Responding to the Commission on Race & Ethnic Disparities

An introduction from Liz Pemberton, Non-Executive Director of That Nursery Life and owner of The Black Nursery Manager consultancy

 I was introduced to Sam in the Summer of 2020 (yes, THAT summer) via a mutual LinkedIn connection Penny Rabiger. Sam had been looking for a Non-Executive Director for That Nursery Life.

 As somebody who has worked in the sector for the past 16 years as a Nursery Manager up until March 2020, I decided that I wanted to come away from Management but still have a direct hand in shaping practice in the sector and my anti-racist training and consultancy business “The Black Nursery Manager” was born. My dismay about the racial inequity that I saw in the sector that I had been a part of for so long and that my Mother, who opened her first nursery in the late 80’s, had been a part of led me to stop critically analysing and reflecting and threw me into action in a way that I had never been before.

I had always been struck that on a systemic level within a sector that was supposed to care for and meet the needs of every child only certain people were informing the policies that directly impacted the futures of children, not just in my local city of Birmingham, but across the country. When I looked at the people at the top of Local Authorities, government in Westminster and within OFSTED I noticed a common thread…nearly everybody was racialised as white. This seemed strange to me as Britain had always celebrated its rich “multiculturalism” and long before my own Grandad arrived here from Jamaica in 1954 multi-ethnic communities in Britain had long been established and Black communities have been in Britain since the 1500’s. So why was there nobody shaping policy that looked like me, had a rhetoric like mine, or like any of the hugely diverse children and families that were accessing childcare provision throughout the sector whose heritage was similarly rooted in the Caribbean, Africa,  East and South East Asia or South Asia?!

Anyway, I digress but I needed to give you context.

Having connected with Sam we quickly realised that we had shared ideals and a vision about how we wanted the sector to look and feel. However, I was initially hesitant to take up this post largely because of that suspicion around white people virtue signalling with their Black squares on Instagram and pledging to be allies in the face of racial injustice globally because of the Black Lives Matter movement. As a result of another murder of a Black person by the police, the latest victims being George Floyd and Breonna Taylor,  there was a sudden rush for companies established for years to want to have Black people in the business and endless “new positions” created. Going into our first conversation I was firmly of the mindset that this white man (Sam) was about to try and do the same thing and I was not about to be his new ‘Black friend”.

But when we met, I really challenged Sam about his motivations for this new company and although that first Zoom call saw him turn all shades of pink and red he moved through any discomfort and was honest about the vision that he had. I said I’d give it a go and subsequent work we have done together has demonstrated to me that recognising and relinquishing privilege not only creates opportunities but makes for an organisation that considers carefully not only who is sat around the proverbial table but also who is going to contribute to the menu.

Let me finish off by saying that this narrative is not one to tell you that Sam has solved systemic racism! Instead, it is to help you recognise that this step in the right direction is only a drop in the ocean within a sector that has historically never had voices like mine in a position of influence. As I look around today I still don’t see many moving in the right direction from a sector who insists that they do not see the colour of children because “whether they are red, green, blue or orange they just see children”.

This recent Government report spits in the face of a factual reality for many people like me, my East and South East Asian and my South Asian heritage counterparts. If this recent report has proven anything it is that diversity does not cure racism and representation politics does not mean that a few Black or Brown faces will deliver a just and accurate presentation of statistical data or a robust challenge to the denials of systemic racism by those who Govern the country that we call home. Now more than ever, in early years and every other sector, people must all look around, check their history and conclude that systemic racism is absolutely alive and well in today’s Britain. 

We continue to advocate a proactively Anti-Racist agenda – here’s why…

As is so often the case, the incisive intervention of Liz Pemberton has prompted me to step outside of my privileged position – in which the contents of this week’s report from the Commission on Race & Ethnic Disparities has little impact on me personally – and to respond publicly and unambiguously to what it says.

Before articulating the specifics of my response, I feel it is important to set my words in their proper context. I am writing this article whilst wearing several different hats.

• I write as the Founder & CEO of That Nursery Life, a business on a mission to radically improve the impact of early childhood education in the UK.
• I write as Co-Founder & CEO of The Good Box, a new start-up making rapid progress with our innovative answer to the challenges of changing consumer behaviour for the better.
• I write as the leader of Prasinus, the organisation at the heart of my professional life and which is dedicated to developing and growing entrepreneurial projects under my direction.

Whilst I am an extremely long way from being the largest employer, the most influential leader, or the most powerful force for change in our society I feel it is important to be clear that the views and thoughts which follow represent my whole-hearted and full-throated position, and by extension, represent the corporate position of the organisations I lead.

1)   Centuries of Racism are the root cause of many contemporary inequalities

The Commission’s report repeatedly attempts to draw a distinction between disparities in British society caused by racism, and those caused by other “socio-economic” factors. To select a single example for the purposes of illustration, the report says;

“The increased age-adjusted risk of death from COVID-19 in Black and South Asian groups has widely been reported as being due to racism – and as exacerbating existing health inequalities. However many analyses have shown that the increased risk of dying from COVID-19 is mainly due to an increased risk of exposure to infection”

That the Commission has published such a flawed and ill-thought-through position is frankly appalling.

For most of the 188 years since slavery was abolished in Britain, Black people and those of other diverse heritage backgrounds have faced intense and overt racism. Openly prejudicial views that Black people are less capable of doing certain forms of work, violent persecution of our South Asian and East and South East Asian citizens on the streets, and the exclusion of people from non-white communities from much of British sport and cultural life was rife in our country for decade after decade. Whilst the Commission is correct that such forms of racism have been and continue to decline, to suggest that the after-effects of those decades are disappearing at the same rate is moronic.

We need only go back three generations – to my Great-Grandparents – to find ourselves in overtly and toxically racist Britain. Were my ancestors from Black or South Asian heritage, the overt racism of the time would have all-but guaranteed that my grandparents were born into a poor, under-educated family, dependent on low-paying manual jobs in an inner-city. Even as such overt racism became progressively less acceptable through the 1950s and 1960s, having started out life in racially-marginalised poverty, it is highly likely that the next generation – my parents – would have also been born into a similarly poor, under-educated family which lived in an inner-city location close to the source of the same manual, badly paid work. That my forebears did not experience this life is in large part because they had the good fortune to be born White.

The fact that Black and South Asian families are much more likely to live in more dense areas of our cities, to do work which puts them at greater risk of COVID exposure, and to have multiple generations of families living in one home are unquestionably the direct result of that historic racism. That Black people are much less likely to be violently assaulted because of their race today does absolutely nothing to change the “baked-in” inequality from the decades when that was a daily risk. Socio-economic factors are inescapably tied to race and ethnicity, and by extension the impact of those factors on the lives of our fellow citizens today is a product of racism.

2)   Being Anti-Racist is not the same as being Anti-White

Much of the Commission’s report returns to a critical stance on the principle of an “anti-racist agenda”. The suggestion, raised multiple times through the report, is that advocates of such a view are “ill-informed or uninformed”. Setting the deeply frustrating superiority implicit in such an attitude aside, it is also fundamentally wrong.

In much the same way that some people attempt to characterise feminism as being determined to “bring men down”, the suggestion that those of us who are proactively anti-racist want to undermine White people is nothing more than a means of deflecting the deeply challenging points we raise.

My position on being anti-racist is not about taking anything away from White people or communities but is – to be deliberately crass – about enabling everyone to live like White people! Of course, there are thousands upon thousands of White people who do not have the life, opportunities, health or happiness to which they are entitled, but the reality is that 1 in every 25 White Britons live in poverty, but 1 in 10 of their Black and South Asian peers do. Reaching the point where the same proportion of Black, South Asian and White people live in poverty would represent a huge stride towards equality of opportunity, and we would all be united in eliminating poverty for all from there.

A final word here on one of the most disturbing sections of the Commission’s report – their treatment of percentages and raw figures. In various places, the Commission appears to minimise the importance or relevance of percentage-based data by citing the raw numbers involved. Using similar statistics to those I’ve quoted above, the report explicitly proposes that the higher incidence of poverty in Black, Asian and racially minoritised communities isn’t so much of a problem because 1 in 10 Black people is a smaller raw number of individuals than 1 in 25 White people. For the authors of a report on racial disparity in our society to start down such a path is deeply disturbing, and in my view undermines the credibility of the Commission outright.

3)   The current speed of change is unacceptably slow

My characterisation of the report as a whole is that it attempts to paint a largely optimistic picture on the basis that the situation today isn’t as bad as it was before, and that by most measures, things are heading in the right direction. So why worry?! If we continue as we are, things will keep getting better and so the order of the day is “steady as she goes”.

Such a stance is abhorrent. Whilst progress in the right direction is clearly better than the alternative, such progress as we are making is nowhere near swift enough to warrant us giving ourselves a collective pat on the back.

One area that stood out to me in particular is the section of the report which discussed disparities in income and wealth. “It is less encouraging” the Commission tells us that wealth and property ownership remains wildly disparate based on the ethnicity of a citizen, but after all “one would expect wealth accumulation to take longer in generational time”. If you think that sounds reasonable, bear in mind that the median total wealth for a family in Britain with a Black African “head” is ￡34,000. The same measure for a family with a White British “head” is ￡314,000. That the median White family is almost 1,000% more wealthy than the equivalent Black African family is disgusting, and anything less than progress at the fastest possible rate is unacceptable.

The full report from the Commission is long, detailed, and – to give it its due – does contain some interesting perspectives and useful statistical insights. However, in its entirety it undermines and in places seems to directly try and curtail the substantial increase in awareness of, anger about, and impetus to change the pervasive race-based inequalities which remain in British society. For that to be it’s principal impact underscores why the criticism of the document has been so intense.

For my part, I will continue to implement a proudly anti-racist agenda in my life and in the work of my organisations. I will continue to seek out voices who are able to kindly but unreservedly point out where we can do better. We will continue to place conversations about race and equality at the heart of our decision making every day. Little by little, with each in-built disadvantage we find a way to tear down, we are making progress towards a society where race and ethnicity is something that brings only positivity, vibrancy, and the joy of our differences. May that day come soon.