[Dr Clive James Nwonka]: Okay I think we are ready to begin, can everyone hear me? Yeah fantastic
Good evening I'm Dr Clive James
Nwonka. I'm a fellow in Film Studies in
the Department of Sociology at the London
School of Economics in Physical Science
and welcome to this special event this
evening at the South London Gallery
Convergence is a brand new ongoing
series of critical conversations
screenings and commissions that are
facilitated by the South London Gallery
and curated and hosted by a number of
guests and it's a pleasure to be the
first person to curate this new series.
In the wake of the murder of George
Floyd, we have seen an immediate
reaction from a number of public
cultural institutions all over the world,
from the BBC, to CNN, to Channel 4, to
BAFTA, and this discussion is calling
into question what I have described as
cultural compensation which is the
tendency of culture institutions to
produce a wave of enthusiasm and
appreciation for aspects of Black
culture in the wake of moments of Black
crisis and injustice and this discussion
wants to explore how the celebration of
culture can respond to the racism we've
seen not just in the last three weeks
but the long history and legacy of
racial injustice around the world. Excuse me. 
So we will be looking at a range of
different examples from media, the arts,
film, music, the gallery and thinking
about the responses we've seen in the
last few days to what we've now called
structural racism. Be that a commitment
to having more diverse programming, as
you seen with the BBC, a commitment to
producing diversity boards and
organisations and committees within 
BAFTA, or a commitment
to ensuring that we are seeing a much
more greater appreciation of Black
culture. However, there's always a danger
that the appreciation of culture is
temporary, and what happens beyond this
moment of heightened consciousness and
and awareness of Black Lives Matter? 
Will we still talking about the celebration of
Black culture in a few weeks time? Next
year? Can we sustain a conversation about
racial injustice through the use of
culture? That's what we are hoping this
Convergence will discuss, and to do so I
want to introduce a wonderful panel of
experts who will be joining me in a
discussion around these key themes over
the next hour. Firstly we have Bidisha
who is a TV and radio broadcaster,
journalist and filmmaker. She specialises
in international human rights, social
justice, gender, the arts, and offers
political analysis, arts critique and
cultural diplomacy that tries to work
through these intersections together. Her
most recent book Asylum and Exile: Hidden
Voices of London is based on her
outreach work in UK prisons, refugee
charities and detention centres, and her
most recent film An Impossible Poison
received its London premiere in March
2018. We also have Lanre Bakare who is
the Guardian's arts and cultural
correspondent. He recently edited this
special GQ, sorry G2, issue
covering race in the UK and has
previously worked in New York and Los
Angeles for the Guardian US and was
awarded the Scott Trust Bursary recently.
And finally we have Francesca Sobande who is a lecturer in Digital Media Studies
at the School of Journalism, Media and
Culture at Cardiff University. She's the
co-author of To Exist is To Resist: Black
Feminism in Europe, and is the author of
The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain,
which will published by Palgrave Macmillan
this autumn.
So this discussion will last for an hour
followed by a 15-minute response of
questions from the audience.
I've asked each panelist to prepare a
three to five minute provocation, which
will discuss their perspective on the
last three weeks, the role of culture in
determining how they've been thinking around race
and racial equality, but equally how
they feel those forms of media and culture
can respond to racism beyond this
critical conjuncture. That'll be followed
by a number of questions within the
panel and then of course we'll open out
to audience questions as well. So firstly
we'll begin with Bidisha.
[Bidisha]: Hi Clive, thanks. When you were talking I realised that we
first met exactly two years ago, talking
about all of this stuff in the context
of British film and the discussion we
had then is probably not going to be
markedly different from the one that
we're going to have now, or the kinds of
questions that the audience is going to
bring up right now, and actually I've
been really frustrated both as a
journalist as someone who sits on boards
of arts organisations for the last
three weeks because all I'm seeing is a
kind of whitewashing around race. I got
an email this morning saying why haven't
we, I won't mention who these
organisations are because it's systemic,
but saying 'Why haven't we put out a
statement about Black Lives Matter yet?'
and I wrote back saying 'Has anyone asked
for us, for us to give a statement about
it? Does anyone care what this book's
organisation cares about what we think
about it?' What's the statement going
to say that you can't get an algorithm
to write in the first place when the
truth of this organisation is that, just
like everything between the 17th century
and the 19th century, it made its money
and developed its endowment through
slavery and colonisation. But that's the
one thing that they can't say, so the
statement's going to say that obviously
racist killings are bad, and that not
racist not killings are good, and that's
gonna be it, for something that nobody is
waiting for at all. Meanwhile in the
organisation there's about three 
non-white people and
that whenever something racist actually
comes up, number one it's never as
explicit as a racist murder, number two
whenever you try to bring it up it
doesn't work because you have to explain
something for about 15 hours to get to
the beginning point of getting someone
to understand which they don't want to.
Anyway, so actually I'm incredibly
frustrated and I'm seeing that the
entire discussion has sort of moved
sideways or backwards so it seems like
people are okay talking about events 200
years ago but if you sort of try to talk
about active ongoing racism day by day,
it just re-encounters all the
resistance that we've all been writing
and talking about all the way through. So
I'm, I'm very very sceptical about 
whether this, or any thing else is
any kind of watershed moment, or if what's
going to happen is just the cultural
version of what fashion brands are doing
which is to employ the equivalent of an
advertising agency to put out a
statement that is sort of unimpeachable
as a statement, while carrying on the way
they've always done. I am incredibly
cynical and, and not really very
optimistic about the way things are
going culturally. I mean major cultural
institutions have weathered far bigger
things than this and then come through
with all of their power structures
completely intact. So I'm watching it but
I really agree with what Reni Eddo-Lodge
said in the Guardian a couple of days
ago that she regards this conversation
as a kind of a power game in itself, and
that she's very wary about, about
getting involved and that's where I'm at
really. But I hope I'm at the more
pessimistic end of where people are at.
[Clive]: Thank you that's fantastic. Lanre?
[Lanre]: Yeah I think I'm not too far away from where
Bidisha is, sadly. I feel like I've been trapped
in this kind of weird groundhog day
for a while, I think most of us have with
what's going on with the pandemic but then
also when the events with George Floyd
happened. I was in America in 2014, I
moved there in the September, so America was
dealing with the Michael Brown situation.
What happened there, where he was, he was
killed by by Darren Wilson and then you had
this kind of an incredible run of, you
know, a horrific run of, Black or Brown men
and women being killed by
the police. You know Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley,
Sandra Bland and on and on there's
many more, and I remember being in
America at that time
and I remember vividly going home from
the office. I'm thinking right I'm going to
put on the TV and see what people are talking
about. This is after the Eric Garner non-
indictment and I put on Fox News. It was just
like, wow, just people justifying the fact
that this man had been killed,
and I saw the reaction to that, people
are out on the street, people protesting,  I was talking to people back home and everybody
was like "I can't believe this is happening in America,
it's completely crazy, like be careful
out there"
and, I feel as if we're in a similar
situation again here. We've seen the same
thing play out on us like spate of deaths,
and then big protests, and it does feel
different this time because it's, you
see many many people, and they will come out. We've had, you know I went many consecutive
days of protests but then the reaction
from the media, which I'm obviously a
part of, it's been, it's been so kind
of piecemeal
and poor, and we've already moved on. The
moment, the moment has already completely
passed.
I think the moment when it, when it
changed, was um, we had the far-right
protests the other week, and then that picture of, of the
the black men carrying the white guy out,
and then that was, that was it, alright
we're finished now. Like racism's kind of not
completely fixed but we've got to the end of
this a little bit, we don't really have
to talk about this anymore. We can talk
about statues, and blackface but let's not
talk about kind of systemic racism
because it's a bit tough, and we don't really
get it, and is it really even our problem?
Um, so I think for me and my work I'm
just trying to kind of figure out ways
that we can keep that conversation going
on a regular basis. There are loads of
things we can do, we tried to do a
little bit with the G2 race special
which was kind of taking a real look at
race in the UK, not making it an American
story, but what's going on in this
country? Because people are frustrated, they're
furious, this is a whole generation of
people who grew up probably reading
Reni's book, and understanding
where the bodies are buried and
understanding that there are these big
systemic problems of being articulate
and able to talk about them.
So in er, one way I'm hopeful because that,
that generation of people, you know I was
at one of the protests and there were so
many people out there and they are not
going to accept it, they want to change and
push that conversation forward whether
or not they're going to be able to do,
you know do that, is a completely different
um yeah a completely different argument.
But yeah I'm kind of hopeful
but then also a little bit like Bidisha so yeah. 
[Clive]: Thank you. Francesca?
[Francesca]: Yeah I'll start with what encourages me before getting real about
I guess how cynical I am, um with
regards to what extent certain
organisations can actually back up the
statements that they're putting out, and
so I think there are, there are many
different examples of grassroots and
collective organising and activism that
involves the creation and sharing of
media, arts and culture, um as part of
the dissemination of really important
resources and information and that's
really vital and it's something that
long predates 2020 and I think sometimes
what we see is  organisations acting as
though they weren't aware of the fact
that people have been on the ground
doing this work for a long time, and they
act as though, or they weren't actually perhaps
actively obstructing that sort of
work in this, what is sometimes frequently
refered to, this current so-called moment.
So I think I see really great examples
of community organising and the creation
of arts at a time of intense pain, at a time when
people are systemically oppressed in
ways that are incredibly heightened, but
I think what really worries me is that
the people doing that work, they aren't
a part of the organisations that are sort
of rushing to put out statements often
as, as, a way to platform themselves and
ultimately try to protect what might be
perceived as being their corporate
reputation. So I think we're seeing many
examples of what might be viewed as the
commodification of not only Blackness
and Black people but specifically Black
social justice activism and sometimes we
might hear this term 'woke washing' has been used, 
and that's something I've looked into a bit as
part of my own work or by organisations for
many years have been trying to sort of
present themselves as being aligned with
certain social justice activist causes
and right now we're seeing this real
increase in the number of brands that
for the first time ever are posting
statements that use the words Black Lives
Matter, but beyond that, are we seeing any
substantial changes and if we do see any
so-called sort of moves towards change,
how's that actually going to impact
Black people and how is that going to
change material conditions, and beyond
surface level representation and so-called
equality, diversity and inclusion
agendas? Where is the real meaningful
change that organisations often want to
present themselves as being behind but
which ultimately falls flat in the form
of a tweet or a statement that is posted
one day and deleted the next?
[Clive]: Thank you Francesca. 
Wow that is a lot for us to really get into.
Um, and for myself having thought about this 
for the last three weeks
um one thing I've noticed that cuts
across everything that all three of you said
is the emergence of the term structural
racism into the popular agenda in quite
unprecedented ways, and in many ways the
skepticism that you've all suggested is needed
here is born from the rapid response
from questions of diversity which is
what we were using to describe racial
inequality just three weeks ago. So now the
recognition that structural racism
exists within our cultural institutions.
And there is something in that rapid
response, from diversity to structural
racism with and through it period, that for
me and for many people promotes a
particular skepticism about how our
public institutions, our cultural
institutions, our media institutions have
done that critical work to understand
and rethink racism and arrive at the
point where we're now describing these
things as structural.
So, Bidisha I want to ask you particularly
given that your work crosses across
journalism and publishing and film. What
do you think that cultural institutions
should be doing right now?
[Bidisha]: Oh wow, that's a really good one. I'm a big fan, I know I like uncomfortable conversations and the
thing that, that I've seen definitely
work is what I call listening sessions.
Which is where you line up the head of
department or the, you know like the
person, and you, you testify in front of
them and in return for you being given
the space to basically list all the
micro-aggressions you've ever
experienced at the organisation, you let
the other person off the hook by saying
they don't need to respond in the moment,
so it cuts out their defensiveness
and you just say to them "okay look this is going 
to be really embarrassing and
uncomfortable, you don't have to answer
back, but you do have to stay in the room
and shut up and listen for the two hours
that we're going to do this" and er, as awful
as it is I have seen that work. 
There's a sort of drip drip drip feed
effect of someone actually just hearing
testimonies of what it's actually just
like to work in every organisation. It's
a bit like the Me Too movement, you know
these aren't legalistic movements.
Whenever people in arts organisations
have been sacked, like in America there
have been lots of stepping downs at the
tops of magazines but I think those are
the people who were ready to leave
anyway so I don't believe or trust any
of those resignations or stepping downs.
But listening circles really work, and
that's one practical thing that I can
suggest, but people have to be willing to
do that and what I've seen again and
again is that they say they're willing
so there's a commitment to doing it and
then inevitably the people stay away in
droves or when the moments gone they,
they repeatedly delay and then somehow
by magic the thing never happens because
it's been postponed seven times 
and then 40% of people don't
go, so I'm really at a loss to say what
should be done but I think it has to
begin just with testimonials because the
other stuff doesn't work. You know trying
to go through grievance procedures and
tribunals clearly obviously doesn't work.
I am very cynical about us all kind of
constantly writing op-eds about it
because all that does for us, particularly
me and Lanre as journalists, is that
that then becomes your beat and I really
always resisted trying to be that person
that's talking about race all the time
because they honestly can't tell us
apart and if it's not me, it's him and if
it's not him it's gonna be someone else
who's on the list. So it has to be done
in a communal, off-the-record,
speech based way.
[Clive]: I'm interested in your use of, both
journalism and the race debate
because we've seen quite unprecedented
rush of spokespersons who
have been parachuted into the desks at 
Newsnight or Good Morning Britain or
BBC or Channel 4 News to be that
person who articulates the nation's mood
and it's a particularly new format at
the race debate that becomes a spectacle
it often becomes a way of someone
displaying Black anger or Black grief
but doesn't really engage the key
question around racial inequality and
Lanre, to bring you in as a journalist as
well. How have you read the last three weeks
in terms of the, what I would call the
psychic wound and pressure and
responsibility of the Black public
figure to now be the Black spokesperson
within these race debates? Are they ever
really debates or just spectacles for
people? [Lanre]: Yeah I mean I don't know kind of
how new they are actually because I was
thinking, just as you were speaking then, I was
thinking of the episode of Brass Eye where
Darcus Howe was on it I don't know if you remember
that? When he comes on and Chris Morris
is basically lampooning that exact
thing, and he's saying to him it comes up
in like the little caption at the bottom
of the screen
goes, Mr Darcus Howe speaks for every
Black person in the UK and he starts
calling him someone else's name and it's
quite uncomfortable it probably goes a
little bit too, like it's bit kind of
at Darcus's expense but, so that was
back in the 90s and I think like George
the Poet when he was Newsnight I
thought he did incredibly well, but there
was an amazing moment where Emily
Maitlis, I think he just explained, he
just talked about the the death of
Christopher Alder in police custody, in
1998 which is a really shocking case I
think worse, that was in Hull, and I think
worse than George Floyd in my
opinion, like there he was picked up
up outside a nightclub, something happened to
him in a police van, he was left on the floor
of a police station, he was dying
basically, the officer did nothing to
help him, they were making monkey noises, it
was all caught on video and he brought
this up, and then er, as an example of
like the fact that it happens here as
well, and Emily Maitlis just went "yeah
well that's just one example so?" and just
moved on completely, obviously hadn't
ever heard of the case, wasn't shocked by it
and it was just like what are these
debates? It's just George the Poet in this
case but it could've been Reni, or any one of
us brought in to try and articulate yeah
this, the, the Black kind of point of view,
and often a lot of racism is thrown at
them and they're expected to kind of sit there
and kind of deal with it so they're
completely calm and articulate, or you
can go the other route and kick off, in which
case it's a kind of performative Blackness
where you're enraged and people like to see
that, you know, when I've written pieces
where I've been angry, it's been clear
there's a kind of strange reaction that
you get, and people seem to really kind of
believe me like "yeah I see you were really angry there like I get that yeah yeah yeah"
and they seem to get that but when you're a
bit more articulate and calm and you come from a different angle people seem to
struggle with it a little bit. So yeah
it's again, you've got that first thing
it's just like, it's very, it just feels
very repetitious like you know what the
playbook is and I think that's why, Reni I've
not talked to about it, but I'm pretty sure
that's why you know she said in an
interview that's why she stayed away
from it. You know you won't see her go on
Newsnight, or Piers Morgan, she could be
shouting at and goaded like Dizzee
Rascal was this morning. It was
completely ridiculous.
So yeah, I think the media knows what the
playbook is and they kind of feel like
they're kind of done with Black Lives Matter right now.
they've had the debate, like we've had Dizzee
Rascal, we''ve had George the Poet. Let's move on
on to whatever it is John Bolton's book 
or something like that. So
yeah, I'm sounding really cynical, but
you know, you've seen the place so many
times and it's so repetitious, and yeah
I don't even remember seeing a kind of, a
debate about race on British TV which
has been satisfactory, genuinely my whole life.
[Clive]: I mean it seems to me, that you mentioned
that people now are withdrawing their labor
from the mainstream. You mentioned Reni,
I know Afua Hirsch
spoke quite vocally about her displeasure
at constantly being the one person who has to
come on Sky News, or come on the BBC and
defend an anti-racist position, and the
kind of trauma that one needs to
experience from that, but equally we
are now seeing there needs to be a
responsibility often for people of
colour to come there and defend an
anti-racist position that wouldn't have
actually taken place without those
people there, and to draw on your work
Francesca, do you think the consequence
of social media and what you described
as the commodification of Black
protest and often the ability of social
media to curate Black spokespeople who are then
essentially preyed upon by the media to
be placed in those situations as the
anointed Black spokesperson?
[Francesca]: Yeah so I think it's, it's tricky. What I often say with social media, digital spaces, there
are many opportunities to facilitate
important activism and facilitate
resistance but there are so many risks
that come along with that
and I think what we're seeing right now
is sometimes referred to as this new
emergence of activism, or this new
emergence of creativity, and response,
responses to this political and current
moment, but I think it's more so about
visibility and, also specifically I'd say
surveillance so I think there definitely
is very clearly examples of
organisations within the media, arts and
culture, creative industries,
essentially observing what has been
happening online, within certain
places, within certain
grassroots organisations and trying to
position themselves in proximity in a
way that will ultimately be self-serving
to the organisation so I think something
that is, something I constantly think
about and something that right now feels
very important to be critically
considering is, to what extent is it
possible to use social media in digital
spaces as part of countercultural
organising, anti-racist organising
specifically Black activists organising
in ways that are going to be more
generative than they are going to cause
harm to those who are at the root of
that organising, and I think quite often
we hear about the importance of digital
spaces and 'the online' with regards
to the sort of organising that we've
been speaking about and seeing about
but I think it's really, really necessary
that we don't forget about what's
occurring elsewhere and again to keep
coming back, as we seem to be doing as
part of this conversation to the legacy
of organising and the fact that what
we're seeing right now might be
presented as new in a way that can
absolve institutions and individuals of
any responsibility or of any needs to
actually enact the change they claim
they want to be about, and yeah I think
the digital, I'll keep going around in
circles in some ways about it. It
presents a lot of opportunities to
expose white supremacy, to call it out
but we also know that within various
digital spaces whether it's YouTube, and
whether it's other parts of online
content sharing sites, white supremacy is
harvested and, and far-right radicalism
occurs at a rapid rate. So maybe a
question or where I'll end my thoughts
on this is, to what extent can the
digital really provide us with the
tools, and the environment, and the
connections that are necessary to move
forward with anti-racist organising and
Black activist organising? When we know
that surveillance is always going to be rife.
[Clive]: Really really interesting points. I think I agree with you there, it's very very hard to have complete
faith in the digital because it's so
democratised and, and open to be
manipulated by a various number of 
actors and in hearing
us speak quite openly which I
can imagine must be quite difficult for all
of us and many people listening, given the
events of the last 3-4 weeks. I can't
help from thinking that we're in a moment
now, that is a third phase of how the
mainstream tries to manage race, racism
and difference. So I'm thinking of that
moment after Stephen Lawrence in 1999
and Macpherson reports and what was the
birth of what we now understand to be
diversity that was pursued in cultural
institutions and we're living with a
legacy still. Before then we had the
politics of multiculturalism, which we
lived with in the 70s and 80s and 90s, and
is it now we're coming into this new
phase which is structural racism? There's
the term that we use to describe what
was previously race relations which was
previously diversity as a way that cultural
institutions try to manage difference.
Bidisha, what do you think? Are we in this new
moment where we're seeing unprecedented uprising? Can we have any faith in the
ability of institutions to claim or
insist that they recognise that those
structures are racist now?
[Bidisha]: I, I don't think you'll ever get a full admission
of what the deal really is, and actually
you were talking about how this might be
a difficult conversation, for me it's
really liberating because everyone's in
the club so you don't have to
do the 40% of explaining that happens
at the beginning of every conversation. I
mean it's actually a real relief because
usually when you're talking about these
things in an arts or cultural
organisation you have to sensor yourself
to such a degree that, by the time you
all agree on what your version of racist
is it's such a boiled down version that
you, that no one ever gets anywhere. I
think that one thing that might help is
that we're in an age of protest and a
kind of anti-capitalist questioning
anyway, so everyone is looking at major
power structures whether they're at
universities, or they're in the media,
or they're in finance and banking, and
saying "well why does this look
the way it does?" when clearly obviously
this isn't working for anyone,
clearly this is exploitative and unequal,
clearly you got a whole generation of
people who were 21 who are going to come
out of university, they're already in
debt they're not likely to be able to
get any job in any area, and that's
subject to race and gender and class on
top of all of the other stuff. So I
don't think this is a bad moment to have
that conversation and I'm thinking now
particularly listening to Francesca that, that
the answer is going to be totally
grassroots, it's going to be completely a
civil rights movement lead change, rather
than people at Tate or the National
Gallery or the National Theatre having
lots of roundtables about how they can
hire one more person that's not white to
do their job, to do some job that they've
just invented for the next four years. I
think that the bourgeois structures are
the ones which are the absolute hardest
to change. Why? Because the people in them
are the absolute worst which is the
Liberals because they think they already
understand it so they're not willing to
change and the worst thing that's
happened in the last three weeks is all
the emails you get from people who are
like, have never spoken to you before in
your life and they come up to you with
really big eyes going isn't it awful, and
those are the people you will never, you
know, how do you turn round and say
exactly to those people "look what you said
is super patronising" and blardy blardy
blar because they can't hear it so I'm,
I think that change will come either
aggressively top-down, so through kind of
the forcible changing of structures, or
aggressively bottom-up. But it won't
happen at the level of pained lunches
and roundtable discussions, and hiring
one or two more people, and I'm also
aware that the anti-racism discussion
has also become extremely class-based so
whenever you go to a big organisation
and say "what are you doing?" they
basically tell you they've got lots of
internships for, for poor people who are
BAME because that's what they think,
they think that we don't go to
university, they think that we've been to
all been to crap schools, they think that
we don't know how to
get into these organisations, when that's
not the problem. The problem is that
they're exclusionary and racist and othering.
[Clive]: Lanre, just building upon Bidisha's
thoughts, I'm thinking about the visual,
I'm thinking about some of the work
you've done more recently on what I
called the rapid response or the
cultural compensation to the events of
the last three weeks. In particular, the
pulling back and withdrawal of films and TV
shows that have now deemed to be racist,
or racially insensitive, to use a term
that previously weren't considered in those
terms three weeks ago. Of course I'm
thinking of Little Britain, I'm thinking
of Gone with the Wind, I'm thinking of
other shows that are being kinda pulled both in the
US and UK. How do you read that
phenomenon of the withdrawal of TV shows
and films that are now deemed to be
racially offensive? Should we be kind of
preserving these as artefacts of how
racist institutions were up until three
weeks ago? Or should these be taken down
as being offensive?
 
[Lanre]: Yeah I think the first piece I ever, I ever wrote for the Guardian as the arts and culture correspondent
this is going back to April last year, was about whether Disney+ which was gonna, which launched in
November I think, in the UK was gonna have
Son of the South on it, which is an old
Disney film, I think it was out in
the 1940s, did huge box office, was
very popular at the time, but was really
controversial because it basically
presented life on a southern
plantation as like idyllic time where
like, there was a character called Uncle
Remus in it, it was really not okay, and
Disney was deciding whether or not to put it on its streaming service that was
launching, it decided to not put it on, and
it was also debating at the time whether to
include the scene in Dumbo which, it's quite famous, there's some crows, these black crows were
dancing and it's seen as a racist
caricature. So that was the first piece
I wrote, so it's been going on for a little
while and, and some of the voices in that
at the time were saying, I spoke to Ashley
Clark who's who's the programmer at
BAM in Brooklyn, which is a fantastic
institution, and he was saying look if
you present these things in the context,
and you give them context, and you talk
about them, even if they are
incredibly offensive, they should
probably be there, and I'm kind of more on
that side in the debate where we shouldn't
be trying to bury them. Because also, like
some of these moves are  incredibly
cynical like Netflix taking the third
series of The Mighty Boosh off its
service I mean that's, that's nothing,
that's easy you can do that in two seconds,
no one's even watching it, and then 
it gets you press, I mean we did that
story so maybe I'm kinda part of the problem, 
and it was interesting, the day
that that happened I interviewed the
comedian Eric Andre, um, who's a mixed
race comedian from America he has 
his own show on Adult Swim
it's just got a Netflix special and we were
talking about it and he was
like he'd just been out protesting in LA
and he was like "nobody out on the street
in LA cares about a peripheral
character in The Mighty Boosh" you know
whether or not that is offensive or not,
and so personally from, from my point of
view I think it's, it's really cynical
for these companies to, to remove them
and I think it's, in some ways the
debate's been healthy, not a lot of it but
a little bit maybe 10% of it. I think the
debate around Bo' Selecta! was important
because Trisha Goddard got to come out
and say "look you ruined my career by doing
this" it was, you know the impact that can
have on someone, I mean when you look
back at that portrayal it's completely
racist, and like Lee Francis cried or
whatever, I'm not really bothered about that, 
but Trisha Goddard gets to have that
public reckoning with someone, it was was good.
but then when you get into like Little
Britain and Mighty Boosh and League of
Gentlemen, I don't know personally I feel
like, these things, because they can stay
on the streaming platform as long as
they're presented in context, and there's
some warning there for people who going
into it, because it's important that we
know that ten years ago this stuff was on
British TV and people are laughing their
asses off about it, and now all of a
sudden everyone's up in arms about it
it's really important because it shows
like how, people talk about the progress
we've made in this country, but has it
really come that far? You know like Stuart
Hall was talking about this stuff in the
70s, you know, and these, yet these
programmes were still getting
commissioned and I think that's part of
the problem and you know better than anyone Clive and Bidisha, you'll know and Francesca, when you
get to the upper echelons of the
British TV industry and film industry
it's just incredibly white and they
don't see these things as problems and
all of a sudden now they're running round blowing 
off their services because it
because it suits their agenda it's it's
yeah it's pretty transparent, and not that
convincing.
[Clive]: I mean Francesca even just
thinking about point that Lanre's
making around institutions, I'm thinking
about the BBC and their commitment this
week to invest 100 million pounds in
diverse content over the next three
years. I mean how do you read that as,
again what I describe as a cultural
compensation, that's very much in
response to this moment we're in now? Is it
simply about making sure there are more
TV shows with some semblance of
Blackness? Is it about making sure that the
directors and those in the boardrooms
are of colour? Or to quote the work of
Anamik Saha have a, a lack of faith in the
ability of the one black person in the
boardroom to actually stimulate change
because he's still working there in a
very very white institution. What kind of
faith and hope can we call in those
kinds of cultural compensations?
[Francesca]: Yes I think this term, I think it was
diverse content was what you said, and I
guess it's the language surrounding
equality, diversity and inclusion. I think
it's, it's weaponised in a lot of
different ways and it's strategically
used to ambiguously allude to sort of
'difference' without naming things like
you know power, and white supremacy, anti
blackness and the specific forms of
oppression that black people face. So
it's probably an unsurprising response but
this notion of diverse content and
efforts to ensure that diverse content
is included, I don't really have a very
strong position in a way in response to
that as a concept because I think it
it's, it's so big that it only seems to
serve an institution in terms of
implying they're going to, going to do
something that's going to address these
issues without, again, naming what those
issues are and perhaps being frank about
how as an organisation they have been a
part of that problem. So I think you know
we've spoken quite a bit about
structural racism, and we've spoken about
the different ways that terms have
evolved over the decades and been
sort of, of the moment or in trend and I
think one of the things that I really
noticed and again is perhaps
unsurprising is that many of the
statements that we've seen made by
organisations and some of the moves that
they say they're going to be
implementing over the coming months or
years, very rarely do we see
words such as anti-Black racism appear
and very rarely do we see them naming
exactly what the problem is and more
often than not we're going to see these
statements cloaked in corporate
communication language that is there to
appease and there to distract from the
reality of institutional racism,
structural racism, and in particular anti
Black violence.
[Clive]: I mean you've struck a really important
point here which is the discord between
these institutions and their public
responses to the last three weeks and
using the language of structural racism
but what we see that the ideas they're
purporting to be approaching are still
cloaked in the idea of diversity, and is it
because
Bidisha, we haven't developed in this
country a real practice of anti-racism within
institutions, because we've never fully
accepted anti-racism? Or racism is a
phenomenon within society so our natural
language becomes diversity, becomes
diverse content,
it can't grapple with the idea of a
policy level of how we produce anti-racism within institutions. Is that what
the distance is here?
[Bidisha]: Yeah I think you're absolutely right and that
there's this classic really English thing of, instead
of wanting things to be different, to
want them to be nice, so it's much easier
to say "things are diverse" like a
fabulous potpourri and everyone's
getting along, than to say "something's
wrong and let's fix it" and it's gonna be
painful. I also think there's, England has
a very, I mean two things, first England
has a very odd relationship with America
so we absorb huge amounts of American
cultural output and at the same time we
think that they're like the really big
shit redneck version of England as if
we're in some kind of relationship with
them which we're, we're not really
so it's easy, so something really weird
and Freudian happens, where by all of
the most violent impulses are somehow
imputed to the Big Brother which is
America, so we can then point at
America and say "well you know we're bad
and it's not nice, but in America
it's really really bad and it's really
really real whereas over here it's
different cause basically we're English
and that's much better" and the second
thing is just a complete cultural amnesia
about colonisation and slavery
and that's gone on for decades and
decades. At no point in any textbook,
including up to university level, will
there be anything about colonisation and
slavery, so there are generations, there are
generations of Britons who genuinely,
truly, absolutely, don't know anything
about it whatsoever, and that includes
Prime Ministers and anyone who went to
Eton and anyone who did PPE at Oxford and then went into the cabinet, and it's
really really convenient to then plead
ignorance if you are genuinely ignorant
and then when you learn obviously it's
painful and confronting and embarrassing
and so you don't do the work, and I
think that's a real kind of, it's a
really clever do-over. I mean it's, I
think it's absolutely deliberate, and
really pernicious and it's all glossed
over with this sort of British well "you
know don't, don't make things awkward.
You got here didn't you, so just shut up and
let's let it all, let's all just be
nice to each other because that's in the
past" and that's really clever and it's
also exactly what you know abusive
perpetrators in relationships do which
is to say you know to not take
responsibility for what happens and to
pretend that every day is like year zero
and let's just move on and can't we all
just have a lovely conversation together
it's it's completely deliberate and
intentional and I'm glad that what's
happening now is forcing, forcing a
reckoning and also you know the idea of
pulling down statues which people were
so opposed to, I like the symbolism of
that in the sense that people did pull
down statues and the world didn't cave
in. So now we have to talk about.
[Clive]: Interesting you mention statues and 
how we discuss them in
public. Lanre, do you think that the
public discussion around bringing down
statues among this is satisfactory for an anti-racist agenda? Do we take these
statues down from the public
and place them in galleries as an artefact
of how Britain was, and our role in
slavery and colonialism? Or do we leave
them at the bottom of the river? Where do
we place these? [Lanre]: I think that on
the Colston statue, we had a debate at
work and David Olusoga joined in, he was
talking about the statue being rolled into the river, and he said it was it was the
perfect place for it because from that
point in Bristol was where some
of the slave ships would actually launch
from, and I'm a big Drexciya fan, they're a kind
of Detroit techno group and they've done
a lot of work about, a lot of their
themes were around the Black Atlantis which is this idea of like, during the Middle
Passage when slaves, enslaved people, were thrown overboard they would
create their own kind of world under,
under the water, and I felt like with the
Colston statue the perfect place
for it is in that harbour
like, just keep it there, like maybe
people will go diving hang around there
and like check it out and see what they
think, but I mean there was something
really poignant and poetic and beautiful
about that moment, obviously it's
been pulled out now, and it's
probably gonna end up in some sort of
museum and I think you know, the
people who did that they created history
like it was, it was a genuinely huge
moment in this country. It's kind of
being played out into a, you know became
this kind of debate quickly about
Churchill and whether you, you know what
we're gonna do next? What we're gonna
pull down next? You know it became like
this thing of
us and them and they're gonna take
away our statues, then it got kind of parlayed
into a political thing of like are Labour
behind this? Like, have they moved on from
Corbyn? Is Keir Starmer gonna stand with
these statues? Which is kind of bananas.
So yeah I think, do they belong in museums? I think in, in the case of Colston maybe, because
he's such a kind of horrific, egregious
example that you know people, people need
to know who he was and I think one of
the great things about the last couple
of weeks is that people have gone off and
googled and found out about Colston, they've figured
out oh that's why Massive Attack
would never play at Colston Hall because
this guy you know traded in thousands of enslaved people and you know ruined the lives of thousands
and was celebrated for it 200 years after he died.
You know the whole thing really lifted
the lid on where we were as a country in
the kind of 1890s when that, when that
statue was erected, and what we were trying to do
at that time, and the way we were trying to kind of, even at that point rewrite our
history and kind of show ourselves as
this kind of strange benevolent colonial
power even though we absolutely you know, were the worst people going. So yeah
I think it's, it's a tough one because
the debate, it kind of just, was used by
I think, a lot of elements in the
right-wing press and some other
elements of the press as well to kind of move the debate to this area where became
us and them and it was a, it was a
comfortable conversation, they know how
that one plays out. You know it's simple one, is it like "do we defend our history?"
or "Should we chuck it in the river?"
which is a kind of false debate, so yeah
I kind of feel as if, you know I cheered
when it went in there, when it went in the
river but then I kind of worried as to
what that was going to be turned into. I
interviewed Angela Davis like the day
after that, and you know she said you
know it was a great moment but, kind of
pointed to what Francesca was saying before
it's gonna be grassroots organising that
gets it done, and that was quite sobering
because I was kind of jumping up and down and cheering and then I was like
actually yeah maybe I want to think
about supporting my local group rather then just getting
excited because the statue's in the river.
[Clive]: I want to go to some questions from our audience
and participants, and the first one is, how
effective is the withdrawal of Black labour
in order to protect, in order to protest 
against institutional racism?
Francesca?
[Francesca]: So my, my first thoughts are I guess it depends on what we're
measuring in terms of identifying how
effective it is, but what I would say is
I think at times the withdrawal of Black labour is necessary to, with regards to the
survival of Black people. So beyond
thinking about does the withdrawal of
Black labour expose a situation so
much so that we see institutional change?
I think that definitely that can result,
result in that in some way, but I guess
at a different level, but one that
is just as important, thinking people on
a personal level, if somebody is in a
situation that is so inherently harmful
to them, their health, their
well-being, their safety, then the
withdrawal of Black labour is sometimes
necessary in terms of them focusing on
their survival. So yeah I think the, the withdrawal of
Black labour is something that I think
more often than not needs to happen in
order for situations to change, but what
is really awful is quite often that
means somebody perhaps stepping away
from a situation to protect their health
to protect their well-being, but also
doing so in a way that might impact them
negatively financially and exacerbate
the structural equalities and material
conditions that they're already
navigating.
[Clive]: Bidisha? 
[Bidisha]: I completely and
absolutely agree with all of that and I,
but I also think that this is, um it's
something that Francesca and Lanre were
both saying a bit earlier on that at
times like this we're just all called
upon to do yet more labour, you know
starting from year zero and then
explaining exactly every tiny little
facet of racism and microaggressions and
systematic racism and all the rest of it
but then has to be boiled down into
either you know a four minute TV or
radio slot that gets us nowhere. I mean
it's a form of, it's a form of
institutional gaslighting because
whenever we're called upon to discuss
racism nine times out of ten all it does
is replicate our experience of racism
all it does is leave us with the bad
taste in our mouths that we then think
about for the next two weeks about how
we couldn't convey the point we were
trying to make or people didn't get it.
All it does is bring on more abuse and
more threats and more racism from
strangers online and I absolutely think
it's very very powerful to just simply
refuse to do any of that and whenever,
particularly in the last three weeks
I've been contacted by organisations
saying "how can we learn?" I said well
that's, I always say "that's completely
wonderful, good luck on your learning
journey" and it's so telling how
incredibly affronted people are when you
say that, when you simply refuse to act
like basically their servant or
secretary or subordinate or employee
when you're not, it just points up the
sheer amount of entitlement encoded in
the demand that we somehow explain it
all or point them in the right direction.
[Clive]: Goodness. Lanre any comments on
this?
[Lanre]: Yeah I was just thinking, yes
I think if, if institutions wants to take,
or deal with this, this moment, this
thing that we're living through
seriously I think they need to put
resources behind it, rather than just as
Bidisha said kind of relying on people
to come in and tell them what to do just
because they're Black. You know I've
definitely had that in my career very
recently and it's it's incredibly
frustrating especially when you know you
could make change with an institution
for example introducing a race editor
whose job it is just to think about these
issues and to commission and to be
complete on top of every new bit of
research and speaking to people like
Francesca and you Clive and also Bidisha
find out what you know where we're going
next for this and really keep you know
news organisations on the cutting edge.
That'd be an amazing kind of
intervention but instead there's this
kind of expectancy that you, and other,
me and other, Black men or ethnic staff will
just have the answers we'll be able to
do that for them and that kind of
work, which is which is extra work you
know, on top of, on top of your job. You
know my job is arts and culture correspondent
I'm not the race correspondent I'm not paid for that, but you know often, you, you know sometimes
in my career I've had to
step in and stop things going live which
just have been, you know, not, not where
they should be in terms of race and, and
that's just an incredible kind of burden
that you have, and it takes a toll on
you personally and yeah like Bidisha
said it just, shows no respect for you for who you are and the kind of
things that you bring to the table.
[Clive]: Collecting practices and the funding of
museums is notoriously white, what can be
done? Francesca?
[Francesca]: So, sorry was that to do with
the collecting practices and curatorial
practices within museums?
[Clive]: Yeah and funding as well as museums.
[Francesca]: and funding as well? Yeah
so I think this maybe picks up on
something that I think Bidisha said
earlier on, and it's more just about the
arts, media and cultural sector
industry in general, but I think with
regards to changing who works in these
institutions and who is
at the root of creating these
structures and trying to dismantle them
and create them again from, from the
start, right from the bottom, I think a
real problem is that there's always this
focus on, as has been said, internships
and training opportunities and entry
level guidance is what it's sometimes referred to as for people from what is often
referred to as underrepresented
demographics and groups, right, and I
think what's really worrying is we all know 
people who, they don't lack the skills,
they don't lack the the leadership
training, they don't lack the capacity
to do the work that they want to do and
would probably do and not only very well
but often better than those who are
already in positions and I think with
regards to say curatorial practices and
museums and how they work right now I
think the system is so fundamentally
flawed and built on colonialist
and racist anti-Black foundations in so
many cases that this focus on helping
people enter an environment that's often
going to be counter to their wellbeing
is useless and the, the
conversation or not conversation because
you've spoken about the limitations of
panels and roundtable discussions but
the action that needs to take place is
real reckoning with the landscape as it
is and thinking how can things be done
entirely differently, how can this
structure be dismantled and how can we
push against this narrative that has so
often been at the forefront whereby
Black people, people of colour and queer
people, people who exist at the
intersections of all these different
groups are referred to as though they are
lacking the ability to take on the very
work they want to do.
[Clive]: Bidisha?
[Bidisha]: Yeah I agree with that and I feel ambivalent, because the thing is I love institutions like for example
the Tate galleries that's, I treat it like my
local, my dream would be to be, to be
featured in there, to have one of my
films screened in there and I absolutely
think that if they didn't, if they didn't
have their money taken from BP or
whoever, who else would it be? It
would be like a Jordanian dictator or
a Chinese firm that had made money through
sending children down mines to get stuff
for our mobile phones, that once you get to
that elite level I do actually think
that all of the money is probably bent
in some way or another and it's very,
very hard to find that amount of funding
that is completely clean and ethical so
if you want to be part of those worlds,
whatever colour you are, it involves
swallowing down the reality of huge
amounts of inequality behind the scenes
and I think, and I think that's a given.
It's also true in film, it's also true in
theatre that just to put on that level of
cultural output which is really
mainstream and really acclaimed it's
watched by lots of people it's gonna be
funded by someone or something which is
so unethical it's, it's really hard to
deal with, and that their version of
internationalism involves you know Tokyo
and Berlin and maybe a few other
countries which are in at the moment but
that's not the same as it being
multicoloured that's what I notice hugely
about, particularly art and film, but it's
often multicultural, often multilingual
but it's not multi-coloured and it's, and
it's not multi-class at all. Having said
that what bothers me is that I still, I
don't think that there should be a
second tier of sort of ghettoised
underfunded DIY shit stuff for all the
other people and I don't know what the
answer to that is but I've been around
these institutions too long to think
that they're gonna change anytime soon
and I also think that for emergent
artists they, they know that the only way
to survive and succeed is to
play the game and to speak on the race
and diversity panels while secretly
doing that thing that you do which is
that you know that your presence is
tokenised and it's not going to go anywhere.
[Clive]: Wow goodness. Lanre, any contributions?
[Lanre]: You're dropping truth bombs there. Yeah I agree with a lot of that.
I think as far as you speaking and 
we're talking about funding I
I think there is an alternative, I mean
look at France and Germany, like you can
do it through the public purse if you
want
but ideologically in this country we've
completely moved away from that.
I remember I think I spoke to you Clive and
you mentioned a book by Chris Smith when he
became Culture Secretary and he
like released it in all the speeches
when he, when he first came in. I went
back and read that because I'm a geek
or whatever and you know Labour then,
they're just constantly talking about
how the arts needs to get into bed with
business and this is how we do it and I
think you still see that manifested with
say Tristram Hunt when he's interviewed
about funding it the V&A and like giving back 
Sackler money, he's like "no why would I want to
do that" he just doesn't get it, like doesn't,
he doesn't seem to register at all
because he's doing what he's being told
to do. This is how we make the the arts
work this is how it becomes a success story'
it's by getting this corporate funding
regardless of where it comes from. I mean
I think fundings a tough one because
like Bidisha said you know the thing with
capitalism is, someone's gonna get
screwed over at some point if you made a
lot of money. I just think sometimes
in, in the UK we let some really kind of
egregious things go, where money has come from the
arms trade,
you know the Sackler money, it's, it's a
pretty dark and murky world so yeah when
when you're involved in that I mean, I seen
some the work that The White Pube do where
they're just been talking about you know
what it's like to work at these
institutions and it just sounds kinda
hellish, and I know working in the media
sometimes, a lot of the time you've
got to kind of hold your nose and just kind
of get on with it and try to do your job
as best as you can and that's the way
you stay sane but that's, that can be
incredibly difficult you know they can
be moments where I've just thought what is
the point of this what am I doing I'm
just kind of propping up some of these
institutions which need to change and
it, it can it can really have a deep
impact on you as a person so yeah I
think, I think there's a hell of a long way
to go I think sometimes in this country
we believe as if, we act as if you know so
much better than America, we're so much
further down line but I think in reality
we've not event started to have this debate.
[Clive]: Well it's now 7pm so we have around 
15 minutes left so here is a question
that really kind of builds on both that point
and Bidisha's point as well
so building from Bidisha's point, museums I've worked in say that application processes
are open to everyone and they actively
encourage diverse applications but they
tend to attract the same people. There's
obviously something inherent in
institutions preventing people from even
considering applying. Have you seen any
institutions making genuine progress in
addressing these issues? Let's start with Bidisha.
[Bidisha]: Huh that's a really good
question I'm thinking of theatres
like the Kiln and the Bush theater who
are very very good about diversity and
equality but the the significant
difference there is in both those
institutions they have very diverse
leadership and that to me makes all the
difference is having leaders who are not,
who don't just get it and say they get
it, but they're actually literally in the
club, immediately makes a step change
throughout the organisation. There's just
a different flavour or a different
language, a different and they can, because they can really see people for
who they are. The question about the
types of people who are attracted to
let's say arts and culture jobs, I
actually think that's a given. That
whether whatever the colour of the person
and even in lots of ways whatever their
background, certain personality types
are attracted to those jobs so you often
get the same kind of person in them and
I actually don't think that's a bad
thing if arty people want to go for arty
jobs then that's how it goes, but there's
a whole different thing because I
actually think that when institutions
talk about their recruiting practices I
just think that's a complete total
whitewash because I have never got a job
that I applied, I've never applied for a job
anyway, but I never, never got a job that
I interviewed for ever, 100% of everything
I've done in my career is through some
kind of backdoor means, or whoever I knew
or someone I met, who called me or sent
me an email casually and that is the
real key to it so when institutions talk
about how they've changed their policy
documents or their application processes
it's total BS everyone knows it's about
who you know and about
casual hiring practices and that that's what
keeps people out.
[Clive]: Francesca?
[Francesca]: Yeah I don't think I could confidently say I
can think of examples of organisations that
are addressing this well, but what I'd just
add to the conversation is I think
sometimes when organisations you
know start to think about issues to do
with racism and to do with who's
represented within that particular
context sometimes they don't also
address issues to do with class and to
do the fact that even if they want to
change their, their workforce and
want to ensure that not everybody who
works there is white, they're not always
thinking about what it means to, quite
often when we're dealing with the creative and culture industry create a setting where
it's people predominantly, if not
exclusively, from middle to
upper-class backgrounds so I think when
organisations are frustrated about the
lack of different people applying for
rules and they sometimes feel as though
well we've advertised this widely why
are we not getting that interest and you
know people do their research when they
look at jobs they get a sense of the
organisation, they get a sense of who
might work there, or who tends to be
welcome in that environment and there
are so many exclusionary aspects to
creative and cultural organisations.
Whether it's to do with classism, racism and so
forth and at the end of the day it will
always fall on the shoulders of the
organisation to address that, as opposed
to the people who they're saying they
want to recruit and if organisations are
failing to attract the attention and
interest of the very people they say
they want to be a part of that
organisation
then again they need to have a think
about the culture they've, they've
created and the long term strategy to
address that, rather than worrying about
trying to invite people in, or at least
pretend to encourage people to
approach them when they're, they're going
to be walking into an environment that
might be very hostile towards who they are.
[Clive]: Lanre?
[Lanre]: Yeah as you were just speaking then, I was just thinking about when I started
in journalism and how kind of naive I was about who could be a journalist, I just thought
well I'm pretty good academically, I'll just do this, 
like I just wanna
do it why not and then you know you get
into a national newspaper you look
around and you thing, whoa
there is literally no one like me I mean not
just in terms of what you look like, but
how you sound, the way you are, your demeanour and
I think that's kind of in the media
where it falls down. Number one there's kind
of like an agnostic approach like, a lot,
lot of institutions just are not
bothered about it, they don't care about
diversity, they don't think
they don't think there's a problem, they  don't think they need to address it, it's not
even on their you know way down the
agenda in terms of what they want to
achieve and kind of sort out so, so you're
already in a situation where you've got
a fairly hostile kind of environment to
walk into anyway, and for me I'm
just trying to think of, I can't think, again I
can't think of like I mean the Guardian's
done, done a good job in the Scott Trust
Bursary I think Joseph Harker's done
amazing work in getting people through
the door and that's, that's been
fantastic but I've kind of looked across to
America at times with a bit of kind of
jealousy during this period and seen
like the changes that've gone on at The New
York Times like the pressure that
their journalists are able to put on the
publisher about the James Bennet stuff
with the op-ed stuff I thought that just
showed that there is a real kind of
like concerted group of people there that
are able to make a change
similarly The Washington Post they put a
lot of pressure on, on their publisher obviously they've got Amazon money
so they've been able to create a new post
which address race which which is good
it's kind of a win, and then the LA Times I
think they've got this new unionised
body and, and they were able to
you know they put out a Black Lives
Matter statement which was about their
own failings within the organisation
which I think is exactly what if you're
gonna put out a statement that's exactly what it
should be, so yeah I think it's when you
get to this critical mass of having
enough journalists in an organisation
who who are aware of the situation and
from, from genuinely diverse
backgrounds then, then you start seeing
the changes being put through the
organisation but it's never, it's never
gonna be simple, it's never gonna be you
know, it's gonna be a tough armwrestle
and you know I think the people who
speak out and put their head above the
parapet, you know they can suffer for that and
they know that, professionally you know they can suffer and unfortunately
that's the situation we're in in
terms of journalism across the media
it's it's very difficult for people to do
 that and speak out and you know have a career.
[Clive]: I'm conscious of time we have like around six or
seven minutes left so I'm going to through out some direct questions that I'm seeing coming through.
So Francesca, one for you, do digital
technologies offer a line of flight for
Black cultural producers?
[Francesca]: I think that, I absolutely think depending on which
digital technologies and depending on
how they're used and with what intention
they can be a really key part of the
creation of content, the sharing of art,
collaborative creative activities
led by Black people so I definitely
wouldn't want to suggest otherwise. I
think the, this is the but, the the
risks that will always exist as I
mentioned earlier on is, depending on
you know which technologies are being
used, who governs them, who's behind
them, the level of visibility that the Black
people involved in that work experience
and more specifically the level of
surveillance, I think that it can be
really difficult for people to do what
they want to creatively as part of
collective organising with the use
of these digital technologies and spaces
without it coming at sometimes a very
considerable cost.
[Clive]: Bidisha, here is a question, I work within a national institution where staff are now
exploring ways to take grassroots style
forms of activism within their
institutions and the same applies for
other museums. I'm interested to hear
from you on this and if they have any
advice. So how can institutions take a
more grassroots led approach to activism?
[Bidisha]: That's really interesting, I wonder who
they work for, I think that museums
are the, the crustiest form of
cultural repository and the hardest to
shift because they're so entrenched with
history and donor and stakeholder
relationships that in fact the only way
you're gonna change museums is if you do
it in a really aggressively vibrant
grassroots let's just brainstorm
everything and throw it onto the table
way. The good thing about museums is that
you have a ready-made venue so you have
basically a box that you can fill with
anything and you can bring in curators
and you can hire curators for different things and that
actually works really well, so it would
involve the museum management stepping
back massively and opening up their
collections and beginning to have
conversations with other collections
maybe even you know not established
museums but archives and repositories of
other cultural artifacts that were not
in the traditional museum world and
letting brought in curators who they
then have a long-term relationship with
to recurate and rehang and to open up
each of the venues as a site for
discussion so it's exactly what we were
saying about statues, that you can't just
have a kind of half dredged up statue
sitting in the middle of the floor as an art,
as an art artefact. You have
to have a description of why that's
there, why that's important and you can
luckily you can do all of those things
with museums, the warning would be to
resist tokenisation so I know that for
the next 18 months what we're gonna see
is Black curators brought in to do one
project given 700 pounds just to curate
a three week exhibition and no one
remembers it afterwards at all it's just
a form of box ticking to make the
institution look good but the
alternative is that museums can then
appoint people on much longer contracts
curatorial contracts can easily be five
to seven years they have a lot of
prestige attached to them I like, I mean,
I mean I'm in favour of museums and
organisations and institutions I think
we belong there we're British too we
deserve all of these things as well.
They have to be willing to do that they
have to be willing to put their
money behind it and that's where the
resistance is you know arts
organisations are really up for all of
this stuff as long as no one gets money
or power at the end of it, they need to
start giving the money and the power over a little bit. 
[Clive]: I want to conclude with a
question for all of us here which tries
to unify these two moments of change we've
experienced over the last three weeks but,
beyond this as well which is Black Lives
Matter but also Covid and the lockdown
and the impact that will have on the
sector. How can we sustain a policy or program
where cultural institutions, the media, the
arts, the film and TV and music responds
in ways we've been discussing to racial
injustice, to Blackness when we know of
the mass mass cuts that could be facing
the sector, we know historically that
in moments of industry Armageddon that
minority identities and those most
vulnerable are always the first in line
to be made surplus. We saw in 2008 how
women were evacuated from the
creative industries as a result of mass
cuts. There's very good reason to believe
that ethnic minorities will be on the
receiving end of exclusions from the
industry as a result of the cuts being
made to the cultural industries once you
come out of this moment of lockdown. So
what strategies can we use to sustain
the interest of the culture industries
in Black life, in equality, when it could
be that Blackness will be the thing that's
evacuated from the creative
industries once we come out of this
moment. Lanre?
[Lanre]: I know, I was just thinking I have no idea Clive.
I've been doing a lot of, kind of doom
journalism over the last few
months just about the state of the
cultural landscape and how it's completely
fallen away, it's like you see a theatre
going under, you know productions getting
pulled, I honestly don't have an
answer. I know that's terrible and that's
kind of what we're here for and I should know but you know I did a, I did a piece on theatre
the, the other day and we were talking
about the kind of, the kinda deep
impact that this moment is gonna have to
a lot of cultural institutions that were
already teetering really on the kind of
brink and struggling anyway and you
know a lot of the artistic directors are saying you know we're gonna try and keep
our programme diverse because that's the
kind of thing that actually gets people
through the door. I was talking to someone at Leeds Playhouse and that's what they were
saying I'd love to believe that that's
the case, I don't know how you hold them
to account though because they're gonna be in a situation where they've
got stakeholders, they're trying to kind of
keep the thing going and at the same
time there's gonna be people saying "well
actually you gonna put on this like play
about you know women from the Caribbean or are you gonna put on that Pinter play?"
You know are you gonna put on Betrayal again because we know it's gonna get people through the door
and they were kind of, they were saying
that actually it's difficult to kind of
predict what people are gonna come through and see so, maybe the work that people have been
doing for the last 30 years has actually worked and has actually impacted people. I
honestly, I don't know, I hope so I'm I'm
not, I'm not optimistic though.
[Clive]: Francesca?
[Francesca]: I think for me in a way I'm less concerned with, how do we ensure that industry
maintains an interest in these issues,
and more focused on how we support and
sustain community forms of organising
and creativity and actually I think the
most exciting work and art and media
that is emerging is often sort of beyond
the parameters of industry as you
understand it so I think right now I'm
thinking less about what, how does
industry feel about what's going on and
how might they continue to try and
contribute to these sorts of
conversations that we see happening
within political media and public
domains and I'm thinking a lot more
about you know what's happening locally
or how are things different across
various regions and how can as
individuals or collectively people be
supporting the efforts of those who are
often most ignored, most oppressed and
most likely to be exploited and
treated badly by some of the
organisations within the industry.
[Clive]: And finally Bidisha.
[Bidisha]: Nothing much to add to it except that I think actually lockdown's been very good
for gaining perspective and that, part of
the reason we're having this
conversation now is that everyone's
having a little think about where we're,
where we're at. The Black Authors Guild
just wrote a big letter to all the major
publishers saying look you know, look how
undiverse the publishing industry is,
and actually that, that letter couldn't
have happened without the three months
of, of lockdown having, giving people an
opportunity to
to gain some perspective. I think that
slowly and painfully all the toxic, all
the toxic matter is coming out and
that's gonna be difficult and
uncomfortable and yes they'll probably
be about two years where we try to get
back up to speed in terms of funding but
I but just to be positive I also think
that lockdown was only three months I
mean you know there are like mass wars
and civil wars going on globally and I
really think it's a form of Western
narcissism to be whinging about three
months that you had to spend at home I
don't think it's gonna be that drastic I
think it's gonna take just a little bit
of time to, to re-engage with culture but
that the conversations have been started
and they're not going to be silenced
anytime soon.
[Clive]: Well it's getting late, it's
been a really really absorbing hour and 15 minutes and I'm not quite sure how we're going to try and contain
all these ideas but there's so much to
think around all I can do is say huge
thank you to our participants Bidisha,
Lanre and Francesca for some amazing
insights and thoughts on the last
three weeks and beyond, and a huge thank
you to the South London Gallery for
facilitating this new series Convergence
please continue to check their website
for further events in this series coming
soon and a huge thanks to all those who've actually participated in this event and
again it's a very very difficult last
three weeks for many people in the UK, in
the US and beyond but there is some
investment we're seeing in culture as
being a response to racial injustice
currently, but as Bidisha as Lanre as
Francesca and myself have explored today,
we still need to retain some kind of
skepticism and inquiry into the ethics
and the motivations of our cultural
institutions when they talk about
diversity, when they talk about
structural racism, but to think about how
rapid the change from those
language to the language we're seeing now have
taken place, and how they've identified
the structural racism within institutions
for only a space of time we can
only see what happens
in the coming weeks and months to see if
those commitments are genuine. Thank you again and yeah, very very very very
intense conversation but thank you big time.
[Bidisha]: Thanks a lot see you later
