ROGER GRIFFITH

RACE AND COVID-19 – ‘A Crisis Within A Crisis’
Emerging Thoughts and Future Actions by Roger Griffith

Coronavirus has devastated the global community, drastically changing our interconnected lives, how we live and work. Many from President Obama to NHS nurses have spoken out. Through my equalises work here I highlight how Black Asian & Minority Ethnic groups (BAME) have been affected and the issues to tackle going forward.

1. Black and Asian people have been disproportionately affected by losing their lives in greater numbers. This also highlights underlying health conditions in BAME communities such as high-blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, in part due to social inequality issues which need to be addressed.

2. Economic disparity and Health issues are related. Years of systematic social inequality have highlighted issues such as poverty and employment which affects underserved communities disproportionately. This has been highlighted by the Runnymede Trust recently

3. Employment Conditions in NHS. There have also been disproportionate rates of deaths within the NHS. There are now two commissions being led by prominent figures, Trevor Phillips (Government) and Dame Doreen Lawrence (Labour. BAME health workers are reporting higher levels of stress from fearing contracting the illness and hearing news of the deaths of their colleagues and community members. Vital answers from these commissions are urgently needed.  https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-understanding-the-impact-on-bame-communities

4. Lack of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) There have been reports from BAME social care workers and those working in care homes who have struggled to gain PPE

5. Violent Racism & Xenophobia has been experienced by South Asian communities where Chinese workers have faced abuse. They have also been the victim of pernicious online media campaigns.

6. General Issues relating to Covid -19: Many in the UK are undergoing financial hardship however international students have stated they no longer have finances to send back home to support their families. Concern has also been expressed about the exposure to Covid-19 in prisons, where due to inequalities in the criminal justice system BAME communities are over-represented Technological poverty also hits low-income and rural area groups as well as BAME.

LOOKING FORWARD

7. Data and Monitoring: The crisis has highlighted the value in gathering data. Information from equalities monitoring forms can identify, then quantify issues and help to tackle the disparities. Resources need to follow the data.

8. Employment – Essential Workers – The work of BAME workers in the NHS, Healthcare, transport, food and service workers have been highlighted in the media. Testing for these groups of frontline workers is a major concern as we face new working conditions. We can report and applaud a new level of respect for these essential workers at the bottom of the economic ladder.

9. Information on Public Health and Covid-19: Due to information gaps, language, poor literacy or lack of internet there must be a concern whether the right information is reaching underserved communities. Concerted efforts must be made to sensitively reach these communities through mediums such as community media including Ujima and BCFM. There has been a rise of misinformation circulating in BAME groups on social media. Providing harm minimisation strategies and health promotion campaigns e.g.: ‘Know Your Numbers.’ (blood pressure, blood sugar rates, obesity) will be required. Post Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, I witnessed information projects to identify, support and train local leaders street by street within the community.

10. Support to community groups. Decimated by a decade of austerity the crisis has re-affirmed the need to strengthen community organisations. Organisations with strong community links such as BSWN, SGREN and SARI have proved vital. Support is needed to BAME elderly groups who are currently suffering bereavement trauma. Key organisations have been Bristol Black Carers, Bristol Ageing Better and Bristol BME Elders Health & Wellbeing Project. Quartet Community Foundation and St Monica’s Trust have made this funding a priority. Faith and advocacy groups have a key role to play in future health education programmes.

11. Covid-19 General Factors where BAME communities are disproportionately affected – Some BAME and Gypsy &Traveller communities have larger families who may live communally. Support and understanding of these groups needs will be required. With new ways of working and living required now more than ever is a chance to engage with BAME communities of their experiences of the environment.

12. Resilience. One thing to report positively is that BAME communities can provide experience in resilience. Imagine arriving in a foreign country with little or nothing, sometimes fleeing trauma yet being able to navigate new languages and customs. Migrants have created family structures against a backdrop of racism, environmental, political and economic challenges. However these communities are not blessed with superpowers. Whilst the UK and the world face the ‘new normal’ only with targeted solutions and resources can we assist these communities to emerge from inequality. This will help these communities to continue to play a key role in our shared new future.

Roger Griffith MBE: Author, Independent Consultant and Lecturer UWE Bristol. With thanks to UWE Bristol, SGREN, SARI, Ujima Radio, Bristol Green Capital for information and interviews.

Published in Bristol 24/7 22nd May 2020 – https://bit.ly/RaceandCovid – 

Image: Roger meeting Prince William

Reclaiming Empire part 2:   My Day at Buckingham Palace

On Tuesday 25th February on a beautifully crisp sunlit day, I collected my MBE at Buckingham Palace for services to Diversity and Arts. It was a wonderful day and occasion for my family with Mum, Sister Laurice and fiancée Stacie, there to witness the ceremony. Being nominated brought mixed feelings and not just because of connotations with ‘Empire’ which I wrote about in Bristol 24/7. There was a sense amongst my fellow recipients including a Citizens Advice advisor who worked with the residents of Grenfell fire disaster, that there were more deserving people. However, as my doting sister advised, today was not the day for that.

Like many others I had only seen Buckingham Palace from the outside, acting as tour guide to family members and friends from across the world in my birth city. I would watch them as they peered through the iron railings, wondering aloud whether the Queen was ‘home’ and perhaps taking tea behind one of the many ornate windows. I would watch as they vainly tried to disturb the Queen’s Guards into actions, that would differentiate them from Madame Tussauds’ mannequins.

Passing through the regal courtyard and feeling the crushed gravel beneath my feet was electrifying and jolted me back to less illustrious times. I was constantly aware of the countless individuals who have assisted my career and proud to have fulfilled their dreams and delivered my potential. ‘A hand up not a hand-out’ had been my mantra and remembering friends like Paul Hassan brought waves of emotion. Paul had nurtured my raw potential since I wondered off a building site and into a positive action scheme in St Pauls. That turned into an 18-year career moving from trainee housing manager to a Senior Manager with Bristol City Council. Then, following redundancy along with founding Director, Kevin Philemon, we worked together to take Radio to new heights. Paul’s guidance of working from the inside, speaking to truth to power, proved his wisest counsel and here I was about to enter one of the most illustrious citadels.

Inside the Palace, thick carpets cushioned my footsteps to protect the priceless pottery from toppling over. Gold leaf trimmings and flecked wallpaper decorated the walls with artwork of monarchs and vistas from Britain and Europe. No one who gazed back at me from these paintings had my skin complexion, no landscape depicted the civilizations that existed before or after the reign of the British Empire. Maybe this is a project for the Lord Lieutenant Peaches Golding and me to work on, I mused chuckling to myself as I waited. Then we were called forward in alphabetical order and I was pleasantly surprised when former children’s entertainer and actor Derek Griffiths joined me. I thanked him for the joy he had delivered as one of the first Black British performers on television, as others thanked Ben Stokes and for his cricket heroics.

The moment came when my name was announced over the classical orchestra. It felt like I was in a Hollywood movie, only I was playing me! I looked for a family wanting to share this once in a lifetime moment, knowing Stacie and Laurice would be shedding happy tears whilst Mum beamed her stoic serene smile. I thought of my late father who had been the first to show me Buckingham Palace. He gave 32 years of his life to the London Underground arriving from Guyana in 1958, beginning by sweeping up discarded tube-tickets before driving the trains. He met and greeted Prince Charles when the Jubilee line opened as the station manager of nearby Green Park underground in 1977. Decades later truth would become stranger than fiction as the sons of Prince Charles and Laurie Griffith from Georgetown, Guyana would renew the connection. A tall uniformed Prince William deftly pinned the MBE medal upon my lapel. He was very gracious and well-briefed as we discussed my community and cultural work, and we both agreed that the arts are such a vital tool for self-expression and engagement for diversity and inclusion. The ceremony ended, and we posed for pictures that would outlast us, but provide memories that our descendants would treasure.

A day later my box-fresh three-piece suit was replaced by a tracksuit, as I sat at my Mum’s home in South London. She had, much to our family’s bemusement, purchased a Netflix subscription, which I was dutifully setting-up. With intended irony, I showed her the opening of The Crown.

” We grew up thousands of miles away from Buckingham Palace, yet we knew everything about the royal family.” My mother remarked,” ‘I can remember when the Queen got her bad news about the death of her father when she was visiting Kenya, the details of her dress for her wedding, we knew everything it was always in our newspapers. But what was that to us? Where was our history?”

I smiled surprised by this new historical anecdote illustrating the colonial influence on a schoolgirl in then British Guiana, South America and still part of the British Caribbean and Commonwealth.

It was a reminder that when we are asked by future generations “Where is our history?” from the paintbrush to the pen, we must ensure we have a curriculum and commissions that tell our story and our many contributions to Britain.

Dear subscriber. I was delighted and honoured to receive an M.B.E. in the recent Queens Honours List https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/queens-new-years-honours-2020-3683178  I wrote these words to convey my feelings

Reclaiming Empire

Many thanks to those well wishes from family, friends and supporters who have helped me to achieve my M.B.E. I’m truly humbled and wouldn’t have got here without you all. I know there are some who disagree with my decision to accept an M.B.E. on principle over the British Empire and I fully understand. However, the seeds of my personal achievement have been sown over ancestral centuries. I’m part of a connected history over co

ntinents. So, I have compiled this short passage to explain some of my feelings and context behind my acceptance. This makes for good writing material during my travels in America as I write Volume Two ‘My American Odyssey, From The Windrush to the White House: Reflections Across a New Black Atlantic.’

As I crossed continents wherever I travelled the world I was asked one question repeatedly by many different people from many different backgrounds often with a tone of incredulity. ‘Where did you get that accent from?’ The answer to this biological riddle has taken me many years to unravel. I was born in multicultural London but grew up in a white enclave of Bristol in Lawrence Weston. My parents were from Guyana, part of an Empire that had broken loose from its colonial chains and morphed into a family of nations known as the West Indies and part of the wider Commonwealth. British Guiana gained independence to become the Republic of Guyana yet geographically was in South America near the Amazon jungle. With the trauma of enslavement and its legacy raging within me, how do you expect me to explain all these conflicts and complexities? I’ll start here.

My parents had been raised from the cradle to grave in the history of the British Empire reinforced at school, church and social institutions like Sunday school and girl guides. Theirs was a relationship built on colonial power with towering sugar cane billowing in the fields to remind them of the reasons their ancestors were taken there. In my Mother’s school curriculum, there was little of our African ancestry or of Caribbean freedom fighters like Nanny Maroon or Quamina. My paternal grandfather who never left Guyana was part of one of these institutions as a Mason (pictured) was never prouder then when sending his sons my Uncles Leslie, Varney and my Dad to help rebuild Britain after World War Two as part of The Windrush Generation pioneers. Through the NHS, the London Underground and more my family and many others from its empire helped to rebuild Britain.
Writing about all of this proved my outlet and was more cathartic than I would have ever of dreamed. I could see the parallels during my adolescence and events of the 1980s where poor-policing and mistreatment led to uprisings and riots in inner-city Britain. I saw the genesis sown from seeds of hate from the state seen in stop and search tactics. This fuelled the violence of far-right groups and racist propaganda from the National Front, skinheads and thugs telling me to ‘Go Back Home’. I was on the receiving end of acts of violence, aided and abetted by a hostile political climate. I had to overcome an internal burden of inferiority that had been placed upon ‘the chips of my shoulders’ by white authority figures. This was characterised by Norman Tebbitt’s infamous ‘Cricket Test’ made in remarks made in 1990 on the 22nd anniversary of Enoch Powell’s incendiary Rivers of Blood speech. Once again a generation of black and brown people were left feeling rejected by their host country. This time it was different, however because we were born in Britain. We were now children of the commonwealth whose forebears had never commonly shared the wealth and natural resources of their homelands.

The seeds of empire and imperialism have always been for better or worse part of my DNA and this has been hard to acknowledge. Now I have chosen to reclaim what this means to me. I will continue to inspire others to make their dreams come true through the arts and championing diversity. Most of all the award is an acknowledgement of the work of my parents and their generation who when they came to Britain dreamed of a better life for their children. Whilst the streets have never been paved with gold, I am humbled and proud to accept the rewards of my ancestral dividend. This allied to the work of many, many friends and colleagues has helped me to reach my potential and achieve recognition.

ENDS

Roger Griffith M.B.E. Author, Broadcaster and MD of 2morrow 2day Community Consultants

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