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Inc Arts have partnered with Chanua Health to provide FREE group therapy led by qualified counsellors  for people who have experienced racism to share their experiences and heal

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Over the last seven months we have been working with the industry to raise funds for this initiative and many have stepped up- see the Donor List below.

Recent Olivier Award-winner Francesca Moody says,"This fund is desperately needed for those in theatre experiencing racism. Supporting Inc Arts Minds is one more step in making the lasting change that our industry needs. We already know that diversity makes organisations stronger, productions better and enriches the theatrical life of this country. FMP is delighted to be part of that."

Dan Bates, Chief Executive, Sheffield Theatres says, "We are making active changes in our thinking and practice around these issues. This is only one of many actions that need to be taken by our industry. Part of that is acknowledging the past and beginning to undo what has been done. I can't think of a better way than by contributing to the Inc Arts Minds fund."

Sean Foley, Artistic Director, Birmingham Repertory Theatre says, "Collaborations such as Inc Arts Minds, which brings together a number of sources from within our industry, give the best possible platform to tackle issues head on - and will help enable us to move toward our goal of reflecting the diversity of Birmingham and becoming an anti-racist organisation. The REP is proud to join fellow producers and venues in this important new initiative."

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Inc Arts UK: diversity and inclusion in the arts

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Over the last seven months we have been working with the industry to raise funds for this initiative and many have stepped up- see the Donor List below. Recent Olivier Award-winner Francesca Moody says,"This fund is desperately needed for those in theatre experiencing racism.

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diversity and inclusion: a ytas working bee

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diversity and inclusion: a ytas working bee tickets

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Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: A YTAS Working Bee

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Eventbrite - Youth Theatre Arts Scotland presents Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: A YTAS Working Bee - Tuesday, 2 March 2021 - Find event and ticket information.

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Interview with Liz Pemberton (The Black Nursery Manager)

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Interview with Liz Pemberton (The Black Nursery Manager)

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https://fsf-podcasts.simplecast.com/episodes/talking-about-racism-and-anti-racism-in-early-years-education

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Talking about racism and anti-racism in early years education

Episode Summary

This week Ben and Jules are joined by Liz Pemberton and David Cahn for a conversation about racism, the work that white educators need to do on their own understanding and pedagogy, what being 'school ready' means for Black and Brown children, and how we should talk to children about racism. If you enjoy these podcasts from the Education Team at Tapestry, make sure to subscribe to be notified when we post new episodes. For more information on Tapestry please visit our website or contact us by email: https://tapestry.info/index.html customer.service@eyfs.info Twitter: @Tapestry_FSF Intro Song: Rising Spirits Music by Jay Man - OurMusicBox http://www.youtube.com/c/ourmusicbox

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Talking about racism and anti-racism in early years education

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This week Ben and Jules are joined by Liz Pemberton and David Cahn for a conversation about racism, the work that white educators need to do on their own understanding and pedagogy, what being 'school ready' means for Black and Brown children, and how we should talk to children about racism.

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A platform for anti-racist education with a Scottish perspective. A learning tool for raising racial consciousness. A safe space for engaging in critical reflections and discussions on race and education.

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The novelette Stone Hunger (2014) is unrelated to the novels, just in the same universe.CZ: Zlomená ZeměRU: Расколотая земляTR: Kırık DiyarDutch: De...

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Facebook community of practice and mailing list with peer-led conversations - previous conversations including on anti-racism, diversity beyond Black History Month which can be caught up on in Unit 7 of the group. 
https://www.facebook.com/groups/culturewellbeingscotland/learning_content/?filter=4079595462080562

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Raman Mundair discusses the urgent need for theatre to change in its post-Covid reconstruction and why representation matters now more than ever
I recently watched a YouTube video of the LA riots that took place as a consequence of the violent, racist policing of the innocent Rodney King. Faintly audible on the video was the rallying cry of 'Burn Hollywood Burn!' There was a righteousness in the voice that was undeniable. There was no doubt a need for something to be turned to ashes in order for a renewal to begin. A making of space, a clearing of the decks. With the murder of George Floyd, Sheku Bayou, Christopher Alder, Sean Rigg, Zahid Mubarak and the recent shooting of Jacob Blake we all know how far we are from justice for Black people and how much work there is still to be done. Part of this work is regarding representation so that we can understand and empathise with lived experiences other than our own: working together towards social justice must include representation on all levels including whose voices and stories we feature in our national, cultural narratives and especially the arts, literature, film and theatre.

I love theatre. I am passionate about it. As a working-class primary school aged child I was first shown an insight into the performing arts by free theatre outings arranged for under-privileged, and neglected children in Manchester by the Variety Club of Great Britain. My teachers recognised that I matched that description and I vividly remember my first outing to the theatre. I had a seat in the gods and had dressed up thinking, that's what you do when you go to the theatre. I remember being distraught that I didn't have elbow length black gloves and a lace hanky and a stole. I think I may have been heavily influenced by all the Ealing comedies and Powell and Pressburger black and white films I had avidly consumed. I made up for my lack by insisting that I wear my winter mittens and my best chintzy shalwar kameez and draped an elaborate chunni around my shoulders with pointed intention - the ensemble seemed to do justice to the grand occasion of 'going to the theatre.'

This may seem strange to some but when I heard the valid distress of the theatre world voiced by white representatives who pointed out the very real nearing conclusion that the whole theatre industry was near collapse post-pandemic, I thought of that phrase 'Burn Hollywood Burn!'

Know this: I love theatre. I support theatre. I am a playwright - I create for theatre. But currently theatre doesn't love me. I am a working-class, woman of colour, queer and disabled playwright. I am a woman who doesn't read in an easy, convenient way - slipping into the grooves left by lazy tropes. I am a woman who is multitudes and not conveniently pigeon-holed as an oppressed Asian woman rising or Asian woman exotic or the formidable high caste Asian woman flexing her intellect.

In the alphabet of theatre 'P' stands as much for privilege as it does performance. There is an unbroken chain of privileged whiteness in play from literary managers to directors to producers to lighting technicians. It is undeniable that cis white men inhabit all stratas of the theatre space with ease with white middle class women in their wake.

The world of theatre and the arts in general wants Black and brown urban and folk performance, art and fashion. This world greedily consumes all genres of our music, fashion and food. All this abundance is viewed as a commodity; it is allowed to pass through the visible and invisible borders, but our brown and Black bodies aren't. Non-white playwrights and directors who are lucky to be 'let in' by white tastemakers are then forever stuck in 'development hell' with projects or stuck in mid-career mode. This has been true of my experience within Scottish and British theatre.

I recently engaged in a Playwrights Studio Scotland webinar where I discussed at length with Valerie Turner, a theatre actor and director from Vancouver, Canada, who identifies as Asian Canadian, on the Climate of Underrepresented Voices in theatre. We lingered over the dangers of telling a 'single story' which is indeed the default in the realm of theatre. The framing of narratives is always set to whiteness. Whiteness can have subtlety. Whiteness can be queer and working-class and multi-faceted. Whiteness can inhabit multiple identities. The same possibility is not given to brown and Black narratives.

The level of research and development afforded to such stories is poor in comparison to their white counterparts. This is significant on many levels including the fact that the documentation and bodies of knowledge around Black and brown experiences are still wholly underrepresented and that in fact presents challenges in making work that truly reflects our lived experiences as we ourselves are living archives and pioneers as brown and Black theatremakers.

But still reviewers complain - something is off, something is naive, something not quite right: that essentially the work of new and emerging brown and Black playwrights and directors does not measure up to their white peers. I faced these very same issues in my brief moment 'in the limelight'. The reviews of my plays The Algebra of Freedom (a play inspired by the state-sanctioned murder of Jean Charles de Menezes) and Side Effects (a juxtapostion of a gallus Glasgow night out with, date rape and Abu Ghraib), both featured strong strains of shaming: the subtext was clear - who do you think you are 'Miss British Asian' thinking you could write a play and own a stage? How very dare you! In both cases the reviews didn't damage the bums on seats ratio - my plays were well attended - there is an audience for my work. But the gatekeepers, the commissioners, the movers and shakers who live for critical acclaim are heavily influenced by reviewers. It matters to them. It is an integral part of the ego of theatre. If like me you are a playwright of colour and have received mediocre reviews (not even bad, just average - 3 stars as opposed 4 or 5) you may find yourself, uncommissioned, unable to get a meeting and not taken seriously.

My experience of the reviewing process is that I am being shamed into silence. The latent accusation being 'Who am I to think I could imagine other worlds? That I could take up space and the stage and write for the temple that is British and Scottish Theatre?' Another issue is the fact that like the cultural gatekeeper literary managers and directors, the reviewers are nearly always white with little or no knowledge of the cultural context of the work, the inter-textuality at play and the nuanced cultural sensitivities. The default is: if I, as a white, privileged, middle class+ person doesn't 'get' or like your play, well of course why would anyone else find value in it, understand, be engaged or entertained by it?

There is a cultural lag in society and that is reflected in the arts, no more so than in the bastions of theatre. Lost generations of brown and Black playwrights and theatre practitioners who should be on par with the Davids, Lauras and Pollys of the theatre industry but instead are in obscurity or written off. As a theatre-maker of colour, you may find yourself out in the theatre world's wilderness for years and bristling when the obligatory, performative 'where are the diverse voices in theatre?' conversation starts up again.

There is no legacy for theatre-makers of colour of our hard work or the labour of dealing with situations that would be laughable if they weren't so demoralising. I have many experiences I can refer to to illustrate, including dealing with a white, male gatekeeper who set up a meeting with me assuming (from the way I write apparently) that I am a gay Asian man and was openly disappointed when my female, queer, Asian self walked into the room.

Or the plain but polished white Toast/Boden/Hobbs/Reis wearing white middle-class women who set up meetings in the Traverse bar/cafe and ensure that we are seated at a table where their eyes can rove during our 'conversation', always grazing for someone of more interest to catch their eye and dispensing with our 40-minute generic chat as a tick box exercise: meeting with BAME playwright done, non-specific advice given. Holding pattern and status quo maintained. Structural racism of course, unacknowledged. I came to privately refer to this as being given the 'Traverse eyes' ™ (!).

But these white literary managers/directors/talent executives feel more than entitled to feedback juicy nuggets such as: my script didn't quite 'ring true' because my Asian characters apparently don't read as 'authentic'. They of course assert that they are experts in exercising such judgements. No doubt they have extensive experience in the working-class, Punjabi, queer worlds I create.

Mentoring you maybe thinking could be an answer. Yes it could if you have a mentor who is open to dispensing more than adages and advice and will actually introduce you to people and share access to their networks and open up spaces in a tangible way. Otherwise it is in my experience a tick box exercise: yes, we mentored 'X' amount of BAME/emerging playwrights - done. I was once mentored briefly by a successful white, male playwright who admitted he admired my writing but made no moves to share his access to the West End and Scottish theatre world or support me during the disastrous productions of my plays. He did encourage me in the direction of an Asian theatre-maker, clearly thinking that that would be a 'good fit' - when I mentioned it wasn't, he made some passing comment about how 'Asians could never seem to get along, and asked out loud; 'Why are we always at each other's throats?'

Brown and Black people are not a monolith. We don't all know each other. We don't, surprise, surprise always like each other. We are as varied in hue and sensibilities as the white world and specifically the world of the arts. Some theatre-makers of colour are happy to work in collaboration with production teams with white people in senior positions, some prefer to work with people who may have similar lived experiences and an understanding of the nuances in play and ask for brown or Black directors, producers and actors. That is our right. We're not trying to be difficult. We're trying to create the best piece of work we can and want to share it.

Psst! Lean in and listen up: We theatre-makers of colour, may have 'stuff' going on that we don't own up to in public often, like class, caste, colourism. We don't want to feel more vulnerable under the white gaze. In my experience, theatre isn't a writer's medium for a playwright of colour - I have little to zero autonomy. I can be asked to adapt my script at will. Change the very nature of my intent. Erase intersectionality and intertextuality from the text if you want to make it to the stage because the white 'we' doesn't get it.

In Asia and Africa the origins of theatre lie in folk traditions. They are a means of communal discourse and entertainment. That is not the case here. Theatre in Britain, in Scotland is frequently inaccessible from the point of view of both an audience member and a practitioner. It functions as a filter of class, a very select few get to make theatre, and the theatre they make represents a select, rarefied lived experience.

The reason why white people are shocked by the murder of George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake and are suddenly 'woke' to Black Lives Matter' (Black Lives have ALWAYS mattered) is in part due to the lack of cultural representation of these issues. The post-Covid collapse of the theatre world is an opportune time for change. A reconstruction of an essential art form that is fit for purpose, that offers an equality of opportunity for all - a truly British and Scottish theatre where you don't have to be called Alan, David, Caryl, Lucy or Polly to write a play of note. We need root and branch change. From gatekeepers to lighting techs who understand how to light brown and Black bodies on stage to full effect. How many non-white productions have taken place in Scotland in the last 5, 10, 15 years? And no more chicken feed creative opportunities and mentoring set-ups that never lead anywhere.

I'm sure my words will be met with pantomime hisses and stage whispered 'boo-hoo-hoos' from some within the theatre world. Hard cheese they may say. But representation matters, it is a political as well as cultural issue. It may be a case of adapt or die: theatre needs new audiences and these have to be earned and attracted by offering work that includes rather than excludes them. Theatre needs me: I have stories to tell, I have a voice and I want my children and their peers to see the fruits of my creative labour. I want them to see nuanced, powerful, iconoclastic reflections of themselves on the stage because it matters and because I never did.

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Decolonising Theatre: A Playwright's Perspective

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Raman Mundair discusses the urgent need for theatre to change in its post-Covid reconstruction and why representation matters now more than ever I recently watched a YouTube video of the LA riots that took place as a consequence of the violent, racist policing of the innocent Rodney King.

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More work to do: thinking through equalities with young children in Scotland (book chapter)

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More work to do: thinking through equalities with young children in Scotland (book chapter)

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Shaddai Tembo

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Play is the Way extra | Postcards from Scotland

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IAP Specific Pre-Reading and Provocations

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IAP Specific Pre-Reading and Provocations

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Some links & summaries as well as provocations to consider!

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IAP & Anti-Racist Education Session Resources  

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ALTERNATIVE CANON TO 1945

Non-Western plays, plays by Black, Indigenous, people of color, by women and by queer writers from before 1945.

Table of Contents

1. Preface

2. Donate to These Organizations!

3. Listing of Plays

1. Armenia

2. Argentina

3. Australia

4. Azerbaijan

5. Bolivia

6. Brazil

7. China

8. Cote D'Ivoire

9. Cuba

10. Denmark

11. Egypt

12. Ethiopia

13. Finland

14. France

15. Germany

16. Ghana

17. Guatemala

18. Haiti

19. India

20. Indonesia

21. Iran

22. Ireland

23. Italy

24. Japan

25. K'ich'e People

26. Korea

27. Mexico

28. Nahua People

29. Nicaragua

30. Nigeria

31. Peru

32. Philippines

33. Poland[a]

34. Quechua/Kichwa People

35. Romania

36. Russia

37. Senegal

38. South Africa

39. Spain

40. Sri Lanka

41. Sweden

42. Turkey

43. UK

44. Ukraine

45. Uruguay

46. USA

47. Yiddish Theater

4. Further Reading: Anthologies and Anthologists

5. Further Reading: Secondary Sources on Non-Literary Traditions

6. Further Reading: Plays After 1945

7. Contributors - Please add your name here if you contribute and would like to be credited!

8. Acknowledgments & Shared Lineage

9. Source Wish List

________________

Preface

The genesis of this idea emerged in 2016 from an anonymous, ad-hoc feminist collective inspired by Guerrilla Girls (Preying Womantis). At first, the list was intended to be representative, not exhaustive. Since then, the list has steadily expanded, as more and more material came to light and our list of collaborators grew and grew.

The goal of the list in its current form is twofold: 1) to create a list of plays for living theater artists to read, discuss, adapt, and produce, and 2) to provide scholars and teachers with plays that will introduce new perspectives into theater history research, syllabuses, and curricula. We're explicitly not looking to create a new canon of texts upheld as the highest order of The Dramatic Imagination, but rather to study and value writers and texts that traditional theater history would rather sweep aside. We've all heard the tired fictions that prop up all-white, all-male theater history syllabuses and seasons ("We'd love to do a classical work by a Black writer, but there just aren't any!" "We've got to teach Strindberg-how else will our students learn about Symbolism?" "I don't know where to find any plays by Indigenous playwrights!" "We already have a Japanese play in our theater history survey course."). Hopefully, this list will help blast these lazy, ignorant excuses into oblivion.

The plays are organized in a rough chronology within each country or culture of origin, which are in turn listed alphabetically. Generally, playtexts that are in the public domain have a link; if you're interested in reading something on this list that doesn't have a link attached to it, please post an inquiry; someone in our community should be able to help you track down a copy!

The list skews heavily towards Europe, the US, and other Western states-the consequence of survival bias and colonial erasure. Within these countries, many works, such as The Drama of King Shotaway and other original scripts performed at the African Grove Theatre, didn't survive because a racist society wasn't looking out for their preservation. Many cultures have rich, powerful traditions of live performance, narrative dance, poetry, and collaborative storytelling that have never been recorded on paper in a script. The guiding principle is to meet these limitations as best as possible , include as many titles as possible, and incorporate an appendix of secondary resources on non-literary performance traditions.

Furthermore, many of these plays are records of the violent social structures and prejudices of their times. Plays by white women in imperialist-settler societies, like Susanna Rowson in the US or Olympe de Gouges in France often feature racist characters and tropes, while the Nō and Sanskrit theaters are elite traditions that often erase or elide the experience of the lower classes. They should be taught and understood carefully and in context.

Because no list is perfect or complete, there are numerous gaps here that need to be filled-including, among others, modern China, Japan, India and Mexico, Korea, Latin America, eastern and southern Europe, Africa, southeast Asia, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Oceania, and Indigenous cultures around the world. There are very few queer playwrights listed here, because of the persistence of historical homophobia and transphobia. Only two playwrights listed here (Teresa Deevy and Juan Ruiz de Alarcón) had documented disabilities.

So please help if you like and as you are able, by contributing edits, additions, captions, corrections, concerns, thoughts and questions as comments to this document and introduction. Hopefully, we can build a non-hierarchical, open-source community for dialogue and play that expands our collective scope of what dramatic texts are available for performance and study.

It should go without saying that hate speech of any form won't be tolerated.

Thanks for reading. Let's write better, more complete, and more inclusive theater histories together.

-The Alternative Canon Community

________________

THE REAL MVPs

Many scholars, archivists, critics, and historians have spent far more time than I have assembling, translating, and writing about these plays. They, and other organizations working to empower and build solidarity for BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and female playwrights and theatermakers, deserve your attention and dollars. If this canon has helped you somehow, and you feel in a position to do so (especially if you're the beneficiary of systemic bias in theater and in life), please check them out, support their work, and give generously.

Black Theatre Network: http://www.blacktheatrenetwork.org/donate-1

Latinx Theatre Commons: https://secure.touchnet.com/C20723_ustores/web/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=281&SINGLESTORE=true

Consortium of Asian-American Theaters and Artists: https://caata.net/about/

Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance (Canada): https://ipaa.ca/

Arts Administrators of Color Network: https://aacnetwork.org/

The Kilroys: https://thekilroys.org/support/

The International Center for Women Playwrights: https://www.womenplaywrights.org/

Women of Color in the Arts: http://www.womenofcolorinthearts.org/support-us/

First Peoples' Fund: https://firstpeoplesfund.kindful.com/

BIPOC List of Demands for the White American Theater: https://www.weseeyouwat.com/

________________

Armenia:

Levon Shant, Ancient Gods (1908)

Symbolic drama of inner dreams and desires, lofty stubborn idealism and stormy, soul-searching upheaval.

Hagop Baronian, Honorable Beggars (1880)

Satire about greed and human vanity.

Argentina:

José Podesta, Juan Moreira (1886)

High melodrama and true crime--with gauchos! Sometimes performed in circuses! What's not to love??? 1920 Translation by Jacob S. Fassett

Armando Discépolo, Mustafa (1921) Babilonia (Babylon, 1925)

A prolific Argentine playwright credited with developing that country's version of the aesthetic known as the "Creole Grotesque." These plays deal with Argentina's urban migrant poor.

Alfonsina Storni, Polyxena y la cocinerita (Polyxena and the Little Cook, 1932) Cimbelina en 1900 y pico (Cymbeline in 1900 and a Bit, 1932)

Storni dubbed these two plays her "Pyrotechnic Farces"; they are revisions of classic works inspired by the Spanish avant-garde. Storni was also a prolific writer of children's theater.

Australia: (THIS SECTION UNDER CONSTRUCTION)[b]

An excellent source for pre-1945 Australian works is australianplays.org

Edith Susan Gerard Anderson (?)

Katherine Susannah Pritchard, Brumby Innes (1927)

Written in the 1920s by a white Australian, Brumby Innes is one of the first plays to portray Aboriginal Australians onstage, well before a play by an Aboriginal author ever found success in Australia (that would be Kevin Gilbert's The Cherry Pickers, in 1968). https://catalog.lib.uchicago.edu/vufind/Record/57087

Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Men Without Wives (1938)

Betty Roland, A Touch of Silk (1928)

Dymphna Cusack, Morning Sacrifice (1942)

Azerbaijan:

Mirza Fath'ali Akhundzadeh/Akhundov

Sakina Akhundzadeh

Bolivia:

Anonymous, The End of Atau Wallpa (c. 1535 - 1555)

Brazil:

José de Anchieta, Na Festa de São Lourenço (Play for the Feast of Saint Laurence); Auto de Santa Ursulá, Play for the Reception of Provincial Superior Marçal Beliarte (1550-1600)

Anchieta was a Jesuit priest who wrote instructional pageants in both Portuguese and Tupi to be performed by his congregants, colonial settlers and natives alike. These plays resemble medieval pageant festivities and autos sacramentales, providing an example of Jesuit educational drama used as colonial indoctrination in the New World.

Luis Carlos Martins Pena, The Jealous Officer, or The Fearsome Slave Catcher (1845)

A nineteenth-century melodrama-or perhaps a parody of a nineteenth-century melodrama (!) (?)

Gonçalves de Magalhaes,

https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_gJAvAAAAYAAJ/page/n17/mode/2up

Gonçalves Dias, [c]

https://www.worldcat.org/title/goncalves-dias-dramas/oclc/320184918&referer=brief_results

Machado de Assis, Hoje Avental, Amanhã Luva (1860), Desencantos (1861), O Caminho da Porta (1863) O Protocolo (1863) Quase Ministro (1864) As Forcas Caudinas (1865/1956) Os Deuses de Casaca (1866) Tu, só tu, puro amor (1880) Não Consultes Médico (1896) Lição de Botânica (1906)

Júlia Lopes de Almeida, A Herança (The Heritage, 1908) [no English trans.]

Oswald de Andrade, O Homem e o Cavalo (The Man and the Horse, 1933) and O Rei da Vela (The Candle King, 1933)

De Andrade was a modernist poet and radical in dialogue with the European avant-garde of t

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ALTERNATIVE CANON TO 1945 Non-Western plays, plays by Black, Indigenous, people of color, by women and by queer writers from before 1945. Table of Contents 1. Preface 2. Donate to These Organizations! 3. Listing of Plays 1. Armenia 2. Argentina 3. Australia 4. Azerbaijan 5. Bolivia 6. Brazil 7. China 8.

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In any crisis it is the poorest and most vulnerable that suffer the greatest impacts. What does Black Lives Matter have to do with climate change? Everything - Adelle Thomas and Rueanna Haynes outline the linkages between environmental justice and racial justice.

©Geoff Livingston, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Black Lives Matter.

The global movement in support of the rights of Black people highlights the systemic and institutionalised racism that has resulted in the murders of Black people as a result of police brutality and the suppression of economic and social development of Black communities in America.

The many videos and accounts of horrific incidents of police violence have spurred protests from diverse groups around the world. People of all ethnicities are joining together to demand an end to these appalling acts of violence, including cries to defund the police and allocate resources to community development, education, and other programs that would uplift Black communities.

But, what does Black Lives Matter have to do with climate change? Everything.

In any crisis it is the poorest and most vulnerable that suffer the greatest impacts.

This has been most recently demonstrated by the telling statistics of deaths caused by COVID-19, in particular in the United States where Black and Native American people are dying at disproportionately higher rates. The impacts of the pandemic have laid bare the striking inequality in the US and its racist dimensions.

As summed up by Patrisse Cullors and Nyeusi Nguvu, members of the Black Lives Matter movement, "Racism is endemic to global inequality. This means that those most affected - and killed - by climate change are Black and poor people". It is for this reason that calls are now being made to centre racial equity and justice in seeking meaningful solutions for the climate crisis.

The direct linkages between environmental justice and racial justice have long been areas of research and activism, and the relationship between climate justice and racial justice builds on these connections. Long-standing racist policies and practices - such as residential segregation, unequal educational opportunities, and limited prospects for economic advancement - have led to increased vulnerability of Black people to climate change impacts and by extension other global crises that may emerge.

In the United States, disproportionate percentages of people of colour live in places that are polluted with toxic waste, leading to negative health effects such as cancer, asthma, degraded cardiac function and high blood pressure. Research has also highlighted that race has a stronger influence on exposure to pollutants than poverty. This means it is likely that polluters not only site their activities in low income areas, but in some cases are actively selecting locations where there are high percentages of Black people in particular.

Climate change intensifies the health impacts of pollution in these communities. For example, higher air temperatures due to global warming traps air pollutants close to the ground, further reducing air quality and exacerbating existing health issues. A recent study of 32 million US births found that women exposed to high temperatures or air pollution are more likely to have premature, underweight or stillborn babies and that Black mothers are most affected.

Black communities are also disproportionately located in areas that are physically vulnerable to climate hazards, such as hurricanes and flooding. Moreover, they are often afforded unequal levels of protection from the government as compared to protection provided for other groups. For example, Hurricane Katrina highlighted the legacy of unequal flood protection in New Orleans, where racially biased distribution of government funding resulted in subpar levee protection for Black neighborhoods.

Over 80% of the homes that were lost belonged to Black people and Black people made up over half of total fatalities. Even after Black people bore the brunt of impacts of Katrina, initial plans for redevelopment of New Orleans privileged white communities. Subsequent hurricanes have exemplified the racial disparity in disaster recovery aid issuance and prioritisation, with Black people being significantly less likely to have access to assistance for household or business recovery.

Black people made up over half of total fatalities and over 80% of the homes that were lost during Hurricane Katrina belonged to Black people. Photo by News Muse CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Climate justice and racial justice are global issues.

Just as the Black Lives Matter movement is not solely about police brutality, it's not just in America where these climate and racial injustices play out. The linkages between racial and climate justice can be seen around the world.

In the climate change sphere, it is well understood that those who will suffer the most from climate change impacts (Small Island Developing States and Least Developed Countries) have contributed the least to the global crisis. But just as in developed countries, for developing countries this inequality in distribution of impacts is also relevant at the community level.

For example, in Latin America, the most unequal region in the world, it is clear that environmental justice is certainly also a racial justice issue. Issues concerning Indigenous land, the rights of rural landowners, and expansion of energy, agribusiness and other industries are central to racial and environmental justice struggles.

Globally, the linkages between climate and racial justice have not gained the recognition they should in the broader climate change movement. At the level of international climate negotiations, the rate of progress on these fronts is still too slow. The human rights lens on climate change in the global discussion has only gained limited traction with some minor progress on the gender and climate change front.

In addition to this, systemic racism in the climate movement also results in the marginalisation of Black expertise including scientists and practitioners, as European perspectives are generally supported, prioritised and magnified. Black climate experts face the additional burdens of operating within racist structures while also trying to address climate change. The climate movement simply does not have a good track record of handling issues of equity or understanding climate change in dimensions beyond strictly environmental.

However, the Black Lives Matter movement is bringing much needed attention to these issues and will hopefully continue to spur positive change. Due to the movement, climate activists around the world are increasing their support for climate justice and racial justice.

These are complex issues and there are no simple fixes. The task of dismantling systemic and institutionalised racism requires more than superficial gestures, but instead entails assessing, changing and even eliminating long-standing systems that lead to inequality. Supporting organisations committed to racial and climate justice and eradicating policies that marginalise Black people and communities of colour are just a few of the widespread changes that must happen. The time has come for the climate change community to recognise and act upon the racial injustices that increase the risks of climate change for Black people and other communities of colour.
Climate Analytics stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.

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Black Lives Matter: the link between climate change and racial justice

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In any crisis it is the poorest and most vulnerable that suffer the greatest impacts. What does Black Lives Matter have to do with climate change? Everything - Adelle Thomas and Rueanna Haynes outline the linkages between environmental justice and racial justice.

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I am 28. Pregnant with my first child. I am packing my home for a move to what we hope will be a good place. In the box with my childhood diaries and mixtapes I throw in a huge stack of notebooks. A floppy disc labeled- my novel. A battered orange file named- my poems. The box is still unopened- I have never returned to it and I knew I wouldn't. At 28 I was done with trying to be a writer- it was a fairytale. It was not for me.

I have been silenced a lot in my life.

Humiliated and mocked into quiet retreat. From the little girl waiting for her letter to be answered by her absent father -

-to the primary school girl who stood up to cruel and casual racism in her 1980s playground- found herself in the remedial class despite being a fluent and keen reader.

To the teenager mocked by her peers for not getting the irony- missing the joke- in their racism and rampant misogyny.

To being the victim- of a short lived but violent assault on a bus, when she dared to shout back at a group of men calling her a paki.

To the home help for an elderly woman, who would frequently yell- you dirty foreign bitch - and despite the accusations of stealing, of not knowing her job and her place- still cared for her for two years.

Found a way to steal herself and silence herself, to see that woman's humanity and fear despite, let's call her Jean, despite Jean's inability at times, much of the time, to see hers.

To the student who talked about her family history- her grandmother- in a research paper on postcolonialism and women- too personal not academic. Feedback from a classmate- I found this really unfair- that she should do well because she has a personal history of colonialism - this is not what this course is about.

To that mature student (I was 21 and not that mature) with her first properly clever writer boyfriend who said her writing was too confessional- it borders on being hysterical (she was writing an experimental novel about the over sexualisation of a young brown girl growing up in Scotland- it was highly ambitious, pretentious and looking back probably quite good) Christ! People will think this is about me - she stopped writing.

She oohed and ahhed at his gritty writing about his Northern childhood. She read her books. Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Jackie Kay, like contraband, in the corners of their wee home (she put her own work away- embarrassed at her "overwrought" emotions. He left her years later for a Canadian girl who called him a prick. She thinks this is irony but she would probably need him to tell her that).

Point is- it took me a while to stop putting my writing away in boxes -to be stored out of sight. It took me a long while to take the risk to share my own stories- to allow myself worth.

I am thirty four in my local library in Dunbar. I stand with a group of mothers. We are sharing our writing. The place is full - almost twenty folk and on a Tuesday night too. We have been writing together for a year. Each month we meet here in the library. We have clubbed together for two creche workers to look after our babies. We write, we cry, we laugh, we really properly laugh- and those mornings are a longed for home- my words rush out the floodgates- I had kept them back for so long.

This writing group which we called- the writing mums- quickly becomes the most important thing in my life, which with three children under five and after the loss of a hard won career as a teacher- a traumatic miscarriage leaving me too broken, had stopped feeling like my life. I had no confidence left in myself to be outside in the world anymore but as I stood with my friends and read my poem about losing my baby, as they read their poems about the numbness of postnatal depression, about a longed for child after IVF, about the joy of watching a first step, about the joy of that first step back to yourself- I felt this release- this relief. Och, it took a while (or it took the time it took). It took me that long to understand I did not need to wait for permission to tell my story and my stories- I could give myself permission- and perhaps in community and in friendship I could help create a space that others could give themselves permission too.

As we served the wine we had brought for our audience we all were taken aside by other mothers and by grandmothers for a tearful hug and for a- that was my story- oh that was my story. I realised there was power in this- this was important. One woman said, well I wish I hadn't brought my husband - you can't expect men to listen to all that blood stuff. Oh yes, this was important. This art thing. This performing thing. This fucking hysterical thing.

In 2014, my father died. My daughter was also very ill at the time and for months I rushed from the deep despair of grief to terrifying ambulance rides - it was an awful and dislocating time. I sat one night in the parents' flat at the Sick Kids and started writing what would come to be my play- The Drift.

I was beyond fear.

I would tell my story. I would write the way I wanted to- in my own rhymes and rhythms and in my own voice. I would hush those voices that all my life had ushered me to the corners of myself, to that remedial class I'd never really left. Those voices that attacked and shamed me- I was done. I didn't care if no one wanted it- I wanted it. I wasn't sure how I would cope without it. I had kissed my father in the morgue and promised him something. I kissed my daughter exhausted in her hospital cot and promised her something too. Something it took three years of writing to understand. A promise to let him go. To be my best self for her. To bear witness. To stand for him. To speak about our history, that hidden history, to speak out against our country and the lies it tells itself which had broken him- broken him for me. I would not let it go unspoken. When my son started experiencing racial abuse at school, this promise was remade and strengthened.

But The Drift was never supposed to be more than one or two small performances to an invited group of friends and family. A pamphlet perhaps with a wee print run. It had a bigger journey than that. Would I have written it the way I did if I knew I would have to perform it to audiences across Scotland? That T he National Theatre of Scotland would want to produce it. I don't know. I am glad I did. But that fear of being taken to the remedial class returned. That fear of that quick punch to the face haunted me- as alone I walked onto stages to say Fuck you, Scotland.

I am a mixed race woman- who I often joke is only seasonally brown- I can pass. I think I can. I am a native English speaker. I have a British Passport. I have a Scottish accent. I know in some ways how this country works. I am a privileged person of colour but still I am a person of colour. A writer of colour. I feel how transient and fragile my position is. How precarious my career is- the assumptions made that I am not a talent instead a tick box. That my work is emotional and not crafted. Patchy and negligible - aye. That my success is the result of other people's good deeds. This is the thing of it- the truth of it. I know how few places and spaces I and people like me can occupy - that these opportunities are limited. Is this changing? I don't know. The rise of the Right. The short lived Black Lives Matter solidarity. The frighteningly quick backlash. The inevitable back to normal-ness and the Right still rises -taking some old allies with it. The fear was not quashed with that black profile pic- it is still there. The fear- the expectation that you will receive a quick and humiliating punch to the face (literally and figuratively) if you ask for too much-point out too much- it has not gone away. That 3am fear that you have sold yourself for trinkets- it does not leave you. And it is not always irrational and unfounded. Though sometimes it is.

What does this do to you?

I have a family to protect. I have to have the emotional energy for them. I keep my voice, my activism, my politics within the edges of my own pages and stages- in the part of my life marked work. I chose to be an artist- to choose what I say, when I say it, how I say it and in what form I say it. I find my world in community and friendship- not on twitter. I am not up for the dashed off tweet arriving like a scream, delivered like a slap, sticking around like...Reactionary self justification should be the stuff of drunken nights down the pub and should be forgiven and forgotten like Sunday's hangover- we are all allowed to be the asshole on occasion and within the privacy of friendship. But I do value those who contain and put thought into their public utterances - those who are motivated by kindness and humility. I retweet them often.

I am now 42. I have started to believe in myself as a writer. I am growing more confident in my work but I still need the safety and support of my writing groups. They are still home for me. Groups such as the Writers of Colour and the Writing Mums hold me steady. And I try to put my work in curated spaces too, spaces that are thoughtful, respectful, and careful with the work they are given, such as the wonderful Fringe of Colour, because I know how quickly women of colour are reduced and belittled. How they receive a much harsher scrutiny than their white counterparts. I have seen it. I know a little of what that scrutiny feels like and what a false narrative can do to your well being, your career and your safety. I know, I have seen, how easily deliberate misreadings of the lives, the work, and the intentions of people of colour are believed.

My daughter is no longer a baby but a bright and healthy eight year old. A few months back she started talking to a lady in a local cafe about her new book - Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls. One of these rebel girls is a young transgender girl called Coy. The lady she struck up a conversation with, said to her- well, that's just not right. Rosa replied- why don't you try and understand how hard it would be to be her. The lady ignored her. We are all so quick to dismiss those who challenge us. To label empathy and kindness as stupid or niave. To dismiss someone's lived experience as irrelevant- not the point- if it doesn't back up our point- like the student who offers her grandmother's story to their study of postcolonialism. It's not fair to bring a real life into it- this is not rigorous. This is not intellectual. These are not our rules on debate.
Why don't you try and understand ...
I vowed to myself when I left Jean's that I wouldn't be driven by my own ignorance, by my own fears and pain -into complicit silences, into hateful behaviours and easy bigotry. I am ashamed to say, over the last twenty two years, I have not always kept that promise to myself. I have let myself down time after time. I want to always be working at becoming a better human but I fail- frequently. I don't always do the work. I have not always been as open to listening and learning as I should've been. But I have always wanted to be around people that are working on that thing of growth and maturity. I seek spaces where that work is allowed and supported. I seek out people who accept that we are all flawed and as capable of change as we are of mistakes. I like to think I write and live in the grey- at the intersections. I definitely seek out friendship and work from artists that live there too. I believe art can transform us- the artist and the audience. It has transformed me. I believe that being ourselves in all our gory glory is beautiful and brave but making room, moving aside, holding space, sticking your foot in the door, wedging it open not only for yourself but for others. Insisting that spaces are safe and inclusive. Creating community in your practice and in your work. Well, that is I think truly revolutionary and properly courageous. And it's what I am coming to think is the real work of the artist.

(But you know, I may change my mind on that).
Hannah Lavery is a short story writer, poet and playwright. Her pamphlet of short fiction, Rocket Girls, was published by Postbox Press (Oct 2018) and her poetry pamphlet, Finding Seaglass: Poems from The Drift was published by Stewed Rhubarb Press (May 2019). The Drift, her autobiographical play, was produced by the National Theatre of Scotland for a nationwide tour in 2019. Her most recent play, The Lament for Sheku Bayoh, was commissioned by the Royal Lyceum Theatre for the Edinburgh International Festival 2019. She was awarded a New Playwright Award from Playwrights Studio Scotland and was named as one on BBC Writers Room Scottish Voices of 2020. She was recently selected as one of Owen Sheer's ten writers asking questions that will shape our future for the International Literature showcase, a project from the National Writing Centre and the British Council.

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I am 28. Pregnant with my first child. I am packing my home for a move to what we hope will be a good place. In the box with my childhood diaries and mixtapes I throw in a huge stack of notebooks. ...

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Learn about what white privilege is, and what parent’s can do to support their family to be actively anti-racist.

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Discover and share books you love on Goodreads.

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We have known about climate change for decades. As early as 1992 the threat was sufficiently obvious, and the science sufficiently clear, to justify a UN treaty on the topic. Yet we've only even begun to get our act together in the last five or so years. Why?

As COVID-19 reminds us, global crises tend to amplify existing inequalities in society. The same is true of climate change. Its impacts have been felt disproportionately by people of colour, both in developing countries and minority communities within wealthy nations.

For many in these communities climate change has devastating effects. It intensifies floods in south Asia, drought in southern Africa, and extreme tropical storms from Mozambique to the Caribbean. And then there's the pacific islands, literally swallowed by rising seas. But the fact that these have mostly impacted poor people of colour, not wealthy white westerners, has hindered global action.

Race has justified the systematic exploitation of non-white people and their lands, and continues to disadvantage Black and Brown people through both institutional and individual bias. But it is not the only reason that action on climate change has been slow.

Class, wealth, gender and the legacies of empire have all played a role. As have the lobbying of vested interests, an economic ideology that discouraged government intervention, and even psychological factors that make it hard for humans to process a crisis of this scale.

But we rarely talk about the impact of race. The murder of George Floyd, and the wave of protests it has inspired, reminds us how Black and Brown lives are often less valued by those in positions of power. An injustice that stretches far beyond the policing system.

Part of the recent surge in interest in climate across developed countries has been because now we are beginning to feel its effects. Directly, through the unseasonable heat of recent years, and indirectly, through images in the media of bushfires in Australia or devastating storms in the US.

Yet these kinds of climate events have been happening for decades in developing countries. While new calls for climate action are always welcome, perhaps if we genuinely valued Black lives as we value those of white Westerners it wouldn't have taken so long.

Some will argue it's natural to respond more strongly when disasters are closer to home. There is certainly some truth to this. Yet even within wealthy countries, official responses to climate events are often weaker when the victims are people of colour. One need only look at Katrina, or more recently Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, where the federal response was quantitatively poorer than for other storms of equal severity. And when storms hit cities with high diversity, such as hurricane Sandy in New York, the impacts are unfairly distributed across race and class.

In the UK, such inequities are less clear, probably because we experience less dramatic climate events. However, if the unequal impacts of other crises are anything to go by, it's only a matter of time. Recent government figures have highlighted how BAME Brits are disproportionately affected by COVID, and independent studies have shown harmful air pollution is most concentrated in ethnically diverse areas. This brings yet another harrowing meaning to the words "I can't breathe".

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Why don't we take climate change seriously? Racism is the answer

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We have known about climate change for decades. As early as 1992 the threat was sufficiently obvious, and the science sufficiently clear, to justify a UN treaty on the topic. Yet we've only even begun to get our act together in the last five or so years. Why?

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An Open Letter from theatre maker and filmmaker Annie George in response to the CEO of Creative Scotland's article about the "impact of the Black Lives Matter movement and Creative Scotland's commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion".
Dear Iain,

What I am about to say represents my personal views only, and not of any colleagues or bodies I am associated with.

I am tired Iain, so very tired, and not only because of this lockdown limbo. I have just reread your blog post. At first I skimmed it, noting the key words as I went along, ticking them off one by one - I know that script you see. But it has percolated and brewed overnight, and despite a special day today to reacquaint myself with cherished script work, your post kept flickering into my thoughts. So fingers to the keyboard again, in the hope of exorcising some of those thoughts. Never fear because your critical friend is here, the friend you say you need.

I'm glad you recognise the critical nature of this moment in time, Iain. Sure it's true to say, a time like no other. It is also the apex of many critical times for BAME artists in Scotland too - I've never liked that acronym by the way, and don't know anyone does. It doesn't describe me, and ignores wholesale the diversity within diversity. (Perhaps, a note to yourself moment: add acronym change).

It is not without some trepidation that I and other colleagues of that ilk, have awaited and observed the theatre sector's inevitable first gush, then the dribble of mea culpas and self-satisfied pledges to listen well and do better.

Your post is welcome, indeed as welcome as the sound of any penny drops in the halls of Creative Scotland, and even that of the funding incarnation before it. We artists (OK, BAME for now) have become very good at listening, having been extensively (and expensively) trained, sometimes trained to within an inch of our artistic lives. The sector is good at reviewing, reporting, advisory-panelling, but I'm not convinced that we all are equally as good at hearing or doing.

As you say, dear Iain, it is twenty one years since the Macpherson Report, in which 'institutional discrimination' was described as,
"The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture and ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, racist stereotyping which disadvantages minority ethnic people." (Macpherson, 1999, 6.34),
Speaking the words out loud, I find, helps to embed them, so I would ask you to try it - processes, prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, stereotyping etc... They echo distinctly don't you think?

And then it's been ten years since the Equality Act, and the progress that you (switching to the collective you now) say has been made has been 'in embedding principles of equalities and diversity in our strategies and practices'. What does that even mean? Undercover activity? If it's not visible, how have the institutions and organisations you fund been held to account? What are the difficult questions you have asked, and the answers you have accepted?

I'm not asking for a defence here, nor for that matter the consultancies, advisories, or the new one 'a taskforce' that you propose. So, what have you done...actually? Asking, because despite countless requests from many quarters, the numbers have been collected at times and presumably counted, yet can you honestly say they have been published in any way that gives a true picture of where we stand on diversity - where you don't have to play a lexicographical game of twister in reverse, to untangle. We know you like to collect numbers, so where do the real ones go? To some numerical undersea abyss in the Bermuda triangle?

In fact - and indulge my default setting of breaking down wordage - the prefix 're-' appears frequently in your post - renew, reinvigorating, revisions, refreshed. If the '-freshed' Equalities Outcomes haven't yielded greater representation and visibility in the first place, and your balm is more cash for clearer 'indicators' and 'Agents for Change', as opposed to actual projects which effect actual change; consultants, rather than artists who make goddamn (excuse I) art; can you not see, nay hear it...the collective screaming out, 'Nooooo! It's not going to work. You're not helping'.

You hold aloft Create:Inclusion funding as a significant leap forward in your strategy and outcomes, as a response to the lack of any BAME Regular Funded Organisations. Hailed as the solution to the 'problem' for the best part of a year before it arrived, it changed in that time and was diluted, even as the problem remained. Numbers again pulled focus. People with football pitch-sized differences in needs, skills and experiences, were thrown into gladiatorial combat against each other, in a cash Coliseum where the trophies were the many, doing more, on less. Plus ça change...

You see visibility isn't just about numbers. It's the difference between the chocolate sprinkles on top and ice cream that unapologetically contains real, chunky fruit and double cream (or a quality non-dairy equivalent for the lactose-intolerant). Trite analogy perhaps, but there's a story in that too. It's about flavour, depth and authenticity. It's about creating a movement, a wave of energy from the artist to audience, a connection between humans, the rarest of prizes in these times. As the proverb says,
'The story is told eye to eye, mind to mind and heart to heart'.
Not a word in there about an Agent for Change, to obscure the landscape, that we create in.

If I were to add up all the drip, drip, drips of funding I've had over the years, as a member of the Perpetual Development Hell-fire Club, imagine as I do, the number of properly resourced productions I could have sprung on to high profile platforms, to greater visibility and maybe even a 'Collected Works by...' on my shelf, to show that I. Have. Been. Here. I existed.
'Another year older and what have I done, my aspirations have shrivelled in the sun' (I've Been Waiting for Tomorrow (All of My Life), The The ).
I'm just plain old tired, Iain. Perhaps, because of my age, having turned (hate to see it on the page) fifty five during lockdown, or because next January I will complete a thirty stretch in Scottish theatre. That's a life sentence, however you cut it, and it feels like it. Instead, we're just going round in circles again. Been round too many times and I'm dizzy ... as well as tired.

You see, no one can speak for me better than I can speak for myself. But the time for talk is over, time to start walking it. You're not seeing us artists, Iain. We are the Agents of Change. Let us do it, better.

Best wishes, Annie

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An Open Letter from theatre maker and filmmaker Annie George in response to the CEO of Creative Scotland's article about the "impact of the Black Lives Matter movement and Creative Scotland's commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion". Dear Iain, What I am about to say represents my personal views only, and not of any colleagues or bodies I am associated with.

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From the author behind the bestselling Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, comes a podcast that takes the conversation a step further. Featuring key voices from the last few decades of anti-racist activism, About Race with Reni Eddo-Lodg e looks at the recent history that lead to the politics of today.

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What does it mean to be black and Scottish? Director Stewart Kyasimire seeks out a range of black Scots of different ages and from diverse backgrounds to hear some compelling answers.

In a seminal, identity-defining film, film-maker Stewart Kyasimire gathers together prominent black Scots from all generations to ask: what does it mean to be black and Scottish?

Stewart grew up in Glasgow in the 1980s, at a time where he felt there just weren't any obvious black and Scottish role models. Now a father himself, he is determined that his eight-year-old mixed-race daughter Yasmin grows up with a clear sense of black and Scottish identity.

In this film he brings together prominent black Scots from all over Scotland. These eminent role models tell their stories, passing on their experience to Yasmin and other young black and mixed-race Scots. How did they get to where they are? What challenges have they had to overcome? Are their experiences different depending on whether they are of African or Caribbean descent? Black or mixed-race? Brought up in Scotland's big cities or small towns? What do they love about Scotland? What do they hope for the next generation? And what should you do if someone asks to touch your hair?

By bringing together these disparate and diverse voices, this film helps to build on the community of black Scots and passes on a legacy not only to Yasmin and other young black and mixed-race Scots, but also the wider Scottish community. The message is clear: we are black Scots, and this is what it means to be black and Scottish.

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What does it mean to be black and Scottish? Director Stewart Kyasimire seeks out a range of black Scots of different ages and from diverse backgrounds to hear some compelling answers. In a seminal, identity-defining film, film-maker Stewart Kyasimire gathers together prominent black Scots from all generations to ask: what does it mean to be black and Scottish?

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doi: 10.1016/j.envpol.2014.12.014.

Affiliations

¹ UK Small Area Health Statistics Unit, MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Imperial College London, St Mary's Campus, Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG, UK. Electronic address: d.fecht@imperial.ac.uk.

² Centre for Sustainability, Environment and Health, National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), Antonie van Leeuwenhoeklaan 9, 3721 Bilthoven, The Netherlands.

³ UK Small Area Health Statistics Unit, MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Imperial College London, St Mary's Campus, Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG, UK.

⁴ Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences (IRAS), Utrecht University, Yalelaan 2, 3584 CM Utrecht, The Netherlands.

⁵ UK Small Area Health Statistics Unit, MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Imperial College London, St Mary's Campus, Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG, UK; Honorary Consultant, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, UK.

doi: 10.1016/j.envpol.2014.12.014.

Affiliations

¹ UK Small Area Health Statistics Unit, MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Imperial College London, St Mary's Campus, Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG, UK. Electronic address: d.fecht@imperial.ac.uk.

² Centre for Sustainability, Environment and Health, National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), Antonie van Leeuwenhoeklaan 9, 3721 Bilthoven, The Netherlands.

³ UK Small Area Health Statistics Unit, MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Imperial College London, St Mary's Campus, Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG, UK.

⁴ Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences (IRAS), Utrecht University, Yalelaan 2, 3584 CM Utrecht, The Netherlands.

⁵ UK Small Area Health Statistics Unit, MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Imperial College London, St Mary's Campus, Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG, UK; Honorary Consultant, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, UK.

Abstract

Air pollution levels are generally believed to be higher in deprived areas but associations are complex especially between sensitive population subgroups. We explore air pollution inequalities at national, regional and city level in England and the Netherlands comparing particulate matter (PM10) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations and publicly available population characteristics (deprivation, ethnicity, proportion of children and elderly). We saw higher concentrations in the most deprived 20% of neighbourhoods in England (1.5 μg/m(3) higher PM10 and 4.4 μg/m(3) NO2). Concentrations in both countries were higher in neighbourhoods with >20% non-White (England: 3.0 μg/m(3) higher PM10 and 10.1 μg/m(3) NO2; the Netherlands: 1.1 μg/m(3) higher PM10 and 4.5 μg/m(3) NO2) after adjustment for urbanisation and other variables. Associations for some areas differed from the national results. Air pollution inequalities were mainly an urban problem suggesting measures to reduce environmental air pollution inequality should include a focus on city transport.

Keywords: Air pollution; Deprivation; Environmental justice; Ethnic inequity; Socioeconomic status.

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national center for biotechnology information

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Associations between air pollution and socioeconomic characteristics, ethnicity and age profile of neighbourhoods in England and the Netherlands - PubMed

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Air pollution levels are generally believed to be higher in deprived areas but associations are complex especially between sensitive population subgroups. We explore air pollution inequalities at national, regional and city level in England and the Netherlands comparing particulate matter (PM10) and ...

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Coronavirus has forced Scotland's theatres to reassess, but despite lofty promises in response to the Black Lives Matter movement real change doesn't seem to be happening, theatremaker Annie George tells Arusa Qureshi

No one can speak for me better than I can speak for myself." When theatre maker Annie George wrote this in an open letter to the CEO of Creative Scotland, her intentions were clear; to highlight the inadequacy of public statements made by organisations that signify little action. The events of the past few months may have brought the industry closer together as they collectively attempt to adapt and survive, but in many ways, the past few months have also underlined the ways in which the system is not built to serve everyone in it.

"It seems to me like they're trying to save the big fish first," George explains, when asked about her thoughts on the creative industry's response to Covid-19. "They're not taking care of the minnows and I just think it's the wrong approach. What's happening is that their focus remains on maintaining structures and hierarchies."

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George has been making work in Scotland for almost 30 years and still remains one of only a few people of colour in the Scottish theatre scene. When the pandemic hit and the industry was forced to come to a standstill, it cemented her desire to reassess her place within it as well as her overall freelance practice. But it also reaffirmed her opinion on the structural inequalities that exist in the arts, only further emphasised by the way institutions and organisations began responding publicly to the Black Lives Matter movement, with lofty promises of a commitment to equality and diversity.

Annie George at the launch of the Shedinburgh Festival

"The truth is, I have no real power so I can't make change," she says about the industry's lack of action, which she has witnessed first-hand in her 30 years in theatre. "I think Black Lives Matter has really kind of blown things apart a little bit so there is a possibility of doing some shouting. But it requires other people to let go of their power, and this is the sticking point.

"What I do have is the gift of overview. I can see what's happened before and can see the patterns because cycles repeat. Which is why I wrote that letter."

Multiple studies, including by the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre and the Office for National Statistics, have confirmed that Covid-19 has had a disproportionate impact on the mortality rates of people from ethnic minorities. But further studies, for example by the Fawcett Society, have suggested that Black, Asian and minority ethnic women in the UK "have been highlighted as particularly vulnerable to the economic and social impacts of the crisis." Through her disappointment in the industry's continued lack of visible change and her dissatisfaction with the overall response from leaders to both the pandemic and the urgency of BLM, George's letter accentuates that a real, positive and organisational shift is needed to prevent the possibility of such impact in theatre, and now is as good a time as any to make it.

"In order to move forward," George says, "we have to decolonise and de-institutionalise. We're the lifeblood of the theatres, not the buildings and not the people who run the buildings. But ultimately, they're the ones that make the choices and we have to ask, who gave them the keys to that door? We have to question it at every stage."

The pandemic has certainly forced the industry to question its framework, including who the decision-makers and gatekeepers are, especially as it becomes increasingly clear that young people of colour may not see a future for themselves in theatre.

"They don't understand the work we do and they don't take the opportunity to get to know us," George says of the gatekeepers in question and general attitudes to diverse voices once they've entered and progressed through the industry. Instead, young artists of colour are able to fulfil their creative needs elsewhere, in other platforms or media, where they are nurtured and given more agency.

She believes that the key is not to try to think of a return to theatre as we knew it, but to consider how we define theatre post-pandemic and who has access to it. "The onus should be on how we live with [the virus], how we do our work and not trying to go back to some model that evolved from the 50s and 60s that excluded us anyway."

One consequence of the temporary closure of theatres has been the increase in virtual events and live streaming, which has led to greater accessibility. "I think it's good for everybody and I think it's also connected us better with people we wouldn't usually be getting in the door to speak to. In a way, it's forced the higher echelons to come and take note and speak to us."

So with this in mind and with real conversations currently taking place around inclusion in theatre, what can be done to reset the status quo? "I think there is work being done," George says, "but for me, I really think independence is the key as well as redefining what we call theatre." As she notes in her letter, "the sector is good at reviewing, reporting, advisory-panelling, but I'm not convinced that we all are equally as good at hearing or doing." For George, this is partly down to a lack of clear statistics that could give an insight into who really makes up the industry and what measures need to be taken for any further development.

"It's really sloppy and we don't know where we are unless we have the figures. We can't make plans and we can't strategise without them. I'm not a numbers person, but I know that we need that kind of information. But it's confrontational and you have to wonder whether that's one of the reasons why we don't have the figures. It puts in their face how they're not stepping up."

A new generation of creatives of colour are organising on their own, many now going online where they can control channels or moving into more welcoming spaces. George believes we should continue to interrogate how independent theatre-makers can sustain a career, what post-pandemic theatre is, and with the right figures and these young creatives in mind, ask who benefits from the various calls to action.

"When I see all the call-outs to save this building and give money to the National Theatre, I just think no!" George says. "I like your work and I'm glad you're there. But it's the people that need the help, not the buildings or the institutions."
This interview is part of a series commissioned by the Federation of Scottish Theatre to highlight the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on theatre and dance in Scotland and the connections performance makers are continuing to make with audiences. The views expressed in them are those of the interviewees. To find out more about what is happening in the sector and to lend support please follow #Love TheatreScotland and #LoveDance Scotland A message from the Editor: Thank you for reading this story on our website. While I have your attention, I also have an important request to make of you. The dramatic events of 2020 are having a major impact on many of our advertisers - and consequently the revenue we receive. We are now more reliant than ever on you taking out a digital subscription to support our journalism. Joy Yates, Editorial Director

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Annie George on post-Covid theatre: "It's people that need help, not buildings"

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No one can speak for me better than I can speak for myself." When theatre maker Annie George wrote this in an open letter to the CEO of Creative Scotland, her intentions were clear; to highlight the inadequacy of public statements made by organisations that signify little action.

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This report was conducted in partnership with EDI Scotland. EDI Scotland provides research and data consultancy on issues related to equality, diversity and inclusion in Scotland.

Data, research and evidence are powerful tools in the fight against injustice and inequality. EDI Scotland promotes robust research with a radical edge and works with organisations (big and small) to make Scotland a fairer place for everyone.

EDI Scotland is directed by Dr Kevin Guyan, a mixed methods researcher based in Edinburgh
with over nine years research experience across academia, higher education and the voluntary sector.

For further information, contact by email: EDIScotland@outlook.com, or Twitter @EDIScotland

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IN SIGHT REPORT - Intercultural Youth Scotland

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This report was conducted in partnership with EDI Scotland. EDI Scotland provides research and data consultancy on issues related to equality, diversity and inclusion in Scotland. Data, research and evidence are powerful tools in the fight against injustice and inequality.

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Bestseller by Layla F. Saad - highly educational, challenging, enlightening
https://www.meandwhitesupremacybook.com

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Since 1751 the world has emitted over 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO ₂. To reach our climate goal of limiting average temperature rise to 2°C, the world needs to urgently reduce emissions. One common argument is that those countries which have added most to the CO ₂ in our atmosphere - contributing most to the problem today - should take on the greatest responsibility in tackling it.

We can compare each country's total contribution to global emissions by looking at cumulative . We can calculate cumulative emissions by adding up each country's annual CO ₂ emissions over time. We did this calculation for each country and region over the period from 1751 through to 2017.

The distribution of cumulative emissions around the world is shown in the treemap. Treemaps are used to compare entities (such as countries or regions) in relation to others, and relative to the total. Here countries are presented as rectangles and colored by region. The size of each rectangle corresponds to the sum of CO ₂ emissions from a country between 1751 and 2017. Combined, all rectangles represent the global total.

There are some key points we can learn from this perspective:

the United States has emitted more CO₂ than any other country to date: at around 400 billion tonnes since 1751, it is responsible for 25% of historical emissions;

this is twice more than China - the world's second largest national contributor;

the 28 countries of the European Union (EU-28) - which are grouped together here as they typically negotiate and set targets on a collaborative basis - is also a large historical contributor at 22%;

many of the large annual emitters today - such as India and Brazil - are not large contributors in a historical context;

Africa's regional contribution - relative to its population size - has been very small. This is the result of very low per capita emissions - both historically and currently.

All of this data is also explorable by country and over time in the interactive map. By clicking on any country you can see the country's cumulative emissions over time, and compare it with other countries.

In the visualizations above we focused on each country or region's total cumulative emissions (1) in absolute terms; and (2) at a single point in time: as of 2017.

In the chart we see the change in the share of global cumulative emissions by region over time - from 1751 through to 2017.

Up until 1950, more than half of historical CO ₂ emissions were emitted by Europe. The vast majority of European emissions back then were emitted by the United Kingdom; as the data shows, until 1882 more than half of the world's cumulative emissions came from the UK alone.

Over the century which followed, industrialization in the USA rapidly increased its contribution.

It's only over the past 50 years that growth in South America, Asia and Africa have increased these regions' share of total contribution.

In the final visualization you can explore the same cumulative CO ₂ emissions as you have seen above but now visualizes by country. Using the timeline at the bottom of the chart you can see how contribution across the world has evolved since 1751. By clicking on a country you can see an individual country's cumulative contribution over time.

The map for 2017 shows the large inequalities of contribution across the world that the first treemap visualization has shown. The USA has emitted most to date: more than a quarter of all historical CO ₂: twice that of China which is the second largest contributor. In contrast, most countries across Africa have been responsible for less than 0.01% of all emissions over the last 266 years.

What becomes clear when we look at emissions across the world today is that the countries with the highest emissions over history are not always the biggest emitters today. The UK, for example, was responsible for only 1% of global emissions in 2017. Reductions here will have a relatively small impact on emissions at the global level - or at least fall far short of the scale of change we need. This creates tension with the argument that the largest contributors in the past should be those doing most to reduce emissions today. This is because a large fraction of CO ₂ remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years once emitted.

This inequality is one of the main reasons which makes international agreement on who should take action so challenging.

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Who has contributed most to global CO2 emissions?

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Since 1751 the world has emitted over 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO 2. To reach our climate goal of limiting average temperature rise to 2°C, the world needs to urgently reduce emissions. One common argument is that those countries which have added most to the CO 2 in our atmosphere - contributing most to the problem today - should take on the greatest responsibility in tackling it.

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Amy Sherald's "Precious Jewels by the Sea" (2019). Credit... © Amy Sherald. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Amy Sherald, Michael R. Jackson and others discuss the challenges and opportunities of cultivating black audiences and dismantling historically white institutions.

Amy Sherald's "Precious Jewels by the Sea" (2019). Credit... © Amy Sherald. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

"If you're silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it," wrote Zora Neale Hurston in her 1937 novel " Their Eyes Were Watching God." Throughout this country's history, black Americans have been reminded near daily that this remains true - both literally and more obliquely. In creative fields, for instance, from the visual arts to theater, the white gaze has long determined whose stories are told - what gets to be seen, what's given value and what's deemed worthy enough to be recorded and remembered - enforcing a seemingly immovable standard by which black artists and other artists of color are nearly always cast in supporting roles to the mostly white stars of the Western canon.

Today, though, many black artists are actively resisting that idea, creating work that speaks directly to a black audience, a black gaze, in order to reform the often whitewashed realms in which they practice. We talked with nine of them - each a voice of this moment, as the nation reckons with the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, and beyond - about making work that capturesthe richness and variety of black life. Whether it's the artist Tschabalala Self discussing the fraught experience of seeing her paintings be sold, like her ancestors, at auction or the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson searching for his characters' interiority, their perspectives distill what it means (and what it has meant) to be black in America. - NOOR BRARA
These interviews have been edited and condensed.

I realized very quickly, once I crossed into painting the black figure, that we are a political statement in and of ourselves, especially when we're hanging on the walls of museums and institutions. Because of that, I knew I didn't want the work to be marginalized any further, and I didn't want the conversation to be solely about identity or politics - our images deserve more than that. And that accounts, I think, for why I paint in grayscale.

For a long time, I felt the work wasn't good enough. But then I started asking the right questions: If I hadn't been born in Columbus, Ga., where I had to perform my identity based on how the lines were drawn down in the South, who would I be? If I wasn't so aware of my blackness because it had been placed against the stark white background of my private school, how would I see myself?

I was excited by American realism in the early 2000s and began thinking about how I hadn't seen any work about just black people being black, captured in moments that were nothing special. For years, I've been trying to find the language for what draws me to my subjects, most of whom I've cast by just running into them while out living my life, then photographing and painting them. I still can't explain it, but I always use this example of walking into a room and catching the eye of someone warm and familiar-looking and thinking, "Huh." If these people were furniture, they'd be like antique furniture, like midcentury modern, you know what I mean? They seem as though, in their spirit, they've been around for a while. I always want the work to be a resting place for black people, one where you can let your guard down among figures youunderstand.

Yet white collectors continue to ask me if I'm ever going to paint white people. It's interesting to me because it shows me they recognize the absence of themselves in a room full of my paintings but don't recognize the absence of us in the greater narrative. I always tell them, "You should go look at a history book and get back to me. Thumb through and take note of how many times you see something that looks like this, and then let's have another conversation." - As told to N.B.

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From left: James Jackson Jr., Larry Owens, L. Morgan Lee and Antwayn Hopper in Michael R. Jackson's play "A Strange Loop" at Playwrights Horizons in 2019. Credit... Joan Marcus

When I think about the now popular idea of "confronting the white gaze" in theater, I think about the fact that I was born into a black family in a predominantly black city (Detroit), where I attended a black church and predominantly black schools taught by predominantly black teachers alongside predominantly black students. The first boys I kissed were black. The first boys I did anything more than kissing with were black. When my father would sit me down to tell me about the evils of the white man, I would roll my eyes because, at the time, the man I felt most spooked by was not some racist white man - it was my father, who was black. I grew up in such a black context that eventually I had to rebel against it. So I moved to New York City at 18 to study playwriting.

In my college plays at New York University, as in most of the short stories and poems I had written in high school, the central characters were black. I remember taking a master class with the playwright Kenneth Lonergan, who brought in two white actors to read scenes from all of our plays aloud. Because this was a pre-woke world, I had to listen to them read my very black, Southern-born characters' dialogue in a "This Is Our Youth" dialect. As cringe-worthy as that experience was, it was a seminal moment: the first time I recognized white consciousness as the default in theater. But while I recognized that, I was not intimidated by it, because my default consciousness had always been black. I saw the world through artistically, culturally and sociopolitically black eyes. Because of how race is constructed, I understood how whiteness shaped the world my blackness lived in. But I did not cater to it.

In my musical "A Strange Loop" (which last year completed a run at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions and recently won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in drama), the protagonist is a black queer man named Usher who is writing a musical about a black queer man who is writing a musical about a black queer man who is writing a musical about a black queer man ad infinitum. I constructed the play in this way in order to explore the interiority of a black man without having to sacrifice him to the trauma of slavery or police violence. I wanted to capture the everyday misery of being a self. For some, this structure is about "confronting the white gaze." For me, it's about what it's been since I first began writing stories: being myself. If being myself is confronting the white gaze, then I suppose the only way I can explain my supposedly confrontational strategy is by appropriating my favorite white gaze of all: that of the character Joanne in George Furth and Stephen Sondheim's 1970 musical "Company," in which she says, "Sometimes I catch him looking and looking. And I just look right back." - Michael R. Jackson

I focus on the fantasies placed upon the female body because I can speak more earnestly to that experience (having lived it), but I think it's obvious from what everyone has seen - everyone who cares to see, anyway - that there are lots of falsehoods associated with black people.

Race is understood primarily on a physiological level: through one's color, features and build - one's literal physical form. And so racism is therefore a preoccupation with control over the body and, in turn, disdain and desire are projected onto that body. There is one kind of blackness in America that's publicly praised - one that seems to support the general consensus of black worth - while the larger, more commonplace reality of American blackness is often ignored. I attempt to explore that duality in my practice.

When I'm making a work, I primarily think about the subject in the painting. They're always imagined individuals; I don't work with real people. My main objective, first and foremost, is to create a charismatic, interesting and complex character so that they can function as a true subject instead of an object. When I'm thinking about them in relation to gaze, I think about the community I'm from, which is the black community - I grew up in Harlem - so that's who I'm imagining experiencing the work. That's the cultural framework in which I feel the work is best understood.

Still, I'm very skeptical of the fetishization of black artists that's consumed the current moment. I do not feel comfortable, for example, with my works being up for auction. It's entirely inappropriate and unnecessary to auction work, especially mine: I'm a black American artist, and I paint black bodies. I'm a descendant of slaves in this country, so it's unfathomable that people could come to me, with glee, to ask if I'm excited about seeing my work, which shows black figures and bodies, being auctioned. That shows me that people have no real understanding of black American history, and they don't understand anything about me and the specificity of my ethnicity as a black person in America. It's over their heads. - As told to N.B.

Some of my most recent collages deal with Klansmen, in the hopes of producing conversations about race relations, both contemporary and historical, here in America, especially given the rise of white nationalism from 2016 on. I am captivated by the people behind these masks. I think about their level of humanity. I think about how they exist in the world as people with souls, morals, jobs and families. We don't share the same beliefs in those ethics, but people have these roles within the Klan as individuals.

I am interested in having straightforward conversations, and I am extending an invitation to the viewer to discuss issues that are troubling, prescient and fraught - issues that some may deem inconsequential. I'm trying to communicate these conceptual narratives in a way that allows audiences from a number of different backgrounds to engage: I want to shift the focus of the conversation around predominantly white institutions so that the institutions that have grown around these hegemonic ideals can be restructured. I am not considering one specific audience when making the work. I am just focusing on the work itself, and how it relates to a white viewer, a blackviewer and a transgender viewer depends on the viewer themselves. I cease to have a sense of ownership over my work once it leaves the studio, but I want the work to have life outside of me - to have agency - and for the audience to consider what I'm trying to say. The goal is to create pieces that will be relevant long after I am here on this earth. They are my own personal pyramids. - As told to Tiana Reid

In my work, I return the power of the gaze to the subject - and usually my subjects are black. My subjects come off very strong and empowered. They don't fall into the stereotypes of black people that white people have created. That's something that has been interesting to present in the art world since 1993, when I was the first artist of color to blow up the black body to over seven feet tall and unapologetically return the gaze to the viewer. If you're presenting black people as victims, that goes a longer way to the bank, but that doesn't change the status quo of the power structure of racism (because racism is about power and economics). I have been more interested in upsetting that paradigm, in at least having the fantasy of havingthe power, if not the reality.

A lot of my subject matter is me. I was born in Jamaica in 1960, and my family never made me feel like I was a victim. They always made me feel like I was on the same level as anybody else - intellectually and, though perhaps not penny for penny, economically. I certainly wasn't struggling. Coming from that background, I've never had to walk with my eyes cast down to the floor because I couldn't make eye contact with somebody. I've always felt that I was either on the same level or above people [ laughs]. I never felt like I had to pretend to be lesser than in order to make Caucasians feel comfortable.

I'm trying to create my own propaganda for the enhancement of black folks. I'm focused on people who look like me. That's why I've returned the gaze: to let my people know that they don't need to have this subservient slave mentality. Returning the gaze is natural for me but there's a radical nature to it, too. A lot of artists don't want to talk about it because they're afraid. Some are comfortable with the monies and the accolades. As far as I'm concerned, they're not doing anything for the race. And they'll say, "Well, I don't have to. I'm just an artist. I'm not a black artist, I'm just an artist. I'm not a black woman artist, I'm just an artist." What are you talking about? When I walk into the room, they see I'm a black woman artist. When they look at the work, they assume it wasn't Muffy in New England who made the work. Why are we running away from who we are? For whose benefit? I'm black and I'm proud and, as a woman, I'm all-powerful. I am the giver of life. Put my ass on a pedestal. - As told to T.R.

I learned how to swim much later in life - just seven years ago - and through the quiet laps and the breathing, it became very therapeutic for me. Whatever I was dealing with before I got into the pool, I didn't feel the weight of it after I got out. A few years ago, I started to think about how I could explore that in my art. I learned about water-memory theory: this idea that water retains the substance of things that run through it. I thought about that in regards to the Middle Passage and how many memories must be in that water.

My parents didn't learn how to swim, and neither did their parents. That's a direct result of segregation. We didn't have access to pools growing up in Wilmington, Del., and my father would tell us stories of his own childhood spent on the Maryland Eastern Shore. Though his family lived just 10 miles away from the beach, they weren't allowed to go there except once a week. And even then they were only allowed on the boardwalk. The beach itself was a symbol of rejection.

I was thinking about the residual effects of that, which manifest in the numbers: We in the black community have the highest rate of drowning. That fear still lives with us. So, ever since I was a little girl, I've said, "My kids are going to learn to swim."

In my last series, "A Dream for My Lilith" (2020), I tried to work through this layered experience by putting black people and black bodies in water - there's a lot of emotion in that. I photographed and then painted girls swimming in and around the rippling waves and liquid blue, surrounded by flickering stars that form when light hits the water in the right way.

With this work, I wanted to discuss the intersectionality of the black female experience,as well as the theory of triple consciousness, which stipulates that black women in this country view themselves through three lenses: the American experience, largely defined by white men; the female experience, generally written by white women; and the black experience, usually associated with black men. To make work, for me, is to seek a kind of spiritual healing from all of that. While I can't say gaze doesn't affect me, I try not to think too hard about what people want from me.

It's funny, though, because I didn't think that making work would become about teaching my culture as much as it has. There's a whole black swimmer community that's reached out to tell me they're so happy I'm depicting these images. And there are people who can't swim who love them, too, and they like to get lost in the beauty of just seeing us in water. Sometimes you want to see yourself in places you've never been before. - As told to N.B.

I work in an art world that has historically been and continues to be a very white space, in terms of collectors, curators, the entire ecosystem. So I'm always concerned with how I present the artists I work with to the world, particularly because I have positioned my work life in such a way that centers black artists. To me, that means paying attention to how we articulate the mission of the artists and their work, and to how they and their works will live beyond the gallery. We are challenging the historical narrative by amplifying the artists' intention and/or providing a context that is generally not examined or considered with depth.

I have been with Jack Shainman Gallery for 12 years now, which has given me the opportunity to collaborate with so many artists who are disrupting and growing the canon. Last fall, we opened three exhibitions across our New York spaces with the 38-year-old Botswana-born artist Meleko Mokgosi, titled "Democratic Intuition." In his practice - which also includes figurative, cinematic painting - he takes existing texts and then annotates and injects them onto canvas, quite literally presenting a history that is a departure from Western hegemonic academia. Mokgosi's work is undeniablya challenge to the white gaze.

But it's hard for me to only talk about Shainman or only talk about We Buy Gold, a roving gallery I started in 2017, which happens to center artists of color. They're both continuations of how I think, but the latter had a lot to do with circumventing the white gaze, or perhaps refusing it: I wanted to create exhibitions that had a different audience, that resisted the traditional elite white space that Chelsea represents. Many people don't feel like Chelsea is a space for them, even though it's an area in New York where there are hundreds of exhibitions a year - all free and open to the public. It's crucial for art workers to help develop future audiences, whether they're patrons or people who show up and participate. We Buy Gold interrogates the exclusionary ethos of Chelsea, and is a way to bring art closer to my own position, to where I live.

Earlier this month, We Buy Gold opened "FIVE," an online video group show curated by the New York artist Nina Chanel Abney, and released a publication, We Buy Gold's deconstructed manifesto, which not only includes contributions from the artists who have shown in each iteration of the gallery but is also another means of questioning how we present our cultural production. Even as we resist the traditional catalog, archives and publications are still important in terms of people looking back and knowing what we did, where we were at and that we were here. - As told to T.R.

What is the white gaze? Which white gaze? Most of my work has challenged the idea that blackness is monolithic. The fact that I and artists like me have so aggressively challenged that position calls into question why we might suggest whiteness is something so simple.

I have people in my community who are white - friends, family, people who influence and participate in my work. If it's their gaze that we're discussing, then it's quite an informed one. If it's a bigoted white gaze, then it's different. But I don't imagine the latter having much access to my work. All of that is to suggest that I don't believe there is a white gaze that we can speak about without delving into the complexity of whiteness.

We need to have these conversations: What whiteness are we talking about? Is it the white liberal? The white New Yorker? Is it European whiteness? Is there a privilege that is also qualified by a real financial agency as opposed to poverty? This produces different kinds of perspectives. Although we like to imagine that white privilege is inherently linked to white wealth, it's not. That's clumsy at best. I'm as guilty as anyone of referencing whiteness with a tremendous implicitness.

I was quite lucky because of how I was raised in Chicago. My mother and father took it upon themselves to introduce me to a black literary and intellectual tradition at an early age. I never had to search. There was never a suggestion that they didn't exist. There are other artists and black thinkers who have had to more or less discover what they felt was an underground world of black intellectualism, having gone to schools that put more of an emphasis on white and Western traditions. When they discover black thinkers, it's a revelation to them. For me, it was never a revelation - it was the way things were - so I don't conjure black literary figures in my work as an opposition to the white underlying concepts and traditions that someone would probably think I'm reacting against. I'm not.

We would never ask Picasso why he painted white people. We wouldn't position him as an outsider, and yet we consistently find new ways to position the work of black artists as inherently being in response to the obstacles presented by a white world. I'm just speaking from how I understand the world, how I see it. And at the center of my world is not whiteness. - As told to T.R.

Mary Lovelace O'Neal's "Running With My Black Panthers and White Doves aka Running With My Daemons" (circa 1989-90). Credit... Courtesy of the artist and Mnuchin Gallery

I ran to the studio so that I didn't have to consider anybody or anything, and I've always said that my work was my way of freeing myself - from students, from my own teachers, from concepts that I had accepted. There's this painting I made in the early '80s called "Meaningless Ritual, Senseless Superstition" that has to do with coming into your studio and maybe jumping around three times, lighting your candles, emptying all of your cigarette butts and sweeping. There are these things I had to do every time to get all of that "outside stuff" out of my head.

Whenever I was teaching - at U.C. Berkeley or the San Francisco Art Institute or the California College of the Arts in Oakland - I would come home and maybe have dinner or take a shower, and then I would get dressed. I'd put on earrings and makeup and my work clothes - a blue work shirt and corduroy trousers or a wool or cotton dress, my favorite lab coat, my clogs - and go to the studio. I didn't know it at the time, but what I was doing through those little rituals was cleansing myself so that I could get rid of all the awful work my students were doing and all the horrible stuff I was seeing in the museums where I was taking those kids, and in the galleries where I'd go for openings. In my studio, I would try to come into myself. I didn't try to make work for black people or brown people or white people or red people or yellow people or crazy people. That wasn't it. I was there to deal with my stuff, to deal with me.

I knew early on in the days of the civil rights movement, when I was at Howard University as a young student and artist, that I didn't have the ability to do what lots of artists could do, like those Cuban artists and those artists in Chile in the '60s who were making these incredible heartbreaking prints that talked about the pain of oppression and taught you how to resist it. I didn't think I could make work that was strong enough to voice what needed to be said in that call-to-action kind of way.

But I am so thrilled when I see people who do really know what they're talking about, like the painter Joe Overstreet, who was one of my best friends back then, or Kerry James Marshall now. I love Kerry's work, and I love, even more than that, the way he talks about it: how he digested what he learned, and what school meant to him, and how he makes things legible for people. For me, though, I knew it wasn't going to move anybody to do anything like that. All I could do was put myself on the line. - As told to N.B.

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Nine Black Artists and Cultural Leaders on Seeing and Being Seen

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Amy Sherald, Michael R. Jackson and others discuss the challenges and opportunities of cultivating black audiences and dismantling historically white institutions. Amy Sherald's "Precious Jewels by the Sea" (2019). Credit... © Amy Sherald. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth "If you're silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it," wrote Zora Neale Hurston in her 1937 novel " Their Eyes Were Watching God."

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Children in Scotland is looking for children and young people from across Scotland, from a range of cultural backgrounds, to take part in our new project with the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS). They are the people who support teachers to be the best they can be at their jobs.

We want to make sure education in Scotland includes and represents everyone who lives in Scotland, seeing diversity as a positive part of our lives.
What will it involve?
Our national panel of diversity champions will meet online in November and December 2020 to share their opinions on lots of aspects of life in Scottish schools. This might include how schools are tackling racism for example.
What impact will it have?
You could make a real difference!

The champions' opinions and experiences will shape the next step of the project which will reach more children and young people through schools.

Then all of the children and young people's voices will form recommendations for GTCS on how to support teachers, schools and education leaders to make sure education in Scotland supports and includes all.
How do children and young people get involved?
Please answer the three questions in the application form ( click here to download the application form). You can do this in anyway you like - for example by making a film, writing a poem, or filling in the form.

Send your answers to: beheard@childreninscotland.org.uk by 5pm on Friday 30 October.

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Diversity in Teaching - Children and Young People's Views on Diversity in Scottish Education (September 2020-May 2021)

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By bringing together a network of people working with and for children, alongside children and young people themselves, we offer a broad, balanced and independent voice. We create solutions, provide support and develop positive change across all areas affecting children in Scotland.

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The links below are meant to offer foundational resources about diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism, in theatre and beyond. Theatre staff, leadership, and artists across the country are eager to make positive change in their organizations.

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Scores of estates in the West Highlands and Islands were acquired by people using the equivalent of well over £100m worth of riches connected to slavery in the Caribbean and North America.

Many would go on to be leading figures in the Highland Clearances, evicting thousands of people whose families had lived on their newly procured land for generations.

These are amongst the conclusions of a research paper titled ' Plantation slavery and landownership in the west Highlands and Islands: legacies and lessons' published today, by two university academics - both from Hebridean backgrounds.

It shows how 63 estates were bought by significant beneficiaries of "slavery derived wealth". The majority (37) changed hands between 1790 and 1855, the main period of the eviction of thousands of people. Almost 1.2m acres were involved covering 33.5 % of the West Highlands and Islands.

It is an independent study, but is being published by Community Land Scotland, the representative body of Scotland's community landowners such as West Harris, Knoydart and South Uist as part of its discussion paper series on 'Land and the Common Good'. It comes at a time when Scotland and the rest of Britain struggle with past involvement in the slavery economy. The new paper builds on the work already done by Professor Sir Tom Devine.

It has been written by Coventry University-based Dr Iain MacKinnon from Skye, and Dr Andrew Mackillop, a senior lecturer in Scottish History at Glasgow University, who is originally from Harris.

It provides the first systematic analysis of the location, size and monetary value of estate purchases financed by directly or indirectly acquired slavery money. This came either from a highly profitable involvement in the slave trade and/or the plantations themselves; through marriage into families of such wealth; or from the compensation paid by the British Government when slavery was abolished in most of the British Empire

An Act of Parliament in 1833, provided £20m compensation to slave owners (none to former slaves), over £16 billion today. The equivalent of over £120m of that figure was spent buying the Highland estates studied.

The authors stress that certain traditional landowners who had inherited their Highland land, also benefited from slavery money

The Mackenzies of Gairloch, Macleod of Macleod and the House of Sutherland, had married into slavery-derived wealth. Meanwhile Cameron of Locheil and Mackintosh of Mackintosh "appear to have been directly involved in the plantation economy in Jamaica." In the 1880s these families together held at least 690,313 acres in the counties of Ross and Inverness.

The paper argues that those who had been involved in slavery brought some of the same attitudes to bear on their newly acquired assets in Gaelic Scotland. The paper calculates that at least 5,000 were cleared from the land by this new slavery elite, although the figure would have been far higher across the whole of the Highlands and Islands. This immediate study was restricted to the Hebrides from Islay northwards and the western coast of the counties of Inverness and Ross.

Examples of evictors are given such as Colonel John Gordon of Cluny who cleared more than 2,900 people from Uist and Barra.

It is also argued that not only did slavery beneficiaries play an active role in the Highland Clearances, they helped develop the idea of the Highlands and Islands being a playground for the rich to hunt, shoot and fish.
Dr Iain MacKinnon said: Dr Andrew Mackillop said: Dr Calum MacLeod, Community Land Scotland's Policy Director, said: "The report is an important contribution to our collective understanding of how slavery-derived wealth helped sustain and shape the pattern of monopoly private landownership in the west Highlands and islands that persists to this day. Its findings are a timely reminder from history of the need to ensure that land in the Highlands and Islands and throughout Scotland is owned and used in ways that satisfy the public interest and achieve the common good." Full paper: Plantation slavery and landownership in the west Highlands and Islands - legacies and lessons Summary paper Annex - data and references "The report highlights how events, peoples, and places that are distant to us in time or in geography are still closely intertwined with Highland history and the present-day condition of that part of Scotland. The report provides important new evidence of the sheer scale of links between estate purchases in the region and individuals or families whose wealth depended to a greater or lesser extent on Britain's system of colonial slavery. It demonstrates how this intersection between slavery-derived wealth and landed property and power was particularly evident during the most intensive phase of the Highland Clearances in the 1830s to 1860s. In pointing out this connection the report is seeking to encourage informed debate over the tangled legacies of Scottish society's substantial and sustained involvement in slavery within the British Empire." "It is now clear that returning wealth from Atlantic slavery had an important impact on landownership change in the West Highlands and Islands in the 19th century, and contributed significantly to the development of extractive and ecologically damaging forms of land use - whether this was commercial extraction through sheep farming, or status extraction through membership of what has been called the 'hunting cult' of the Victorian era in which many social elites were involved. Of course, empty glens and cleared communities went hand in hand with both forms of the extractive economy."
The authors will discuss their research paper on BBC ALBA's European current affairs programme Eòrpa on Thursday, November 12 at 8.30pm.

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New research reveals extent of historical links between plantation slavery and landownership in the west Highlands and Islands

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Scores of estates in the West Highlands and Islands were acquired by people using the equivalent of well over £100m worth of riches connected to slavery in the Caribbean and North America. Many would go on to be leading figures in the Highland Clearances, evicting thousands of people whose families had lived on their newly procured land for generations.

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As I write this, I'm watching my tomato plants outside being battered by ferocious winds and I wonder how many of them will survive. It is perhaps a useful metaphor for the times we find ourselves in. Recent global events have seen the chill winds of inequality and social injustice rip through society and our cultural landscape.

Many of the sector's freelancers and independents are facing the full force of the storm, wondering what will be left by the time it subsides. Others are lucky enough to have some safety and shelter for the moment, but who knows what tomorrow will bring. There is so much uncertainty about what the future will look like in all aspects of our lives and our ability to be resourceful, imaginative and compassionate is being severely tested.

Our social and cultural ecosystem is fragile. Its rich diversity needs to be nurtured and protected especially during such tempestuous times. Those of us who have worked in the margins, on the fringes, or between the gaps of the perceived 'mainstream' and what is identified as 'community art', know how uneven the playing field is - and always has been. The coronavirus crisis has highlighted that in sharp relief, while also making the 'mainstream' vulnerable in ways they have never experienced before.

We have always known that power resides in the hands of the few and the distribution of financial resources is unequal. The arts have for the most part served to reinforce a very particular type of cultural hierarchy, experience and narrative. A narrative that is largely western, white, male, and dominated by the values and views of the upper and middle classes. A narrative and approach which protects the status quo and reinforces the world view as seen through the lens of the elite (sometimes very overtly and sometimes in nuanced ways that not everyone notices).

Crisis points invoke radical change

Covid-19 has of course thrown some of that into disarray: a global pandemic that has impacted profoundly on all aspects of our lives. It has highlighted the systemic, structural inequalities in the UK and revealed starkly the devastating effects of austerity and poverty on our communities. Through Covid and Black Lives Matter we can also see vividly the disparity in access, resource and opportunity within our cultural sector for those who do not fit the majority narrative as defined by the powerful. Perhaps therefore it is not surprising that the battle lines are drawn between those striving to reassert and re-establish what has gone before, with those who seek to grasp this moment of crisis and disruption to radically reimagine our collective futures.

For many it continues to be a time of intense challenge and difficulty. The stormy weather might eventually break but it looks like it's going to be with us for some time yet. And when you are in the thick of the storm it is hard to imagine a future as you struggle to survive from one day to the next. There are some great conversations and Zoom gatherings happening, and some extraordinary shifts in ways of working and responding to wider civic and social responsibilities, but we have a lot of work to do to get our own cultural sector house in order.

We need to collectively find a way to sit with some uncomfortable truths, to accept responsibility for our failings and recognise our acceptance of structures that perpetuate inequity. We need to relinquish power where we have it and create space for new possibilities, if we truly seek to encourage cultural democracy.

There are many, like me, who are battle weary and have the scars to prove it. We have witnessed much over many years, fought hard and been the change we've wanted to see and shown what could be possible. But we've also seen the gains taken away from us when times get tough, or, when we've breached some invisible boundary. It suddenly becomes apparent that only a certain amount of change and radicalism is possible.

The crossroads of possibility

The pandemic is testing us all in many ways. How honest are we going to be? How open are we really to creating a way of working and being that is different to what has gone before? How serious are we really about making a cultural sector that is more equitable, rich in the narratives it embraces, and one that genuinely seeks to celebrate our complex, different lived experiences and harnesses the power of our diverse voices?

If we are serious then that requires significant behaviour change and reallocation of resources and finances. Are we really ready for that?

How we tell our stories is as important as what stories we tell and who tells them. Our lives are messy and complicated, our stories never neat and tidy, packaged into specific cultural boxes of 'Black', 'Asian', 'Disabled', or any kind of 'Other'. What would happen if we embraced that messiness, created space for the making and sharing of work that celebrates difference because each of us sees and experiences the world differently.

Radical innovation, surprise and interpretation comes because we see the world through a different lens to the norm. So much of what is deemed to be important and of quality in the arts is shaped by the personal taste and opinion of a small, niche crowd, and services a small, niche market. If we are serious about cultural democracy then we need to fundamentally change the rules of the game and embrace the uncertainty, encourage the random and surprising, and celebrate the difference we can make.

Kully Thiarai is Creative Director and Chief Executive Leeds 2023
Leeds2023

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As I write this, I'm watching my tomato plants outside being battered by ferocious winds and I wonder how many of them will survive. It is perhaps a useful metaphor for the times we find ourselves in. Recent global events have seen the chill winds of inequality and social injustice rip through society and our cultural landscape.

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Equality and Diversity: Part 5 - Race and ethnicity

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Thank you for visiting Nursery World and making use of our archive of more than 35,000 expert features, subject guides, case studies and policy updates.

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Just why do we have concerns about campus officers (COs), and how does connect with our anti-racist activism? As a follow-up to our earlier post about the history of campus officers in Scotland, this article will discuss issues around racial profiling, racialisation of children, and how they inform concerns around officers being in schools. These different strands of thought come together in deep ways to govern the lives of racialised others in school settings, and are what we need to grapple with to effectively interrogate the presence and potential oppressions brought by COs.

Before discussing the facts around racial profiling, it is useful to look first of all at what we mean by "racism" and just why we bring it up in this campaign around campus officers. Definitions of racism that emphasise interpersonal abuse/violence result in treatment which would involve "educating" the racism out of society (perhaps by focusing on unconscious bias or hate crime). But a structural explanation helps us get to grips with the deep racialised inequalities of daily life in a world where vanishingly few would openly call themselves racist. How does racism persist, and in fact get worse, when many avow that the effects of racism today are less destructive? Looking at a structure allows us to understand that racism is not just what shouts at us in the street, but also that which exists without a face and flows through life often without fanfare or acknowledgement. It is the slippery sense that things benefit those racialised as white (along with the multiple intersections of power that hold privilege in society). Structural or institutional racism is what we focus on here. This idea of racism not simply being name-calling but rather a system for organising and sorting life outcomes according to how one is racialised forces us then to consider how schools fit into this (such is the purpose, after all, of this partnership between The Anti-Racism Educator and Glasgow Prisoner Solidarity).

If schools in Scotland are a productive force (meaning not neutral or just receptive, but actively making material change) when it comes to maintaining structural racism, then how does this force us to examine the presence of campus officers in a number of schools? To understand this we must look at how policing has disproportionate negative impacts on people of colour outside of school, for which we have a great deal of data.

First, some facts on what racial profiling looks like in Scotland. We may speak and have heard about it more in other settings, but it is clear that people of colour are routinely singled out for inspection by law enforcement at a disproportionately high rate. CRER have on this and shown how policing acts to add an extra burden upon the shoulders of people of colour. They found that black people are up to five times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police, to which the reaction of Police Scotland was less than accepting and grateful. The case of the killing of Sheku Bayoh is a concrete instance of how calls for institutional racism within Scottish police have been routinely pushed back against both public and in private. Stories of how people of colour in Scotland are excessively policed. All of this shows how the institution of the police is often one that hampers, rather than protects, the freedoms people of colour have in Scotland.

This understanding must be accompanied by accounting for the role of in schools. Whilst reporting on suspicions of radicalisation is not a statutory duty here in Scotland, the logics underpinning the agenda are certainly not absent, and anti-Muslim racism is a of school life right across the country. We should also account for the role migration status plays in structural racist violence, and that people in the asylum system are some of the most vulnerable when it comes to and receiving humane treatment when it comes to peers, and the . Taking in these facts around racial profiling and the general ecosystem of racism in Scotland, we can now turn to what role schools play in all of it.

Taking structural racism to be a given, then we should consider if and how Scottish schools serve to perpetuate and continue to give life to it. As previously mentioned, we should think of schools as not just being receptacles into which racism is poured by the presence and speech of unpleasant individuals (whether they be staff, children, or families), or spaces in which racism only lives to be challenged. This view furthers the cause of a liberal anti-racism which contends that racism is individuals, but not institutions and certainly not cultures, histories, or the hallowed spaces in which our children are taught. Against this liberal conception, are a part of the wider culture previously discussed in which racism lives and is a perfectly normal part of our existence. As per critical race theory (CRT), it is almost mundane. It exists and is to how schools in Scotland work.

In appreciating the varied ways racism presents itself in daily life, for children we need to also consider how the very idea of childhood has from its conception been a racialised one. While childhood is often considered to be a time of freedom, play, and innocence, these apparent facts are not often read on the bodies of racialised minority children, and particularly those who are black. Frederick Douglass spoke of "white children [being] permitted to mature out of servitude" while black children may gain an adult body but be condemned to a childlike mind forever, and therefore need to be policed and controlled as such. More recently Audre Lorde said that "Black children are often preoccupied with survival within a fundamentally anti-Black culture, and therefore 'never allowed to be children.'" Black children are simultaneously stripped and loaded with autonomy which white children do not have to either lack, or bear the burden of. If black and other children of colour lead lives with racism forever clouding their vision and regulating their speech and movements, how might a campus officer who has moved from the street to the classroom fit into this?

We have embarked upon this campaign to bring together these two well-documented facts. If schools and the police both perpetuate racism in distinct and observable ways, what may the effect of the presence of COs be? What are the experiences of racialised minorities with them? While we can have hypotheses and are certainly guided by the set by challenging police presence in schools in other countries, we must now investigate it in our settings here in Scotland.

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Just why do we have concerns about campus officers (COs), and how does connect with our anti-racist activism?

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No Problem Here: Understanding Racism in Scotland 

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No Problem Here: Understanding Racism in Scotland 

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Back cover text:
Does Scotland have a problem with racism?
With its 'civic nationalism' and 'welcoming' attitude towards migrants and refugees, Scotland is understood to be relatively free of structural and institutional racism. As the contributors to this book show, such generalisations fail to withstand serious investigation. Their research into the historical record and contemporary reality tells a very different story.

Opening up debate on a subject that has been shut down for too long, No Problem Here gathers together the views of academics, activists and anti-racism campaigners who argue that it is vital that the issue of racism be brought into the centre of public discourse.

Scotland's role in maintaining and extending slavery across the British Empire is finally beginning to receive the attention it deserves. Yet there is much more that needs to be said about racism in Scotland today.

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Does Scotland have a problem with racism? With its 'civic nationalism' and 'welcoming' attitude towards migrants and refugees, Scotland is understood to be relatively free of structural and institutional racism. As the contributors to this book show, such generalisations fail to withstand serious investigation.

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Naomi Klein - Extract from "On Fire", Stop Trying to Save the World All By Yourself (p130)

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Naomi Klein - Extract from "On Fire", Stop Trying to Save the World All By Yourself (p130)

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This Work Isn't For Us by Jemma Desai (2020) 

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This Work Isn't For Us by Jemma Desai (2020) 

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Two years after the stark revelation that only 1% of British children's books featured a main character who was black, Asian or minority ethnic, the proportion has increased to 5%, according to new analysis. But a child from an ethnic minority background is far more likely to encounter an animal protagonist when reading a book than a main character sharing their ethnicity.

Two new reports into representation in children's books are published on Wednesday, with the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) finding that 5% of children's books published in the UK last year had an ethnic minority main character, compared to 4% in 2018 and just 1% in 2017.

We need to make sure that the incremental increase doesn't make us complacent, or doesn't make us feel like we're kind of done

Farrah Serroukh, CLPE

The number of books that featured any black, Asian or minority ethnic characters also increased to 10%, up from 7% in 2018 and 4% in 2017. This is still well below 33.5%, the proportion of primary school aged children who are from a minority ethnic background.

"We're pleased that it continues to go up, year on year, but the starting point was just so low. And even where we're at, when you step back, that's still so disproportionately low that we need to make sure that the incremental increase doesn't make us complacent, or doesn't make us feel like we're kind of done," said Farrah Serroukh, who directed the CLPE project. "We want to encourage the publishing industry just to continue to strive for better."

The report also reveals that some publishers had pushed back against the CLPE's past research, and asked them to also report on the number of animals in children's books, hypothesising that it would "go some way towards qualifying the lack of ethnic minority presence". But the publishers said that 38% of their books featured animals or inanimate objects as main characters, meaning that children are almost eight times as likely to encounter an animal main character than a human main character who isn't white. This fixation on animals, write the report authors, "diverts the attention, energies and efforts of stakeholders from addressing the real issue".

"Given that ethnic minority presence makes up such a small proportion of these human casts, these self-reported figures further illustrate the ways, in which under-representation can impact on reader identity and shape reader outlook," says the report.

A second report into diversity, from children's reading charity BookTrust, found small growth in the number of people of colour working as authors and illustrators in the UK over the last two years. In 2019, just under 9% of children's authors and illustrators were people of colour, creating 7% of titles. In 2017, 6% of authors and illustrators were people of colour, behind 4% of titles. The number of people of colour debuting as authors and illustrators also doubled over the period, to 24, but the report notes that almost half of these were self-published or published by a hybrid publisher.
'Do black people read?' What my years in publishing have taught me about diversity in books | Natalie Jerome
"Things are going in the right direction, but these things take a long time to change, and they need everybody to work together on them," said Jill Coleman, director of children's books at BookTrust. "After the first report, people were shocked to see just how bad things were in black and white - there's kind of no getting away from the numbers. I think there has been quite a change in people's attitudes, due to all sorts of things going on since the last report was published, not least Black Lives Matter, which really did impact on publishers. And so publishers have a different attitude now, they're much more interested in making change, and are aware that the situation is not a good one."

BookTrust is challenging the publishing industry to increase the number of creators of colour in the UK to 13% by 2022, when it will publish its next report.

Sarah Crown, director of literature at Arts Council England, which funded the CLPE report, said regular surveys had been "crucial in helping to address historic imbalances and lack of opportunities".

"While it's encouraging to see consistent improvement over the past three years, there is significantly more work to be done, to ensure all children can see themselves in the books they read and that the children's publishing industry reflects the diversity of 21st-century Britain," she said.
Topics

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Children's books eight times as likely to feature animal main characters as BAME people

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Two years after the stark revelation that only 1% of British children's books featured a main character who was black, Asian or minority ethnic, the proportion has increased to 5%, according to new analysis. But a child from an ethnic minority background is far more likely to encounter an animal protagonist when reading a book than a main character sharing their ethnicity.

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Naomi Klein - Extract from "On Fire", Stop Trying to Save the World All By Yourself (p131)

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Naomi Klein - Extract from "On Fire", Stop Trying to Save the World All By Yourself (p131)

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Lola Olufemi & Minna Salami at Edinburgh Book Festival 2020

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Lola Olufemi & Minna Salami at Edinburgh Book Festival 2020

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Watch free online: Lola Olufemi & Minna Salami: Critical Reflections on Feminism

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From Fri 21 Aug - Since 2010, the award-winning blog MsAfropolitan has connected feminism with critical reflections on contemporary culture from an Africa-centred perspective. Its founder is Nigerian-Finnish writer...

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Let's talk about ... racism.

Chapter 2: Let's talk about ...bad-mouthing

Chapter 3: Let's talk about ...leaving someone out or

ignoring them

Chapter 4: Let's talk about ...understanding people who are different from

themselves

Chapter 5: Let's talk about ... negative messages

Chapter 6: Let's talk about ... what a setting can do about

racism

Chapter 7: Let's talk about ... how to develop an anti-racist

curriculum

Chapter 8: Let's talk about ... our heroes.

Chapter 9: Let's talk about .... challenging racism in the

early years

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Creating an Anti-Racist Culture in the Early Years: An Essential Guide for Practitioners

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At a time of growing evidence of racism across many countries and cultures, Creating an Anti-Racist Culture in the Early Years will help those working with young children recognise racism, name it for what it is and help their young pupils understand that difference is nothing to be feared.

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Last May, my friend James married his drag persona, Diane A. Lone, in a performance art ceremony in San Francisco. It was in honor of his 30th birthday, meant to commemorate and remind himself to uphold tenets of self-love. As party favors, he gave out copies of bell hooks' 2000 text All About Love: New Visions. Stripping away its cloaks of sex, romance, and desire, the famed feminist theorist instead asks we consider love as a verb, not a noun, and nurture our own spiritual growth as well as that of others. "When we see love as a combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility, we can work on developing these qualities or...we can learn to extend them to ourselves," she writes.

In some ways, the teachings of self-love run through the entirety of hooks' decades-long career. Because you must always love yourself enough to believe what you have to say has value, and that your voice matters.

Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, she would adopt for her pen name bell hooks from her maternal great-grandmother. hooks would choose that name as an acknowledgement of matriarchal legacy, and use its lowercase letters to call attention to that message, rather than her own persona.

Coming of age in the deeply segregated south, hooks sought respite from social oppression through literature and writing. In particular, she loved the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In high school, hooks also drew inspiration from Toni Cade Bambara's 1970 anthology The Black Woman, which featured stories, essays, and poetry by a then-emerging group of black women writers that included Alice Walker and Nikki Giovanni. Where few texts had done before, these writers tackled race, sex, politics, body image, and countless other topics at a time when feminism was not yet seen by black men as a relevant part of the civil rights movement.

hooks at one point dreamed of being an architect, but found her ultimate release in the freedom of expression - something difficult to come by as one of seven children in a household she would later describe as dysfunctional. She graduated from Stanford University in 1973 with a degree in English Literature. While in college, at 19, she began working on what is now known as a foundational third-wave feminist text, Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Inspired by Sojourner Truth's legendary 1851 speech of the same name, hooks began writing the book after seeing a dearth of black women's history represented in and out of academic contexts. The process of writing Ain't I A Woman took seven years. In the meantime, she also published her first chapbook of poetry, And There We Wept, in 1978.

Calling Ain't I A Woman "a love letter from me to black women," hooks contemplated the role of black women in society from slavery through 1980, the year before the book's publication in 1981. She explored the grave error committed when their stories and experiences are relegated to the back shelf, specifically when developing feminist narratives; how black women in particular have been affected by sexism and racism and what that means for black womanhood; and the pursuit of an all-encompassing equality. "[She] asked us to consider seeing black women as leaders, as beautiful," says Dr. Soyica Colbert, Professor of African American Studies and Theater and Performance Studies, Chair of the Department of Performing Arts, and Director of Theater and Performance Studies at Georgetown University.

"As our world shifts, [hooks is] also shifting with it, and that gives us a road map to see how black feminism is changing and how questions around gender, sexuality, and race transition as well," Dr. Colbert says.

It was with Ain't I A Woman that hooks also established her signature writing style. While certainly an academic and a theorist, she chose to use clear, accessible prose to discuss her ideas so as not to limit discussion to the academy. "She's creating theory, and most of the time when we think about people who are writing theory, it's usually in a way that's very dense and hard to decipher and that is not normally engaged by the general public," Dr. Colbert says. "Part of what feminism is trying to do is to engage in consciousness-raising in a social movement, so if people understand what the theory you're creating is, it's then very helpful with engagement." The populist nature of hooks's writing means she has appeared as much on college syllabi as in independent bookstores over the last four decades.

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How bell hooks Paved the Way for Intersectional Feminism

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Last May, my friend James married his drag persona, Diane A. Lone, in a performance art ceremony in San Francisco. It was in honor of his 30th birthday, meant to commemorate and remind himself to uphold tenets of self-love. As party favors, he gave out copies of bell hooks' 2000 text All About Love: New Visions.

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Vanishing Points

Vanishing Points is a new anthology of cultural criticism, focusing on the making, watching and conditions of Live Art and performance in the UK today. Vanishing Points is edited by Salome Wagaine, with deputy editors Ava Wong Davies and Ben Kulvichit, and designed by Chani Wisdom.

The book features contributions from Ava Wong Davies, Zarina Muhammad, Ben Kulvichit, Season Butler, Jack Tan, Salome Wagaine, Marjorie H Morgan, Rajni Shah, Selina Thompson and Dr Cecilia Wee.

It is co-published by LADA and Diverse Actions, a Live Art UK initiative, championing cultural diversity in the sector and marks the final point of three years of activity. Supported by an Arts Council England Ambition for Excellence grant, Diverse Actions is managed by Cambridge Junction on behalf of Live Art UK.

Rest. Stop., an essay by Salome Wagaine in Vanishing Pointsis available to listen to online.

Image Credit: Happiness Forgets (2019), Season Butler, SKIN IN THE GAME, Chan-Yang Kim

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Vanishing Points - LADA Live Art Development Agency

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Vanishing Points is a new anthology of cultural criticism, focusing on the making, watching and conditions of Live Art and performance in the UK today. Vanishing Points is edited by Salome Wagaine, with deputy editors Ava Wong Davies and Ben Kulvichit, and designed by Chani Wisdom.

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We live in one world made up of differences and these should continue to be celebrated in early years provision as they currently are. But this celebration of diversity must also address the very existence of racism and never leave it unchallenged, says Sandra Smidt.
Let's talk about racism Politics in the nursery?
UN Convention on the rights of the child Article 2: The convention applies to every child without discrimination, whatever their ethnicity, gender, religion, language, abilities or any other status, whatever they think or say, whatever their family.

Many people blanch at the mere suggestion that politics plays any role in the nursery. Peter Moss - as long ago as 2007 - wrote a paper on this subject and I read it then and found it significant and my opinion has not changed. The paper was entitled "Bringing politics into the nursery: Early childhood education as a democratic practice".

In this piece, Moss suggests that institutions for children and young people, like schools and nurseries, could and should be places of political practice - particularly democratic political practice. If you think carefully about what you would expect your child to learn in the early years you might talk about learning to read and write, to play with other children and be safe and happy while her parent or parents are at work.

I think you would agree that young children need to learn to be members of a community, to use and share resources and communicate with others; to think about things that interest or scare them and talk about their ideas, feelings, hopes and concerns. Does this proposition make sense to you or would you object to taking this stance? Those of you familiar with the famous nursery schools set up by Loris Malaguzzi in Italy will know that the children there produce startling images, reveal insights into how societies work, collaborate, communicate and join in making decisions and choices with each other and with the adults. They are functioning as little citizens in democratic institutions.

You will have noticed that I refer to the child as 'her'. I will continue to use this throughout the book.

What do you think about this so far? Does it make you anxious or would you like our small children to be viewed as little citizens? I am certain that very young children, in making sense of their world, develop an interest in other people, new experiences, how things work, what is good and bad, who is right and wrong and much, much more.

For Moss democratic practice means that the child is seen as being a competent citizen, someone with ideas and opinions worth listening to and an expert on her own life. She has the right and ability to join in making collective decisions. Moss joins with Malaguzzi in recognising that even very young children - and, of course, adults too - have a hundred languages to express their ideas and thoughts and feelings. They can speak and read and write and paint and make and take down and build up again. More than having a hundred languages to "speak", the competent child can also listen to and pay attention to the hundred languages.

Parents too can be seen as competent citizens because through their life experience they have developed opinions, points of view, interpretations and ideas which may be rooted in their own experience as parents and citizens. They have and develop their own experience, points of view, interpretation and ideas ... which are the fruits of their experience as parents and citizens. The adults working with young children assume what Oberhuemer (2005) called " democratic professionalism ", which means understanding their roles as practitioners of democracy. While recognising that they bring an important perspective and a relevant local knowledge to the democratic forum, they also recognise that they do not have the truth nor privileged access to knowledge.

What values do you think need to be shared by all those involved in the democratic setting?

According to Moss democratic practice needs certain values to be shared among the community of the early childhood institutions and offers these (based on Rose 1999) for consideration:

a respect for diversity, which relates to the ethics of an encounter: such a relational ethics was foregrounded by Dahlberg and Moss (2005) in their discussion of ethics in early childhood education. (It may help to know that a relational ethic is knowing what the right thing to do would be);

a recognition of multiple perspectives and diverse paradigms - which means that there is more than one answer to most questions and that there are many ways of viewing and understanding the world, a point to which I shall return;

welcoming curiosity, uncertainty and subjectivity and accept the responsibility that they require of us; making sure that children know that they can ask questions and are entitled to a serious and meaningful response.

critical thinking which requires "introducing a critical attitude towards those things that are given to our present experience as if they were fixed or timeless, natural and unquestionable". It means being able to challenge the sayings, values, practices of one's time and received wisdom ... What this means, put more simply, is that children should be enabled to question things that might seem obvious or right in terms of their experience.

I asked a group of students what they understood by these terms - diversity, curiosity, uncertainty and critical thinking - and what they thought.

Helena: Of course you have to have respect for diversity. We are all different. Even two girls of the same age will be different. We are all individuals and we are all entitled to respect.

Jaime: Well, in theory, you are right but I don't respect the views of racists and I don't respect the ways some people talk about other people calling them names.

Omar: I think you are entitled to dislike individuals but not to label a group of people. For example I don't like my next door neighbour because he is a racist but I don't call him a fascist to his face!

Emmanuel: On my teaching practice there were two little boys who ganged up against one smaller boy and taunted him, called him dirty and smelly just because he was black and they were white. I did try to deal with it but the class teacher just said "Well, boys will be boys", which was not very helpful.

Jodie: I was interested in how a white child in the nursery where I go kept touching the skin of a new black child in the class. I thought it was just curiosity and it did not offend me. I asked the white child why she was touching the new child's skin and she said: "I thought it might feel hot". I thought that was intriguing.

(Personal notes)

Let's think some more about what we mean by racism.

The word "race" is said to have come about in early attempts to categorise people according to their physical differences and similarities - features such as colour of skin or other physical characteristics - and things such as curly or straight hair, height, facial or other visible features. This is not rooted in any scientific basis and today the term is falling out of use. If you look up its meaning you might not find it, or you might find it merely applying to people competing in or enjoying races!

When I lived in South Africa I was classified as "white". I had no choice about it and could not change my race had I ever wanted to. My skin colour alone determined that I was entitled to privileges denied to people whose skins were black or shades of brown and who were classified then as being mixed race or "coloured" (as it was called in apartheid South Africa).

The traditional definitions of race and ethnicity are related to biological and sociological factors respectively. Race refers to a person's physical characteristics - things like bone structure and skin, hair or eye colour. Ethnicity, however, refers to cultural factors, such as nationality, regional culture, ancestry, religion and language.

An example of race is usually expressed as having brown, white or black skin (all from various parts of the world), while examples of ethnicity could be Greek or Han Chinese or Buddhist. Your race is determined by how you look while your ethnicity is determined by the social and cultural groups you belong to. You can have more than one ethnicity, but you are said by some people to have only one race, even if it's "mixed race". When I am asked about my ethnicity, I want to say " white South African English/Afrikaans/Italian-speaking British passport holder atheist/Jewish expat - immigrant ".

However tricky it is to define racism it is apparent that the characterising or labelling of people according to their physical characteristics or the customs and values and beliefs they hold is still evident in many parts of the world and is the basis for extreme reactions such as hatred. For me, racist means more than prejudice because there is such a history of the horrors that have been done in its name. Let's try and look at what two black African leaders said about racism:

1. At the Global Convention on Peace and Nonviolence in New Delhi on 21 January 2004), Nelson Mandela, the South African leader imprisoned for opposing the racist government, said that religion, ethnicity, language, social and cultural practices are all elements which enrich human civilisations and add to the wealth of our diversity. He questioned why they should be allowed to become a cause of division, and violence. This raises the question of why we should demean our common humanity by allowing that to happen.

2. At a conference in Belgrade in 1961, Haile Selassie, political leader in Ethiopia, reminded the audience that all people strive for a better life, and hope to educate their children even though they, like him, had not been well educated. All parents want to shelter and clothe their children, spare them from cruel diseases, have opportunities to improve the quality of their lives. The danger is that many need to be reminded of the possibility and dangers of doing this at the expense of others. The inequalities embedded in many societies give rise to fear in some and hatred in others. Where the rich and privileged and the very poor encounter one another it is often fear, greed, envy and even hatred of those who are different from them. This, as we know, is often the root of racism.

Here are two Oxford Dictionary definitions of racism. Please read them and think carefully about whether you think either or both are racist.
The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.
Racism is prejudice, discrimination or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.

Racism, in essence, is the process of making something about a person or a group of people who are unlike you in some way or ways appear to be inherently bad. This can refer to power and position (what work they do, where they live, for example), or to physical characteristics (having black skin or curly hair) or to cultural things (the language they speak, their religion and its customs), or to social things (like their position in society, the people they associate with, the clothes they wear) ... almost anything.

What we need to do is understand that racism is a system adopted by those who have some power to group together to ensure that they hold on to their positions in society by denying people who are different from them from taking or sharing the benefits. The apartheid regime in South Africa was a prime example where all aspects of life were organised for the benefit of the white people and the enslavement of the black people. When Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president of South Africa in 1994, he stated that no one is ever born hating another person because of the colour of his or her skin or their background or religion. It is apparent then, that people must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can also be taught to love, which he believed comes more naturally to the human heart than the fear of or hatred of others.

These words mean a great deal to me because they reveal that no one is born racist: it is a learned behaviour. This means that a person who reveals racist actions or words must have learned them from someone else.

Many of you reading this may remember the murder of black student Stephen Lawrence. In the inquiry in 1999 into this racist murder Macpherson defined institutional racism as " the collective failure " of an organisation or body of people to provide appropriate and professional services to people on the basis of their skin colour, culture or ethnic origin. We recognise racism through the negative or prejudicial processes, attitudes and behaviours which may occur through lack of knowledge, unwitting prejudice, ignorance or thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.

Racism and the law in the UK
I have some difficulties with Macpherson talking of acts of hatred being unwitting or thoughtless but respect the role he played in the amendment to the Race Relations Act (1976) and to the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000) which placed a statutory duty on all public authorities to ensure that racial equality issues were placed firmly in all their policies, practices and procedures. It is important to remember that treating individuals or groups with less favourable treatment is against the law in this country. In short then, race discrimination is said to occur when an individual is unfairly treated on the grounds of their colour, nationality, ethnicity, origin or citizenship. In the UK, therefore, race discrimination is completely illegal, and if you experience such behaviour you are entitled in law to take action about it. Whether the discrimination is direct or indirect, or in the form of victimisation or harassment, the act is punishable by law.

It follows that anyone experiencing racial discrimination in any or many aspects of life such as education, housing, employment and training, may proceed to take her complaint to an employment tribunal or a court. So if you believe that an individual or an organisation has discriminated against you on the grounds of your colour, religion, origin or caste, you can do any of the following:

Go to the police;

Find a lawyer to seek legal advice;

Talk to the person or organisation responsible for the discriminatory behaviour against you;

Make an employment tribunal claim (if you have suffered race discrimination in your workplace);

Publicise your case through social media and/or the press;

Take legal action through the court;

Contact Equality and Human Rights Commission if you think the problem is widespread.

Despite the lessons we should have learned from the past, racism survives and is found in almost all of the world's countries. You will have heard about the growth of racism in Nazi Germany; apartheid in South Africa; the civil rights movement in the USA; the horrific war in Rwanda between the Hutus and the Tutsis; and what happened when, starting in April 1992, Serbia set out to "ethnically cleanse" Bosnian territory by systematically removing all Bosnian Muslims, known as Bosniaks. To illustrate this here is the account of an 11-year-old girl, Zlata Filipovic, in 1992, living in Sarajevo:

Among my girlfriends, among our friends, in our family, there are Serbs and Croats and Muslims. It's a mixed group and I never knew who was a Serb, a Croat, a Muslim. Now politics has started meddling around. It has put an S on Serbs, an M on Muslims and a C on Croats, it wants to separate them. And to do so it has chosen the worst, blackest pencil of all - the pencil of war which spells only misery and death.

I wonder if this makes you think about what you may have heard or read about or even experienced yourself about being identified by a symbol. In 1939, in Germany, hatred of the Jews began to dominate all aspects of life and, as you must know, this culminated in the holocaust. The extreme right-wing fascist Nazi party set in place a programme aimed at ridding the world of people other than white Aryans. In short, their prime target were the Jews, but this was gradually extended to include other groups: Roma people, gay people and people with disabilities. They embarked on an enormous and well planned and resourced programme to take as many people in their target groups to specially constructed work or extermination camps where they were systematically killed. In total the Nazis killed over six million men, women and children.

It is evident that both language and symbols are used to identify both those belonging to racist organisations or to possible targets of racist organisations. You see that in the story of Zlata Filipovic (cited earlier in this chapter) as an example of racist organisations labelling people with the initial of their ethnic or cultural group - M for Muslim, S for Serb and so on. There is something very chilling and de-humanising when a person is labelled simply by a digit or letter or colour.

In Auschwitz the classification system was universal and complex. All prisoners were given a number that was in the form of a tattoo and all prisoners also wore a coloured symbol to indicate what their "crime" was. It makes for horrific reading because each human being became a cypher.

Here are some chilling true examples of how this operated, told to me by my mother's friend Dora:

Just before I turned 6, my family was deported to Auschwitz from the ghetto. My arm was tattooed with the number 12345. There, I was separated from my brother and mother and put into a barracks with older girls - many seemed to be twins.

Despite the lessons we should have learned from the past, racism survives and is found in almost all of the world's countries. You will have heard about the growth of racism in Nazi Germany; apartheid in South Africa; the civil rights movement in the USA; the horrific war in Rwanda between the Hutus and the Tutsis; and what happened when, starting in April 1992, Serbia set out to "ethnically cleanse" Bosnian territory by systematically removing all Bosnian Muslims, known as Bosniaks. To illustrate this here is the account of an 11-year-old girl, Zlata Filipovic, in 1992, living in Sarajevo:

Among my girlfriends, among our friends, in our family, there are Serbs and Croats and Muslims. It's a mixed group and I never knew who was a Serb, a Croat, a Muslim. Now politics has started meddling around. It has put an S on Serbs, an M on Muslims and a C on Croats, it wants to separate them. And to do so it has chosen the worst, blackest pencil of all - the pencil of war which spells only misery and death.

I wonder if this makes you think about what you may have heard or read about or even experienced yourself about being identified by a symbol. In 1939, in Germany, hatred of the Jews began to dominate all aspects of life and, as you must know, this culminated in the holocaust. The extreme right-wing fascist Nazi party set in place a programme aimed at ridding the world of people other than white Aryans. In short, their prime target were the Jews, but this was gradually extended to include other groups: Roma people, gay people and people with disabilities. They embarked on an enormous and well planned and resourced programme to take as many people in their target groups to specially constructed work or extermination camps where they were systematically killed. In total the Nazis killed over six million men, women and children.

It is evident that both language and symbols are used to identify both those belonging to racist organisations or to possible targets of racist organisations. You see that in the story of Zlata Filipovic (cited earlier in this chapter) as an example of racist organisations labelling people with the initial of their ethnic or cultural group - M for Muslim, S for Serb and so on. There is something very chilling and de-humanising when a person is labelled simply by a digit or letter or colour.

In Auschwitz the classification system was universal and complex. All prisoners were given a number that was in the form of a tattoo and all prisoners also wore a coloured symbol to indicate what their "crime" was. It makes for horrific reading because each human being became a cypher.

Here are some chilling true examples of how this operated, told to me by my mother's friend Dora:

Just before I turned 6, my family was deported to Auschwitz from the ghetto. My arm was tattooed with the number 12345. There, I was separated from my brother and mother and put into a barracks with older girls - many seemed to be twins.

Despite the lessons we should have learned from the past, racism survives and is found in almost all of the world's countries. You will have heard about the growth of racism in Nazi Germany; apartheid in South Africa; the civil rights movement in the USA; the horrific war in Rwanda between the Hutus and the Tutsis; and what happened when, starting in April 1992, Serbia set out to "ethnically cleanse" Bosnian territory by systematically removing all Bosnian Muslims, known as Bosniaks. To illustrate this here is the account of an 11-year-old girl, Zlata Filipovic, in 1992, living in Sarajevo:

Among my girlfriends, among our friends, in our family, there are Serbs and Croats and Muslims. It's a mixed group and I never knew who was a Serb, a Croat, a Muslim. Now politics has started meddling around. It has put an S on Serbs, an M on Muslims and a C on Croats, it wants to separate them. And to do so it has chosen the worst, blackest pencil of all - the pencil of war which spells only misery and death.

I wonder if this makes you think about what you may have heard or read about or even experienced yourself about being identified by a symbol. In 1939, in Germany, hatred of the Jews began to dominate all aspects of life and, as you must know, this culminated in the holocaust. The extreme right-wing fascist Nazi party set in place a programme aimed at ridding the world of people other than white Aryans. In short, their prime target were the Jews, but this was gradually extended to include other groups: Roma people, gay people and people with disabilities. They embarked on an enormous and well planned and resourced programme to take as many people in their target groups to specially constructed work or extermination camps where they were systematically killed. In total the Nazis killed over six million men, women and children.

It is evident that both language and symbols are used to identify both those belonging to racist organisations or to possible targets of racist organisations. You see that in the story of Zlata Filipovic (cited earlier in this chapter) as an example of racist organisations labelling people with the initial of their ethnic or cultural group - M for Muslim, S for Serb and so on. There is something very chilling and de-humanising when a person is labelled simply by a digit or letter or colour.

In Auschwitz the classification system was universal and complex. All prisoners were given a number that was in the form of a tattoo and all prisoners also wore a coloured symbol to indicate what their "crime" was. It makes for horrific reading because each human being became a cypher.

Here are some chilling true examples of how this operated, told to me by my mother's friend Dora:

Just before I turned 6, my family was deported to Auschwitz from the ghetto. My arm was tattooed with the number 12345. There, I was separated from my brother and mother and put into a barracks with older girls - many seemed to be twins.

There was a person who would rub the ... a little piece of dirty alcohol on your arm, and someone else had the needle with the inkwell, and he would do the numbering. My number is 24681.

(Names and identity numbers changed to protect the identities of these examples)

Here is a sample for you to consider.

In some camps there were red triangles for political prisoners, social democrats, socialists, communists and anarchists; rescuers of Jews; trade unionists; and Freemasons. Green triangles for convicts and criminals. Pink triangles for homosexual men, bisexual men and trans-women, sexual offenders including rapists and paedophiles and yellow triangles for Jews. Gypsies or Roma were allocated the black triangle.

It is very difficult to make sense of why any particular groups were targeted for hatred - some because they were part of a caste or tribe or religion and others because of the colour of their skin. Some because they had come from somewhere else to do the jobs others refuse to do or belonged to a different belief system. What is frightening is how common this suspicion of or hatred for people who are other in some way, or discriminated against, was. Read the next paragraph to get some idea of how widespread this was and possibly still is.

You may have heard of the 'untouchables' - the people who are sometimes called the toilet cleaners of India. They are also known as the Dalit, which means broken or oppressed people. Mahatma Gandhi tried to reverse the accepted view of these people by calling them Harijans, meaning the Children of God. There are caste systems in and beyond India. Japan, for example, which has a reputation for being a homogeneous and mostly harmonious society where there are few foreigners, linguistic differences are rare and on the surface class distinctions are largely absent. But there is one, often hidden, exception: Japan's untouchables. They are to be found in the corner of a pristine room tucked away in Tokyo's Shibaura meat market where there is a table loaded with a stack of crudely composed hate mail - evidence of a prejudice that dates back to medieval times. Today the slaughtermen, undertakers, those working with leather and in other so-called "unclean" professions such as sanitation have long been marginalised in Japan. That prejudice continues to this day and especially for those working in the Shibaura abattoir.

Can you think of what you have heard people say which strikes you as being racist? Here are some examples:

As long ago as 1853 the French social scientist Arthur de Gobineau insisted that there was a hierarchy of talent between the white and "others" in society. He sees us human beings as being black, white or yellow and his writing is so offensive that I will only give you the smallest taste of it. He talks of the "negroid" variety as being on the lowest level of some mythical ladder and equates a black person with an animal He adds to this that black people are completely stupid and have excessive sexual energy and desires and acute senses of taste and smell. There is more but I can't bear to even write the words.

Pauline Hanson, in her first speech as member of parliament in Australia in 1999, spoke of being in danger of being " swamped by Asians " because, she said, they have their own cultures and religions and form ghettoes and won't assimilate. When accused of being racist she agreed that she was and elaborated by adding that she had every right to have a say in who comes into 'her' culture and country.

The definition of institutional racism
Jane Lane in her book written for the National Children's Bureau in 2008 said that institutional racism might be defined as being made up of the essential structures, policies, practices, behaviours and attitudes whereby some people are treated less equally and hence unfairly solely on the basis of their ethnicity, skin colour, religion, language, nationality or religion.

It can be identified through the discriminatory behaviours, attitudes and decisions seen or detected in processes, decisions, attitudes and behaviour. It is possible that this might come about through unwitting prejudice,ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.

Up to this point we have been thinking about the attitudes and resulting behaviour of or by individual adults involved in or witnessing or committing racist acts. Let's now look more closely at the words and reactions of young children on encountering someone different from themselves and those who look or sound like her. Very often the initial response of the child appears to be the child making meaning of something new, something unfamiliar in the everyday world. In the brilliant way that very young children make sense of the world and the people and objects in it they look, notice, compare and come to some conclusion. " It's a child: a girl like me with two eyes and brown hair and wearing a dress, but her skin is brown and my skin is pink. " They are curious and trying to find out if this person who is not like her in some way is someone to be wary of or someone who can be trusted.

Here are two stories, one that I can vouch is true and the other perhaps not.

I vividly remember when my daughter Andy was a very small child in Manchester and we saw someone in a wheelchair, she shouted out: " Mummy - a lady in a pram! " She was commenting on something strange or different which she found interesting, but not like any woman or grown up person she had encountered. There was no judgement in her behaviour.

In contrast Judy, a little black girl, while listening to the story of the Ugly Duckling who, you will remember became a beautiful white swan, asked if he had been ugly before when he was black. She was seeing black - the colour of her own skin - as ugly and hence bad and, by implication, white skin as good. She was associating skin colour with good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly.

The difference between racism and institutional racism
Do you think there is a difference in racism (person to person in essence) and institutional racism?

As I have explained earlier in this book, I often use the word "othered" when thinking about racism in the lives of young children. This is because I sense that someone who is different or unusual and not like those whom a young children has encountered before in her normal life needs to be slotted into the child's narrative about her world. The young child often lives in a world filled with people who look like her, talk like her and act like her, and the people she knows. Her mum and dad probably smile at and talk easily to the people who look like them. Otherness is something to be adjusted to, and how the young child does this depends to a large extent on how she sees and hears the responses of significant others in her life. Children with parents or siblings or others who are wary of difference and make negative responses to "others"are more likely to develop racist ideas than children who are fortunate enough to have parents who are open to welcoming diversity. I suggest that the young child senses a difference, something surprising and not what she is used to and that raises questions in her mind. Is this good or bad? Should I smile or frown? What is my mum saying? Is it good or bad? and so on.

If the child's world is made up primarily of white people, the child has to make sense of someone who is black or brown. Similarly, if the young child hears someone speaking a language which is different from those in her daily life, she pays attention and it raises questions in her developing brain.

This personal response to otherness arises through the questions children ask when they encounter something new or different and their reactions to this difference will depend on the child's previous experience of how otherness is dealt with by those close to her - her siblings or parents or other people in her life. Putting it bluntly, where a child has parents who are themselves racist and react negatively to people of other races, the young child is likely to develop a negative response to otherness.

Institutional racism is rather different and the clearest explanation of it comes from Iran Siraj-Blatchford's book The Early Years: Laying the Foundations for Racial Equality, first published in 1994. She starts by telling us that institutional racism is not something overt, easy to spot or deal with, unlike some very obvious in-your-face racism like name calling or committing violent acts against 'others'. She says that

it is both more subtle and very persuasive. It could be defined as the policies and everyday practices of institutions - such as early childhood organisations, nurseries or universities - that work to perpetuate racial inequality without actually acknowledging that unfair practices are taking place, or that unfair procedures exist.
Sansvirtual (the name I have given to my mythical early childhood centre)
Please read through this again and think about what it is saying and decide if you agree with this or not. You might want to highlight the words that you think are key to this explanation. We return to much of this later in the book. My key words are 'perpetuate', 'inequality', 'unfair' and 'without actually acknowledging'.

A small task for you is to read through these features noted in a virtual nursery school and ask if they make you suspect or suggest the presence of institutional racism. Try to justify your answers. Some are very simple and others more complex.

The majority of the children are white.

The headteacher is black.

The only language heard is English.

There is no evidence of an anti-racist policy.

There is a waiting list for places.

The dolls all have white faces.

The dressing up clothes include scarves and burkas, saris and jeans.

An anti-racism policy is displayed in the head's office.

The anti-racist policy is only available in English.

All parents receive a document about the way in which the setting operates in terms of what they hope the children will be learning and the roles of parents in this. This, too, is only in English.

There is a parent society with only one Vietnamese mother, one black mother and two Chinese parents on it.

There is a range of books reflecting characters of different colours, classes and cultures.

Here are my responses:

The fact that most of the children are white is irrelevant since this is a country where in some areas the majority of people are white. All children will probably find it easy to relate to children who look like them, but they also need to learn to relate not only to these children but also to those who are different from them in some ways.

The fact that the headteacher is black and newly appointed may be significant since it is still relatively unusual and suggests that this may signal the possibility of change.

The fact that only English is heard may also not be relevant since it is the language of this country. However, many of the children will almost certainly have other languages at home and all children should have the opportunity to hear and speak other languages. To check you might need to look at the resources - the books, songs, games, resources - to see if other languages are celebrated.

Having a written and easily visible anti-racist policy suggests that the setting is aware of the negative impact of racism on pupils, staff and parents.

Having such a policy in the head's office implies that the head knows that the setting has such a policy but does not guarantee that anyone has read it or implements it.

A waiting list for a child to get a place is fraught with the possibility of discrimination. Parents new to the system or not speaking the language or having no one to look after a small child may often fall off the list or even fail to enrol the child.

All white-faced dolls suggest that there is very little awareness of the need to show respect in all aspects of the life of the setting.

The presence of a wide range of dressing up clothes pays lip service to diversity and does not guarantee a commitment to anti-racism.

The lack of black or brown or other characters in picture books suggests an ignorance on the part of the staff about the need for the children to see images of people like them and not like them. In the same way the images should reflect a range of homes and other aspects of our diverse communities. (Based on personal notes)

A waiting list for a child to get a place is fraught with the possibility of discrimination. Parents new to the system or not speaking the language or having no one to look after a small child may often fall off the list or even fail to enrol the child.

All white-faced dolls suggest that there is very little awareness of the need to show respect in all aspects of the life of the setting.

The presence of a wide range of dressing up clothes pays lip service to diversity and does not guarantee a commitment to anti-racism.

The lack of black or brown or other characters in picture books suggests an ignorance on the part of the staff about the need for the children to see images of people like them and not like them. In the same way the images should reflect a range of homes and other aspects of our diverse communities. (Based on personal notes)

A waiting list for a child to get a place is fraught with the possibility of discrimination. Parents new to the system or not speaking the language or having no one to look after a small child may often fall off the list or even fail to enrol the child.

All white-faced dolls suggest that there is very little awareness of the need to show respect in all aspects of the life of the setting.

The presence of a wide range of dressing up clothes pays lip service to diversity and does not guarantee a commitment to anti-racism.

The lack of black or brown or other characters in picture books suggests an ignorance on the part of the staff about the need for the children to see images of people like them and not like them. In the same way the images should reflect a range of homes and other aspects of our diverse communities. (Based on personal notes)

A waiting list for a child to get a place is fraught with the possibility of discrimination. Parents new to the system or not speaking the language or having no one to look after a small child may often fall off the list or even fail to enrol the child.

All white-faced dolls suggest that there is very little awareness of the need to show respect in all aspects of the life of the setting.

The presence of a wide range of dressing up clothes pays lip service to diversity and does not guarantee a commitment to anti-racism.

The lack of black or brown or other characters in picture books suggests an ignorance on the part of the staff about the need for the children to see images of people like them and not like them. In the same way the images should reflect a range of homes and other aspects of our diverse communities. (Based on personal notes)

Constructing identity: 'Who am I?'
Please note that we return to this theme in a later chapter because it is so integral to challenging racism.

All children construct their identities from their experiences and through their interactions. This includes seeing themselves as unique, one member of a family and also as part of a group or groups who share a culture. The ways in which they and other members of their group are represented will be crucial in doing this. So children construct their identities partially from how they (the group) are represented. To clarify this, think about how it may feel being the only black child in an all-white class or being the only girl on the football team, for example. How children define and identify themselves is a complex process and one that essentially involves their self-esteem. The reactions of others to them or to their group impact on self-image and hence on self-identity. Children who encounter few images or predominantly negative images of themselves and their group will suffer damage to their self-esteem and the whole process of identity construction will be difficult.

In their remarkable book, Minority Education: From Shame to Struggle(1988), which is now regarded as something of a classic text, Skutnabb-Kangas and Cummins included a moving piece by Antti Jalava called "Nobody could see that I was a Finn". In this disturbing autobiographical piece, Jalava wrote about his experiences after his family moved from Finland to Stockholm in Sweden when he was 9 years old. On the first day at school the principal did not know what to do with this little stranger: all she could do was hold the child's hand as they walked to the classroom: " Holding hands was the only language we had in common " ... in class the child was called names and teased. He tried to adjust:

Adjusting was not, however, at all simple. To what did one have to adjust and how? There was nobody to explain things, there were no interpreters, no Finnish teachers and no kind of teaching of the Swedish language. And I was no chameleon, either, for I only wanted to be myself, out of habit and instinct. When the others wrote in Swedish, I wrote in Finnish. ... But that was something that just couldn't be. The teacher grabbed my pencil and angrily shook his finger at me. In spite of everything I continued to fall back on my mother tongue.

(Skutnabb-Kangas and Cummins 1988: 162)

You get a really strong sense of the child's struggle to both become part of the new host culture of Sweden and school but also to retain part of his self-identity - represented by his language ... As the children in the class wrote in Swedish, Antti did the only thing that was possible for him as a child who clearly had the capacity to understand the task together with the implied rules and conventions, but was not equipped with the essential tool of knowing the Swedish language. Antti ended up in the principal's office. That night he threw a stone through the window of the office, and never again wrote in Finnish. He bonded with a band of " brothers " and said that violence became the only language understood by all of them.

By the time he moved up to the junior grades he had learned some Stockholm slang and said that the language of the classroom, which he described as middle-class Swedish, was as impenetrable to the working-class Swedish boys as it was to him. He was fiercely homesick and went down to the docks to watch the boats from Finland come and go. He wept in private. But with time the idea grew within him that it was shameful to be a Finn. The way in which he writes about this is both powerful and painful:

Everything I had held dear and self-evident had to be destroyed. An inner struggle began, a state of crisis of long duration. I had trouble sleeping. I could not look people in the eye, my voice broke down into a whisper, I could no longer trust anybody. My mother tongue was worthless - this I realised at last; on the contrary it made me the butt of abuse and ridicule.

So down with the Finnish language! I spat on myself, gradually committed internal suicide [underlining added by Smidt] ... I resolved to learn Swedish letter perfect so nobody could guess who I was or where I came from.

(Skutnabb-Kangas and Cummins 1988: 164)

This is adapted from what I wrote in 2013 about how difficult the construction of identity is for all children, but is so much more difficult when a young child has to create a new identity, learn a new language, live within a new culture among people who are so different from her. You can see how difference and prejudice can operate against groups and also within groups. This child made the terrible decision to give up his language and become as perfect in Swedish as it was possible to be, precisely in order to disguise his true identity both as an individual and as part of a group. The underlined words in the above excerpt illustrate the depths of his despair. I nearly cried.

Why anti-racist? Telling it like it is
I was very insistent that the title of this book include the word "anti-racist" as opposed to the more common and currently popular word "bias". Bias is a much softer word that, for me, suggests that when you are biased about something or someone itmeans that you would prefer to have nothing to do with it or them. Anti-racist is very specific. It is judgemental and based on the recognition of what is regarded as being acceptable in any human exchange. Hate, fear and anger based on physical features, invisible beliefs, the sounds coming from human mouths are never acceptable. Nor is it acceptable to hold fast to a belief that one group of people has the right to control another. No individual or group has the right to deprive another individual or group of anything. We live in one world made up of differences and these should continue to be celebrated in early years provision as they currently are. But this celebration of diversity must also address the very existence of racism and never leave it unchallenged. So this is where we go in this book.

People currently working in early childhood settings with young children from all over the world will almost certainly be working within a culture of "multiculturalism" where the adults are encouraged to have books to read to the children from all over the world; offer dressing up clothes from many cultures; celebrate religious and cultural occasions and more. Please don't think I am suggesting you stop doing that. It makes for a celebration of difference. All I am saying is '

MacPherson, W. (1999). The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. Report of an Inquiry. [online] The Stationery Office. Accessed here
At a time of growing evidence of racism across many countries and cultures, Creating an Anti-Racist Culture in the Early Years will help those working with young children recognise racism, name it for what it is and help their young pupils understand that difference is nothing to be feared. Drawing on both personal research and established theory, Smidt includes examples of anti-racist practice from real life and in literature, looks at how racism is acquired and cites examples of people who have spoken or acted against racism through the centuries.
This is an extract from Chapter 1 of Creating an Anti-Racist Culture Early Years, by Sandra Smidt and published by Routledge.

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Creating an Anti-Racist Culture in Early Years

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We live in one world made up of differences and these should continue to be celebrated in early years provision as they currently are. But this celebration of diversity must also address the very existence of racism and never leave it unchallenged, says Sandra Smidt.

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Decolonising the Curriculum - experiences of a theatre teacher

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Decolonising the Curriculum - experiences of a theatre teacher

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LIVESTREAM Decolonising the Curriculum Conference 2020 ｜ COMMON GROUND OXFORD

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Key points include:

Two-thirds (66.1%) of respondents said they had issues recruiting Level 3 Qualified staff and 26.5% report difficulties recruiting Level 2 qualified staff

Level 3 staff make up 58.9% of the overall workforce but represented 64% of the total number of leavers

At other levels of qualification, employers reported fewer issues

Over 83% of the workforce in non-maintained settings have Level 3 qualifications or higher in line with the National Minimum Standards for Regulated Childcare (NMS) and staff with Level 3 qualifications make up 59% of the workforce

Turnover of staff is an issue in Wales with a rate of 19.4% costing the entire childcare sector an estimated £59.6m

Due to other costs rising, early years settings are planning to keep staff training costs at similar levels to last year. If changes are planned they are more likely to reduce than increase training budgets

Business rates relief is helping the sector remain sustainable, keep costs lower or invest in improving quality.

Download the full report and highlights summary report for Wales in both Welsh and English languages below:

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download ndna  workforce survey 2019 childcare

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Nursery Workforce Survey and Report | 2019

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Key points include: Two-thirds (66.1%) of respondents said they had issues recruiting Level 3 Qualified staff and 26.5% report difficulties recruiting Level 2 qualified staff Level 3 staff make up 58.9% of the overall workforce but represented 64% of the total number of leavers At other levels of qualification, employers

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Challenging the harmful legacy of white-centred British history, this is a powerful, hard-hitting examination of modern, divided Britain. Essential reading for our times.

The Sunday Times bestseller that reveals the uncomfortable truth about race and identity in Britain today.

MEDIA REVIEWS

' Brit(ish) is a wonderful, important, courageous book, and it could not be more timely: a vital and necessary point of reference for our troubled age in a country that seems to have lost its bearings. It's about identity and belonging in 21st-century Britain: intimate and troubling; forensic but warm, funny and wise.' - Philippe Sands

'Brit(ish) brings together a thoughtful, intelligent, accessible, informative investigation on Britain as a nation not only in the midst of an identity crisis but in denial of what it has been and still is.' - Dolly Alderton

'Highly personal and yet instantly universal, this is a book that millions will instantly relate to. Hirsch places her own lifelong search for identity and a sense of Britishness against the backdrop of our national identity crisis. Part historical exploration, part journalistic expose of racism and class disadvantage in modern Britain, this is a book searching for answers to some very big questions. Delving behind words like 'prejudice', 'disadvantage', 'structural-racism' Hirsch unpacks the real world impact of these forces and on the lives of real people. Written with passion not anger, insight rather than resentment, on the issues of race, identity and the multiple meanings of Britishness this is the book for our divided and dangerous times.' - David Olusoga

'Memoir, social analysis and an incisively argued challenge to unconscious biases: this is a truly stunning book on racial identity by a remarkable woman.' - Helena Kennedy

'[A] bracing and brilliant exploration of national identity ... Through her often intensely personal investigations, she exposes the everyday racism that plagues British society, caused by our awkward, troubled relationship to our history, arguing that liberal attempts to be colour-blind have caused more problems than they have solved. A book everyone should read: especially comfy, white, middle-class liberals.' - Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller, Editor's Choice

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Challenging the harmful legacy of white-centred British history, this is a powerful, hard-hitting examination of modern, divided Britain. Essential reading for our times. The Sunday Times bestseller that reveals the uncomfortable truth about race and identity in Britain today.

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Challenging racism in Scotland - Guest blog from Danny Boyle, BEMIS Scotland
"Tackling racism and building connected communities is not a side issue. This is one of the most important things in society. We need the science of data - but we need the science of stories too"
BEMIS Scotland held a thematic conference on prejudice motivated by racial and religious hatred earlier this week. Our intention in instigating this conference in 2018 and continuing it in 2019 was to explore alternative ways to tackle prejudice and hate crime beyond the criminal justice system.

The Police and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service have a very important role to play in holding perpetrators of hate crimes accountable for their actions but they cannot arrest and prosecute away racism or hatred of communities identified by their ethno-religious characteristics.

After listening to experts and conference delegates BEMIS Scotland developed and identified 8 key action points[1] that we thought could help progress additional methods to tackling prejudice and building connected communities in Scotland.

At our conference we decided to hone in on cultural recognition via a panel discussion on creating an 'Inclusive National Identity' to try and elaborate on ideas and initiatives that might help advance understanding on how this could help tackle prejudice and build connected communities.

The 'Inclusive National Identity' panel discussion involving Khaleeda Noon (Intercultural Youth), Dr. Tommy J Curry (Prof. of Black Male Studies / University of Edinburgh), Jeanette Findlay (Irish An Gorta Mor Committee), Asif Khan (Scottish Poetry Library) Harriett Campbell (African Caribbean Womens Organisation) and Professor Duncan Morrow (Independent Advisor on Community Cohesion) identified some challenging but progressive insights, observations and action points.

Professor Morrow outlined that if Scotland wasn't able to have an honest and interrogative self-reflection on its colonial and imperial past and how this has affected communities in the present then we would fail in our efforts to truly tackle prejudice and build connected communities.

What followed was an invigorating conversation on the nature of Scotland, Scottishness, lived experience, self-identity, racism and cultural miss-representations. For Tommy, Khaleeda, Asif and Harriett their personal experience of colour based racism in Scotland included being threatened at their place of work and being told they can't truly be Scottish.

With professional hats on they forensically analysed the lack of cultural funding for black and ethnic minority arts organisations and individual artists, the lack of profile in democratic and decision making institutions of ethnic minority people and the lack of understanding of ethnic minority communities cultural assets by key agencies and funders.

Jeanette Findlay from the Irish community An Gorta Mor Memorial committee outlined that while her experience of racism was evidently different given that it was not based on the colour of her skin that her community also had experienced isolation, expulsion and hostility from the idea of an inclusive Scottish national identity.

This experience was also reflected by Scottish Gypsy Traveller delegates like David Donaldson. Despite being in Scotland for centuries they were still faced hostility in being acknowledged as "included Scots" and had challenges with socio-economic disadvantages.

So where does this leave us in our quest to progress and inclusive national identity?

Far from being despondent about the gravity of the issues raised and their apparent incompatibility with the top level strategic goal these are precisely the conversations and discussions that we need to have. In our schools. In our race and equality organisations. In our trade unions. In our communities. In our local authorities and in our Government.

For BEMIS part we now pose ourselves three key questions.
1) How do we enable Tommy, Jeanette, Khaleeda, Asif and Harriett's stories to be told in an appropriate way that gives them and others like them the platform to engage and speak on their own behalf and help shape Scotland? 2) How do we engage local and national arts funders, local authorities and government to ensure that the communities and individuals from ethnic minority communities are invested in and supported? 3) How do we engage the broader Scottish population in conversations on colonialism, racism and representation in a way that is worthwhile and doesn't have the unintended consequence of increasing tension?
These are challenges that we embrace and challenges that we want to progress in conjunction with Government, political parties, communities, individuals and organisations.

Hate crime awareness week is the perfect time to instigate these difficult discussions and shows that the focus of the week and events are already moving beyond a narrow focus on reporting crime to a broader discussion on the nature of Scotland.

This level of discussion and the policy response it will drive is indicative of a society that is slowly, in little ways that will become bigger, advancing the cause of race equality and the idea of an inclusive national identity in a responsive and creative way.

Challenging racism is not just good for racial minority communities but society as a whole.

[1] 2018 conference report: https://bemis.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/hate-crime-conference-2018-learning-outcomes.pdf

Tags: hate crime, hate crime awareness week, racism, Scotland

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Challenging racism in Scotland - Guest blog from Danny Boyle, BEMIS Scotland - Fairer Scotland

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"Tackling racism and building connected communities is not a side issue. This is one of the most important things in society. We need the science of data - but we need the science of stories too" BEMIS Scotland held a thematic conference on prejudice motivated by racial and religious hatred earlier this week.

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The Scottish Government recently consulted on its draft Culture Strategy for Scotland, which sets out a vision for Scotland to be "innovative, inclusive, and open to the wider world". Their vision, however, overlooks a group particularly likely to be disadvantaged: Black and minority ethnic communities.

The evidence - qualitative and quantitative - demonstrates that Black groups are less likely than white groups to have access to opportunities in the culture sector. White artists can more easily access opportunities and funding as they have previously had chances to create; Black artists are more likely to be overlooked for opportunities, meaning they are more likely to be overlooked in the future. Institutional racism plays a key role in this discrimination.

CRER responded to the Scottish Government consultation - indeed, we were the only race equality group to do so (although culture is not part of our core remit, we felt it was too important not to respond to) - but we may as well not have.

Hardly any of our suggestions or constructive criticisms were included in the consultation analysis. There was a cursory mention of 'inclusion' in the Key Themes Report and acknowledgement in the Full Report of concerns regarding representation in a national partnership, the use of the word 'diversity', care needed to ensure BME groups are involved, and the need to increase inclusive work opportunities in the sector. However, other, more systematic issues were dismissed.

The race-specific issues we raised, which were dismissed in the analysis, included:

A nationwide survey[1] of 'diversity in the arts' which found that half of BME respondents saw their ethnicity as a barrier to career progression compared to just 5% of white respondents, with BME respondents having a lower median income overall. Barriers listed included discrimination, a lack of understanding of or interest in the cultural themes of their work, and lacking established networks.

Of Creative Scotland's regularly funded bodies, no chief executives, artistic directors, or chairs, and only less than 2% of board members, permanent staff, freelance staff, and volunteers had a BME background.

The impact of the main funding bodies in the culture sector being led by white people, which means that if artists do not fit into a white, Eurocentric model of culture and art (which adopts a tokenistic approach, valuing art and culture created by Black individuals and communities only when it reflects their ethnic heritage in some way as part of an exoticised view of 'diversity'), they are not chosen for opportunities.

The relationship between culture and its wider historical context; the history of slavery, colonialism, and empire continues to impact Black communities - and Black artists - in Scotland today. While the rich and complex history of Scotland is celebrated and studied, and despite Black communities having long been intertwined in this story, often this history ignores or poorly represents Black groups.

The focus of current funding encourages Black groups to celebrate heritages linked to a 'non-Scottish' ethnicity or to participate in very specifically 'Scottish' celebrations of heritage. This approach contributes to an 'othering' of Black communities and creates the misleading impression of culture in which Black communities in Scotland are seen to be distanced from the culture of the majority white Scottish ethnic community.

Furthermore, there was no mention of calls to:

Develop specific plans to improve the representation of BME groups in the culture sector and promote equality of opportunity for Black artists, moving away from the deficit-based model of capacity building

Examine of the impact of the broader story of Scotland's history and the continuing impact of white supremacy and white privilege

Commit to educating white leaders in the sector about race equality and the long-standing reality of institutional racism, informed by the impact of slavery, colonialism, and empire

Reconsider of the role of Black leadership in culture and a development and better understanding of the relationship (and differences) between ethnicity, heritage, and culture

A strategy needs more than good intentions to be effective; the culture strategy in its current form will do nothing to advance race equality in this regard and will only further contribute to the inequalities faced by Scotland's Black communities.

We hope that the final strategy will take more cognisance of these issues, and strongly urge the Scottish Government to engage with Black groups on these issues. If not, culture in Scotland will continue to be yet another place where institutional racism continues to thrive.

Unfortunately, this whitewashing occurs with nearly every consultation response CRER offers, despite our responses being evidence-based and often the only one addressing race equality.

[1] Creative Scotland - Survey on Diversity in the Arts 2017

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The Scottish Government recently consulted on its draft Culture Strategy for Scotland, which sets out a vision for Scotland to be "innovative, inclusive, and open to the wider world". Their vision, however, overlooks a group particularly likely to be disadvantaged: Black and minority ethnic communities. The evidence -

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David Olusoga - James MacTaggart Lecture, Edinburgh Television Festival

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David Olusoga - James MacTaggart Lecture, Edinburgh Television Festival

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David Olusoga | James MacTaggart Lecture | Edinburgh TV Festival 2020

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Hope this is okay to share - was thinking about the lack of representation in children's literature/picture books so reached out to a children's writer who recommended this resource!

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The Colourful Bookshelf is an initiative to support published British kidlit authors and illustrators by providing a shopfront on Bookshop.org and providing other useful resources for published creators on this website.

We will promote books and authors, highlight new publications, deals and create resources for parents and teachers to use with young readers.

Read our blog to find out about how we got started.

At this time, this site and the bookshop curation is managed by , author and storyteller.

We are looking for volunteers from the British Kidlit Creators of Colour community to join our team. Find out more in our blog about volunteering opportunities.

Let's build colourful bookshelves in every home and every classroom.

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The Colourful Bookshelf is an initiative to support published British kidlit authors and illustrators by providing a shopfront on Bookshop.org and providing other useful resources for published creators on this website. We will promote books and authors, highlight new publications, deals and create resources for parents and teachers to use with young readers.

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The #BAMEOver Live Debate

On Friday 4th September over 250 of us came together to hear from speakers who shared their own lived experiences, debate openly in a safe space and vote live on what we want to be called.

Check out the brilliant coverage of #BAMEOver on Radio 1Xtra, The Independent and Newsweek. You can also read Leo Wan's insightful write-up of the event and own thoughts on the campaign here.

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Inc Arts UK: diversity and inclusion in the arts

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The #BAMEOver Live Debate On Friday 4th September over 250 of us came together to hear from speakers who shared their own lived experiences, debate openly in a safe space and vote live on what we want to be called. Check out the brilliant coverage of #BAMEOver on Radio 1Xtra , The Independent and Newsweek .

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At the beginning of the year in Ms. Verwayne's kindergarten class, the children are working on an All About Me project. They begin by drawing pictures of themselves based on observations of their reflections in a mirror. Next, the teacher provides them with sentence starters asking them to describe their hair color and texture, their skin color, and their eye color. In this racially and ethnically diverse class, the children learn a variety of vocabulary words they can use to describe these differences.

On the playground after school, some of the parents chat about the project. One White mom, Ellie, tells the other parents that the project made her feel a little uncomfortable. She explains, "Since this is the beginning of the year, shouldn't the kids be doing things that help them see what they have in common, rather than emphasizing their differences?"

Many parents and teachers of young children share Ellie's concern that children should be shielded from learning explicitly about race and racial differences. Adults often worry that introducing these topics too early could be harmful (Husband 2010). Early childhood educators who wish to make space for learning about race and racism in their classrooms may feel unprepared to approach these complex issues (Vittrup 2016). Shaped by their own experiences with issues of race and racism, parents and teachers may hold differing views regarding the appropriateness of teaching about this topic in the early childhood classroom.

Research demonstrates that children's awareness of racial differences and the impact of racism begins quite early (Tatum 2003; Winkler 2009). Multiple studies document the ways that young children take notice of racial differences and note that as early as preschool, children may begin excluding their peers of different races from play and other activities (Winkler 2009). Many argue that creating safe spaces for children to explore these topics is more important than ever, given the current political and cultural climate, where these issues are highly visible (Pitts 2016; Harvey 2017; Poon 2017). As such, parents and teachers have an obligation to teach and learn with children about these critical and complex issues (Delpit 2012; Derman-Sparks, LeeKeenan, & Nimmo 2015; Ramsey 2015). This article documents how one kindergarten teacher, Diandra Verwayne (the second author), worked with the parents in her classroom to grow together in their understandings of the role we all must play in talking with young children about race and racism. Additionally, this piece offers curricular and pedagogical resources for adults who are committed to engaging with young children in this crucial work.

Learning about race and unlearning racism

In her seminal research and writing on this topic, Beverly Daniel Tatum (a former psychology professor and president of Spelman College) has written extensively about the ways in which the unjust structure of racial hierarchy in American society is normalized and transmitted to children from birth (Tatum 2003). In discussing how messages about race-based privilege and oppression are internalized, Tatum provides a powerful metaphor. She explains that in the same way residents who live in highly polluted areas cannot avoid becoming "smog breathers," Americans who are immersed in the structures and practices of white supremacy unwittingly become "racism breathers" (6). Many of us may not realize the degree to which these toxic beliefs shape our perceptions and experiences of the world. Unless we have opportunities to unlearn racism, these messages become absorbed and have consequences.

Schools, in collaboration with families, have an important role to play in fostering young children's positive racial identities.

More recently scholars have documented the negative impact that being subjected to racism has on young children's academic success, as Lisa Delpit (2012) conveys in her aptly titled book chapter, "There Is No Achievement Gap at Birth." These consequences vary depending on our levels of privilege and oppression, which intersect across our diverse identities. Early childhood educators can support the unlearning of racism-and minimize later breathing in of racism-by intentionally teaching about race and related issues. Schools, in collaboration with families, have an important role to play in fostering young children's positive racial identities. Teachers who intentionally plan curricula that affirm children's racial identities have seen the benefits this produces in supporting children's growth and learning across many domains of development (Ladson-Billings 2009; Wright, Counsell, & Tate 2015).

There is often confusion about the difference between racially based bias and racism. Racism is a system of oppression that results from a combination of prejudice and power. This combination produces institutional structures and social practices that deny equity to people based on race. There is a common misconception that biases or prejudices that some people of color hold against White people constitutes "reverse racism." Anyone can hold a bias against people of another race, but only some races are subject to oppressive structures and practices as a result of that bias. To illustrate, consider a comparison to sexism. Some women are biased against men, but this is not "reverse sexism"; only men's biases against women have produced the conditions in which women are subjected to far more sexual harassment and sexual violence than men (Breiding et al. 2014). Similarly, racism has created structures and practices that deny equity and justice to people of color, including, for example, great disparities by race in family wealth. One of the most reliable ways to accumulate and pass on family wealth is through home ownership. Until recently, many Black Americans-including those with high incomes-were unable to buy houses because of redlining, a practice by which banks refused to offer mortgages in predominately Black neighborhoods. This is a key factor explaining why median wealth for White families in the US is about $134,000, while the median wealth for Black families is about $11,000 (Jones 2017). This disparity in family wealth accumulated over several generations and will likely take several more generations to address; meanwhile, it continues to have broad implications for access to opportunity, such as parents' ability to pay their children's college tuition.

For all children to understand that the effects of racism are not the fault of people of color, we need to address these issues early in children's lives. We begin by fostering the positive development of every child's racial identity. This work must be paired with opportunities for young children to learn where and how injustice and inequality operate in our society. When children are armed with this knowledge and these skills, they can begin to disrupt these systems and work toward building a more equitable society for all of us.

Lessons Learned

When planning to implement a curriculum that addresses issues of race and racism, consider the following:

Identify colleagues who are also committed to a racial justice curriculum and work together. Alternatively, seek out communities online to support your teaching practice. Remember, you're not alone!

Anticipate the kinds of concerns or misconceptions that children and families might have, and prepare in advance some strategies for responding.

Recall experiences that have expanded your own thinking about these issues, and consider sharing the story of how your perspective has grown and changed.

Make yourself available, either in person or over the phone, to communicate with families about their perspectives on the curriculum. Email communication can often amplify disagreements, so try to keep communication face to face, if possible.

Model a stance of respectful openness. Even if you disagree, strive to set a tone that maximizes the possibilities for considering different viewpoints.

Recognize that we-children, families, and colleagues- are all on a journey of growth with respect to these issues. Draw upon the ways that you scaffold children's learning in other areas and apply these skills when supporting others' growth.

One teacher's work

Ms. Verwayne teaches kindergarten at a racially and economically diverse public school. Born in Guyana, she moved to the United States at the age of 6 and recalls that when she entered school, she was made to feel like an outsider because of cultural differences. She reported, "When I was in elementary school, I felt like I had to hide my culture so that I could be accepted by the masses. I don't want that to happen within my classroom. I want my kids to be able to recognize who they are." Ms. Verwayne is committed to affirming children's racial and cultural identities throughout the year.

In her planned curriculum, Ms. Verwayne begins by offering learning experiences that allow children to observe and celebrate their unique identities. She also acknowledges the need for teachers to reflect on potential questions and concerns in order to prepare (as much as possible) for unplanned teachable moments. While she knows that some adults may resist addressing topics like identity, race, and racism with young children, she remains committed to the idea that these issues are an essential part of the early childhood curriculum. Musing about this tension, she shared the questions she asks herself as she designs curriculum:

If I do talk about race, will it offend anyone? How do you talk about it in a way that doesn't offend people? . . . I think a lot of teachers will just choose not to address it because if you don't address it, you're not offending anybody. . . . I think this is the problem that we have in our country. . . . We never have an honest, open discussion about race ever.

Considering the current climate in America, where racism and racially motivated violence are visible to adults and children, Ms. Verwayne feels the stakes are too high to ignore this topic in her classroom.

Responding to parents' anxiety

Because Ms. Verwayne is committed to openly and collaboratively addressing these topics, she believes it is important to discuss families' concerns. For this article, two parents whose children were enrolled in Ms. Verwayne's kindergarten classroom were interviewed by Kirsten Cole (the first author) about the curriculum. Fabiola is a Haitian American mother of two. Ellie is a White mother of two. Both mothers' first-born children were in Ms. Verwayne's class.

After moving to the United States at the beginning of kindergarten, Fabiola was frequently the target of racial epithets and other acts of racism. Fabiola described the painful consequences of having internalized these oppressive messages, in large part because as a child she did not have the opportunity to process these experiences with her parents or teachers. As a parent, Fabiola has prioritized giving her children many opportunities to celebrate their racial identity and making space for their questions about race and racism. Nonetheless, Fabiola recognizes the potential for some families, particularly White parents, to feel uncomfortable with such a curriculum. She explained,

I think the teachers have to be prepared to deal with the parents and manage the anxiety of the parents. Because I think instructionally and educationally teachers know that it's important. . . . I strongly believe that the kids can tolerate it. It's the parents that are the hardest to convince.

Given the tendency of some adults to avoid these topics, Fabiola was pleased to discover that Ms. Verwayne made learning about race an integral part of the curriculum.

Ellie, in contrast, expressed some initial resistance to having her daughter participate in open discussions of racial differences. Ellie grew up in the Midwest in mostly racially homogenous environments. As is the experience for many White children, Ellie recalled that race was never discussed. Echoing the "colorblind" view that many White families espouse, Ellie recounted, "I don't think I thought about it much. I always thought, 'Everybody's wonderful. Everybody's the same.'" When her daughter began to attend public school, Ellie and some of the other White parents discussed their concerns about Ms. Verwayne's curriculum. Ellie recalled,

In kindergarten they did a worksheet for social studies about identity. The worksheet asked them to note their physical traits: eye color, skin color, hair color, hair texture, things like that. That was the first time anything like this had come up. I was thinking, "What is this? This is ridiculous. There's no reason that 5-year-olds should be doing this sort of exercise. This is futile. Why should my kid be having to say that she's White?"

In recalling how she felt at the time of this incident, Ellie articulated a stance many White people are raised to adopt: claiming to not see color is the most equitable way to approach teaching and learning about race.

Especially in recent years, many scholars have questioned the presumed benefits of the colorblind approach (Pollock 2005; Husband 2012). As society is not equitable and racial bias does exist, the colorblind approach denies children the validity of their experiences of the world. Because the impact of racial bias is visible, not allowing children to process this injustice is confusing, and it denies them the opportunity to see themselves as agents of change to resist injustice. Colorblindness fails to acknowledge the impact of racism on all people and, further, does not push White people to do the important work of reckoning with the legacy of white supremacy in our lives (Derman-Sparks, Ramsey, & Edwards 2006; DiAngelo 2012).

Ms. Verwayne has a practice of encouraging families to meet with her during weekly parent engagement time. At one such meeting, she asked if anyone had any questions about the curriculum. Ellie responded, "Actually, there was a worksheet that came home, and I don't think this is a useful thing. I think it's really hurtful, because it makes them identify things they haven't even realized about each other." Ms. Verwayne recalled being surprised by Ellie's reaction to the assignment, but she was grateful to have the opportunity to open a dialogue about their different views. She explained, "I needed to understand where that parent was coming from, and that parent needed to understand where I was coming from." For her part, Ellie had the opportunity to hear both Ms. Verwayne's intentions and also other parents' perspectives on the curriculum. Ellie recalled,

Fabiola responded, "Well, as a Black woman, we take a lot of pride in who we are and we want to talk about it a lot." As soon as she said that I realized, "Oh, of course. You're proud of your race. And I am not."

Ellie's reflection on this experience revealed another tension the colorblind view often masks. In naming the root of her discomfort, Ellie illuminated one of many challenges teachers face when doing this work in schools. The false premise of colorblindness is often deployed to obscure the discomfort White people have with confronting ongoing and historical racial oppression and injustice (Harvey 2017). As Fabiola noted in a later interview, "I think it's really detrimental to tell children they don't see what they're seeing and they're not feeling what they just felt-that they can't trust their eyes and they can't trust their gut."

While Ellie had entered the conversation seeking to maintain the colorblind view, she suddenly realized that not speaking about race with children does not protect them. Having had the opportunity to see the issue from another perspective, Ellie reported being transformed. Reflecting on this incident in a later interview, she recalled,

It was just totally eye-opening. It upended me. Ever since then I just thought, there are so many parents of both Black and White kids and kids of every race that need to have those conversations about these differences, and that the differences are good. I realized that it has to be talked about.

This transformation-this "upending"-would not have been possible had Ms. Verwayne not opened this potentially challenging dialogue with families.

Particularly in early childhood, it is essential to build trusting and respectful relationships with families. Not all families will be receptive to a curriculum that addresses these issues, nor will all families be as open to being transformed in their thinking, as Ellie was. Ellie remarked, "What I really appreciate about Ms. Verwayne is her openness and respect for different viewpoints. Whenever I have had a concern, she has always been willing to talk and listen to my position with great interest and care." For early childhood teachers seeking to do the critical work of teaching about race and racism, it is important to be prepared to address parents' myriad responses, including being ready and willing to create space for conversations many of us have been taught to avoid. While some families may never be open to a new way of thinking, teachers who model this openness will set the tone for approaching disagreements respectfully. As Fabiola noted, the hesitation that many White parents have stems from adults' issues rather than any difficulty children may have in exploring the topic (DiAngelo 2012). She mused,

It's not a scary thing. It may be uncomfortable, but it's a good thing to be having this conversation at this stage. And it was fine. We pass on these anxieties to our kids. The more anxious we are in talking about it, the more anxious they feel. They think that there's something wrong with what they're saying.

It may be surprising that children are ready for us to facilitate these learning opportunities. As parents and teachers, it is critical that we make ourselves ready for planned and unplanned opportunities to learn about race and racism.

Following children's leads

As with the curriculum that sparked the previous discussions, teaching and learning about race should begin with children's observations. Children notice differences and need to feel safe and supported in asking questions about what they notice. Fabiola explained that her daughter's learning about race "has been very child directed. . . . If she asks a question, more times than not it's just an observation of something. So I acknowledge the fact that she's absolutely right. She's noticing differences." Ms. Verwayne concurred; she likes to follow children's leads and design projects, activities, and read-alouds that emerge from their questions and concerns. She emphasized that children's innate sense of justice and fairness creates opportunities for them to wrestle with these questions. She explained, "Their questions mean that they're seeking an answer about this topic. And they have a lot of curiosity and wondering, and they need a way to figure out that answer." As with other inquiry-based learning experiences, a curriculum that emerges from the children's process of making sense of the world often yields the most engaging opportunities for learning.

While some of children's observations and questions about racial differences may be straightforward, at times children echo harmful biases they have heard elsewhere. Ms. Verwayne recalled an afternoon when her class returned from lunch in a state of distress. One of her students, an African American girl, had told another child, "I don't like White people." At the time, the nightly news was full of reporting about police brutality against African Americans, so Ms. Verwayne suspected that the child was repeating something she had overheard an adult say. Though math was on the schedule for the afternoon, Ms. Verwayne asked the children to join her in a circle on the rug. Drawing upon strategies she had learned in Responsive Classroom workshops, she reminded the children of their classroom norms that create space for each child's voice. She reminded the children to use accountable talk grounded in their experiences and to listen to each other with care. As they shared their feelings about what had happened at lunch, Ms. Verwayne prompted them to reflect on the sense of community and friendship they had cultivated together in class. They concluded that, while some people of any race may "not always be nice," we cannot draw conclusions about a whole race based on the actions of individuals.

Planning for learning through children's literature

For parents and teachers wishing to open a dialogue about racial identity and racism, children's literature provides an excellent starting point. Well-written children's literature allows children to identify with and develop empathy for characters, particularly those that may be different from themselves. Stocking the classroom library with children's books that represent a diversity of experiences is essential. Providing books that allow children to see themselves in the pages offers the kind of high-interest materials that support children's early literacy (Klefstad & Martinez 2013). Especially when children are beginning to do the challenging work of learning to read, it is important for them to be able to select books that allow them to feel a connection to the content. If children do not see their lives and interests reflected in the books in your library, they may feel that reading is not for them.

Stocking Your Library with Equitable and Inclusive Children's Titles

For teachers seeking to foster an appreciation of difference and empathy, it is especially important to have a classroom library that represents a range of characters and experiences. Great children's books allow us to get inside the protagonists' experiences. Fortunately, excellent resources exist to guide teachers and families in creating such libraries (see "Stocking Your Library with Equitable and Inclusive Children's Titles" above). The classroom library can offer a child-friendly opening to learn about important histories and to celebrate the accomplishments of seminal figures in the fight for racial equality. However, be sure to provide a balance and to also include books that represent diverse characters engaged in ordinary, everyday experiences.

Once you develop a classroom library that addresses issues of race and racism from many perspectives, prepare yourself to respond to children's questions as they arise. Ms. Verwayne recalled that when reading about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., her children wanted to know more. When the book addressed the topic of segregation, they asked, "But why would people do that?!?" Ms. Verwayne was glad that she had anticipated these questions and was able to provide context by talking about Jim Crow and how it institutionalized racial bias and made it the law of the land.

Developing strategies for responding to teachable moments

In addition to planning a curriculum that addresses issues of race and racism, Ms. Verwayne described how she often needed to think on her feet in responding to children's natural curiosity about race and difference. Many teachers may have a desire to address these topics but feel unprepared to respond when the issues arise in their classrooms. Teachers need resources and support to develop the tools to do this work skillfully and thoughtfully. Ms. Verwayne argued that this includes trusting teachers to think on their feet and to ground their responses in the deep knowledge they have of their classroom communities. She noted,

Some people definitely do not want to discuss issues of race and difference at all. They think it's best to sweep it under the rug and just act like it doesn't exist. That's the safest space to be in. But is it the right space to be in, knowing the times that we're in? I think we need to give teachers the leeway to be unconventional and try different ways to address this.

In an era when many educational reforms have argued for standardization and "teacher proofing" the curriculum, the work of responding to complex issues requires that we give teachers the training and time to reflect on and discuss them, and also trust teachers to write their own script when teachable moments arise.

As described earlier, Ms. Verwayne uses protocols and practices offered by the Responsive Classroom to facilitate a complex conversation about racial bias. By developing these routines, Ms. Verwayne asks the children to join her in taking ownership of creating the kind of classroom in which they all feel included. These pedagogical strategies are supported by the content of her social studies curriculum, which explores the meaning of community.

A number of organizations have created forums for the exchange of social justice curriculum ideas (see "Preparing for and Responding to Teachable Moments" below). Responding to teachable moments is never one size fits all; but resources that provide candid and thoughtful sharing of teacher knowledge can provide teachers with models of practices and strategies. Even pedagogical models that do not explicitly address race and racism, such as the practices offered by the Responsive Classroom, can be adapted to create a framework for talking about race in the classroom. Whatever the approach, we must acknowledge the need to offer these kinds of curricular and pedagogical strategies to teachers throughout their professional development experiences.

Preparing for and Responding to Teachable Moments

Committing to teaching for equity and justice

This article, along with the suggested resources, provides a starting point for teachers and families seeking to do the important work of supporting young children's learning and understanding about race and racism. As Ms. Verwayne's experiences illustrate, this work is both challenging and essential. Concluding her reflections on her own experiences with Ms. Verwayne's kindergarten, Ellie emphasized, "In a school where you don't have the kind of diversity we have, it might be even more important." As we prepare young children to be members of the human family, we must offer them opportunities to celebrate all aspects of their identities and to resist bias and oppression. In the field of early childhood education, we spend much of our time and energy nurturing children's capacity for kindness and respect. Helping children see the role they have to play in fostering equality and inclusion through racial justice is a critical piece of this project.

References

Breiding, M.J., S.G. Smith, K.C. Basile, M.L. Walters, J. Chen, & M.T. Merrick. 2014. "Prevalence and Characteristics of Sexual Violence, Stalking, and Intimate Partner Violence Victimization-National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, United States, 2011." Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: Surveillance Summaries 63 (8): 1-18. www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6308a1.htm.

Delpit, L. 2012. "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children. New York: The New Press.

Derman-Sparks, L., D. LeeKeenan, & J. Nimmo. 2015. Leading Anti-Bias Early Childhood Programs: A Guide for Change. New York: Teachers College Press; Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).

Derman-Sparks, L., P.G. Ramsey, & J.O. Edwards. 2006. What If All the Kids Are White? Anti-Bias Multicultural Education with Young Children and Families. New York: Teachers College Press.

DiAngelo, R. 2012. "What Makes Racism So Hard for Whites to See?" Chap. 10 in What Does It Mean to Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy, 167-89. New York: Peter Lang.

Harvey, J. 2017. "Are We Raising Racists?" Opinion, New York Times, March 14. www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/opinion/are-we-raising-racists.html.

Husband, T. 2010. "He's Too Young to Learn About That Stuff: Anti-Racist Pedagogy and Early Childhood Social Studies." Social Studies Research and Practice 5(2): 61-75.

Husband, T. 2012. "'I Don't See Color': Challenging Assumptions about Discussing Race with Young Children." Early Childhood Education Journal 39 (6): 365-71.

Jones, J. "The Racial Wealth Gap: How African-Americans Have Been Shortchanged Out of the Materials to Build Wealth." Working Economics Blog, Economic Policy Institute, February 13, 2017. www.epi.org/blog/the-racial-wealth-gap-how-african-americans-have-been-s....

Klefstad, J.M., & K.C. Martinez. 2013. "Promoting Young Children's Cultural Awareness and Appreciation Through Multicultural Books." Young Children 68 (5): 74-81.

Ladson-Billings, G. 2009. The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Pitts, J. 2016. "Don't Say Nothing." Teaching Tolerance,no. 54. www.tolerance.org/magazine/tt54-fall-2016/feature/dont-say-nothing.

Pollock, M. 2005. Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Poon, O. 2017. "Our Schools Need to Teach a Fourth 'R': Racial Literacy." Rewire. https://rewire.news/article/2017/03/01/schools-need-teach-fourth-r-racial-literacy/.

Ramsey, P.G. 2015. Teaching and Learning in a Diverse World: Multicultural Education for Young Children. 4th ed. New York: Teachers College Press.

Tatum, B.D. 2003. "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race. Rev. ed. New York: Basic Books.

Vittrup, B. 2016. "Early Childhood Teachers' Approaches to Multicultural Education and Perceived Barriers to Disseminating Anti-Bias Messages." Multicultural Education 23 (3-4): 37-41.

Winkler, E.N. 2009. "Children Are Not Colorblind: How Young Children Learn Race." PACE: Practical Approaches for Continuing Education 3 (3): 1-8.

Wright, B.L., S.L. Counsell, & S.L. Tate. 2015. "'We're Many Members, but One Body': Fostering a Healthy Self-Identity and Agency in African American Boys." Young Children 70(3): 24-31.

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Becoming Upended: Teaching and Learning about Race and Racism with Young Children and Their Families

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This article, along with the suggested resources, provides a starting point for teachers and families seeking to do the important work of supporting young children's learning and understanding about race and racism.

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Citizen of Nowhere is a great Comedy by Daliso Chaponda in which he plays with the idea of White Guilt https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b2nxyn

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Citizen of Nowhere is a great Comedy by Daliso Chaponda in which he plays with the idea of White Guilt https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b2nxyn

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Realising the Ambition: Education Scotland

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Realising the Ambition: Education Scotland

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In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, a newly formed group called the Black Psychiatrists of America began to challenge their white colleagues to think about racism in a new way. Its members had been discussing for some time the possibility of creating an organization that would address their lack of representation within the key bodies of American psychiatry. But now, as one of these men, Dr. Chester Pierce, later put it "we anguished in our grief for a great moderate leader," and it seemed that the time for moderation on their side was also over. In Pierce's words: "As we listened to radio reports and called to various sections of the country for the on-the spot reports in inner cities, our moderation weakened and our alarm hardened."

Racism had led directly to King's assassination, and not only had white psychiatry consistently failed to take racism seriously; it had, in ways both subtle and overt, enabled it.

The decision was thus made to organize black psychiatrists into an independent body that would use tactics of the civil rights movement to force American psychiatry to acknowledge both its own racism and its professional responsibility to address the scourge of racism in the country.

On May 8, 1969, representatives from the Black Psychiatrists of America interrupted the trustees of the American Psychiatric Association while they were eating breakfast, and presented them with a list of demands. These included a significant increase in African-American representation on APA committees, task forces, and other positions of leadership; a call for the APA to commit itself to desegregating mental health facilities; and a demand that any individual member of the society who was found to be guilty of racial discrimination be barred from practicing psychiatry.

The most fundamental demand made that morning, however, was that the profession begin to think about racism differently than it had in the past. Racism did not just happen because some bad people had hateful beliefs. Unlike many of their liberal white colleagues, who were fascinated by the potential mental pathologies of individual racists, the Black Psychiatrists of America (drawing on new sociological work) insisted that racism was built into the systems and structures of American life, including psychiatry itself. For this reason, as some of them put it in 1973, "institutional change (as opposed to personality change) are needed to root out and eliminate racism."

Chester Pierce-the founding president of the Black Psychiatrists of America-was most concerned about the pernicious influence of one institution in particular: television. By 1969, virtually every American family home had at least one set. As one commentator at the time observed: "American homes have more television sets than bathtubs, refrigerators or telephones; 95 percent of American homes have television sets."

Small children of all ethnicities were growing up glued to TV screens. This worried Pierce, because he was not just a psychiatrist but also a professor of early childhood education. And from a public health standpoint, he believed, television was a prime "carrier" of demeaning messages that undermined the mental health of vulnerable young black children in particular. In fact, it was Pierce who first coined the now widely used term microaggression, in the course of a study in the 1970s that exposed the persistent presence of stigmatizing representations of black people in television commercials.

It seemed to Pierce, though, that the same technology that risked creating another generation of psychically damaged black children could also be used as a radical therapeutic intervention. As he told his colleagues within the Black Psychiatrists of America in 1970: "Many of you know that for years I have been convinced that our ultimate enemies and deliverers are the education system and the mass media." "We must," he continued, "without theoretical squeamishness over correctness of our expertise, offer what fractions of truth we can to make education and mass media serve rather than to oppress the black people of this country."

Knowing how Pierce saw the matter explains why, shortly after the founding of the Black Psychiatrists of America, he became personally involved in helping to design a new kind of television show targeted at preschool children.

The show had had originally been conceived as a novel way of bringing remedial education into the homes of disadvantaged children, especially children of color. Pierce, though, saw a different kind of potential for a show like this: one that could directly counter and counteract the racist messages prevalent in the media of his time. The issues for him were even more personal than they might otherwise have been: at the time, he had a 3-year-old daughter of his own. He thus agreed to serve as a senior advisor on the show, working especially closely with the public television producer Joan Ganz Cooney, one of its two creators (the other was the psychologist Lloyd Morrisett).

In 1969, the show aired on public television stations across the country for the first time. It was called "Sesame Street."

It was not only the most imaginative educational show for preschoolers ever designed: it was also, quite deliberately, populated with the most racially diverse cast that public television had ever seen. All the multi-ethnic characters- adults, children and puppets - lived, worked, and played together on a street in an inner-city neighborhood, similar (if in an idealized way) to the streets in which many minority children were growing up.

Each show opened with scenes of children of different races playing together. Episodes featured a strong black male role model (Gordon, a school teacher), his supportive wife, Susan (who later is offered the opportunity to develop a profession of her own), a good- hearted white storekeeper (Mr. Hooper) and more.

Within a few years, Hispanic characters moved into the neighborhood as well. As Loretta Moore Long (who played Susan) later reflected: '"Sesame Street' has incorporated a hidden curriculum ... that seeks to bolster the Black and minority child's self-respect and to portray the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural world into which both majority and minority child are growing."

The radical nature of this "hidden curriculum" did not go unnoticed. In May 1970, a state commission in Mississippi voted to not air the show on the state's newly launched public TV network: the people of Mississippi, said some legislators, were not yet "ready" to see a show with such an interracial cast. The state commission reversed its decision after the originally secret vote made national news - though it took 22 days to decide to do so.

"Sesame Street" would go on to become the most successful children's show of all time. Over time, though, the radical mental health agenda fueling its creation was largely forgotten. Later critics would instead increasingly suggest that the show, as a straightforward experiment in early education, benefited white middle-income children more than its primary target audience of disadvantaged minorities, and in that sense had arguably partly misfired.

Chester Pierce, however, never lost sight of the hidden curriculum that, for him, had always been at the heart of "Sesame Street." "Early childhood specialists," he reflected in 1972, "have a staggering responsibility ... in producing planetary citizens whose geographic and intellectual provinces are as limitless as their all-embracing humanity."

What mattered most about "Sesame Street" was not the alphabet songs, the counting games or the funny puppets. What mattered most was its vision of an integrated society where everyone was a friend and treated with respect.

The program had originally been a radical experiment in the use of mass media to give the youngest generation of Americans their first experience of what Martin Luther King Jr. had famously called the Beloved Community: one based on justice, equal opportunity and positive regard for one's fellow human beings, regardless of race, color or creed.
Anne Harrington is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the history of science and medicine at Harvard University, director of undergraduate studies in her department, and faculty dean of Pforzheimer House, a 400-strong undergraduate community on the Harvard campus. She is the author of four books and numerous articles. This story is part of an Undark series in which book authors share stories that didn't make it into their books. Here, Anne Harrington shares a story that didn't make it into her latest book "Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness," (W. W. Norton & Company.) This story was originally published in Undark.

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The Forgotten Tale of How Black Psychiatrists Helped Make 'Sesame Street'

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In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, a newly formed group called the Black Psychiatrists of America began to challenge their white colleagues to think about racism in a new way.

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Arts council: Every child:equality and diversity in arts and culture with, by and for children and young people

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Arts council: Every child:equality and diversity in arts and culture with, by and for children and young people

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https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/FINAL%20report%20web%20ready.pdf

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CRER's latest research report shows that even before the Covid-19 pandemic, minority ethnic people in Scotland were suffering disproportionate levels of poverty. Particularly worrying is the lack of progress on employment gaps and the recent stark rise in poverty levels for children in minority ethnic families. Policy and Research Officer Kirsty McNeil explores our findings.

In Scotland, someone from a Black and minority ethnic (BME) background is around twice as likely to experience poverty as someone from a white Scottish/British background. There is a danger that, in 2020 and for years to come, the wide-ranging impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic will contribute to a rising tide of poverty amongst those on low incomes, including a disproportionate number of BME people.

Our report, Ethnicity and Poverty in Scotland 2020: Analysis and reflection on the impact of Covid-19, investigates key themes and puts the most recently available statistics on poverty for BME people in Scotland into context. It also begins to explore the short- and long-term impacts of the pandemic on poverty for people from a minority ethnic background.

Key findings from the report

The rate of relative poverty in Scotland is more than double for those from BME groups compared to the majority white Scottish/British group

Poverty levels appear to be rising, particularly within Asian or Asian British ethnic groups. In 2013-18, 34% of the Asian or Asian British statistical category were in relative poverty, and by 2014-19 this had risen by 5 percentage points to 39%

Children from minority ethnic families in Scotland are the only 'priority group' within child poverty policy still seeing rising levels of poverty. Almost half of all children in minority ethnic families were living in relative poverty in Scotland over 2016-19

In employment, BME people continue to be more likely to work in low paid sectors with little chance of career progression

Unemployment rates are higher for minority ethnic people in Scotland; in 2019, the gap in employment rates between minority ethnic people and white people in Scotland was over 16%

This gap is much wider for minority ethnic women at 22% compared to 9.5% for men. BME women in Scotland continue to face serious barriers in access to work, including racist and sexist attitudes and discrimination

The employment gap is also much wider for younger people. For 16-24-year-olds, there is a 26.1% gap between minority ethnic and white employment rates. Figures are similar for 25-34-year-olds, at 25.3%

Only 2.3% of Scotland's Modern Apprentice starts in 2018/19 were from BME backgrounds, despite a target of 5.1% by 2021

Graduate unemployment (and under-employment in part time jobs) is affecting BME graduates in Scotland, who are up to three times more likely to be unemployed compared to white graduates

BME people in Scotland are particularly affected by poverty linked to the cost of housing. BME groups are often more likely to be living in expensive private rented housing

Homelessness may be becoming a significant problem; in Scotland, 7.4% of homelessness applications in 2018/19 were from BME people

These figures are just the tip of the iceberg. BME people face significant issues across Scottish society which impact risks and experiences of poverty. However, despite being far ranging, these figures do not tell the whole story.

In some areas such as benefit take up, there are still gaps in the data for individual ethnic groups, which are combined together into headline figures. This makes it impossible to see the real picture for these groups, and can hide the true extent of poverty by mixing data for worse off and better off groups. We've long called for an improved evidence base on poverty and ethnicity, and in particular, further analysis of why the poverty risks are so high for certain BME groups.

Over the years, calls for action on poverty for BME groups in Scotland have been plentiful. This report is the latest in a long line that have made concrete recommendations, but despite this, there is a history of both insufficient and inefficient action.

Quite simply, our findings show that current measures to tackle poverty (which tend to take a race blind approach) are not working for minority ethnic people in Scotland.

Whilst the Covid-19 pandemic has the potential to be a major catalyst for a rise in poverty rates, it is also a time to push harder for Scottish Government to tackle inequalities and set out targeted actions that focus on the specific barriers faced by BME groups. It is only then that we might achieve the meaningful change that is badly needed.

Read the full report here: Ethnicity and Poverty in Scotland 2020: Analysis and reflection on the impact of Covid-19

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New research from CRER: Ethnicity and Poverty in Scotland 2020

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CRER's latest research report shows that even before the Covid-19 pandemic, minority ethnic people in Scotland were suffering disproportionate levels of poverty. Particularly worrying is the lack of progress on employment gaps and the recent stark rise in poverty levels for children in minority ethnic families. Policy