Here in England, we’ve been in lockdown for almost half a year now (I’m counting lockdown as this whole period where I’ve had to work from home – I do know that technically we aren’t in full-on lockdown right now). There’s been a lot of ups and downs over the course of this lockdown (okay, mainly downs) and everyone keeps talking about this ‘new normal’ we are living in now where every conversation has to start with ‘I think you’re on mute’. People have clearly been affected by Covid-19 in vastly different ways depending on their personal circumstances.
I’m actually one of those people that’s probably in the biggest position of privilege during all of this – I have no caring responsibilities, I have still been able to work full time (albeit from home) and get paid, I have not had the stress of doing a frontline key worker job and I have no health conditions that put me in the ‘high risk’ category.
Now that I’ve caveated that, I’m going to spend the rest of this blog complaining about how hard I’ve found lockdown – after all I am British and there’s nothing more British than grumbling about things without actually making any effort to change them.
I have to be honest and admit that I was one of those idiots that completely underestimated this coronavirus back in January and February, when the news first hit about it. I thought everyone was just overreacting and the media was being as dramatic as usual about it; after all it’s just a flu, like any other flu, right? (Nope, not right). If I had been someone who was in more of a high-risk position, or who lived with someone high-risk, I wouldn’t have been able to be so blasé about it.
I went to Morocco at the end of February and my entitled self didn’t even consider the prospect that the coronavirus could affect my ability to travel there or back safely. One week after I returned, I heard news stories about people being stuck in lockdown in Morocco and struggling to find their way back to the UK.
When work announced that we were all going to have to work from home I did not twig how long this could be for – the first announcement we got said that we would all be working from home for at least 2 weeks… that was in March.
When the company paid for all of us to have a home office set up with monitors and equipment in our houses, it suddenly clicked that it was probably going to be more than 2 weeks of working from home for that to be a worthwhile investment – I made the very prudent adjustment in my head of understanding that this lockdown may actually last for a whole MONTH.
Looking back to March and reflecting on what the start of lockdown was like actually feels like a lifetime ago now. The empty shelves in supermarkets, the pictures of people stocking up on lifetime supplies of loo roll and the question on everyone’s minds as to whether or not Joe Exotic really tried to kill Carole Baskin feel like they were from a completely different era to now.
The start of lockdown with this shift to working from home and spending more time in the house felt like a bit of a novelty at first. For me, that novelty lasted for a whole 20 minutes before I got sick of it and realised I really struggled with productivity and motivation when I was stuck in the house all day – it’s way too easy to have a middle of the day nap when you are stuck at home all day. Working from home every once in a while when you choose to (and can still meet people and socialise on the weekends) is really quite different to being told you have to work from home everyday.
During that initial month of lockdown, my social media was bombarded with people going on new diets, or picking up new hobbies, or engaging in new exercise regimes – people who were convinced they were going to use this time during lockdown to better themselves and achieve true inner peace and happiness in the only way possible: through getting a six-pack.
I initially thought I was going to be one of those people.
I did Shaun T’s 6-day-a-week Insanity workout schedule (by this, I mean I watched it and occasionally moved my body along when I felt like), I went for daily lunchtime hour-long walks, I got into painting (okay – it was paint by numbers) and I had about 4 recurring zoom quizzes every week with various friends and family. (Pro tip – no matter how many degrees they have between them, large loud brown families really struggle to get their heads round the concept of not shouting out the answer as soon as the question is asked during a quiz).
Fast-forward to around a month later.
I was struggling to get any of my work done or even motivate myself to get out of bed and get dressed for work (did I do a couple of meetings braless and in my PJs? No one will ever know). I felt permanently exhausted and irritable and was shutting my blinds and hiding every time clap for carers happened because I couldn’t deal with seeing people (for those of you that aren’t based in the UK, clap for carers was a weekly ritual where proud Tory voters remunerated nurses with claps and cheers). I spent most of my spare time mindlessly watching TV and had somehow inexplicably managed to watch every episode of Phineas and Ferb on Disney Plus (and by inexplicably I mean COMPLETELY SPLICABLY).
I was really frustrated and angry with myself for not being able to use this time more productively – I felt like I was the only one who wasn’t thriving through all of this. I made the decision that I would start using my time better and being more productive.
But then I realised that Desperate Housewives had been added to Amazon Prime so obviously I had to binge watch that first before I could do anything productive.
Then May came around and the world changed.
The lynchings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor made the world wake up. This wasn’t the first time at all that we have seen police brutality towards Black people; we’ve been seeing evidence that the police in both the US and the UK are institutionally racist for a long time.
But this time round, it was too much.
People all across the world, not just in the US, and not just within Black communities or within communities of colour, were talking about it, were protesting, were finally waking up to the realities of the societies we live in. People were putting pressure on their firms to do something about the anti-Blackness and racism within their institutions. People were calling for active anti-racism practices, rather than just being ‘not racist’ – they were realising that being complacent in a system of white supremacy is an act of racism in itself.
Some people even really put themselves out there and posted a whole black square on Instagram – this obviously completed exhausted them and so they had to go back to not paying any attention to systemic racism after doing that. (FYI I have nothing against posting the black square on Instagram as long as that isn’t all you did – performative allyship isn’t helping anyone).
People were taking it upon themselves to educate themselves, to learn about colonialism and slavery and why this aspect of our history is so key to the way our society is today (here’s a clue: OUR WHOLE ECONOMY WAS BUILT ON IT). People were buying Black-owned products, amplifying Black voices, donating to anti-racism charities, signing petitions and finally listening and learning.
I don’t know why this time everyone in the world was so affected by this and felt riled up to engage in the Black Lives Matter movement. Perhaps it was the rise of social media and the fact that information spreads so much faster these days. Perhaps it was because social media allowed the actual video footage of these murders to be watched by people all around the world; something I don’t think is really fair for the families of these people, but did clearly affect the audiences watching it. Perhaps the lynching of George Floyd was the final straw in the camel’s back; the realisation that even though we were in the middle of a global pandemic and everything else was shut down, police brutality was still happening. Perhaps it was the fact that Black folk were already being disproportionately affected by, and dying of, Covid-19.
I’m not sure if we’ll ever know what the exact reasons behind the global awakening to the realities of police brutality, systemic racism and anti-Blackness are – but it happened (even if it was about 4 centuries too late).
I chair the Multicultural Network at my firm. Officially, what that means is that I advocate for racial equality and inclusion of people from different cultural backgrounds both within my firm and across the wider industry. Unofficially, what it means is that I’m given a platform to be a loud brown woman and talk about issues around racism unapologetically. I am also pretty sure it’s therefore a job requirement for me to get on the nerves of many of my colleagues. I think annoying some of those pale, male and stale people that still believe in the myth of meritocracy and feel threatened by the rise of diversity and inclusion practices is a good sign that you are doing your job properly.
I went from barely working a 9-5 day and spending most of my spare time in bed watching TV, to suddenly being in one of the busiest months I’d ever had at work – I was doing my full time job as an investment consultant while also organising talks, discussions forums and educational tools for my firm about Black Lives Matter. It was brilliant to have so much engagement from the firm on this – it was like people were finally listening to the things that we, as a Multicultural Network, had been banging on about for a year - and their responses were no longer to tell us we were ‘making it about race’ or ‘playing the race card’.
I even had conversations directly with the CEO about what we, as a firm, were going to do going forwards to promote anti-racism practices. We were able to make real changes to things like our recruitment processes, the pool of candidates we would recruit from, the charities we work with and we even started engaging with schools in underprivileged areas. Getting that kind of widespread engagement towards promoting anti-racism practices across all levels and sectors of the business was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
It was also a lot of pressure.
Working long hours when you are playing with spreadsheets or building a mathematical model is very different to working long hours where you feel personally and emotionally affected by the work you are doing. I didn’t want to do nothing and miss out on the firmwide engagement, but I also didn’t want to take up space where Black voices needed to be amplified.
I felt guilty about feeling so emotional about this work because I knew that anything I was feeling was nothing compared to what many people in Black communities were feeling. My mood was all over the place, and while I am very proud of what our Network achieved, I did experience burnout from it. Luckily, I had some annual leave booked in so I was able to take a week off from everything, including social media, and just recover.
It is now a couple months on from that and the end of lockdown is in sight – it looks like I’ll be able to go back into the office within the next month or so. Unsurprisingly, we can’t say the same about the end of institutionalised racism.
Something I really struggled with, on a personal level, was seeing people appear as though they had just moved on and had lost interest in learning about racism now that it had stopped trending on social media. It felt like their ability to ignore the realities of systemic racism was a luxury I’d never be able to afford as a brown woman, and definitely a luxury that Black communities wouldn’t be able to afford – especially when combined with our punitive criminal justice system.
For the sake of my own wellbeing, I am trying to convince myself that everyone is still doing the work inwardly, just as I am about a lot of topics I was oblivious about before all this, like the criminal justice system in the UK and prison abolition.
If you’ve managed to get to the end of this blog, there are two things I’d like you to take away. Firstly, please question yourself critically about what you are doing to incorporate anti-racism practices in your life. And secondly, if you’re asking yourself whether you are too old to watch all 4 seasons of Phineas and Ferb on Disney Plus – no, no you’re not.