or sometimes we don’t.

We just take it easy.

But usually on a Sunday I reflect on the week gone and plan for the week ahead. It’s a ritual of getting my head in the game. Not the outside societal, capitalist game. No, my own game. The Sheree Mack Game, which runs counter to the White Supremacy Culture game of go go go produce produce produce and strive for perfection at the same time as avoiding conflict and being grateful for the crumbs from their table. Yeah counter to that game as I refuse to be part of this system, where my labour is being bought and sold to support the actors, that are white people.

I’ve been hibernating for months now and I’m still tired. Go figure. Maybe my exhaustion is more than a year in a dumb ass job but runs much deeper. A generational exhaustion that I just can’t shift which has to be recognised but will take a lifetime to ease.

Ease. Yes that would be welcome.

There are moments when I grasp these ease and feel it spread across my back, untightening bunched up muscles. Making my spine fluid rather than ridged. These times I can feel my heart and soul float and I’m relaxed into whatever I’m being. But these are just moments. The aim is to extend these moments into longer moments, into days and months.

I’m working on being so but it is a practice. So when I say Sundays are reflecting/ planning days. I don’t mean around a to-do-list of jobs that need to be completed in order to bring in the tainted coin. I mean, where did I experience ease this week and where can I factor in/ plan for more ease next week. Where did I experience joy and pleasure and how can that be replicated moving forward.

Yeah in the Sheree Mack Game, all the rules and tasks are different to the societal external game. At more ease and I know I’m winning x

Entitlements

| Sheree
Oak Moss Lichen, presence signifies the air quality of a place/ space/ session!

I’ve written before about this fucking counselling skills course I’m completing. So because it follows the school terms time dates, we have just returned on Monday after a week off. And my god was it difficult for me to return.
We only have five sessions left and I was thinking of all kind of excuses to get out of these next five weeks, so I can just stay at home on a Monday evening and complete the mountains of task, assignments and reflective journals that need to be completed by the end of March to be in with a chance of passing this shit.
So I didn’t want to return but return I did because I don’t want to fail. I’ve already put a lot of time and effort and pain into the course and I want to be able to walk away with my head held high.
But it’s making it very difficult to stay the course. It really is as the space is not equipped for diversity, equity and inclusion and this is a fact.
First off, a lot of time is taken up the week with the discussion of next steps. And some students are going to carry on with Level 4 and 5 with the current tutor’s private practice. Some are waiting a bit to get the finances together or looking into adult funding loans etc. But most of them are taking the next steps as they are needed to be able to practice counselling skills in society.

Lots of talk about finances, and time and access and how things are unfair and more money should be made available to do the next levels for free etc. One student, all up to date with assignments and very pleased with herself because of this, has her pathway all planned out and took great pleasure in letting everyone else know that she as the perfect student who had the time and space to just read about psychology and just add it into the pot for later etc. I recognised myself in her not so many years ago when I was always working to fulfil the perfect student role and make sure everyone else knew it too. How things have changed.

Me I know I’m not going any further than Level 3 for a number of reasons.
The finances is one. This is barrier for anyone wanting to become a counsellor, the different courses and levels to complete and professional fees to be members of in order to practice, is all money money money. While training not only paying for the course, you also have to be under supervision of a therapist yourself, and be part of groups theory sessions, and then also be on placement, which is usually voluntary. The whole system is set up for those who have money already to be able to keep throwing it at the barriers and stipulations that are in place before you even qualified to counsel.
So the finances are an issue, as well as not believing in the system I would be funnelling my money into in order to qualify. Not only is the education system steeped in colonialism, patriarchy and white supremacy culture but what kind of stupid duped yes massa oppressed fool would I be to actually pay to be further oppressed and brainwashed. Dead white men is the syllabus for counselling skills so why would I buy into more of that shit?

I just don’t believe in the whole system set up around becoming qualified and how it’s the privileged who continue to be in these caring helping positions when really they haven’t done the work on themselves to check their own unconscious bias, racism etc.
So I’m not going any further after Level 3 so the majority of the conversation in class was very off putting and I switched off, thinking what is the point.

Once we got to the skills part, I had hardly got into my usual triad before one ‘friend’ said she didn’t want to work with me. No offence they said but you always make me laugh and I need to get my observation logs complete so I can’t work with you.
How am I supposed to respond to this remark? Do what the fuck you want, but in the process make sure you reject me, by refusing to work with me and make it all my fault?

She said I make her laugh too much and she needs to focus. So okay work with the other individual in our triad and I’ll observe you as you practice being the listener and I’ll give you your feedback.
And I’ll just add here, she still laughed during the skills practice, being put off by the tutor listening in on the session. I did nothing to make her laugh. So I just want to put it out there that maybe I’m not the problem or issue and that maybe they are. Just putting it out there as I’m not the problem but why not make the only Black woman in the group the problem, as then that’s easier than taking responsibility yourself for your own short comings.

It’s time to switch roles and I create a scenario to tell the other person in the triad so they can fulfil the listening counsellor role. I talk about a real current issue and I’m just being my expressive self etc. Fleshing things out to they can demonstrate all their counselling skills etc. At the end of the exercise, they takes a deep breath and turn to the other person in the triad who didn’t want to work with me and says, you’re right she is difficult to work with. That was hard, she made it hard.

Fuck why not gang up on me and make it all my fault instead of looking at yourself, or checking yourself to find out what might be lacking in your skills set and learning that you would think having a conversation with me about a real issue for me, what hard for you?

Why blame the only Black woman in the room once again for your own shortcomings?
Again I return to what I’ve said before white privileged people who will be in caring positions of authority who haven’t done the work on themselves, in order to know their own inner workings, before they start working with other peoples’.

But yes it’s my fault.

When it’s my turn to be the listener and practice my counselling skills, well didn’t the person come up with a scenario that was a dead end and she just sat there and didn’t really play ball. They didn’t elaborate, just dropped their problem and expected me to do all the work. I just had to laugh, and just think, but I’m the difficult one I’m the one who doesn’t take it seriously?

I’d just sat there and completed detailed feedback on each of their counselling skills, not making it personal. I didn’t critique them as individuals but in their role as the listener. But it was okay they thought for them to mess with my skills practice and after they had attacked me personally

Where is the fairness in that or the justice?
Fuck and I wonder why I continue to put up with this shit week in and week fucking out?

Go Back, Go Home

| Sheree

Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you, your feelings need you, your perceptions need you. Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it. Go home and be there for all these things.

Thich Nhat Hanh

The Message

| Sheree

What advice would you give to your teenage self?

Darling, you were never too much. You were only too big and too bold to those who couldn’t see their own light.

Baby, you were never too much. Your cup overflowed in ways that the parched could not understand

Honey, you were never too much. You were always just right.

Rules, timetables and regulations

| Sheree

What bores you?

When my sixth form tutor advised me when I said I wanted to be a teacher, that I’d be better off serving in a shop, I felt I needed to prove him wrong.

That I could be a teacher and a good one at that. I studied hard, got to Uni, struggled financially and to dropped out to gain employment. But that didn’t work out, so I returned to complete the degree and then went on to train at the Institute of Education in Secondary English and Geography.

I had to prove that tutor wrong but I also had to be a positive role model for kids who looked like me; brown and black students.

So inner city London teaching was where I got my first teaching job. I didn’t realise the school was under space measures as a failing school. Every term we were inspected to make sure we improved and got out of special measures. But I loved it as I felt as if I was making a difference.

With my rose- tinted spectacles still on, I didn’t realise I was propping up a system with its purpose to create factory fodder rather than free-thinking individuals.

Fast-forward to teaching in the north east with curriculum responsibility. Actually teaching in the same school I went to as a kid. Some of the teachers who used to teach me were still there including that sixth form tutor who said I would be better off working in a shop.

I showed him he was wrong.

But I also realised during this period, that I was wrong. I was in the wrong career. Not only was the hours long and tasks never ending. Not only was there a distinct lack of creativity.

But I was bored and frustrated by all the rules, timetables and regulations. Basically at every point or time in the school day, everyone knew where to find me. In the same classroom teaching the same stuff. Life was controlled by the bells and the timetable never changed from each week to the next.

I was bored and when I tried to bring in some fun and excitement by inviting guests and creatives, I was told that this is not the way to teach. It’s just not done that way.

I was dying from the inside out. Little pieces of my soul were being eaten away from the rules, the controls, the regulations. I had to go.

I jumped ship without a net and suddenly I was no longer bored but full of wonder and curiosity and fear of the unknown but so much more energy for life. And willingness to explore.