I once worked night-shift in a toy-shop in the weeks leading up to Christmas. 7pm to 7am. My job was to help unbox the day’s deliveries and re-stock the shelves. I suppose you could say that my hard graft was indirectly responsible for putting happy smiles onto the faces of thousands of local children. Aw! Sounds pretty magical, right? You’re probably imagining me and my twilight workforce moving in blissful synchronous, singing a jolly song as we form a human chain, passing parcels of dolls and dinosaurs along it, hoisting them up onto the shelves and high-fiving as we go, the whole happy endeavour overseen by a kindly old man sat behind an antique desk who’s busy scrutinising each and every toy for imperfections so that little Jeannie and little Harry won’t be disappointed come Christmas morn.
You’d be imagining it all wrong, though. Because working in a toy-shop at Christmas time is about as magical as being tied up and force-fed corned beef by a maniacal clown in an underground car-park.
It’s about as merry as weaponised AIDS being crop-dusted over you while you’re sunbathing, and only half as joyful as taking a cricket bat to the stomach, and then being stabbed in the face with pencils by fifty angry dwarfs as soon as you double-over, and then hit with the cricket bat again as soon as you straighten up, and on and on and on, until the dwarfs grow weary of their little game and decide to set fire to you instead.
And then being shat on by a pigeon.
Instead of imagining mirth and magic, try imagining a group of tired, miserable men – many of them with substance abuse problems and severe personality disorders (and that was just me) – desperately trying to reach the end of their shift without succumbing to the desire to leap head-first from the top-shelf of the board-game aisle down onto the cold floor below whereupon they’d swiftly be entombed by falling Cluedo boxes.
Imagine a group of guys muttering to themselves like lobotomised Lurches up and down the cold, deserted aisles as thousands of eerie plastic smiles beam out at them – only managing to preserve a faint sliver of sanity by occasionally stopping to boot a musical dog in the face just to hear it scream.
Of course, these days I’m a soppy, genetically-invested father of two, and would probably really enjoy a yuletide stint at the toy shop… although my colleagues most definitely wouldn’t: “You know who would love THIS toy, right? My kids! And do you know who would love THIS toy over here? THAT’S RIGHT, MY KIDS!”
You’ve probably intuited from the pronouns I’ve used thus far that everyone on the night-shift was male. These days my boss wouldn’t have hesitated to re-boot the shift with an all-female cast, but back then, in the late twenty-tens, it was XY all the way, baby. We may have had a woefully gender-imbalanced workforce, but at least we were ever-so-slightly ethnically diverse. There was one black Nigerian man among the crew, which certainly helped break the facial monotony of our miserable Caucasian countenances.
On my first shift I realised with horror that my fellow whiteys were referring to this man as ‘Teeth’, a nickname I surmised he’d been given on account of that offensive supposition that a black person can blend into total darkness and only have their position betrayed by their blindingly white smile.
The guys weren’t just referring to him as Teeth; they were calling him it to his face.
“Hey Teeth!” they’d say.
“Gimme a hand shifting some of these boxes, eh, Teeth?”
“Whit time is it, Teeth?”
I knew what time it was: horrible racism time!
‘Teeth’ himself didn’t seem phased by the racist moniker he’d had forced upon him by his co-workers. He never once reacted. He just accepted it, as if they were calling him nothing less innocuous than ‘mate’ or ‘pal’.
I went home at the end of that shift the next morning and agonised over what I’d borne silent witness to. By doing nothing, wasn’t I a racist, too? Or at the very least a shameless coward. I tried to come up with alternative explanations. Most of these guys had been working together for weeks. Maybe they’d bonded at the coal face and developed a friendly, no-holds-barred way of dealing with each other. Maybe context was king, and I’d misunderstood the dynamic. After all, I’ve said some hellish and horrendous things to my friends over the years, and had it back in spades. What if it was all just banter?
But what if it wasn’t? Or what if the white guys assumed they were trading harmless banter, but were really hurting this guy and he didn’t feel empowered enough to speak up?
The second shift began. I wondered what I should do. Call the guys out? Report them? I knew one thing for certain: I couldn’t just stand by and watch a man being marginalised and demeaned. Not this time. Not again. I had to do something. But first, I had to show the guy he had an ally; that not everyone on the night-shift was an unbridled monster.
We talked for a while as we sliced open boxes together: about life, love, childhood. I liked him. He seemed a nice guy, which only served to make me feel more guilty about my cowardice the night before, even though his agreeableness as a person was irrelevant to the injustice at hand. Even an asshole deserved my support.
I stretched out a hand for him to shake. ‘My name’s Jamie. I’m not going to call you ‘Teeth’ like all of the other guys around here, I don’t think that’s very nice at all, and I just want you to know I’m not on board with it. What’s your real name?
‘Latif,’ he said.
~~~
Have you ever wished for the ground to open up and swallow you whole? I quickly realised that the only racial abuse Latif had been exposed to in the workplace… had come from me. I’d bent over backwards to avoid being labelled a racist, and in the process inadvertently back-flipped onto a big fat crash-mat of racism. I was the closest thing the toy-shop had to its very own resident Klansman.
I sloped off down the aisle, and gazed up longingly at a stack of Cluedos that was teetering on the edge of the top shelf. Thinking that was maybe a bit of an extreme reaction, I decided instead to track down a musical dog and kick it in the face.
Ho ho ho.
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