You Can Keep The Corporate Blackface

Today I have sat and watched the most insidious and cynical (what feels like a) forced PR stunt by some of our UK Arts organisations and I am shaking with absolute rage. My stomach is in my throat, my heart is tearing itself out of my chest and I have 20 years of pain, chiselling its way out from behind my eyeballs, ready to split them in two. For 20 years I have given my entire life to this industry and I may be about to lose it all tonight.

It’s a very British thing, to throw the rock and then hide your hands. We can never have an adult conversation in this country about racism. Anti-Black racism is something that only happens in America, apparently and it’s confined to the use of slurs, white hoods and the murder of Black people on camera. Any considered and nuanced discussions about the complexities of structural racism are always derailed with ‘tu quoque logical fallacy’ like; ‘Is calling someone racist the REAL racism?’ And ‘someone called me Karen, I too have been discriminated against.’ It’s a very old and deliberate ploy but it seems to work here.

Funny, (not really but, you know what I mean), in a country that has developed more policies and allegiances and systems and establishments and structures than anywhere else on the planet, we cannot seem to understand the simple concept of racism being more than just name calling. With all the treaties we enforced across the globe, the complex contracts of protocol, covenant and convention, yet we still can’t understand that racism is a system ‘of social and political levers’ (Scott Woods) and not just someone calling you the N word? Make it make sense! And for an industry that claims to be ‘the voice of the unheard’ as often as it does, you’d think the arts and culture industry would know this best, apparently not.

I don’t know what finally turned the tide because I remember 2011. The tweets, the silence, the cognitive dissonance, so what changed now? Lockdown fatigue, the reality of our industry disappearing before our very eyes, or whether it was simply that the abyss finally stared back; whatever it was, after years, decades, centuries of us telling you all what was happening to us, you finally started to listen. And then so did the brands, or was it the other way round?

Many organisations have finally said the one thing that they could never bring themselves to say, could never utter, could never conceive, could never imagine... until now. That Black Lives Matter. Not that we are better, or we matter more or we are above anyone else just that our lives matter as much as everyone else’s. That’s it. It took until now for our arts and culture organisations to just admit that one thing. Then it hit like a wild fire. Once one establishment had the balls to say it, it emboldened the rest, all of them; copy-pasting their quotes and their Microsoft Paint posters and now we are thankfully all in agreement that yes, Black people’s lives actually are in fact, just as precious as anyone else. Halle-fucking-lujah!

But you want to know why I’m hurt? Why I’m raging? Why I am distrusting of this soulless, empty platitude? Because today I saw a company that watched me get bullied out of a job, tweet ‘Black Lives Matter’. A company that watched my discrimination first hand, tweet ‘Black Lives Matter’. A company that treat me with the utmost distain and saw me cry every day both on my way into work and out of work, for years, tweet ‘Black Lives Matter’. A company where I was the only Black cast member and the makeup team wouldn’t touch my hair, tweet ‘Black Lives Matter’. A company, where after years of service, I was mistaken for “the cleaner” in my own dressing room, tweet ‘Black Lives Matter’. A company whose owner, just last year referred to Black people as “the darkies” (you were there, you saw it too), tweet ‘Black Lives Matter’. The list goes on and on. Countless, countless instances; abuses that we just can’t and don’t bother to mention because explaining endless slights and micro-aggressions is just not worth the mental distress. Having to constantly speak and explain to the willfully ignorant - not just from my own experience but from many, many others in our industry, examples of complicity, ignorance, apathy and betrayal. Companies throwing the brick at us and then hiding their hands with a tweet today. Smelly, very smelly!

I am glad, you have finally realised that Black Lives Matter but, you cannot Black Wash your way out of the countless times you have let down your Black employees, co-workers, audience members and local communities here, in this country. You don’t get to perform ‘Corporate Blackface’ (Kim Crayton), follow us for the Black Pain Porn, tweet ‘empty performative, corporate solidarity’ (Blaak Richardson) and then be absolved of your mistreatment of us here, in this country, no fucking way!

So many of us are bound by evil little bits of paper that prevent us from speaking our truth but you do not get to tweet that fake solidarity and have zero Black staff members – or worse, have one, then burden them with the enormous task of writing your shitty ‘Black Lives Matter’ PR statements when they are already dealing with not only watching their people being systematically murdered on camera but, the highest rates of infection and death rates of a global pandemic. Not on my fucking watch!

If Black Lives Matter – then they matter both over there, over here, then, now and always. You have now entered in to a fucking contract (Trevor Noah) and you cannot now EVER turn back.