This text was originally written in 2020, among the unsettling events of a strange year, in between collective shocks of a global pandemic, the public murder of George Floyd and subsequent grief, anger, and frustration. It appeared in SoundAdvice’s NOW YOU KNOW publication, a collection of 60 essays by BAME architects, artists, and urbanists exploring spatial inequality through thought and music. The book is available in select stores in the UK (see below) and the accompanying playlist is available on Spotify. This is a slightly edited version.
An Invisible City
There is this strange parallel between racism and the world it makes. Both have two sides. One that we point to — and one that we mean. And while those sides overlap often, all so many times they don’t. When they do, we share a common world. One we make together and one we can talk about. One we can engage in, that allows for action and calls for change! A common public, a community — a city.
But what happens when what we can point to is not really what we mean? When reality is so subtle that it almost goes unnoticed, even by those it hurts? In that moment, all there is is personal. Then, all public becomes private — and the city falls apart.
What remains is a risky choice of what story to tell and what feeling to trust. A few anecdotes, yet to be put together. A couple of strange observations, that just don’t seem to fit right in. It’s the truly invisible city: the hidden, tacit experience, that is so hard to design for, and impossible to escape.
This invisible city is our blind spot. And just like any blind spot, you don’t see that you don’t see it. In fact, the only way to notice it, is to have someone else point it out to you! When that happens, it doesn’t just hold new answers — it poses entirely new questions. It’s a genuinely social experience, because we can never do it on our own, and because the power of our friends, co-workers, neighbours and sometimes (especially) those of our adversaries isn’t in sharing „the truth“ with us. The true power 'the other' is in pointing us to those unasked questions in our own world.
Stop asking, start fixing.
To me, that is a puzzling and irritating experience. It’s puzzling because I keep noticing my own blind spots, these hidden rules, that I take for granted until I literally run into them. „Randomly“ selected for the luggage scan when traveling Europe? Just normal airport security, I suppose! Spending more than a year, looking for a new apartment? Such a terrible housing market! Holidays in Eastern Germany? Lol! (Wait, people do that?)
And it’s an irritating experience, because when I share them, these stories all too often spark the opposite of what I intended. They are tacit, incoherent experiences, at times full of questions and doubts. But all of a sudden they turn me — the one with the questions! — into the expert. I hear: „Thanks so much for pointing that out! Now, how should we all go on from here? How do you want me to change? What do you consider most important for us now?“
Maybe, it’s your job to figure that out!
Stop asking the same questions over and over again.
Start owning your shit – and fix it.
I am not your expert.
The power to choose
Or am I? The truth is, blind spots are a tricky thing. And they point us to what racism really is: power. The power to choose the side you’re on, and the power to decide whether or not to keep your blind spots where they are. And it goes both ways: just like you might never fully grasp the experience of being non-white in a postcolonial world, I might just never really grasp the extent of what it means to have that power to pick a side. Our personal worlds are always only ours — and we cannot share what we don’t see. (Btw: that holds true among non-whites, too. A little side note that all too often gets overlooked).
Asking new questions
It’s these blind spots and their implicit power we have to come to terms with. And the only way to do so is doing it together: not by constantly asking the same questions we already have in mind. That’s boring at best and hypocritical at worst. But by sharing our stories, unfinished and incoherent as they may be. The ones we don’t know the answer to, the ones pointing us to something else.
We direly need public spaces designed to have these discussions of vulnerability, of deferred judgement. We need to take responsibility to truly listen to the stories in our communities, our neighbourhoods, our society. To take a stand on them, even though they might be inconclusive and complicated. And then, of course, we always need actual collective action that goes way, way beyond symbolic change and fixes the many open wounds in our global social fabric.
But please, let’s keep looking out for our blinds spots along the way. Just don’t treat me as an expert for that. Just because I'm not like you, I don’t have all the answers. But I might bring the questions.
The NOW YOU KNOW hardback is available to buy from Tate Modern Terrace Shop, South London Gallery, AA Bookshop, Koenig at Serpentine Gallery, magCulture – and online.
My thanks go to Pooja Agrawal and Joseph Henry of SoundAdvice for having me.
