We are moving in the right direction when it comes to racism – but painfully slowly

There’s never been an easy time to be a black journalist. Not in a trade where the overwhelming majority (94 per cent in 2016) is white, and a mere handful of black people are in senior editorial positions.

But over the past few months in particular, under a barrage of information about our vulnerability to the pandemic that has so far claimed hundreds of thousands of lives; against the backdrop of growing protests against police brutality and racial profiling towards black people around the world, it does feel harder than usual to have to be so tapped into every ugly detail of what’s unfolding before us.

We have, however, reached a point in the conversation that many of us have been waiting for all our lives: moving beyond convincing white people and non-black people of colour that racism and anti-blackness exist. We must incentivise our allies to not only speak out but also to fight alongside or even in front of us, as some protest tactics have shown. And this has been reflected in our coverage.

Though the usual suspects are reticent to change, it seems things are shifting (albeit painfully slowly) with the realisation that the longer white people take to be convinced of the power they have always had to help dismantle the systemic racism that claims lives all over the world, the longer this will continue.

Those displays of renewed solidarity are wonderful. But it’s an effort that cannot fade away when there’s a brief lapse in the sharing of harrowing videos of black people dying at the hands of police or racist citizens to shock people into action.

In the UK, we’re still at the point where people assume racism is a uniquely American phenomenon, with a handful of similar instances here. People who do not know how deeply institutional and interpersonal racism cut, still – after everything in the last 20 years alone – believe in the subtlety of expressions of it in Britain. But there is nothing subtle or short-lived about the experiences I’ve had in my personal life as well as across my working life. We – or white people – as Toni Morrison famously said, have a very serious problem.

I hope now that we’re toeing a path towards more honesty about the way racism works, we won’t have to repeat that same quote, said almost 30 years ago, that white people “should start thinking about what they can do about it”.

Yours,

Kuba Shand-Baptiste

Commissioning editor, Voices