This week Creative Access – a charity that has been helping people from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds get work in the creative industries – had its funding cut. Since 2012 the charity has helped over 700 young people break into the notoriously white creative arts, and earlier this year, was promised its funding would continue. But here we are: in the golden age of Theresa May’s Tory Britain, and so the charity has revealed that the Department of Education is ending its support. The cherry on top of this sad, austerity-soaked cake is the fact the DoE is leaving Creative Access with a £635,000 debt; in advance of the expected grant they now will never get, the charity spent money continuing to help young people of colour gain employment.
Leaving aside the fact the government has a responsibility not to cut funding for programmes they have already promised to help, the possible loss of Creative Access is a huge blow to those of us committed to diversifying the creative arts. The creative industries benefit from hiring people from as many different walks of life as possible. Instead of cutting funding for BME-specific services, the government should be helping them more, as well as looking at ways to also help those from other oppressed identities.
Primarily the arts are white, and on the whole are made for and up of the middle and upper classes. In a world where major organisations offer year-long, full-time, unpaid internships, those of us without family money to fall back on can find it near-impossible to get a foot in the door in the first place. For the many of us who are both people of colour and working class – a group so often ignored in the endless conversations about so-called ‘identity politics’ – breaking into the arts can seem impossible before we’ve even started.
More than ever before, creative industries – journalism in particular – need diversity. Today’s world is changing and becoming a terrifying one for so many. If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that the role the media plays when it comes to both politics and pop culture cannot be ignored. Yes, schemes to redress the structural racism and classism we have in our society are a good thing, but there’s more to it than that. It’s pretty simple when you think about it: diverse journalists mean diverse stories, and black, brown and working class people in newsrooms and being commissioned to write articles means that the stories that are told, are told better.
Every week you can find a news story with shallow reporting at best, and fundamental errors at worst – errors that I can tell would have be solved if even one working class person of colour was involved in the extensive writing and editing process that goes into making an idea a published article. Mistakes range from journalists missing crucial points entirely to not asking important questions, or even getting facts totally wrong. Just yesterday, I read an article on so-called ‘Manthreading’, which is apparently when men thread a number of their tweets together. Gendered phenomenon or not (I think not), I find it baffling the piece didn’t mention that often, the people who do 30-strong Twitter threads are black people – often African-American women – whose funny or informative tweets often gain thousands of retweets. A few days before, a different white journalist was mocked across the web for mistaking the re-starting (otherwise known as a reload) of a track at a Skepta gig for ‘technical difficulties’.
Journalism about white people with traditionally black hairstyles is perhaps my biggest bugbear. Article after article not only refers to the styles as if white celebrities invented them, but also uses the wrong terms. This could literally be prevented by a 30-second Google search. Perhaps the most recent example of this were the numerous articles about Chenise Benson, a 14-year-old who was suspended from school for getting ‘dreadlocks’ (they were braided extensions). The story, clearly an excuse to mock the child’s hapless father and point out the alleged reverse racism of her school allowing her black friends’ braids to stay, was frustrating. Not one outlet pointed out the price the Dad paid was comically expensive, nor the fact the braids had no chance of ‘staying in for a year’ as he thought they could. There was a whole other story here, about a (presumably) black hairdresser giving this kid expensive, bright white hair that definitely would not last as long as she claimed, but it didn’t come up. Clearly, no-one involved had any experience of black hair, but crucially they also didn’t care to find out.
Just a few days ago, The Huffington Post published a piece about Elijah Quashie aka the Chicken Connoisseur, whose YouTube series The Pengest Munch reviewing inner city London chicken shops went viral last week. ‘WARNING’ is tacked across the top of the article, with the disclaimer ‘some readers may find the terms used… confusing. See glossary at the end of this report for clarification’. Here again is a piece of journalism devoid of cultural context. It’s beyond insulting for the use of slang to apparently require a glossary to decipher it; as though people who understand slang don’t read the news, and as if those who don’t understand can’t look up the terms themselves. I’ve never seen a glossary at the end of the many overwritten articles out there that use long, alienating, multisyllabic words and awful prose, but here it’s deemed acceptable and suggests the slang of working class black kids is beyond normal comprehension.
Most insulting of all? The glossary was wrong. ‘Mandem’ according to the white man writing for The Huffington Post is ‘a group of men, or boys, but also the name of an infamous Tottenham street gang’. By ‘infamous’ I assume he means ‘made up’, because it’s just not true. It feels ridiculous to define exactly what ‘mandem’ means, so instead I’ll just quote a friend of mine: ‘mandem is mandem innit, either you know or you don’t’. I’m not annoyed the writer and editor of the piece didn’t know who or what mandem was. What I am angry about is the fact they didn’t have anyone who knew the facts around them, or they were willing to simply make up a definition because facts aren’t important here, or both. On that note, you’ll be unsurprised to know that they didn’t know what peng, crep, ting or wagwan means either.
This anxiety of whiteness about black, working class language is nothing new. If David Starkey’s grim 2011 post-riot BBC Newsnight tirade proved anything, it’s that Enoch Powell-esque angst about poor people of colour polluting nice, middle class white kids with their so-called ‘patois’ is still alive and well. Journalism, I feel, should rebuke this – and if not that, at the very least the media has a responsibility to not add fuel to flames of racism and classism which are currently reaching fever pitch. On Newsnight, Starkey took aim at black culture. His comments were, fundamentally, misinformed and divisive: fuelling a ‘them and us’ mentality. In some ways his ignorant comments were a sign of things to come, an almost prophetic precursor to the widespread racism and xenophobia that have come to the boil this year. ‘A particular sort of violent, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion’ he said, ‘and black and white, boy and girl, operarte in this language together which is wholly false. This language which is a Jamaican patois that’s been intruded into England. And this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.’ Starkey explicitly and unapologetically equated black culture with criminality on national TV.
Many media organisations and online platforms hold themselves to a basic standard to get things at least, correct. But when it comes to issues that have something to do with race, especially those that straddle the lines between race and class, standards seem to be flung out the window. None of the many white writers who don’t know things as basic as what a reload is ever find themselves in real trouble because of it. At worst, they may be mocked online for a day or two, but they still continue to work in offices lacking the people of colour who could, to be blunt, do their jobs better.
To be clear, it isn’t enough to simply to make sure people of colour are more visible on boards and in newsrooms. That’s how change begins. Racism is most dangerous when it is institutional, and won’t be fixed in any meaningful way until we address the racist structures in place. We need to address the mentality that black culture is not only other, but somehow lesser. The implication is that white culture is high and black culture is low. Skepta’s grime is not equivalent to classical music, slang doesn’t carry the same weight as standard English spoken in received pronunciation. The value judgements are explicit and they are wrong. The beauty of language is that it is never complete; English is constantly evolving, the changes caused by different communities is what makes English rich. It tells the story of different socio-econonomic backgrounds, locations, races and generations, and we should embrace that, listen to those stories, and learn from them. As Lynda Mugglestone writes in ‘Talking Proper: The Rise Of The Accent As Social Symbol’ accents in this country have long been markers of ‘social acceptability, facilitating or impeding social advance’.
In today’s world, both people of colour and working class people need to have their voices heard and understood across the creative arts. In the months after Brexit, a lot has been said about how the so-called ‘liberal metropolitan elite’ ignored the voices of the working class, and that is why the media was so blindsided with the results. I’ve read pieces about the white working class and they voting Leave not because of racism but out of defiance, and I’ve seen articles discussing how people of colour feel post-Brexit. Rarely, however, have I heard the voices of working class black and brown people on the matter. So often, we’re invisible, and the Government’s destruction of schemes like Creative Access that help us to be visible this will only make things worse.
I am black, working class, and have found myself working in creative industries full-time. I’m grateful for this every single day. But when I look back at how I got to where I am now, I feel an overwhelming sadness. I joined my first arts programme at 17, after picking up a leaflet at a now-defunct Connexions centre. My first proper internship was courtesy of SOWF (Some Other Way Forward), a treasury-backed scheme to provide well-paid work experience for teenagers who couldn’t afford to do internships otherwise, and my first big creative success came after seeing an add on IdeasTap, another service that lost its funding and now no longer exists. Without the springboards of specialist schemes to help young people of colour who might not have a lot of money or well-connected parents, the arts will suffer and so will future generations. It’s a shame that our government can’t see this. While I hope that the creative industries will take action themselves by diversifying their own workplaces, I’m not optimistic. Diversity schemes don’t make things easy for marginalised young people, they give talented kids a chance, and it’s beyond a shame these chances are being taken away.
We talk about diversity. We talk about intersectionality. We talk about ending prejudice. But for all the diversity schemes and panel discussions, the numbers stay relatively the same and the same problems remain. The system doesn’t change. If 2016 was a year we spoke a lot more, 2017 needs to be the year that things get done.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.