Society

When I founded Syncity, I took a long time to come up with the name. Breaking it down we have Syn, which means “together” or “with” and City which originally means citizens. It was about working “Together with citizens”. Originally this was aimed at how I work with customers to deliver digital. I feel now like it needs to be widened to how we work as a society and to come together in these times.

I do not profess to fully understand exactly what happens. I do not profess to have any answers. To be clear, I’m a mid 40’s white male who went to private school in Middle England. I’ve never experienced racism. I have never had to think about it from my own perspective. I have found that far too many people are far too quiet on the subject currently. I cannot sit by and say nothing. Will I get something wrong. Probably. But being open and inviting conversation is not wrong. On my digital foundations the first module is Discuss. It is all about conversation and communicating. I think that is possibly the most important thing that now must happen. And everyone must be part of it. 

I like many others would have stayed quiet. But two things changed my mind on that. Firstly, a post by Lewis Hamilton that asked if you had ever woken up and had to think about your colour. This is not something I have had to do, nor is it a question I have ever even thought to ask myself. Just thinking about the fact that people do have to ask this shows a huge failing in society. 

The second was a posted by an American man, I cannot recall on which medium it was posted. He stated that when he went for a walk, he took his daughter and dog with him to protect him. He felt that walking alone as a Black man would raise suspicion in his neighbourhood. He normalised his walk by having a child with him. Dads are supposed to protect their daughters not the other way round. I have never walked out of my front door and thought about how I would be perceived or had to worry about what people would think. I would never dream of having to take a child with me so that I do not look suspicious. I cannot even imagine what that must be like every time you open the front door. Every time you want to go for a walk. Every time you want to go for a run. Every time you want to go for a drive. Every time you apply for a job. It was this one that shook me more than any and why I feel compelled to add my voice to the outrage. 

The world we have created is a messed-up world. How have we managed to get ourselves to where we are today. We live on a ball of rock billions of years old flying through space. As far as we know we are the only life in the galaxy. The fact that life exists is a miracle. The fact that we as individuals exist is even more of a miracle. The fact you are reading this is only down to millions of years of evolution married to the fact that each of your ancestors met when they did and had a child when they did. Had any of those factors been different then you and I would not be here as we are. We have then taken this ball of rock and carved it up, put boundaries and borders in place, fought over more land. Fought over our beliefs and created a society based on superiority and suppression.

I am English, I am British. My surname Godfrey is originally not. Around a thousand years ago one of my ancestors came from Normandy over to England. I like to think it was 1066 and we were on the winning side. Whenever this move was made, determined the fact that 1000 years later I am now regarded as English. Isn’t it ridiculous that by nationality was determined by someone that long ago? Yet this is now how and where society judges’ people. Some people have moved over time. Some have not. Where we are from has so many factors contributing to it that we have had no influence over. Grandparents, Great Parents and even further back have shaped who and what we are today. 

And that is a key part of the issues we see today. We live in a world that was designed hundreds of years ago and we have not fixed the problems. Society models that are out of date and are designed around privilege and wealth. Society is man-made. And I mean man. It also means we can change it. We need to change it. 

Throughout history the idea of suppression has been widespread. And what we suppress has been labelled so that we fully understand what to suppress. Look at countries. We have labelled them first, second and third world. Guess which world chose these labels. When atrocities happen in First world countries, we get more offended than we do in Third world ones. There is a bias in our unconscious that drives this behaviour. It is fed by what we are taught and how news is presented to us. Media companies do not present us with the news. They present us with their version of the news. Images of immigrants dying on beaches. So desperate to flee their countries that they risk their lives and those of their families in a rubber dinghy. And how to we view this? As a nuisance. Block the borders. These people’s ancestors did not move 1000 years ago so why should we accept them now. We would rather close our borders and force refugees to live in dirty camps than give them any decency or humanity. Why should we help third world country refugees? Why do we look at them differently? They are still human. Where they are from is just a consequence of their history that they had no control over. 

We have suppressed people based on class. In the UK the class systems was widespread. Again, we gave them labels. The working class, the middle class, the upper class. We learnt to treat people differently based on how much money they had. Or how much money their families had. We looked down on the poor. We kept them poor. We treated them badly. We looked at them in disgust. We gave them the worst jobs in the worst conditions. We treated them with contempt. 

As the poor sort to improve themselves we looked at immigrants from these so called second and third world countries to take their roles. We treated them with the same lack of respect and humanity. As the first wave of immigrants improved their lives, we looked to another set to replace them and so on. All the way through to present day where we now treat Eastern Europeans with the same disdain. We voted Brexit off the back of lots of immigrations reports in newspapers. 

We still now have this concept of supressing immigrants regardless of how long they have lived in the UK. Back to Lewis Hamilton and his question about asking if you have ever had to think about your colour. The fact that it is 2020 and this rings true shows how little we have learnt from history. 

There are countless other examples of suppression. I won’t touch on religion, but they are constantly trying to suppress each other. 

Then there’s women. Throughout history they have been suppressed. It is not until 1928 that all women were given the right to vote in the UK. That is less than 100 years ago. My Gran has been alive longer. They are still suppressed today in the through pay gaps and glass ceilings. It is this male dominated need to be superior that ensures people are treated unequally. 

And what about sexuality. Just because someone is born to prefer one sex to another, we suppress them. It is still illegal to be gay in many countries. Why do we care that someone prefers one sex to the other? It has nothing to do with us. How does someone choosing to be gay affect my life? It does not. But they are different, so we will label them, and we will suppress them. This applies to anyone who is LBGTQ+. Label and suppress. They are different and we do not understand it. 

What about race? We all have a race. None of us chose it. History has ultimately decided what race we are. Our ancestor’s choices. Choosing how we treat someone because of historical decisions and the level of melanin in their skin. Really? Is that what we do. We are on this planet for about 80 years and we have created a society that over time judges, labels and suppresses people based on how much melanin their skin has. And in 2020 we are still doing it. Deciding that a black person out jogging looks suspicious but the white guy next to him is just trying to keep fit. 

We live in this man-made society still based on centuries old models of rule with the same prejudices, labels, and suppression that we have always had. As its man-made, it means we can also unmake it. We can change the way we live. We can change the choices we make. 

We accept far too much as sheep just following the herd through life. We school, we work, we retire. If we are lucky we take a two week holiday every year. We buy the newspapers that spread prejudice and hate. We vote in politicians that are funded by large corporates. We chase wealth and a better life. We see inspirational Instagram posts and want to be them. We publish a rich list every year. Showing who is at the top of the human pile of success. We measure success through wealth. We want the life of footballers. But we then complain they earn too much. We applaud black footballers, but then are the first to turn on them when things go wrong. We love black sportspeople that have made it. Michael Jordan is a hero to people of all races. Now they are rich and famous we allow them to unsuppress themselves. We put celebrities on a pedestal that do not deserve to be there. We give people a platform because they are attractive. We worship movie stars because they can act. We want to be them. We celebrate their wealth. We ask their views on politics. They post an image to support a cause and then return to their lives 24 hours later. Seriously who cares what half of them think. We are focusing on the wrong things throughout our lives. 

We need to look at ourselves and change the way we act and behave if we truly want things to change. The issues we are seeing today are ingrained in our history and in our society. We have created a world where we chase wealth. In chasing wealth, we suppress those that do not have it. We have second homes when so many do not have one. We buy houses to make money not to live in. We price people out of areas as we gentrify them. We still look down on the classes below us. We do not try to elevate them. We keep them down and price them out. We eat well when so many go hungry. We have created a world where the constant drive for more pressures people into depression, anxiety, and stress. We push people to the brink of suicide and all too often over it, because of the society we have created. 

The Black Lives Matter movement needs to force society to take a long hard look at itself. It is no good adding token rules around ethnicity or race. Look at anti-semitism. Instead of addressing why it happens or what causes it, we just made a law making it illegal. We shut down the conversations. The understanding. The empathy. We drove it underground. We have done the same with race. We need to have the conversations. We need to understand. We need to discuss. We need to change the way we live. We need to do it together. Together as a human race. No labels. No suppression. 

Everyone deserves to be on this planet and to live a full and happy life. We need to share more. To care more. To fight for equality. To live our lives with equality at the heart of it. We need to respect each other. This is not the Victorian age. We are better than that. We need to stop judging people based on race, wealth, colour, religion, or nationality. 

I get the All Lives Matter posts. But now Black Lives Matter, Rohinga Lives Matter, Palestinian Lives Matter and Suppressed Lives Matter more. Every human on this planet deserves for their life to matter. But we must come together and fix society first. Let’s get to the root of the problem and change it. What is man-made can be undone. We can do better. We must do better. And we can do it. Together. 

I set my business up to focus on digital with them aim of it helping to improve people’s lives. I feel like the sentiment behind Syncity is now more than that. I don’t know where this takes the business or what changes I need to make. I don’t have the answers. I know I have a lot to learn. But we can and we must change. We must talk. We must understand. We must stand together. We must stand as one human race. Together.