Pugna Pro Nobis by Siofra Rafferty

Pugna Pro Nobis: The Fight for Justice Against St Michael’s 

On the 26th June, I saw a post. It made me think.

Unfortunately, immediately, I didn't doubt it. In fact, it even sounded familiar, I wondered who must have passed this hushed comment on to me.

Disturbingly, I was also amused. Not just by the absurdity of the statement itself, but by the fact that I know I had heard and overheard much worse. I knew, as a student of St Michael’s, this was the tip of a teetering iceberg of insensitivity. 

Over the years I’ve spent at my school, I have heard and witnessed different instances where my friends had been insulted - whether intentionally or not - by other people’s views and actions on race. 

I can imagine it was difficult: to go to the school with a complaint so personal and deeply hurtful: a feeling the majority of the staff just can’t understand, and to be forced to dribble Catholic words of forgiveness and mask the second slap in the face the school’s response has left.

I can imagine it equally difficult to learn that really nothing can be done, to become conditioned to take a deep breath, share a piercing glare, and get back to work.

And I can imagine it was infinitely more difficult because a significant lot of these original comments, insults, and disrespect came from our teachers. 

When the person who’s supposed to help you and educate you, seems as if they don’t know how to help, and don’t know how to respond, it must feel so frustrating. It must feel very isolating. 

Jane Elliott’s famous ‘Eye of the Storm’ study (1968) shows that when young children are discriminated against in a classroom setting, based on a characteristic as biologically meaningless as race (eye colour): their enthusiasm, engagement and performance drops drastically, within less than a few hours. To have to fight this false notion of being ‘less than’ every day of your life, not even just on the street to strangers, but in an environment supposed to cater to your learning and growth, to have to defend your humanity to the smiling faces of your friends and teachers? Indeed, it must feel very isolating.

Already, black students at St Michael’s are made to feel ‘othered’. Their concerns, and their pain are perceived differently, handled awkwardly, and soon dismissed, with perhaps no more than a flushed, backward glance. Yet the grades these brilliant minds achieve (despite the emotional, psychological and intellectual damage that discrimination is proven time and time again to cause) are still boasted as the fruits of St Michael’s labour, instead of the determined, uprooted trees that grew despite the thunderstorm that wrecked them.

Every time a black student was insulted in this way, it seemed the whole school was insulted with them. The close-knit sister solidarity that I feel is so precious, cultivated and nurtured so carefully by all-girl schools, expresses itself well in times like these. When it seems we have no other allies, and one common enemy. 

But we were only children: fighting a fight that is generally believed since no one else is doing it, we shouldn’t be either. We were disgusted, we were outraged, we were up in arms, but we were only children. And begrudgingly, I knew the school used our learnt powerlessness and obedience to their advantage. Society as a whole finds it disturbingly easy to dismiss the feelings and pain of young women. And that discrimination, that dismissal, is not limited to outside our proud, pearly gates. In an all-girls school, the rampant vindication, villainisation, of young women, especially young women of colour, is blood-curdling.

As a white female student of St Michael’s for many years, I know the incidents that instantly sprang to my mind, upon seeing that post, and the successive posts detailing similar incidents at St Michael’s (which now brings us to top of the leaderboard for recurring features on public shaming posts on black activism accounts, an achievement I can’t help but think perhaps will be exempt from any celebration and self-congratulation in assembly) were but a fraction of the experiences my black and brown classmates had endured. I couldn’t help thinking about the younger students in the school: with now a more senior student’s perspective, it seemed barbaric that eleven year old girls had already learnt to endure and dismiss each insensitive comment after the next. 

So I decided to ask. And my heart broke.

“Colonisation in Africa was a good thing. It helped the development of Africa.”

“India’s colonisation was beneficial. The British helped them: gave them railways, etc.”

“Well, you should probably look into your family history: your ancestors were probably slaves from Africa.”

And the more they revealed to me, the more girls confided in me and thanked me, the more it became clear to me how important this task really is. Students in STM seemed to have been waiting for someone with the privilege, position, and perturbation to fight for them.

To defend the girls who had to seriously, calmly answer the question “Is there clean water in Nigeria?”, from an adult who should have received at least a university level education. 

To the brown girl sewing in DT, who was asked by a member of staff “Do you have plans to work in a sweatshop? It’s not much of a career choice you know.”

To the girls who were asked if their braids and locs smelled, and if they ever washed them. To the same girls who were then physically smelt.

To the girls told to remove their afro picks and headscarves, on the one day we are given to celebrate black history, threatened with detentions and accused of defiance, whilst the white girls like myself, with bandanas and flags and headbands every St Patrick’s Day face no such threat.

To the history class who were made to debate if the slave trade was really racist.

To the history class who were made to debate if Oliver Cromwell’s ‘rights’ (which are still unknown to me) outdid his wrongs of mass slavery, control and murder of ethnic minorities.

To the Muslim students in our sixth form, who only a few years ago were allowed to wear a hijab, who were told, when they wanted to lead a school assembly on Islamaphobia, to be careful what they say, “because we don’t want any of the little Year 7s thinking they’re going to get bombed.”

To all the black girls whose names have been used interchangeably, identities swapped carelessly with any other black classmate. To have to again, seriously answer the illogical, thoughtless question of “Are you related?” concerning two people who look nothing alike, and have different names.

To the English classes who year after year had to hear their white English teacher enthusiastically anunciate the n-word in the dialogue of ‘Of Mice and Men’, as if it meant nothing.

To the school, who was told by a senior member of staff that the n-word carried the same weight and pain and insult as sh*t, b*tch, or f*ck. That a historical and present racial slur, the last word so many black people heard screamed and spat in their face as they drew in their final breath, is the same as my automatic response to any minor inconvenience.

As these girls and young women told me more and more, as they recounted a range of incidents that happened not only this or the past year, but also years ago, I realised how deeply these comments still affect people. Your students will carry this burden for a lifetime.

The more I learnt about this dark, lived reality, the more a disturbing, even corrupt, pattern began to form. It appeared that, time and time again, St Michael’s valued the ancient, abstract notion of ‘reputation’ above the immediate and tangible experiences of their students.

Hushed apologies behind closed doors, coerced words of forgiveness and desperate assurances that “This will never happen again.” seem to be the tactics of an operation not set out to fight racism, but to conceal it.

Because it would happen again. And again: until the spread of disillusionment resulted in silence of so many girls, who heard and witnessed and experienced more than we will know, as they had already come to realise that the school was helpless, and therefore so were they.

A system of discipline that can seriously dismiss repetitive, identical incidents as ‘isolated’, instead of a direct consequence of lack of education in the staff and student body, is one riddled with a malignant cancer, one refusing treatment to keep up appearances for its open-casket funeral.

So although the way in which I approached this, guns blazing, words searing, was perhaps not wise, it was honest. It was passionate. It was true. Which is more than what can be said for a lot of journalism these days. 

Ignorance is hurtful, is dangerous and corrupting. It leads to violence. So I hope I might be excused for catering to the humanity of my fellow students before the feelings of adults.

I am 16. I am still learning my way with words. I am still exploring my views, opinions and ideologies. I am still growing. 

But you - you have been allowed to settle. You have dug your heels in the muck of the past, and no one yet has stopped to unstick you. 

Just because no one else in my place has bothered to question your ignorance, doesn’t mean I’m wrong. It doesn’t mean that either myself, or my question, are unreasonable.  

It doesn’t make me - like how so many horrifically influential people like to call intelligent women with informed opinions - a b*tch. 

I know - well, I’d like to know - that you didn't mean it. It wasn't your intention. But I’m afraid that doesn't matter. Once our words leave our mouths they are not our own. They are no longer thoughts, they are a choice: a physical, tangible product that our peers can interact with. It is other people’s right to decide now what our words mean to them, their right - not ours - to feel hurt.

Everyone says things they shouldn’t say. I must make this mistake ten times a day. But we shouldn’t hide or deny our words, it is no good running away from them. We must run after them. Our words, released snarling and spitting from the dark corners of our private consciousness, have the power to destroy. Yet we have the same power to heal what we wound. 

I think I can understand all people with strong opinions to some extent: even if they have a polar opposite ideology to my own, essentially we are still the same. I also feel passion in my thoughts and words, and I too feel frustration when I feel unheard or misunderstood. 

We, as the loud and the outspoken, have a duty now to recognise that just because we are louder, perhaps more eloquent or concise and succinct, it doesn't mean we are correct. Often I can get carried away with the (for lack of a better word) enchantment, of my own speech, my conceited, persuasive charm sometimes convincing even my most logical elements of myself. 

We must listen to the voices and the minds of people who know more, yet say less. Truly those are the people who have stopped and observed, and absorbed, whilst we preached atop our soapboxes and cackled at our own wit.

These people are those who the world has forced to be silent; it is not by accident that society wants the voices of young black women quashed. To paint passionate, intelligent young women as over-emotional and irrational is perhaps the greatest crime on gender I have yet to witness.

To think of where we could be in this world if women had been listened to all along - defended, justified, celebrated - gives me pain; but it also gives me hope.