An Eye for A Sleepy Eye
A fight over a bus window. Though it was frosty outside and they were sopping wet with condensation, I wanted to crack one open to let out the stench of teenage boys. That unmistakable pong of mud, hormonal armpits and Lynx spray used so excessively you got the sensation you were huffing solvents.
Another smelly group got on from our school year. Ugly boys but good at sport so they just about survived socially. One of them, Jamie, nonchalantly slammed the window next to us closed again with a sharp crack, trapping the stink back in. My friend calmly re-opened it. Feeling the breeze on his neck again, he grinned and snapped it back closed again. This time I stood up and punched it shut. Very quickly it became a relay of opening and slamming, opening and slamming until the driver started shrieking from the front.
“I thought you lot didn't like the cold?”
His friends snickered, remnants of crisps still stuck in their braces. A cuss which even if it made sense was weak. But still that classic sound of a collective “oooooOOoooh” that precurses all pubescence fights was released causing the rest of the bus to turn their attention to us.
“What does that mean cos if it means what I think it means then that is really out of order. It better not mean that.” my friend blurted out like machine-gun fire but with none of the effectiveness.
“Nothing…” he conceded.
Drama seemingly averted everyone settled back into their seats.
“...Sleepy eyes,” he muttered at the lowest volume possible, causing his gaggle of smelly cronies to erupt into stifled laughter.
“W h a t did you say?” I pressed.
“I said ‘sleepy eyes’,” he responded this time more confidently.
I can’t remember exactly the order of cusses that followed, just that I snatched the window back open, stood over him and launched into an assortment of insults about how he stunk of ‘knob cheese’, had a monobrow and dandruff. But I do remember my final pièce de résistance because it rolled out of my mouth far too easily, causing the bus to descend into awkward silence rather than the cheers I’d hoped for. “You’re just white scum.”
Hurt, he slouched back round leaving the window open. When we got off my friend darted up the street eager to get away from me like the pin had been pulled from a grenade. So I began to walk home alone now racked with regret. Two of the boys who’d been parked far at the back of the bus caught up with me. Much older, intimidatingly-popular, good looking. One was Filipino, one Irish and Malay. They both had those greasy boyband curtain haircuts, cubic zirconia studs and go-faster slits shaved into their eyebrows to look hard, even though I’d seen them banging the dance machines at Oriental City in giggles.
As they sidled up either side of me they didn’t mention what had just happened. Instead, they asked my name, who my mum and dad were and, most pertinently, where they were from from. Their friendly distraction successfully stopping the hot tears that’d been building in my throat.
As they both broke off up their road, the Pinoy boy turned round and walking backward added,
“If you need anything, yeah?”
“Thanks,” I bleated back, bottom lip now going like the clappers at this, in my mind, enormous display of kindness.
Our mini enclave was not an overly friendly one, but there was a quiet solidarity. A strange mix of “jungle Asians”, a phrase my friend would say for shock value to distinguish us from the rich east Asian expats. The children of Filipino, Malay, Vietnamese newcomers that found themselves amongst working-class Irish by way of working in nursing. When the police had been called to our house after an incident, yet again, involving my mother, casual racism and someone’s car being kicked in, our deadpan Belfast neighbour was quizzed as a witness. My dad recalls with glee how he’d responded to the grilling with, “I didn’t see anything,” before taking a long drag on a roll-up, “Just that wee cunt being rude to the nice Chinese lady.”
The next week, I’d all but forgotten about my brush with the race war when my form tutor pulled me aside. I was rarely in trouble at school because I put in minimum participation to the point where teachers forgot my name. But this was different. She wanted to speak about The Incident, how my choice of words had been Very Serious and would mean a letter home. ‘Scum’? ‘Monobrow’? ‘Knob cheese’ I wondered? Before she clarified. There was no asking of what had led up to this tirade, no need for my version of events, no chance of squashing the beef with an apology even. And instinctively I knew not to bother disputing it. The letter home never arrived, so I didn’t get to do my routine of intercepting the mail and ceremoniously burning the evidence in the toilet. Nevertheless, it played on my mind. Was I, in this instance, ‘half-white’? Was I fuck.
By all accounts, it was a mild incident, one that could’ve blown over. But I committed it to memory because it was my first peek at the mechanics behind the fragility of power. How levelling to someone that they’re prejudiced can so often be construed as a more serious offence than prejudice itself.
During my first month as a staffer at VICE, editorial was re-jigged to accommodate what was now a rapidly growing team. It was an exciting time to join. I held up my phone carefully between my thumbs and forefingers to get the right angle, snapped everyone in the new seating arrangement and uploaded the picture to Twitter with the caption “I see white people.” I showed it to my new boss and we both laughed.
Before joining full-time, I’d vacillated between publications but secretly hoped I’d end up at the acerbic VICE mothership. If anyone had punctured my Coolest Mag Ever admiration back then I’m sure I would have swung at them. I’d also had stilted conversations with Gavin McInnes — their ex-founder who was unceremoniously ousted from the company — about writing for his then baby ‘Street Carnage’ but it never amounted to anything.
When I started writing for VICE in 2011, I’d work in throwaway jokes about being mixed race and riffed on Asian stereotypes that would receive casually bigoted comments in response, which I felt I had to take on the chin. Everything existed on a knife-edge of humour that I, frankly, didn’t have the range to be putting into the public domain.
The shock-jock schtick that had buoyed the voice of the publication for so long soured rapidly over the next five years. Children's bodies were washing up on beaches. Terrorist attacks had been brought to our doorsteps rather than confined to faraway countries. Dangerous jingoistic clowns that should’ve been footnotes in local papers began to be interviewed on primetime TV. The method of lazily pulling a minority out of a hat then pointing a camera at them did not age well against a backdrop of palpable political and social tension. So while the company began in haste to tow a more serious line, the old VICE-voice that once exemplified its cult popularity began to sound like a drunk uncle shouting at the family-do he was barred from.
I was changing too. It’s tempting in these days of ‘gotcha’ retribution to paint yourself as if you shot out the womb a liberal saint. Able instantly to not only traverse but lead how we think about social, cultural and political reform without any blind spots. But that’s just not true, is it? Otherwise, it wouldn’t be called ‘progressive’, duh. Nevertheless, the lens with which I viewed the world had matured rapidly and in the process, I found myself at odds with the workplace I’d once loved and wrapped my esteem up so tightly with.
Within VICE, the tension was not only palpable it was right there on the surface and festering in full view as a layer of pond scum. It made for heated meetings tempered by carefully worded follow-up emails. Unionisation efforts across international offices began to go balls-to-the-wall on discrimination, alluding to pay gaps and unfair firings. Lurking in the background of this all, was McInnes' failure to get any of his post-VICE projects off the ground and, instead, go full hog into fascism with Proud Boys. Though his involvement had long passed his name hung around like a virulent fart.
I massively underestimated just how touchy a subject this was.
Fresh off the back of our biggest union meeting, I was sat making an internal job application as two producers and a new department boss discussed a short doc that’d been canned beside me. In frustration at the film being put on hold, the main contributor had referred to VICE as a “white supremacist patriarchy”. Overhearing this I snort-laughed to myself, turned to the three of them, gestured around the office and said ‘look around’, before turning back to my laptop.
Later the same day, I’d asked to privately meet one of the producers from the same meeting — a spineless cokehead whose paranoia had been compounded by VICE’s changing tone — to discuss my application. At that point, I still had a pipe dream that all my job misery could be solved by a union. I never wanted to leave, I wanted them to do better. So when he began to earnestly demand an apology I thought I might’ve been having a stroke. In his version of events, it was like I’d stood on the desk, pointed at him and sucked in as much air as I could to bellow “YOU, MR HONKY, ARE THE WORST WHITE SUPREMACIST OF THEM AalllLLL!!!!!” As with everything there, our relationship had up until then been wildly unprofessional, so thinking he was also joking I started laughing again. I quickly realised, as he was going purple with rage, that this wasn’t that. This was very different and I began to cry. Like, hysterically. Snot bubbles and chin trembling. He remained unmoved, rippling with anger.
Everything moved pretty fast after that. Their first port of call was formalising the process of my extrication to stop me from speaking publicly about it. I would come into the office and see backs turned in meetings I’d been uninvited from. Thrash my head around like a meerkat trying to get the gist of people discussing email chains I’d been cut out of. Even my fucking desk chair kept going missing. The victim, on the other hand, the person I’d offended so deeply by snickering at a passing comment was so distressed he was sent to work from the lounge of a private member’s club.
I was sitting alone at the team desk when the confirmation came in that he’d refused any mediation and was upholding the formal complaint that would secure my dismissal. Once again, I thought, here I am crying like a baby. Horrified at the scene I was making by weeping in full view of other staff, the boss who’d facilitated this pantomime firing patted me on the back before pressing her cold, hard tit into my shoulder in what I think was supposed to be a supportive hug.
Initially, the biggest mistake was allowing them subtlety. I didn’t want to make out that I’d never been complicit in the culture that had aged so poorly because I had. Both through cowardice and ignorance. Rather I wanted to explain that after years of inter-rank shagging, bosses supplying Thursday night’s gear and churning out edgelord clickbait, my internal compass of what was normal, what were and weren’t close to the bone jokes, was a little off. In an impromptu meeting leaving me both alone and unarmed, I was pressed for specific examples of offensive comments, comments that might drive me to a "white supremacist patriarchy" meltdown. After an hour’s interrogation, I relented and made some vague reference to being quizzed about the colour of my nipples and if I exclusively slept with Black men. Both things that had happened but, by way of being such throwaway examples of the company culture, were of course unprovable.
The next day these were filed as false accusations and added to the list of sins against VICE I was to be investigated for. These two nuggets of humiliation would haunt both my case and the subsequent New York Times exposé of the company. Though knowing it was nigh on impossible to prove, a counter-case of gender and racial discrimination was filed to highlight out how I had been treated differently, I had been iced out of projects, I had been forced to sit in tears in the office as my counterpart sipped fucking lattes at Shoreditch House. But it would all be boiled down to two silly points, painting me as the hysterical race-baiter and them the arbiters of reason and fairness.
After that was when I knew the boulder couldn't be stopped from rolling. I was accused of drug dealing. I was asked to supply proof of my ethnic background. Fictional exchanges with me were cited by both management and peers eager to suck up to said management, while CCTV of my frequent office blubberings disappeared. Chunks of dialogue from the minutes of the meetings were redacted without reason, but concocted asides from myself were inserted. The boss who’d been sitting beside me during my alleged "white supremacist patriarchy" meltdown now stated she was never there, a vanishing woman.
I kept playing it all over and over again in my head. Had I been in the wrong? Yes, absolutely. But did I deserve to lose my livelihood over it? No. Against the better judgement of the union reps and solicitors, I decided from then to flat out refuse to apologise. That stupid sentence...“white supremacist patriarchy". But if they were going to be trolls, I thought, then I could also be a troll about semantics. The VICE I worked at was largely white, largely male and largely hired from a small pool of well-heeled, privately-schooled London creative elite. The more I pointed this out, the angrier they got.
The process was over in a flash and I was fired. Ruling on all counts in the producer’s favour. The head of HR said she was sorry it had ended like this as she handed me the letter of dismissal. With minutes no longer being typed out, I got up, smoothed my outfit down, told her to go fuck herself and left the building.
Over time I’ve been able to revisit the diaries I kept over this period without them inducing the thumping panic in my chest as if it were happening all over again. Reams and reams of pages silently documenting my frustration at such a brazen closing of ranks and how hopeless it felt being so deftly bullied out of a voice.
They’ve been of particular interest of late as the debate around an imaginary attack on free speech has become deafening. Hysterical fixations on culture wars and identity politics. Factually incorrect assertions of becoming the minority. Those structurally at the top so boldly lacking in self-awareness they either don’t realise or don’t care they're crowing about being silenced from the top of mountains. Everyone so desperate to be the victim, so desperate to be oppressed they drown out those who are.
I can only hope these are the death throes of people so fearful of a changing world that they thrash and cry and point fingers in an attempt to restore the equilibrium that favours them. Otherwise, there’s a long road ahead for the rest of us.
But if I were to take one lesson away from this dumbest of traumas, it's that when it comes to standing up for what’s right you should never make yourself smaller, quieter or less of a bitch for someone else’s comfort. Let them squirm.
I have moved 🥳! TinyLetter served me well but it reached the point where I had to graduate to a more structured platform. The subscription will remain free but as always I’m brass lol so won’t turn down any donations for food and no doubt impending legal bills.
Thank you for reading!