“WHO would want to be black when they could be white?” was a question put to me by a BBC producer some years ago. I’d written a play about a mixed-race man who was pale enough to deny his black heritage but decided not to. The producer doubted that anyone would voluntarily give up the riches of her whiteness.

This arrogance made me wonder, not for the first time, what made being white so wonderful. The poet S.K. Kim puts it beautifully in her poem about racist violence Sisterland: Fugue and Assimilmentations: “as if whiteness were the heaven from which we fell, and not-whiteness our original sin” (Magma issue 80).

The widespread belief in white supremacy has only been strengthened by the term white privilege. This is commonly defined as the inherent advantages possessed by a white person on the basis of their race in a society characterised by racial inequality and injustice.

I set out to write about this but decided to change focus to talk about black privilege as it needs to be given more attention. On googling the term, I found a US commentator describe it as the ability to win more sporting scholarships and the right to use the “N” word freely.

This sort of impoverished thinking is inevitable when black people are often seen as burdened by their race. We only have to look at examples of violence against black men and women by figures in authority. This, along with the still prevalent impact of transatlantic enslavement on education, housing and employment etc, feeds the belief that being black is not a choice any sane person would make.

However, is this sense of victimhood imposed, and as such does it need to be refuted?

The Morning Star recently published an article by me about the obstacles I’d faced as a black woman. I also detailed my victories, including winning a tribunal case for race discrimination. I was surprised when the article was given the headline Still Struggling After All These Years. Perhaps a better title would have been Still Determined… or Still Strong.

This projection of black victimhood is often inscribed in anti-discrimination policies that mention people of colour and people with disabilities in the same breath. A high-profile organisation recently set out their aim to “support people who face barriers due to mental health issues, disability… and black, Asian and minority ethnic communities.”

What if the policy read: “We aim to support people who have been subjugated, robbed of their homelands and exploited for their labour by white leaders/communities for centuries”?

Does a failure to contextualise in this way also disadvantage white people by suggesting that their skin-colour makes them inherently superior? What sort of attitudes does this breed and how would they feel to be labelled people of no colour?

Toni Morrison stated in the documentary Pieces Of The Sky that she believed racism was an undiagnosed mental illness. The researcher and academic Gail Crowther writes in The Comforts of Whiteness: “I think about how whiteness covers things up, things that should never be covered up.”

What are these things and what happens to your worldview when your sense of identity is based on a white-washed lie that seeks to glorify the past by leaving out the wholesale enslavement of others, and the theft of whole continents that characterises British history?

Are we now ruled by white men who have stepped out of a 19th century oil painting because so many white people refuse to look at the past from an honest perspective? If the truth about Britain’s savage exploitation of black people in the Caribbean and Africa was widely known would white people call it a privilege to be beneficiaries of that system?

A paradoxical advantage, for me as a black woman, is that having faced so much casual racism in this country, I was compelled to research the history of British transatlantic enslavement. It helped me to ground myself in the knowledge that I’m descended from people with unbelievable resilience.

The research also forms the foundation of my work as a poet. I have the advantage of being able to code-switch between the voice I’ve gained as someone born here, and the Jamaican language that is part of my heritage.

I put this to creative use in my latest collection, Map of a Plantation, in which I write from the imagined perspectives of white enslavers and enslaved black women. I was also able to imagine the self-destructive havoc violence causes the perpetrator. This helped me to see that white people are not true victors when it comes to this history.

It made me wonder how it must feel to be stuck in white shame and guilt about systemic racism. Does this throw up another paradox in that shame and guilt might cause the out-of-control prevalence of micro aggressions? These are commonly described as destructive behaviours, verbal or non-verbal, conscious or unconscious, directed at a member of a marginalised group.

The white “gentry” in Brixton regularly walk me off the pavement in order to demonstrate that they are the highest of the high. But is this arrogance a result of ignorance and blindness when it comes to the past? Micro aggressions are such an everyday occurrence it leads me to wonder if the perpetrators aren’t silently screaming: “See me! Bow to me! Show me I exist!” Does this suggest a crisis of identity and is the ability to project this onto people of colour the only inherent advantage of being white?

I haven’t even begun to talk about cultural appropriation. This is described as the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas of one people or society by members of another, typically the more dominant. Suffice to say that if there weren’t advantages to being black why would so many white writers, artists, dancers, poets etc feel the need to “ape” us in their work?

In thinking about all this, I’ve come up with my own definition of black privilege: “the ability to survive an attempt at wholesale destruction while still maintaining the ability to create work that others too-often appropriate.”

On a personal level, it is my privilege as a black woman to feel as if I embody hope for the future. A poem called Imagining a Forest Full of Freedom (winner of the Aryamati Prize 2020) and featured in Map of a Plantation attempts to capture this:

They’re bubbling, black roots reforming
pushing at the soil. Bones misshapen
with slave labour, straighten and grow strong,
ripping through the ground.
Fractures caused by beatings fuse, shape young trees
swelling to enormous trunks, fed with blood unjustly spilt.
Welts, deep-planted by a whip, design a hardy bark.
Starvation in reverse makes fertile leaves
wave, carefree at last.

Map of a Plantation published by Indigo Dreams. @jennymitchellgo