A Huge Amount of Work
Our work here is done!
This morning I turned on the radio to LBC, and heard a woman who earlier in the week had told David Lammy (Member of Parliament for more than 20 years, born in London, educated at SOAS and Harvard, former Shadow Justice Secretary and Shadow Lord Chancellor) that he could not be English because… reasons. (Spoiler — “reasons” = he is black.) Today she called in again to say she had subsequently read Adam Rutherford’s book, “How to Argue with a Racist”, and Robin DiAngelo’s book, “White Fragility”, and she had now changed her opinion. David, she said, was just as English as her. She apologised for having suggested the citizenship of David and other black people was somehow less authentic than her own, and pledged to be an anti-racist from now on.
I went online as usual to catch up on the latest news, and read that the government had published a report acknowledging that black people in the UK have worse health outcomes, are disproportionately excluded from schools, stopped and searched, arrested, imprisoned, dying from Covid and losing their jobs during the pandemic, while also under-represented in professional occupations, management jobs, and being paid less than white people for the same work. Concurring with the many people of colour who had made submissions to the commission that published the report, as well as with academic research from Aberdeen University and others, the report made it clear that race remained a significant factor in structual inequalities in the UK, and there was a huge amount of work to do before Britain could claim to be a post-racial society. The commission’s chair refused to cherry pick data, conflate ethnicities or make spurious international comparisons, saying that doing so would diminish the lived experience of black Britons. The commission proposed ten concrete actions to tackle systemic racism, and confirmed that Downing Street had accepted its recommendations, vowing to implement them within this parliament.
This put a spring in my step as I jogged to my local woodland, where I was running in a new trail race. On the start line, I was stood next to a black couple, who said it was their first ever trail race - an accessible 5k they could reach easily from their inner city home. They’d worked through the trail running tutorials provided online by the event organisers, and were raring to put their new skills into practice. Behind them, a black student said he’d been encouraged to enter when the race website featured people who looked like him, and there was an option for the unwaged to get discounted places, as well as a scheme to provide shared transport to the start. It was his first time running on the trails. I caught up with them, and a dozen other black runners, at the finish village. Over a chicken roti from one of the food vendors, we talked about how energising it was to run on trails, experiencing the outdoors in a way simply not possible in the inner city. And we loved the rotis too. Not as good as the ones I used to get at the Queen’s Park Oval in Port of Spain, but not bad at all.
When I got home, I checked my email and saw one from a race director in Yorkshire, the county of my birth. They wanted to support BTR’s work, they said, and had already ensured their races were entirely inclusive. And when they said “inclusive”, they didn’t just mean not overtly exclusive, they said. And sure enough, when I looked at their website photo gallery, I saw people of colour represented in proportion to their representation in the population. These looked like truly multi-cultural events, a far cry from the almost exclusively white trail event websites I used to see last year.
What a fantastic day! It almost seemed too good to be true.
And then I checked the date.
Our work here is not done!