Black Lives Matter

I am a Roboticist at Imperial College London with Sri Lankan origin. I am writing this on 9^th June 2020 with so much sadness about the death of George Floyd under police custody in broad daylight symbolising a general pattern of brutality against Black People. I am not generally categorised to be Black, but being South Asian, I may have few things to share with fellow Black academics. I must confess that I learnt about Black history in the past two weeks than I did in my whole life despite having lived in Baltimore when I was at Johns Hopkins University. Baltimore was a vivid example of how African-American communities are victimized from multiple fronts from within and outside their communities. If one walks just 200 meters from where the School of Medicine of Johns Hopkins is located, one could imagine what it would mean to grow up as a child in those neighborhoods. Schools in those areas are traditionally under-funded and going to school is not just waking up, brushing teeth, washing, having breakfast, and dashing to the school with a smile. Those children wake up with memories of violence in the neighborhood the night before, how police treated them, or a sad discussion at home. The mechanism of victimization was so complex that FBI found two police officers involved in a drug gang. What might an African-American child think when they cannot trust the law enforcement agencies set up to protect them as citizens?

My colleague, Sarah Hemminger, while being a PhD candidate in Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins had practical ideas such as driving vulnerable children to school and just being a listener to their complicated stories. This volunteer effort then grew to be an organization called “Thread – the new social fabric”. Thread strives to address social segregation and isolation of African American communities in Baltimore simply by weaving them with the rest of the social fabric by matching each African American student with a Thread Family. A Thread Family can be a group of upto 5 university students or community-based volunteers who give their 100% to do whatever it takes to help the student realize his or her potential. Now 100% of the students under the care of Thread remain enrolled for 10 years, 85% of students who have been with Thread for 6 years have graduated high school, and 83% of student alumni have completed a 4 or 2 year degree or certificate program. Thread has been a spark of hope for Baltimore. Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Business Journal, Forbes Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Citizen, and a whole list of other media have reported about the great work of Thread. Please listen to one of her TEDx talks here.

Fast forward to my life in UK, after I saw the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston coming down in Bristol last week, I did some fact checks. Edward Colston has been a member of the British parliament towards the latter part of his life. He ran "Royal African Company (RAC)" that did the slave trade. I guess he cannot use "Royal" without government patronage. When an African was taken captive, they branded their chest with letters RAC so that if they escape, the police can catch them. A brand is a permanent scar. The appalling conditions and cruelty in his ships made nearly 30,000 such captives die even before they reached U.K. to be auctioned to the rich in the American South. He is not alone, I realised that there have been several more such statues of slave traders even in London. This BBC report shows how authorities peacefully and proactively removed such a statue in London perhaps after learning lessons from how Edward Colston statue came down. These events teach us a sad side of colonial history we never noticed. We pass by these statues never noticing that these slave traders have been treated as virtuous patriots for their philanthrope back in UK. According to the report, some slave traders have been Knighted not for their slave trade but for the philanthrope back at home. The Director of London School of Economics (LSE) had to resign for a deal with Gaddafi regime to give education to a set of future leaders for Libya. None of those lofty standards seem to have been applied to these slave traders who showed a different face of generosity and philanthropy to UK. 

Many people with African origin had raised concern that these statues do not represent what the general public associate public statues with. Statues are built on tall pedestals so that people have to look up to them. They often represent a sense of authority and heroism. Then I listened to several debates around these statues. I saw in one debate an Oxford historian said that "statues are just bronze pieces, there are more important things to celebrate today" (not exactly the same words). I am not a historian, but I felt it was ridiculous for a historian to say what a roboticist like me can be pardoned to say.

What is clear to me from these basic observations is that there has been a general insensitivity for what people of African descent have been going through ever since West started to colonize Africa. The story is different from what we South Asians have gone through.

As a South Asian, I have mixed feelings about British colonial history. Unlike most other Western powers who colonised Africa and Asia, the British built schools, first to teach religion, with a subsequent expansion to all areas of modern education. This gave a new tool for the downtrodden to break social barriers to unleash their true potential. Sri Lankan movies like “Gam Peraliya” reflect on this social transformation with the emergence of a new educated middle class. Social activism that sprung from within the upper middle class led to Sri Lanka enjoying Universal Franchise in 1921 before UK saw it. I obtained primary and secondary education at Richmond College, Galle. Richmond is one of the oldest schools in South Asia established in 1814 by British Methodist Missionaries, but it kept a spirit of respecting and celebrating a multi-religious atmosphere. We saw the West through sports like Cricket, English literature studies, and other values taught in the school about social harmony. We saw how British governors like William Gregory who built a museum in Colombo to give Sri Lankans a sense of pride of their 2500 history. However, even him was an avid supporter of the Confederate movement in the US by the Southern States to fight to keep slaves to maintain their livestyles. Therefore, even governor William Gregory has been an enemy of my favorite US president Abraham Lincoln who fought back to release slaves through his abolotionist movement. We also learnt how ruthless governors like Robert Brownrigg ordered massacres during the Uva-Wellassa uprising in 1818, a complete genocide of villages in the Uva area in today’s terms, and how Viscount Torrington ordered similar oppression against the Matale rebellion in 1848. We read about how high-ranking officers of the East India Company went elephant hunting. Samuel Baker was one such brutal killer of Sri Lankan elephants. In his book titled "The Rifle and Hound In Ceylon", he writes how he and his brother hunted more than 30 elephants a day. At some point he writes how they hunted down a lactating mother elephant, and how they enjoyed sucking the spilling milk from the dead mother elephant. This, to me, gives shivers of disgust even today.

When I look back at the colonial history in Sri Lanka, the single thing I value most is the access to widespread education right upto the university level. This gives me courage to pardon the British for all the bad things they did in Sri Lanka.

Few suggestions for a way forward:

Reconciliation: I am a Buddhist. In Buddhism, there is a clear guidance for reconciliation called “Patisaraniya Kamma”, where we engage in a honest discussion with the aim of re-establishing trust, which goes beyond simple forgiveness. Companies such as Sony and Phillips can settle for a financial deal and forgive each other for the patents they infringed from each other to avoid costly litigation, but it does not mean they re-establish trust. In Buddhism, honesty of the process of discussion is shown as the best way to reach the end goal of re-establishing trust. An honest process of Patisaraniya Kamma trues to look internally to see "my role" in the problem while respecting other for seeing their role. Therefore, it is a process of creating an atmosphere to be honest by being honest. I follow this when I want to talk about any settlement including the topic of British colonial history. Based on that principle, one suggestion I can offer to my colleagues is to provide a space for an honest discussion about the history our colleagues with an African heritage have had to go through. My Pulitzer Prize winner colleague Viet Thanh Nguyen whom I met when I was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University said “every battle is fought twice – once in the battlefield, and then in the alleys of memory”. He related to his writings about Vietnam war and how complicated involvement of a number of Western powers including the French, led to brutality in Vietnam. I think this critical discussion of the African history in the alleys of memory is yet to be fully addressed in the modern society. As a result, irritants of this sad past keep haunting us.

Be conscious about our own biases: A big part of my Buddhist meditation practice is to notice how many conditioned labels I use to create an identity. For instance, I claim myself to be Sinhalese as an ethnic group. But if I look closely, I cannot compare myself with a Sinhalese who lived just 100 years ago in terms of behaviors, language, and views. Yet, we hang on to the same “Sinhalese” label. While it is important to be proud of our ethnic backgrounds and cultural history, it is important to notice that identity can also hold us back from progress and healthy relationships with people from different backgrounds. At least in Buddhism, this attempt to see how unreliable these conditioned labels are is considered to be very hard but fully worthy of an attempt. The attempt should be directed to understand that I am also a part of the grand problem of viewing the World through identities. I can only change it by offering myself as a person who makes an honest attempt to see people as they truly are with talents, ideas, and creativity.

Reach out: If you are a BME academic, try to write research grants and publish with colleagues whom you think are the best people to solve grand academic problems irrespective of ethnic backgrounds. This helps to learn from different cultures and ways of thinking. It also helps to break the entry barrier. I believe almost all academic colleagues are racially neutral or at least make an attempt to acknowledge unconscious bias I mentioned above. However, as humans we find it very hard to break free from a bombardment of racially biased media we have grown up with. This short clip shows how Disney has contributed to inculcate racial bias in children. Once a child grows up with narratives such as the White Queen in Cinderella is the good queen and the other colored queen is the bad queen, what can you expect when they grow up? There is a scene in the TV drama series Poldark where a self-styled biologist preaches to a group of aristocratic White women that Africans are less intellectually evolved. Poverty and lack of funding for education in Africa may have fitted this narrative those days, but this kind of unfounded lies were soon proven wrong when people with African origin became great intellectuals the moment they got access to good education. We cannot be sure that all academics have had a chance to rise above such lies told in the name of science and childhood media conditioning. Therefore, do not expect such biased memories not to resonate when they grow up to review a grant proposal or a paper you write. Be aware of this and build your collaborative network across ethnic borders so that you will have broader support to prove your abilities. Soon you will grow a sense of gratitude towards the positive side of the society and provide breeding grounds for true reconciliation.