High as a kite

This extremity of Norfolk at Hunstanton, which you imagine to be bleak in the winter but which is wild and exhilarating in the summer, is a hotspot for kitesurfing.

Ali is learning to kitesurf and knows some of the kitesurfing community, so we hung out on the dunes all afternoon. We formed a merry band as my colleague Angelique joined with her mother, her husband who she met whilst working in the Central African Republic, and their daughter. Those guys brought a treasure trove of delicious food. The wind was strong, which pleased the kitesurfers but posed problems for those of us trying to avoid sandy gusts in our plates of coronation chicken and Swiss roll. The peaceful afternoon was temporarily rocked by a dune-wide search for a six-year old girl described as possessing a unicorn bucket, who had gone missing. I don’t know how it was resolved but there haven’t been subsequent news stories that lead me to panic further.

During an end-of-the-day shandy at the pub just over the dunes, it transpired that the white kitesurfing community in Hunstanton think that the Black Lives Matter movement is ‘a load of sh*t’. One of the group now in his 40s went to school with a black lad whose nickname was the most base of insults directed at black people, but who was said to have been fine with it. I imagine he had no other choice than to laugh along or humour the label, for fear of being told to ‘man up’. The white kitesurfer in his 40s, who couldn’t allude to any subsequent meaningful interactions with a black person during the intervening years, was adamant that there is already an equal footing in UK society regardless of race, without questioning whether others would agree with this view.

I can’t express how completely ignorant I find this standpoint. Black speakers at the anti-racism gathering in Cambridge last month directly said that their childhood experiences and labels have affected their wellbeing and esteem for decades. No white person should ever even think of claiming that their view of a black person’s experience is the true interpretation of the experience.

Until more of us can start to acknowledge that the experiences of others are valid and worthy of listening, we won’t get anywhere with this. Much more humility is needed.