Black Lives Matter: cheap words & valuable actions

The death of George Floyd has shocked everybody. Suddenly every company and organisation seems to be releasing statements about how they support the Black Lives Matter movement and I worry that their motivation for this is often more about good PR and image than it is about genuinely resolving to see and do things differently. Some of those organisations posting black tiles this week included NFL teams that hounded out Colin Kaepernick because he peacefully took a knee in protest not that long ago, and a few organisations that I know from personal experience have all-white boards or all-white leadership teams. Talk is cheap! I hope they back it up.

There was a moment when I realised how little I really understood about racism.

It was a sunny day a few years ago. UKIP and Nigel Farage had just won the European elections the night before. I was walking along with Chaz, my wife at the time (who, for the sake of clarity, is black). A large, tattooed and clearly drunk man started following us down the road shouting "UKIP! UKIP!". He became more and more physically threatening towards us. We walked faster and eventually our younger age and lack of inebriation got us to safety. Where I'm from - a small white town in the midlands - a lot of people are taken in by the politics of UKIP. Some of them are reasonable and kind in every other aspect of life, but have been duped to see "the other" and immigration as their enemy. They don't see the consequences of what it emboldens. It was genuinely scary.

However, that wasn't the moment. The moment was a few minutes later when I started trying to make sense of it and expressing how scary it was. I remember Chaz casually brushing it off as "just one of those things". It was one of those things she'd seen time and time again. I was petrified, she was blase. To have black skin neccessitates having thick skin.

I now understood why her parents' house for her entire childhood had badly framed newspaper cuttings on the wall of famous and successful black people (Oprah, Martin Luther King, Prince... and weirdly for a child of the 80's, the tennis player Arthur Ashe - I guess there were even fewer role models being spotlighted then than there are now). Imagine that need, as a parent, to have to remind your kid every time they walk down the hall to their front door that success is something that you can reach - despite the world out there being rigged against you. We are no longer together, but I know the time will come where we'll probably start thinking about black and mixed race icons (and autistic icons) for the walls of our respective houses, to inspire our son.

So I know that I have much to learn and won't ever fully 'get it'. I also know I want to be the best ally I can be. If that feels like your stance too, then I humbly ask you to join me in declaring how little you know. Declare that you don't have the answers. Elevate those that have them, or at least have better questions than you do (more of which in a mo).

It can feel exhausting trying to do the right thing, or trying not to say the wrong thing. I do think there's too much energy thrown at how to behave on social media around this stuff, and not enough focus on how to think and behave in, y'know, actual life. We need to change things in businesses and organisations even more than on Twitter. If you are thoughtfully not joining in on social media, you're accused of being "silent and therefore complicit" and if you speak out, people tell you it's "performative".

Sometimes temporary silence can be contemplative, not complicit. Sometimes these conversations are challenging and uncomfortable. What matters is our commitment to growth. Remember all those models about how personal development comes from the risk zone, not the comfort zone? So go there. Have courageous conversations, face to face if you can. Do some homework - and remember if you're white, it's YOUR homework. You can't just ask your black friends to complete it for you - because the system already probably gave them more assignments than you.

We had some interesting conversations in our team this week. It's a team committed to spending the summer reading and learning, searching for all the ways to be better and I'm proud of them for that. I'll also admit I was shocked when I trawled back through the recent episodes of my podcast, Beyond Busy, and realised how few black voices have appeared. I hadn't been giving this enough thought and I hold my hands up there to complacency (although two of my favourites ever are this one with Seyi Obakin, the inspiring CEO of Centrepoint, whom I had the privilige of working closely with for a number of years, and my friend and Ugandan-version-of-me, Abudu Sallam - so please go check those out). It's now on my agenda to amplify more black voices and if you don't see this filtering through on the podcast in the coming months, please do call me out.

I'm going to try now in the least ham-fisted way possible to bring this back to productivity and action...

There's no such thing as problems, only projects.

Except "challenging and overcoming systemic and engrained racism" feels like a difficult project, right?

But just like with any other project, we only need two things and we have one of them already - a defined end-goal. The other thing we always need is a "next physical action". So, if you're committed to this project, what can you do today to create momentum? How can you turn the intention into something more than just a thought in your head? How can you make it part of a physical, tangible action you're taking, that will help you figure out what to do after that, and after that?

If you're looking for places to start understanding things better, you've probably seen reading lists this week. But if you're busy home-schooling or dealing with pandemic stuff, it might be that you don't have time to read Reni Eddo-Lodge's book right now, so here's a video you can watch in fifteen minutes. My friend David McQueen made an incredible video called Centering Black Lives. I also saw this incredibly honest one from Abi Adamson, which stood out amongst all the usual corporate blandness and preening on Linkedin. And anything involving Akala is usually thought-provoking and well-delivered.

Our very own Caitlin at Think Productive also curated a really useful thread of stuff to read, check out or donate to.

Finally, I mentioned Chaz earlier - my ex-wife, co-parent and friend (there really should be a proper word for this!). She's an author too. She writes women's fiction, which admittedly isn't usually my go-to genre, but I can assure you she's really good. If you like witty, observational fiction, you might find that most of the books on your shelf are written by white folks (publishing is an industry that has A LOT to do!), so vote with your wallet. You can get her latest book here.

So my invitation to you this week is, as ever, to focus on action. Be guided by what you're doing, not by mere good intentions floating around in your head, or by the empty words and actions of a social media meme.

(NOTE: this was originally posted on my ‘Rev Up for the Week’ mailing list, which you can sign up to below, but a couple of people who weren’t on there yet asked for links, so I chucked it up on the blog too! I think it all makes sense, still).