Patrick Hutchinson - Everyone Versus Racism: A Letter to My Children

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

FIRST EDITION

Text Patrick Hutchinson 2020

Illustration on title page Christine Smith 2020

All other illustrations Kingsley Nebechi 2020

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Cover layout design HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Patrick Hutchinson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008443993

Ebook Edition November 2020 ISBN: 9780008444006

Version: 2020-10-13

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• Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008443993

To my children

Dominic, Tyler, Sidna and Kendal.

To my grandchildren

Kyrie, Tiger-lily, Asia and Theo.

And one day to my great-grandchildren.

Everything I do is for you.

And to the greatest woman Ive ever known

Maxine Adassa Prince ... my mum.

1. 
   Introduction
2. 
   CHAPTER 1: IN THE BEGINNING
3. 
   Acknowledgements
4. 
   About the Author

To my beloved children

and grandchildren,

After much thought, I have decided that a letter might best acquaint you with the times that I am living in. Textbooks have done enough damage to the truth, and a novel can often find itself mixing fact with fiction much like the news channels of today. But a letter is the product of my heart being given a pen. Of course, my heart has become calloused perhaps too much a product of what it has been subjected to. But its posture is an honest reaction to what life has apportioned to me. If I can promise anything, it is an honest reflection of what it has meant to exist in the twenty-first century as a black person in a world that celebrates black suppression. As a black man in a world that seems to crave black mens blood. As a black person who is certain that compassion is the only solution to the deadly tale of racism. I am not saying that we should forgive and forget. But I believe that in our fight to move forward, we must arm ourselves with as much empathy as we do energy. I think that the only thing left that can save humanity is a touch more humanity from both sides. Many people will disagree with this position, and I do not blame them. After watching the video of George Floyds murder, I, too, was filled with anger . In fact, sometimes the aching parts of me still are. Unfortunately, however, Ive lived to see how consuming vengeance can become once empowered. Ive worked in the martial arts my whole life and I know what can happen when rage justifies itself before searching for a peaceful solution. Ive wished the revolutionary well on their way into a life of such activism. I know we need them. I know we cannot all be them. I desire to laugh truthfully, from the floor of my gut, with my radiant grandchildren, and fill their bodies with love and hope rather than anger and resentment.

Sometimes this means closing my heart when rage comes knocking. Shielding my young family from the structures that may one day work against them. Sometimes it means turning off the news, forcing my head deep into the waters of joy and trying to fish out a level of compassion and humanity that I wish was extended to me. Deep in the anatomy of the black being, there is a resource so rare in the fallen world. Something that has perhaps had to be conditioned into us so we can survive. Hope. A grieving, electric hope for a more balanced tomorrow.

I have decided to write a letter because, since the beginning of time, letters have preserved the truth of the moment, even if that truth has changed by the time the ink dries. If all this shard of my heart does is to project the current state of affairs beyond our WhatsApp group chats and kitchen tables, it has played its part in commemorating a season of life that I hope changes the world. Goethe, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writer, referred to a letter as an immediate breath of life. Today, the streets scream I cant breathe into a mourning sky, repeating the last words from several black men who have been brutally killed at the hands of the police. We hold signs, take to the streets and pull fire from our throats. We eternalise the last words of these men by forcing them into the everlasting journey of the wind, in the hope that we keep breathing long enough to see our grandchildren scream only in laughter, and not in protest.

Perhaps you will stumble across this manuscript years from today, during a time when letter writing no longer serves as a form of documentation. Maybe your fingertips will pause on the spine of this book and you will tug on its skin till it slips from its shelf into curious palms. You might push the dust away with your breath, rotate it between your fingers and begin to digest the blurb on the back cover. And as you get to the last line, you might wonder whether the year 2020 was fiction or non-fiction. As I piece together this letter, I wonder the same. Living, or at least surviving, has begun to feel like an existential satire. In an attempt to convince my body that it is not an actor in The Truman Show, I write obsessively about the times, hoping to make sense of the pandemic we have found ourselves in. No, not COVID-19. A much older disease. Racism.

I have worn black skin for centuries. And over these years my flesh has been weaponised, regulated, discriminated against, bleached, incinerated, sold and yet, somehow, I have survived. Somehow, I smile. But you wont remember me from my smile. You will remember me from a photograph that forced a large percentage of the watching world to pause. To stop thinking for long enough to question their thoughts. To question their bias and decide how they felt towards a six-foot-one black man lifting a barely breathing white man from beneath blood-stained shoes and carrying him to the feet of police officers who picked their other, arguably less essential job of documenting the violence for evidential purposes (as opposed to stopping the incident) on their selfie sticks and smartphones. Depending on which side of favour you fall, the thought of a police officer not doing their duty to defuse the violence and protect the violated may seem appalling, if not felonious, during a moment such as this. But by 2020, this hardly came as a surprise to me, a black man. A black man who believes that if life and death cannot discriminate, then nor can we begin to play master over who deserves to live or die. On that Saturday, near Waterloo Station, when I saw a mans breath being robbed from him by righteous rage, I saw only a man. One whose death would scatter a family, but also tarnish the Black Lives Matter movement in a way that I knew we could not afford. Not after such a global display of peaceful, progressive momentum.