Confusing Stormzy and Lukaku? Using the N-word? This is not trivial. This matters | Kehinde Andrews | The Guardian

Stormzy ‘was right to be offended’ that the Herald was unable to tell him and footballer Romelu Lukaku apart. Photograph: Twitter/David LammyView image in fullscreenStormzy ‘was right to be

offended’ that the Herald was unable to tell him and footballer Romelu Lukaku apart. Photograph: Twitter/David LammyOpinionRace This article is more than 7 years oldConfusing Stormzy and

Lukaku? Using the N-word? This is not trivial. This mattersThis article is more than 7 years oldKehinde Andrews

An Irish newspaper failing to distinguish between two black men might seem less serious than an MP using a racial epithet but at its root it is about seeing us as the same Kehinde Andrews is

associate professor in sociology at Birmingham City University

Tue 11 Jul 2017 14.19 CESTLast modified on Thu 13 Jul 2017 16.51 CESTShare I must admit that my first reaction to seeing that the Irish newspaper the Herald had mistakenly used a picture of

Stormzy on its back page announcing Manchester United had signed Romelu Lukaku was laughter. In contrast, I hope that not many people were laughing when the Conservative MP Anne Marie Morris

was caught saying that no Brexit deal was the “nigger in the woodpile”. While one seems less harmful than the other, both of these incidents speak to the role that racism still plays in

society.

May orders Anne Marie Morris MP to be suspended after using N-wordRead more Morris has rightly been suspended, with numerous calls for her expulsion from the Conservative party. No doubt

there will be some people jumping to her defence, decrying the “PC gone mad” brigade. But she is an elected official, not Jeremy Clarkson. The history of the word is so troubled, it is

shocking that a politician would utter it in any context. Morris was speaking at the East India Club, a private gentlemen’s club founded in 1859, so perhaps she got caught up in the colonial

nostalgia of it all. We should be grateful for the recording because we don’t always have access to the conversations that go on in the spaces of the elite. The fact none of her colleagues

on the panel raised any objections tells us the climate in which she made the comment and it was received. We should not forget that Tory peer Lord Dixon-Smith used the phrase in an official

debate on housing in the House of Lords in 2008. This latest incident is just one in a long history of Tories and racist language, the most notable being the embrace of the slogan “If you

want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour”, by successful Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths in Smethwick in the 1964 general election campaign.

A grime artist being mistaken for a footballer in an Irish paper seems a lot easier to dismiss – nothing but a Stormzy in a teacup maybe. Very embarrassing for the newspaper but innocent

enough. After all they are both dark-skinned black men and Stormzy was in a United shirt. But Stormzy was right to be offended and spoke for all of us who are tired of having to remind

people that we don’t all actually look alike. It’s deeper than a case of mistaken identity, confusing us for one another is rooted in seeing black people as not just looking similar, but

being the same.

In the classic Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison explained what it was like to never be looked at but looked through. Of always being seen as the anonymous black male, the stereotype, the

implicit threat to white society. It’s something that is impossible to understand unless you have witnessed strangers cross the road to avoid you; been followed around shops by security

guards; or been ignored by colleagues in your place of work because they refuse to look too closely at the black man in the corridor. In those moments you no longer exist, you have been

reduced to nothing but society’s fearful image of you. The fact that in 2017 being seen in their own right is not even afforded to black celebrities tells us how far society still needs to

progress.

The consequences of being seen as nothing but the stereotype are certainly no laughing matter. In Britain black communities have been complaining about always being viewed as suspect for

decades. Vastly disproportionate use of stop and search is in no small part down to seemingly always fitting the description of a suspect. In America the consequences are deadly, as the

never-ending examples of police shooting unarmed black people demonstrates.

Colonial nostalgia is back in fashion, blinding us to the horrors of empire | Kehinde AndrewsRead more Terence Crutcher, a student and father who sang in a church choir, was shot by police

with his hands up, after being identified as a “bad dude”. Of course, even though he was unarmed and posed no actual threat the jury acquitted the police officer who killed him. When Barack

Obama said: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon [Martin]”, he wasn’t abstractly connecting to the tragedy of the killing, he was echoing the sentiments of black parents. No matter who

you are, what your background is, you are a black male and therefore a threat. If being an unarmed 17-year-old can’t protect you, then neither would being the president’s son.

An MP casually dropping the N-word may seem like the more serious cause for offence, but the fact no one at the Herald noticed the picture on its back page was of the wrong black man is just

as insidious. We are quick to focus on the obvious displays of racism that are relatively easy to condemn and call out the individual racists. But it is the mundane, everyday racisms that

we all collude in that we need to be just as vigilant about.

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