Voorbij Racisme: Beyond What, Exactly?

I have been invited to moderate an event called Voorbij Racisme. Beyond Racism. There is something hopeful in those words. They suggest movement. Possibility. The imagination of relationships and communities no longer organised around racial hierarchy. A willingness to think further than the categories and assumptions that determine who is readily heard, believed, trusted or recognised as competent. I like that possibility.

Perhaps that is why I keep getting stuck on one word. Voorbij. Beyond. What exactly are we being invited to move beyond? And who is expected to do the moving? I know how easily beyond racism can become an aspiration for the person experiencing it. Become resilient enough. Educated enough. Self-aware enough. Professional enough. Spiritually grounded enough.

Learn when to speak. Learn when to remain quiet. Regulate your body. Choose your battles. Explain what happened clearly enough that someone who has never experienced it can understand. Remain warm. Remain reasonable. Remain credible. Carry on. Some days this resembles a sophisticated version of fake it till you make it. Straighten the shoulders. Enter the room. Keep going. That requires energy. And when energy, rest, community or other resources are depleted, resilience looks rather different from the admirable quality we so often celebrate.

I cannot personally get “beyond” racism by becoming resilient enough to withstand it. That realisation has been sitting with me. Racism is not mine to undo. It belongs to a racial value system developed to rank human beings, legitimise domination and make exploitation appear reasonable. Its consequences fall differently upon us, but the system itself was not created by those it racialised.

So perhaps the work available to me is something else. Perhaps I can become more conscious of what racism asks me to carry for it. The translating.

The proving. The shrinking. The bending. The constant calculation of what can be said, how it should be said and whether the person receiving it will remain comfortable enough to hear it. Continual bending eventually changes the shape of a body. It can change perception too. That thought leads me somewhere unexpected. What if racism has never actually been capable of seeing the people it racialises?

It sees skin tone, feature, name, accent, ancestry or cultural practice and builds a story. A fantasy of intelligence. A fantasy of danger. A fantasy of civilisation. A fantasy of beauty. A fantasy of professionalism. A fantasy of who belongs where. And then those of us standing inside that fantasy can spend astonishing amounts of life responding to it.

Explaining ourselves to it. Qualifying ourselves within it. Protecting ourselves from it. Sometimes even seeing ourselves through it. What happens when I stop treating that impoverished imagination as an adequate mirror? Perhaps we are already beyond what racism is capable of seeing. Not beyond its consequences. Not beyond the institutions and material inequalities through which it continues to operate. But beyond its imagination.

Its failure to perceive us fully does not make us incomplete. The difficult part is remembering this when that failure of perception carries institutional authority. I keep returning to the body here. When something is injured, the body does not ask one isolated cell to become exceptionally resilient and repair the entire organism. Repair involves signalling, protection, nourishment, circulation, communication, rebuilding and rest. So why do we so often ask racialised individuals to behave like isolated cells expected to heal an injury produced by an entire social organism?

Speak up. Educate. Report. Recover. Forgive. Remain calm. Find community. Practice self-care. Try again tomorrow.

There is something strange about asking the person carrying an injury to provide both the evidence of that injury and so much of the labour required to repair it. The body seems to understand something our institutions often forget. Healing is an ecology. But another question has started appearing alongside this one. What about the other people with whom I share these professional, social and institutional worlds?

People who are often kind. Educated. Socially competent. Productive. Well intentioned. And sometimes remarkably unaware of the systems in which their ease, authority and assumptions are embedded.

I do not ask this comfortably. The question unsettles me too. I know the feeling of noticing something in a room and immediately beginning an internal negotiation. Do I say it? Do I leave it alone? Am I seeing clearly? Will the question open something useful or simply disturb the atmosphere? I am often the person who risks disturbing the atmosphere. Not because I enjoy doing so. Usually something has disturbed me first.

There is a contradiction I cannot quite ignore. Something in the story being told does not fit what my body is registering. And then comes another question. If I remain quiet, am I protecting my peace? Or abandoning something I know? Perhaps this is where voorbij begins to mean something different to me. Not becoming strong enough to endure racism beautifully. Not speaking every time I notice something. Not turning myself into a permanent educator, interpreter or warning system. Perhaps it begins with discernment.

Knowing when to explain. When to challenge. When to collaborate. When to withdraw. When to rest. When to find others with whom the meaning can be made together. I have increasingly come to understand peace as something that needs protecting. Peace that can say no. Peace that notices when the body is depleted. Peace that does not require every question to be answered immediately.

Rest is resistance. Patience is power.

Not because rest somehow dismantles racism. But because exhaustion can make it difficult to hear ourselves. When I slow down, sensation becomes information again. I can ask what belongs to me and what does not. What I want to carry forward. What I want to put down. What deserves my energy. And what does not. So perhaps Voorbij Racisme does not ask me to pretend racism has become smaller than it is.

Perhaps the word is simply opening a question. How much territory does racism get to occupy inside my imagination? How much authority do I allow it over what I understand as knowledge, beauty, professionalism, belonging or human worth? What do I refuse to keep carrying for it? And what might become possible when we ask those questions together? I do not yet know.

For now, I am interested in remaining with the tension. There is hope in voorbij. There is discomfort there too. Perhaps both are necessary.

Perhaps beyond begins not with claiming that we have arrived somewhere new, but with becoming willing to notice what we have been carrying from the old place.