At the age of eight, my dad brought me in history encyclopedia. I loved it. I read it all the time.
And I still have it now. But in it, there's no front cover anymore. There's no back cover. There's not even really a spine.
It's just a dusty book on my bookshelf. But when I was reading it, I realised there were a couple things missing. So this is me reading it, realising there are a couple things missing. And then I'd go to my history classes and realise that there are a couple more things missing. And I started to think...
Surely history can't just be castles and white men in tights. There has to be more to history than that. It can't just be that. My ancestors must have come from somewhere. Why aren't they in my encyclopedia?
And so one of the stories that was missed was of a Brummie boy called Samuel Galton. We'll get to Francis a little bit later. But Samuel Galton was a gun maker. He made guns in Birmingham's gun quarter. And he sold them all across the world.
He sold them in exchange for black women's bodies on the west coast of Africa. He sold broken and faulty guns for black women who would be sold into slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas. And it started to get me thinking that through colonisation, through the white men in tights that were in my book, traveling all across the world thinking they knew what was best.
The price of a black woman's body was equivalent to a faulty gun, to a broken gun. That was the value of a black woman's life. And so we skip forward a little bit to the 19th century to a guy called Dr. James Marion Sims.
And see, Dr. James Marion Sims was a physician, and we laud him today in history books for finding gynecology and for developing a lot of the practices that we use in modern medicine today when looking into gynecology. And gynecology is the study of women's reproductive systems, so any diseases or things that may be attributed to their womb, to their ovaries, to their downstairs parts. But what a lot of history won't tell you is that Dr. Sims perfected his ideas on gynecology on three enslaved black women. Their names are Anarka, Lucy and Betsy. And he used their bodies whilst they were alive and awake and in pain and screaming to rummage around because he felt entitled to their bodies.
because he didn't think they were human. Because, again, the price of a black woman's body is a faulty gun. When he had perfected those practices, he then used them on white women and he gave them painkillers and anaesthetic. The same was not extended to the black women he had experimented on. And so where does this come from?
Well... Dr. Sims believed that black people, and black women in particular, had a higher pain threshold. That because they were closer to animals, that they could endure more pain. And that's an idea that still lives on today. This is a picture of them, of Anarka, Lucy and Betsy and Sims just staring at them like wagwa.
But this lives on today. The Emory study in the US found that... black patients are 66% more likely to receive no pain treatment compared to their white counterparts even when they describe similar levels of pain.
So those ideas are still in our medical practices today because of one man's belief and the idea that pain isn't valued the same when it comes from a black person or a brown person or a person who is deemed as being undesirable and lesser. And we see histories, ideas, sprouting into today. But who is producing these ideas? Stats in the UK also show that black women are more likely to live in silence with chronic pain.
then go to the doctors out of fear of not being believed, or experiences of not being believed, or being told to their face that they have a higher pain threshold, or being told to their face that it's not that bad, I am one of those women. And so it kind of got me asking, how do the things we believe and practice today live on? How do they come from the histories and the lies that we've been told to believe and that we've been told are truths?
And why do they live on? And where are they from? Do you remember our friend Samuel Galton, the one with the dodgy guns?
He wasn't really good at his job. He had a grandson, also from Birmingham, a little brummy lad, called Francis Galton. And Francis founded an idea called eugenics. In eugenics, the dictionary definition is the science of improving the population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable, hereditable characteristics.
And in English, that means there are some people with desirable characteristics that we want to keep in our society and there are some people with undesirable characteristics that we want to exclude from our society. And Galton was obsessed with how do we breed out the bad ones. How do we make a society where there are only good stock?
When his idea of what good stock was, was white, was blonde, was blue-eyed, was, we might have heard it in our history books, the Aryan race. Or an idea that disabled people, black people, queer people, people from all over the world that weren't European, were not as desirable, were not as important. This idea is also called scientific racism, which is a bit funny because it's got nothing to do with science. It's just racism. There's nothing scientific about it.
So why would we have to call it a science? And we'll get to that a little bit later. But where do we see eugenics play out today? And it does still play out today. Those ideas still exist in the way that we interact and treat people today.
First off, Hitler was a big fan. He loved Francis Galton. His ideas of sterilising mass disabled people, of exterminating millions of Jewish people, of destroying the lives and sterilising black and brown people in Nazi Germany came from a little book that Francis Galton, our Brummie boy, developed. And that's not where it stops. The massacres in the Congo by the Belgium government and King Leopold are also true of this same theory of dehumanising.
We also see it in the gynaecology story I spoke about a little bit earlier, with black women being tested on. And closer to home, we see it in the beauty standards we hold dear. So the idea that white is right or white is default, the idea that it...
you're prettier if you're closer to whiteness. The idea that we can dehumanise, so if you're closer to whiteness, your pain is valued more. We also see it in our schools and in our institutions.
And the fact that black boys can't go to school with afros in some schools in Birmingham, they can't have fades, they can't have their hair dreaded or plaited or growing how it grows from their scalp because it's seen as being undesirable. I could name those schools, but I won't. And where does that come from? This idea that this is normal or this is professional, and this isn't.
It all links back to our friend Francis Galton. And a little bit closer to home, we see an actual eugenics conference happening at UCL, the university in London, last year, where they spoke about how do we solve the Mexican problem. How do we actually make sure that refugees die at sea? How do we stop black and brown people being drains on our resources? And how do we stop Jewish people taking over all of these very dangerous ideas that are not based on truth?
And it's still taught today in our schools, in our opinions, in our attitudes. So an idea from Berms, where we currently are, can permeate all across the world today. And you're like, Alia, why are you telling me this?
Well, go on. I'm going to ask you to wait a bit. We'll get there.
I want you to ask yourself, where did the ideas our current society is built on come from? How are Galton's ideas so ingrained in today's society? My guess is colonialism, is colonisation, is the project of the white men in tights that were in my history encyclopedia on the ships navigating everywhere knowing best or thinking that they knew best in contexts they didn't quite understand. They transplanted Eurocentric or European ideals on places everywhere.
and said that this is the right way to be. But how can it be right if you don't understand the context of that place? Why would I wear suits if it's hot outside?
Why am I in a three-piece suit? I'm in the Caribbean. Should we be wearing a flannel t-shirt?
And so I also end up asking myself the question, what do we have to do to a people to justify colonizing them? You have to destroy their knowledge. their ways of producing knowledge. You have to destroy the way that they love, the way that they be, the way that they produce culture, traditions, what they value. You have to destroy all of it, and you have to dehumanize an other.
So then you can justify doing this, and you can justify doing that. You can justify selling black women for guns, and that's what was missing from my history encyclopedia. And so the first time I heard the word decoloniality, the first thing I thought was, wow, it's a big word. I don't know what it means, but I can feel it all over my body.
I can feel that it's true. I can feel that it's right. And what I've come to know since finding out about decoloniality is that it is value in multiple ideas, multiple perspectives, multiple people and humanizing everyone.
Instead of having absolute truths or sciences that are based on people's opinions of other people, it's also about questioning. How do we question where we currently are today? How do we ask what's missing? How do we put those things that we're thinking into action?
And how do we start reimagining? Because for so long we haven't been able to reimagine. We haven't been able... Our imagination has been limited because people have told us that this is right and this is wrong.
If everything isn't that binary, just think about what more we could have. If one little boy from Birmingham came up with an idea of eugenics that still permeates society today, why do we think that our ideas can't live on for the next 500 years? or that they won't be able to change the world and permeate in a good way, in a way that we can value people, in a way that their experiences are important and not dehumanised, in a way that we don't still see black women as collateral damage.
Whose permission are we waiting for? And so if we want to develop real systematic change, like really deep change, like actually do the stuff we're talking about, Create that change. We need to start interrogating whose lives matter, whose are throwaway, and who does it serve for these lives to be throwaway or these lives to be valued.
We need to think about the inequalities we see and point them out all the time. We need to question why and where did they come from. We need to start reimagining because that's a beautiful place, that our imagination, anything can happen.
And we need to action that. As a side note, we also need to Google decoloniality, colonisation and eugenics and see what comes up. And so I'd like to throw it to my G, James Baldwin, who said this. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
And I believe that with every ounce of my being. That yeah, it's going to be a bit uncomfy, we're not going to like what we hear in the history books or what we're writing in our history books, but it needs to be done nonetheless. Because nothing ever changed from people ignoring ideas. And that at the end of the day, it will be uncomfy for a little bit. but there's a home for all of us in decolonizing.
Thank you.