How do we respond to racial inequality and injustice?
Once more, this time with feeling
When I finished writing this piece, I realised I was writing from a blank sheet of paper, the same thing that I’d written every year for the last three or four years. Some of my colleagues who’ve been directly working on equality, diversity and inclusion, have probably written their version of the same article for the last three of four decades, so I’m lightweight. Nonetheless, once again.
I’m writing because I’m a rarity in our sector – a BAME background Chief Executive Officer. There are not a lot of us at the top. It’s not surprising, as BAME make up some 15% of our population on these fair isles, but even so, disproportionately few rise to the top. Of my generation of leaders, only Faisel Rahman at Fair Finance and Kashaf Ali at Street UK, come to my mind as CEOs social investors; alongside them, Amir Rizwan leads social investment and Red Shed at Comic Relief. Allies such as the Foundation sector have Danielle Walker Palmour at Friends Provident Foundation, Vidhya Alakeson at Power to Change and Bharat Mehta at Trust for London. And of course excellent leaders of advisory and network bodies advisors such as my colleagues Bonnie Chiu, Stephen Bediako and Kunle Olulode, alongside thought leaders such as Derek Bardowell. Forgive me please, those BAME social investment or foundation leaders I’ve not mentioned. We are fortunate to have some LGBT+ leaders in our sector. You are there and I thank you for it. And please know, I treasure all my beloved fellow CEOs in our sector, regardless of race, colour or creed. You are all my people and I like you. I know each and every one of our non-BAME social investment CEOs support me and stand with me. Many of you have led on equality, diversity and inclusion, thoughtfully and well. I appreciate it. I thank our foundation colleagues for backing change through their network the Association of Charitable Foundations.
That said, when it comes to the money, few BAME leaders have risen to the top to have the opportunity to steer it. In my professional context, I think of myself as a social investor, not a BAME background person. In the day job, I don’t have to notice the difference. I’m mixed race Bangladeshi/White English, so visually, I fit into the room well. I’ve learnt a cut glass BBC London-calling accent, got my BA, MA and MSc., and thanks to early funding from an international development finance institution, was paid to attend a progressive public school from the age of 12. Growing up, our family abroad had our fair share of hard experiences, but I cannot compare my life to that of someone growing up as Black British in South London, Asian in Bradford, or a BAME woman experiencing the societal disadvantage of intersectionality. I’ve got every bit of middle-class privilege you can think of. I even get an espresso in the bike shop when my puncture gets fixed in Peckham.
Every now and again, I get mildly peeved.
I’m too old to be an angry young man, so allow me to be peeved in my middle age. The racial disparity in the impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic is clear, with between a 10% and 50% higher chance of death in different ethnic minority communities shown by the recent government review “Disparities in the risk and outcomes of COVID-19 (PHE 2020).” Alongside this, regardless of ethnicity, there is a higher death rate in deprived areas as compared to the least deprived. While the report does not touch on why, a working hypothesis it is inequality is at the root of the greater impact of the virus on sickness and death in BAME communities. Black may not be good for your life chances, but Bangladeshi community in particular is at the extreme end of the Covid-19 death scale.
Here in London, BAME people are proportionately more likely to be fined than white people if they breach social distancing restrictions. It is not to excuse any wrongdoing, but why is it, in 2020, that my brown skin would in London be 26% more likely to attract a fine than a white skin and my black colleague, twice as likely to be fined? If only it reflected public health action, to try and protect people most likely to suffer from Covid-19 from harm! Sadly, not.
Earlier this year, the Community Security Trust reported a 7% rise in antisemitic incidents in 2019, to 1,805. In this increase, was a 27% increase in assaults, to 157. It is not surprising to me that there is a strong resonance her in the UK to the US police killing of another black person. This isn’t virtue signalling or bandwagon jumping. It’s the evidenced experience of people who live here in the UK.
It is particularly sad as we have made great progress as a society on equality, diversity and inclusion. There legislative progress, LGBT+ rights, police reform. Our police have made great strides, compared to decades past and let’s give them every encouragement to continue to improve their practices. Overall, things are so much better than the 1970s or 1980s, but it feels that at best, we have plateaued in terms of progress in the last 10 years.
Where are we at Big Issue Invest?
In our own social enterprise and charity sector, the recent #CharitySoWhite movement has bought to the public view the extent to which BAME organisations and individuals feel excluded by the current funding structures. The focus has been on philanthropy and mainstream charities, but we should also consider this in Social Investment. For ourselves at Big Issue Invest, we track our funding to BAME organisations – we were ahead of where we should be, now slightly behind, though we are running a programme specifically targeting BAME led and women led organisations. We’ve some 20 staff at any one time and a pretty diverse set – North and South America, Africa, Asia, the rest of Europe, make up about half our staff by family background. We’ve got a diverse Board too.
We fall down at a staff level on gender. Our senior management is almost wholly male. Observationally, some of our social investment counterparts are better than us on gender and on class. Culturally, most of us think the same way. We are poor at counting that which may not be obvious to us – disability, LGBT+.
Five easy things we can all do
First, check the problem yourself by doing some counting. It’s like a bit of basic first aid. If you fall over, or get knocked off your bike, you probably feel some shock as your body fires up defensively. You don’t notice your wounds at first. If a kind first aider comes to help you, one thing they do is carefully check you over, so you can see what scrapes, bashes and bangs you’ve got, that you are not feeling, as your body defends itself against what it perceives as an attack. So check yourself.
We are good at counting in social investment. Count your staff, count your board, count your investment committee and stick them in boxes and categories, as if you were doing a social impact assessment or a set of accounts. We are numbers people and numbers are hard to get away from. If your senior leadership are mostly men, and back office staff over-represented with ethnic minorities, or under-represented in management and decision makers, well, its pretty hard to get away from numbers.
Second, once you’ve done some counting, make some change. The tools are there. In social investment, we took a particular look at our own equality, diversity and inclusion issues, for the last 3-4 years. We set up our social investment network the Diversity Forum for inclusive social investment and looked at our own practices. How our BAME staff tend to be over-represented in the back office, and under-represented in management. How women do fine, until you reach the decision making levels. That intersectionality affects our people along with the rest of society. Out of this work, we developed a toolkit of practical things you can do as an investor. You can find our research report and toolkit here.
It is within our power to change our own structures, systems and processes. They are our own. As funders, in our case investors, as we change, the change rolls out. Our board, our staff, symbolise the change we seek to bring about. We can offer technical support can bring in organisations that otherwise are less able to access funding. And in turn, our own funders have helped enable change. Our Impact Loans England programme particularly seeks out BAME and Women Led organisations, identified as less normally participating in social investment.
Third, accept responsibility.
I think we must go further and do something difficult, which is look at ourselves and be open to the possibility, that we are part of the problem. Only doing that, frees us to be part of the solution. I have come to believe that the way we think makes it particularly hard. The very optimism and hope that brings us to work for social change, can make it hard to see where we are failing. Not us, surely? Speaking personally, it took me a while to realise where I was part of the problem. Gender at a senior level in our sector is a problem. Yet when I looked at my networks of choice, they were male heavy. I realised I needed to change. I didn’t particularly want to change. I’d not had to engage on equality and diversity formally in my work, so I’ve come back to it late on. Noticing where I was falling down, looking at my own advantage and privilege and recognise it, makes me open to the possibility of change.
The great power of looking at yourself, and seeing you can do thing better, is that you can do things better. It’s not to knock yourself down, but to raise you up. You may feel you cannot change much but you can change yourself.
Fourth, chose where you stand.
Seeing the continued rise in anti-Semitism this year, we chose to hold our staff away day at JW3, a Jewish community centre in North London. We booked a room, did our team stuff and had a great day. The previous year, we did the same at the Stephen Laurence Trust. After the attacks on Muslims worshiping in New Zealand, I took some of our staff round the corner to our local mosque and checked in with the people there. We didn’t make a thing about it, or do it to look good. It’s a simple choice and action, to physically go to places and be there and stand with people, locate your work with them. Does it change anything? Maybe not much. Does it make a difference? Only the smallest. Still, worth doing, because of the fifth point, below. We don’t change ourselves overnight. We have to practice.
This is the fifth thing. Constantly practice. The Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland is remembered for her ability to believe in six impossible things before breakfast. What is less quoted, is that she used to practice believing in impossible things a least ½ an hour a day, in order to do it. Practice believing in impossible things. The T’ai Chi School I’m part of says you need two things to learn Tai Chi. Good teaching, and practice.
So, solving injustice is not going to happen just by good intention, counting, systems change, or standing with people, but by constant, continued practice, day in day out. What I know from my Tai Chi, is when I practice it, I get better at it. I need to practice a lot, because I’m not good at this stuff. So, join me, and practice.
Danyal Sattar is CEO at Big Issue Invest.