“Because I experienced the end point of colonialism inside my own family, as a tragedy, I came not to be able to maintain the traditional distinction between what is subjective and what is objective. Once you open those gates, you speak — even if you're speaking about the political situation — you're speaking as if it were allowing something from the psychic energy to flow into the world.”

““I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice. Diversity is a corporate strategy. It’s a strategy designed to ensure that the institution functions in the same way that it functioned before, except now that you now have some black faces and brown faces. It’s a difference that doesn’t make a difference”

—Voice of Angela Davis at USC’s Bovard Auditorium at ‘Angela Davis: A Lifetime of Revolution’, hosted by University of Southern California’s Black Student Assembly and the University of Southern California Speakers Committee on 23 February 2015, the 43rd anniversary of her release from prison

— Voice of Audre Lorde at “The Personal and Political Panel’, Second Sex Conference, New York, 29 September 1979

Introduction:What this paper is (and what it is not)

Using the language of diversity can be a way of avoiding confrontation. But what else do we avoid if we avoid confrontation?

This report is not a quantitative study full of easy to digest data. It is not written in the language of an institutional report. It is not a snapshot of a cultural moment with readily actionable recommendations. I have spent a long time thinking about how to best present the deep work I have undertaken during this period of study between September 2018 and March 2020. I have been asked (and asked myself) what I want the paper to do, and who I want to listen to the contents of it. I have struggled to answer those questions at some times and other times it has been painfully clear. This tension of method and divergence of desire is at the heart of paper.

Through sitting with this (im)possibility, I have come to understand the truth of American author, professor, feminist, and social activist bell hooks’s maxim that “Language is also a place of struggle” (hooks 1989 :203) and grappled with the possibility of enacting what cultural theorist Stuart Hall described to her as a “politics of articulation.” In the spirit of that questioning and search for a meaningful language, I have chosen a form that refuses the constraints and conventions of the professionalised arts sector, and takes to heart poet, feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lorde’s words on language as a liberatory force: “I feel, therefore I am free ….For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanisation, our feelings were not meant to survive....

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt”. (Audre Lorde, 1985)

This is a paper which advocates for change, but it does not centre the need to explain why that change is needed. I assume that as a given. I refer to reports generated by agencies who administer the arts sector and studies that confirm this ‘objectively’, and I have grappled with such papers in the writing of this report, but here I offer an alternative to the ‘top down’ narratives on inclusion, one generated from cultural workers, in the grounded reality of such narratives.

This paper is an embodied, self reflexive piece of writing which uses autoethnography as its primary research method. Autoethnography is an approach to research that puts the self at the center of cultural analysis. Chang (2008) describes how the method uses “narration of self to engage in cultural analysis and interpretation”. In the analysis of diversity policy in the arts and culture that follows, I centre my 15 years of working in the cultural sector.

I write as a respondent but also as a recipient of, and an active participant in, the cultural sector’s diversity policies over the past 15 years. I write as a Londoner who by participating in the cultural sector, has felt complicit in a kind of gentrification of myself and my city, complicit in what my friend and mentor Madani Younis describes as a “cultural appartheid”, regularly delivering work in spaces where teams or audiences rarely reflect the populations they located in.

This paper is the result of a lifetime of living as a minority in predominantly white spaces, and of being subject to the ‘imaginations of others.’ In adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy:Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017), they describe how people of colour (and especially Black people) are in an “imagination battle” having to contend with building lives and futures whilst at the same time being bombarded with images of racist stereotyping, violence and deprivation through our culture. I argue in this paper that by flattening difference and tokenising the presence of those represented by the nomenclature such as BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic), marginalised workers in the cultural sector face a similar battle every day.

Part of such imagining starts to take shape in the language and implementation of policy about diversity. In this frame, an imagining of me by people writing such policy might be that I am a statistic of progress for the sector, and that my participation in these schemes and institutions is, in part, a symbol of change. My experience of the cultural sector and what comes out of it problematises those statistics. Whilst they may appear a helpful advocacy and accountability tool, the struggle I have experienced to be seen in the totality of my experience whilst working in the cultural sector is a negation of them. I believe the picture is much more troubling than those statistics can communicate. Disembodied as these statistics are from the true experiences of cultural workers and practitioners, I would argue that genuine solutions to the unjust position we find ourselves in require a fundamental disavowal of the logic of their language which is the language of establishment, business, political expediency and an embracing of a new more thoughtful and embodied one of humanity (and humility) and understanding. For this reason, the paper is punctuated with my embodied institutional memory, my dialogue with others and that of other cultural workers (from sectors including film, visual arts, theatre and music). By putting my voice in dialogue with others, I honour the stories and thoughts shared with me without repeating the harm of the cultural sector’s diversity policy which as I will go on to show, so often unfeelingly makes individuals performatively hypervisible and invisible at will, and which so often renders us completely disembodied when discussing our lived realities. Sometimes, these voices might punctuate the argument in midflow, this attempts to articulate something I can’t underline enough. While policy led initiatives continue to grapple with inequality with quantitative data and ‘focus groups’ and ‘consultation’, cultural workers and artists are speaking every single day. In a myriad of ways, in multiple contexts and to people at every level of the sector we are sharing our lived experiences of the realities of such policies. I make as much space for them here as it is possible to do so but all ‘voices’ are anonymised unless they come from public events or from platforms such as Twitter.

Diversity narratives in public documents often focus on the lacks, gaps and description of the marginalisation of the excluded rather than the behaviours and attitudes of those that are the beneficiaries of that exclusion - often those that do the excluding. Part of this research is to help workers (and myself) describe and articulate what they face, to confront a feeling we often share, of lack, or of failure within ourselves as we struggle to progress, or are marginalised and discriminated against. Through this process of description we ask ourselves where the perceived lack might actually be located.

They think they understand us so well, but they don’t see us properly. Actually what I realised is that we need to remember that we understand them, how they work.

It is important to note that I do this with caution and care and with the knowledge that cultural institutions in their current form rarely centre (or even cite) the perspectives and solutions proffered by marginalised communities, preferring to co-opt them and translate them into institutional double speak. Undertaking research funded by the AHRC and a Clore Fellowship and enabled by time away from an institutional job within the sector and hoping that this paper will be read widely, I have often considered the risks of being complicit in this practice of exclusion. I consider this throughout the paper.

Much like the art that cultural workers are responsible for caring for and actualising, I have written this paper by enacting a deep internal as well as external search, the reading and translation of it will require an equal self-reflexivity.

A note on Structure

The paper is organized into four chapters which look at how diversity-led initiatives such as policy, professional development and public programming meets with the lived experience of the cultural workers who are embodied in difference. Across the chapters, I draw on academic literature and policy documents in the main body of the text and include my embodied experiences of working in the cultural sector and researching this topic in blue throughout. The embodied experiences of other cultural workers in the wider arts sector I have been in dialogue with also punctuate the text in pink throughout. My own articulations in dialogue with the collective I forged through this process also appear at certain points in gold.

In considering what this research is, and what this paper can do. I have been trying to join what has often felt like insurmountable axes - of the language of academic theory and of public facing documents, of lived experience, professionalisation and (de)politicisation. These are the axes that many cultural workers face, and they are all represented here in this writing. They will perhaps jar with some used to a certain kind of document over another. These voices are discordant with one another because they don’t belong together, they have been forced into conversation because of my work in the sector. This fragmentary, at times, dissonant text reflects what happens when, what academic Sarita Malik describes as the “language games” of public policy play into a ““racelessness” …. [a] lack of engagement with inequalities and racisms” and collide with the bodies that contain the lived experience they attempt to describe. They have been forced into dialogue in such a cacophonous way because of the disconnect between political and financial expediency (the flow of power and money) and the values of truly liberatory political/situated art making (work often directly connected to the lived experience of the bodily beings of the vast majority of people yet to be ‘included’).

Chapter 1: ‘From the Top’ finds its purpose but also its counterpoint in reports commissioned and produced by agencies such as the Arts Council England (ACE) and British Film Institute (BFI). It looks at how what Sara Ahmed describes as the “happy talk” of diversity and narratives of progress in arts, meets with the lived reality of cultural sector workers who participate in the present and draws attention to two interconnected axes that are rarely acknowledged in such reporting: that of the socio-political and that of the embodied. I look at seminal reports in the cultural sector such as ACE commissioned The Art Britain Ignores (1976) authored by Naseem Khan and BFI’s Barriers to Diversity (2007) authored by Reena Bhavnani and situtate them in their socio-political context. I consider how subsequent developments and refinements in language of diversity policy have resulted in ahistorical, disembodied and depoliticised approaches to inclusion and have continued to leave little space for the real testimonies of workers in the cultural sector. Through this omission, I argue, these policies have further entrenched ‘institutional whiteness’ (Ahmed, 2007) whereby real difference is contained and cultural workers must comply with the ‘universal somatic norm’ (Puwar, 2004) of whiteness to progress. Such a reality problematises the notion of ‘representation’ as a progressive way to address inequality. I am concerned here with how the language and concerns of these documents impact the work cultural workers embodied in difference are expected to do and the dissonance they must process. Here I begin to discuss the psychological impact of being ‘included’ on the basis of the contortions and constrictions of such diversity language.

In Chapter 2 A (Host)ile Environment I build on the ideas of the ‘somatic norm’ of establishment that we explored in the previous chapter, to critically look at how professional development programmes function to uphold institutional whiteness. I consider how professional development programmes function as a kind of ‘hopeful performative’ whereby the existence of such schemes from recruitment onwards allows various gestures of benevolent ‘investment’ in the ‘underrepresented’ to be performed largely for the benefit of the instigators of the activity. Meanwhile the conditions which unfairly marginalise new entrants go unaddressed. By considering the language and structure of such schemes and putting them in dialogue with the experiences of people who have participated in them, I show how schemes which ostensibly seek to empower different voices for access into the sector, in practice function to disempower. By offering conditional access and flattening difference, such schemes endorse social dynamics that continue to uphold institutional whiteness and racism and contribute to profound alienation and psychological distress, as well as fragmenting collectivity. My interviews with those who have been through such schemes, become a lens through which to study how whiteness structures organisations and how whiteness shows up in everyday interactions. This lens provides a frame to answer why, after decades of professional development programmes the number of marginal workers in paid employment continues to remain seemingly unchanged. Could addressing institutional whiteness be the key to addressing sector wide issues of retention?

Chapter 3 The Sunken Place In this chapter I look at another aspect of visible institutionalised diversity activity, and another ethical frontline for cultural workers embodied in difference - the public programme. Building on my piece The Arts are in the Sunken Place: How do we Get Out (2019), which outlined my experiences of working in public programming as a cultural worker embodied in difference, I consider some aspects of this discomfort in more detail. I show how market driven public programmes intersect with the ‘creative case’ diversity language we explored in Chapter 1, and inflect spaces of cultural criticism and public programming in parasitic ways. I build on work that draws attention to how neoliberal values (demonstrated by the professionalisation and commercialisation of the arts sector we touched on in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2) intersect with a fetish (and market potential) for ‘difference’ and ‘radicality’ and show how that impacts the way that we are commissioning and consuming art in the UK. Through drawing on my own experiences as a public programmer, as well as embodied responses to public programmes through Twitter posts and interviews, I consider the experiences of cultural workers on the front line of delivering such activity (and expected to demonstrate their implicit endorsement with their presence). I want to explore the human and social cost of poorly conceived and dubiously motivated activity that presents itself as politically progressive. I will suggest that such activity has a harmful depoliticising effect at just the moment where we need our cultural institutions/ to be places of challenge and change making. I will show how such depoliticisation is contributing to a “cultural appartheid” (Younis 2019) where despite presenting a face of plurality and accomodation, our cultural spaces are effectively sites of mediation and gentrification, rendering much activity meaningless to all but a select monocultural audience, effectively enacting a social cleansing of cultural spaces.

In Chapter 4 From Snap to Push back In this chapter I consider the personal costs of the ways that diversity narratives tend to render ‘progress’ or ‘happy talk’ hypervisible through the bodies of cultural workers. Whilst pain is explored in art works and programming, often such pain is detached from the lived realities of the populations it seeks to ‘represent’. I consider those who are steadfastly ignored and silenced, those that are struggling, do not progress, or choose to leave the industries that they enter. In this chapter I look at ways that institutional indifference is communicated to cultural workers and audiences embodied in difference by looking at how dissent is either contained or ignored. By considering how such ‘unhappiness’ is framed through institutional responses, I ask what such ‘leaks’ might tell us about the ways that the cultural sector accommodates the difference it appears to invite in. I consider the impact of silencing on individuals, the costs of not speaking out, and consider my own experiences of articulation (through written and verbal means) during the period of the research. I consider the importance of such testimonies and ‘complaint collectives’ (Ahmed 2019) both in forging strategies of survival in the present and in imagining new futures. I consider how during all of these periods of writing and exchanging, it has become clear to me that the result of such disembodied and transactional thinking about difference in all its forms, has led us all to believe that as cultural workers who wish to participate in the sector, our real, often painful, embodied experiences of the contortions of ‘diversity’ policy are a form of weakness. I dedicate this chapter to dismantling that belief, and to showing the depth of alternative knowledge production, communities of care and support that emerge when we resist such contorted thinking. Through my own embodied experience of using my voice to articulate myself, and those of other cultural workers embodied in difference, as well as my own voice in dialogue with theirs, I consider what alternative networks and strategies could be nurtured and explored in order to better support one another and make meaning for bodies like ours in our cultural landscape.

Methodology

One thing I've been trying to do through the research is create community and I've been trying not to go too far from people that I know well because I think it changes a conversation.

So the idea is that, yeah, I am doing a piece of research and it'll all be anonymised and the institutions won't be named and stuff but that it's like a sort of, I don't know,

that we all kind of feel supported and it's not just, oh this like really annoying thing happened or I'm really finding it hard to find a job or I don't know, that it's kind of not how these reports normally are which is like, oh, there's a lack, you know,

This research came from an embodied place, as a feeling, something I held in my body that it was hard to articulate.

I have approached these questions in a non-linear and iterative way. I have tried to approach a subject that has been deeply disheartening and personally painful in as generative and cathartic manner as possible. I owe much of my ability to trust in that process, and to stick with it to the work of adrienne maree brown’s concept of “Emergent Strategy” which accepts that the world is in a continual state of flux. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, brown invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. (brown 2017)

A note on citation:

I’ve tried not just to retread the familiar in my citation practice, but equally I have tried to be true to the work that has shifted me and changed my ways of thinking. In the midst of researching I have read, listened to, and watched so many things that have fed into the research which live on in the piece.

I have tried to work in a different way to the ways that I will show institutions work. I have tried not to be extractive, I have tried to be instinctive. I have tried to engage deeply with work, and to avoid taking a gentrifying approach. I have tried to move out from my position, take recommendations from people rather than follow a rigid series of references. Conversations snatched at events, over meals, on buses and planes and trains, over WhatsApp, email, skype, impossible to cite in their entirety have sometimes been as important as reading whole books. My thinking and approach to this owes much to contemporary activists and scholars such as adrienne maree brown, Nora Samaron, Farzana Khan, Maori Karmael, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Adele Patrick and Dani Mclain who are making links between their lived experiences, social justice, climate justice and societal change and privilege thoughtful, careful, intentional space as well as direct speech and action.

The constant moving set of citations feels like a tension between public and private, legible and illegible.

In considering language and audience, in my citation practice I have considered legibility for those not used to academia and also the possibility of over familiarity with certain voices that those used to deeper study might perceive in the paper.

My approach to the form in which I write, located from from the part of the cultural sector I have spent most of my time (film) is of course indebted to cultural studies theorists such as Stuart Hall. Hall and his contemporaries, charted social change through the quotidian, understanding identity as both imparted, and hybrid, because people know themselves to be multifaceted, intellectual and have the capacity (if cared for) to see themselves, their families and others like them to be fully fledged human beings, not statistics or under institutionalised nomenclature such as BAME. Our questions about culture, the ones that we find familiar and those that are less so, emerge from our lives, our lived experience, our upbringings and are impacted in a myriad ways by the environments we find ourselves. These questions (and the possibility of their answers) are deeply, meaningfully connected to the political climate of the day. In acknowledgement that Hall’s writing is oft cited and is complex, erudite and perhaps opaque to people less familiar with his work and political position, I use transcribed quotations from his oratory rather than his texts. Hall’s ability to translate complex arguments into language that could interest and empower meant he was a steady fixture on British TV and Radio. At a time of polarisation and provocation, such a voice is rarely given the space that was afforded him, and it's a voice that it was helpful for me to hear in its embodied form through recordings, transcripts and John Akomfrah’s The Stuart Hall Project. It is a voice that dialogues easily with those of marginalised workers in the sector who grapple with the issues he made familiar to us, but have little platform beyond closed spaces or the limitations of social media to air them.

In addition to Hall, the manner of my thinking, and indeed the courage to even move forward with it and entertain the idea that it is possible to ask to be seen and fully understood as a person of colour in predominantly white institutions, have been informed, finessed and sharpened, by the work of radical women of colour scholars and writers. Sara Ahmed, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, combahee river collective, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, Maia Williams, Amrit Wilson and Gail Lewis amongst many others. Institutional critique is not new, and I’m indebted to the work of many independent curators, artists and critics who are also speaking about these issues from outside of institutions sometimes less afraid (but always made vulnerable by a system of arts funding that is controlled by the establishment) by the fear of loss of position and power that pervades their walls. Artists and educators such as Aditi Janagathan, Imran Peretta, Jasleen Kaur, Morgan Quaintance, Rabz Lansiquot, Raju Rage, Rehana Zaman, Sajdeep Somal, Taylor LeMelle, Teresa Cisneros, Tobi Kyeremateng, Amy Fung and many others have made me think differently about agency and helped me to be more articulate and generous in my critiques.

They, like Hall, speak from their lived experiences and show me the truth of what Hall learnt from his wife and feminist historian Catherine Hall, as they renegotiated their marriage after the advent of the women’s movement in the 70s:

“Feminism taught me the difference between a conviction in the head and a change in how you live.”

My understanding of feminism in relation to my own embodied living (as a South Asian woman) with the historical underpinnings of the feminist ‘movement’ (which throughout its histories in majority white settings has and does exclude women of all backgrounds, on different scales, from their proximity to the white and middle class ‘norm’) informed the manner in which I have enacted the research.

Especially when citing the work of Black women, I have been intentional, thinking through full practices, of oratory, written and academic essay, and poetry. Black feminism has taught me countless things that White feminism has not: to acknowledge harm, to rethink justice, to demand accountability and care. It recognises the revolutionary potential of new imaginings, beyond reforming old things, asking us to change not only our relationships to each other, but also with ourselves. Using Audre Lorde and bell hooks may feel tired to some more used to these themes, but having the opportunity to really spend time with their work which is so deeply about speaking internal truths to power has been the central personal concern for this period of study.

I have considered and grappled with what it might mean to be ‘well researched’. How to be rendered both legible and credible? My friend, poet, writer and film programmer So Mayer shared with me an insight which I bring to my approach here. They taught me research does not have to be complete, finished, exhaustive (and exhausting), they drew my attention to the search in research, so this work is at its heart, searching, open ended and generative.

The research has taken me on a long journey of learning, but also unlearning so here I acknowledge my need to go deeper to reach those who have worked hard to navigate this journey before me, but also to stay a little nearer to the surface to reach a hand to those who are still to begin theirs.

A note on Location

“London has always had the highest concentration of Black artists in the country. Simultaneously, however, it’s always been (with sporadic and problematic exceptions) the city in which Black artists have had the most derisory profile. In thirty years, no amount of institutional tinkering has changed that. There can be no greater evidence of the wholesale failure of ‘diversity’ initiatives within the visual arts than this.”

This paper is firmly located in London. I am a Londoner. I am invested in this space. I am not at all oblivious to the (in many ways more progressive) work being done in culture outside of the capital and I had the pleasure of meeting so many people through my Clore Fellowship and observing the activity of many others through Twitter and other social media. Sometimes those meetings have been validating in themselves. These small exchanges have been deep spaces of learning for me, and have confirmed the sense that many of us face similar struggles, I hope that this paper will have resonance to the rest of the UK but in my intention to grow out from my location with depth, I did not have the time or resources to build the relationships I wanted outside of London.

In addition, I believe London in particular is the epicentre of a cultural emergency. It is one of the most diverse cities in the world, but it is also the most unequal. Events such as those of 14 June 2017, when 72 people died in a tower block in North Kensington, West London highlight just how divided the city is. A recent report written by Dhelia Snoussi and Laurie Mompelat, and commissioned by CLASS Centre for Labour and Social Justice and the Runnymede Trust describes the situation:

“Despite Grenfell Tower being only 4.3 miles away from Westminster, it might as well have been on the moon. It is very easy to view the night of the Grenfell fire as an aberration, a one-off event that shocked us all. Yet the starker reality is that it was a disaster years in the making. It is the story of a society that dismisses working-class voices, prioritizes profit over people, and creates institutions that are inaccessible and indifferent to those who most need them.”

It is also a place where the gap between the number of cultural workers and the population is at its most stark and visible. As Lyn Gardner recently wrote in an article in The Stage:

In London, there is also a game-changing shift of demographics that arts institutions such as the Southbank ignore at their peril: 57% of those under the age of 15 living in London are from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds. Will those youngsters, more than half the city’s population, ever think that our cultural institutions have any relevance for them and their lives when our cultural workforces are so white?

These polarities describe a dissonance that I find hard to process and accept. It is a dissonance that means I would never have access to the arts if I was a young person today. I did not grow up with cultural ‘capital’, my parents worked 7 days and week and we didn’t regularly attend cultural spaces. My engagement with the arts came through school, and then as I became a middle class adult or member of the “creative class” (Brook, O’Brien and Taylor, 2018). I grew up with a compliant world view, and internalised a sense of what did and didn’t belong to me - cultural space was never a space where I felt I belonged. University education and friends who felt more comfortable in those spaces helped to acclimatise me to their norms, but in recent years I have considered more keenly how it can be that that feeling continues to persist even as an adult with all the middle class benefits of “access” and “inclusion”.

London in the last couple of years has also been the site of an excellent demonstration of why the number of cultural workers from underrepresented groups is staying relatively static. Two high profile hires, one at Southbank Centre, Madani Younis and another at BFI Southbank, Gaylene Gould both left their jobs within a year. My understanding of the nature of their exits, and the conditions they navigated were informative to this study. Younis, my mentor on the Clore Fellowship in particular, has powerfully shaped my thinking on the need to rethink and rebuild and a friendship with Gould has made me keenly aware of the processes that fail to care for those whose talents and networks might change cultural spaces.

As a programmer for a London based Festival, I have observed how high profile events such as the BFI London Film Festival are increasingly sites where the mediation of culture is most apparent. As the films that the programme considers every year has opened out in expansive ways to include more women and people of colour, it has been disorienting to see that the way this work is financed, greenlit, produced, selected, reviewed, marketed and distributed is still in the hands of the most privileged demographics, and reaches the eyes of the most privileged audiences first.

This disorientation has been something that runs through this paper, as I relocate my relationship to the city I live in and consider my participation in the imminent “cultural appartheid” facing our cultural institutions.

My experience primarily in film means that many of my examples of embodied experience will draw from a section of the creative sector which is distinct and it may be tempting to regard it as a film specific narrative. However through conversations with marginalised workers across the arts sector I have been struck by the similarities of our experiences. The only significant differences between our stories has been the way we process the dilemmas, dissonances and toxic behaviours we are subject to. This has its root not in the art form, sector or discipline we work in, but in the specificities of our multiplicities, access to networks, familial support and precarity. As one cross arts practitioner I spoke with said (and the statistics back up):

They ask me to cover some screenings. One of them is Rocks. I am so excited about the film but I haven’t seen it and ask them to get me into the press screening in the morning. It is the usual crowd. I’m pretty sure I am one of the only non-white people there. The press screenings are tiny this year and everyone seems to want to watch it. I get there late and there is a single seat in the middle of a row. The lights have already gone down and no one stands up when I come in. I have a bag as I have to work later, so I barely fit through, they tut and huff and I slide myself into the seat, hot and ashamed, feeling like I shouldn’t be there even though I’m working.

The film makes me think about me and my brother, about being alone and caring for others when you are so young, about not fully remembering when you were care-free. The fullness of lives despite and because of those cares. Young Londoners that aren’t about going to the BFI, Tate and the British Museum, about learning to take up space in cultural environments, but about wandering round the ends, sitting in a living room watching TV, because your parents are working and don’t really do culture. It’s a London full of alternative systems of care, enacted by the young and the old, the familiar and unfamiliar. It's an experience I rarely get to reflect on.

Later at the screening there are what feels like 20 people on stage. Everyone on stage is excited, heightened with emotion. The girls are amazing. The film fills me with hope. We use up the Q&A asking everyone what it feels like to show the film in London. I lean into my accent, I don’t pretend to be different. I feel at ease and in dialogue. Even though the girls are so nervous they barely register my questions and presence, I don’t feel invisible like I normally do.

The stage is bright, and I can only see the first few rows of the recently refurbished luxury cinema. All I can see are white people with collared shirts leaning back expansively on their sofa seats. From the stage they seem so nonchalant to me, so (in)different to the energy pulsing on stage. On stage it feels like London, off stage it feels like all the places we never went to when we were younger, and all the places I am so often in now.

All the places where it feels like I am taking the last seat but no one has told me where it is.

At the end, I get my bag to leave and see the security gather to guide people out the building as a big name producer arrives for the next screening. The Rocks audience comes out and are penned into little sections in the foyer. Out there I see there are lots of Black women, who have been in the screening, they are crying, about their daughters, about their mums. I see Theresa who wrote the film, screaming in recognition with tears streaming down her face. Her sister, who she wrote Rocks to honour, a love letter for her, has unexpectedly arrived to surprise her.

The foyer is so bright and sharp edged. It can’t contain this emotion with any dignity. I suddenly feel out of body, not sure what to do. I feel a hand on my arm and turn, it's my friend Tobi, a Black womxn, a Londoner, as moved to emotion as all the others; she hugs me so tight. I can’t remember what we say. I am so grateful that she found me and extended that embodied softness and care.

Throughout the paper I try to use the term ‘cultural workers embodied in difference’ instead of BAME unless it is relevant to do so. This is in part to refuse institutionally articulated nomenclature but also in acknowledgement that within such institutions we are turned into a clunky monolith. I want to make clear this is not to flatten difference, rather to draw attention to its problematic nature and to acknowledge that while we are all different, in institutionally white spaces we come to embody not our own bodies, but simply, difference. It is in my acknowledgement and resistance to this that I here acknowledge my specific intersections, the limits and specificities of my hybridity.

I am a South Asian cisgender woman who grew up in London to immigrant parents. Our family began as working class and through investing in the values of the bootstrap politics of Thatcher moved into the lower middle classes. My story will be familiar to others in the diaspora and it will diverge hugely from others. All our stories are unique. Cultural workers who are disabled, d/Deaf, LGBTQ+ and Black men and women, or more precarious workers will also move through the arts in a different way to me.

You know, there's downward and upward mobility which so many people, if you're not an immigrant or from an immigrant situation, they don't understand that.

This paper advocates for a need for us to understand the lived, intersectional realities of people who are embodied differently to us. I commit to the work of this myself, and wish to learn and grow. I do this by investing in friendships, engaging deeply with art made by artists of all perspectives and will “own, apologize and repair” (Samaran 2019) if it is necessary that I am held to account. It is through listening to others embodied differently to me that I have learnt to use my own voice, and these acts of listening have informed my work below. I hope that there will be arguments, experiences and validations for them in return.

As I write this paper I am reading Sadiya Hartman’s “Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments”. Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Hartman describes her approach in her note at the start of the book:

Wayward Lives elaborates, augments, transposes, and breaks open archival documents so they might yield a richer picture of the social upheaval that transformed social life in the twentieth century. The goal is to understand and experience the world as these young women did, to learn from what they know. I prefer to think of this book as a fugitive text of the wayward, and it is marked by the errantry that it describes. In this spirit, I have pressed at the limits of the case film and the document, speculated about what might have been, imagined the things whispered in dark bedrooms, and amplified moments of withholding, escape and possibility, moments when the vision and dreams of the wayward seemed possible.

This commingling of historical and political research, lived experience and communal imagination—known and unknown—drives the impulse of this work. It seeks to open a space for us to move forward from our current narratives, ones that describe us in terms of lack, to move forward from describing ourselves as a problem, and able to move away from any description at all. Into the liberty to be, and to create and reflect, and luxuriate in the richness of the embodiment we inhabit.

Prologue

My mum and dad met at university in 1978. My mum, the eldest of four, was born into a sprawling extended family in a small town in the state of Gujarat where her father and her uncle ran a modest tobacco farming business. My father was born on 26 August 1950, three years after India gained independence from British rule. His father worked in Aden in Yemen, as a trader for French owned B.E.S.S.E & Company. The port city of Aden was occupied by the British in 1839, and became an important fueling depot for the British Navy as they defended their interests in East India Company related trading. Situated at a strategically advantageous spot at the entrance to the Red Sea, Aden became a British Crown Colony in 1937 and remained under British control for another three decades. When Dad turned two, labour movements and unions began to create unrest in the region and my Ba and Dada made the decision that dad and Ba would take the British controlled Mogul Line Steamer boat, a 20 day journey from Aden to Gujarat. His father continued to work in Aden until his death in 1966, just one year before the colony was disestablished. After his brother disappeared a few years later, my father became the sole breadwinner for his mother, sister, sister in law and 5 nieces and nephews, dependents he still continues to support.

Facing a level of precarity that he had never had to consider, my dad started surveying his options. A chance conversation with a friend alerted him to his right to a British passport so he placed his name on a waiting list in 1975 and 5 years later, on the 4 June 1980 while Indira Gandhi (known as the Iron Lady of India) was prime minister, he travelled with his granted documents on a British passport to London. He had got my mum’s papers in secret and when they were granted he soothed her protestation with a promise that if she didn’t like it, they could come back.

On their Iraqi Air flight to the UK my 23 year old mum asked my Dad if he thought there would be rice and dhal in London.

I have been working in the arts for fifteen years. I have worked at small organisations such as the Black Cultural Archives (BCA) and Independent Cinema Office. I have worked on film sets in production, and production companies, at the London Film Festival and most recently the British Council. Often (apart from my wholly different experience at BCA) I have been the only person not white in the team.

I am the daughter of first generation immigrants, who travelled from India with British passports in 1980, into Thatcher’s Britain.

My parents’ decision to leave and their ability to do so is a complicated relationship between coloniality, subjectivity and assimilation, a relationship with empire and sovereignty and citizenship; a complex set of signifiers to belonging. It is a story that I did not know in its totality until very recently. In August 2016, just 3 months after he finally retired from working almost everyday for 15 hours a day in shop and then a post office, lifting himself up by his bootstraps just like Thatcher told him he could, my Dad was taken to hospital where he stayed for 6 weeks, some of those weeks not knowing if he was going to live.

At this point of mortality Dad’s need to tell his story, in his own words, in his own language emerged in a profound way. Facing death, perhaps he realised he hadn’t really lived, or that he had swapped a real life for another one. I sensed an implicit but powerful compulsion from him to have me listen. To have me see him in his totality.

My father’s illness was the first experience I had had with parental mortality.

In the heightened feelings of that month my partner and I decided to have a baby and a month later my dad was safe at home and I was pregnant with my daughter Leena; a new addition to the family with new routes, pathways of her own; Indian, German, British and European. Birthing a white-passing child into the political climate of post-Brexit Britain, a climate that increasingly seems similar to the one my parents entered 40 years ago has meant I have experienced in a different way (or perhaps become more attuned to) the nature of racism enacted by the liberal arts elite. It has had me questioning whether it is possible for me to truly exist in predominantly white institutions and even to be in relation to people who don’t share the experience of being racialized when we participate in the cultural life of the country.

It is through these personal experiences, these entangled personal histories and futures that I have carried in my body that I reflect on the last 15 years of my working life, and indeed my whole relationship with the culture of Britain and Britishness. Seeing how the end of Empire and colonialism has marked the ways that I relate to my parents, how they relate to themselves and my daughter, how (in)visible I am sometimes rendered by others in relation to her helps me to understand that the division that our conversations around diversity in the arts makes between the rational and subjective is as meaningless as it is untrue.

Chapter 1 : From the Top

The Creative Case for Diversity is a way of exploring how arts and cultural organisations and artists can enrich the work they do by embracing a wide range of influences and practices. We believe that embracing the Creative Case helps arts and cultural organisations not only enrich their work, but also address other challenges and opportunities in audience development, public engagement, workforce and leadership, and collections development in museums. Our funded organisations are expected to show how they contribute to the Creative Case for Diversity through the work they produce, present and collect

Eighteen years ago the proportion of BAME workers [in the film industry] – black, Asian and minority ethnic – stood at 3 per cent....the most recent available figures show that the BAME representation in the film industry now stands at – 3 per cent.”

I don't think we can say that nothing has changed. I do not think that is true. If you look at any of the indicators, things have changed sometimes in different directions. … It obliges us ...To go back to that and say what has changed? What remains the same? How does the media function in it? How does a market function in it? What is the nature of the state in a moment when the state isn't coming but going and so on.

— Stuart Hall in Jhally (2016) The Last Interview: Stuart Hall on the Politics of Cultural Studies

This chapter explores academic literature and policy papers alongside my embodied experiences of reading and reflecting on these documents and the embodied experiences of other cultural workers in the wider arts sector.

(De)politicised & (Dis)embodied

At a recent Clore Fellowship talk Director of Arts Council England (ACE) Darren Henley spoke about data as one of his most useful tools — the key to complying with the “The Green Book”, the main document setting out Government guidance on the appraisal of public investments to ensure that policies, programs and projects funded deliver on their objectives and make best use of resources (HM Treasury 2018). This small detail clarified a number of things to me for the first time; first that this relationship to the highest office of the government dictates at least part of the way that funders gather and disseminate information about the sector; secondly that this symbiotic relationship is likely to ape the norms of establishment; and thirdly that funding of the arts at its most upper echelons is almost entirely structured by political maneuvering.

The concerns of the first and third of these observations on the visual arts sector are considered by cultural critic and curator Richard Hylton in his book The Nature of the Beast: Cultural Diversity and the Visual Arts Sector, A study of policies, initiatives and attitudes 1976 — 2006 (2007). The book has been described by artist and academic Eddie Chambers as “the most authoritative and modern history of Black artists’ activity in Britain” charting “three decades of muddled institutional thinking about cultural diversity and the initiatives such thinking has spawned”.

In a key chapter for considering the language of diversity and political expediency, Hylton looks at Arts Council commissioned study The Arts Britain Ignores (1976) which was researched and written by Naseem Khan, a journalist, activist and later a policy maker for the Arts Council. Khan’s interest in the subject of the paper was partly influenced by her struggle to access the cultures of her own heritage. As the daughter of Abdul Wasi Khan, a doctor from India, and Gerda (nee Kilbinger), the daughter of a German trade unionist, who had come to Britain to learn English, Khan faced a duality and a distance from the concept of Britishness. The paper focussed on the arts of recent migrants to the UK (from Bangladeshis to the Polish), and the contributions that they made to the fabric of British society. Making a case for these ‘ethnic arts’ to be paid attention to, Khan advocated for their ‘inclusion’ by funders as a counterpoint to stereotyping and cultural misunderstanding.

Hylton notes the longevity of the paper’s influence on the language of ‘cultural’ and ‘creative’ diversity discourse today, and Khan’s own reflections on the paper many years later in 2005 that the paper was a “pioneer” and that its recommendations “are in many cases, as relevant today as they were then; indeed, they were probably a bit before their time”. However, in drawing attention to the language of the paper he shows how it opened itself up to be used in insidious ways to speak for people other than the recent immigrants she advocated for (notably the first and subsequent generation of Black and Asian artists graduating from art schools in the UK).

Hylton shows how the political context was key to understanding why Khan’s narrative proved attractive and useful for cultural policy makers. He describes a set of circumstances (which sound eerily familiar in our post migrant crisis, post Brexit moment) where popular push back to the Black and Asian labour force related immigration of the 1950s was performatively addressed by successive governments through a series of punitive measures which sought to demonstrate a ‘controlling’ of the flow of immigrants to the country. Drawing attention to the Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968, Hylton underscores how this legislation (and the visible activity to back it up) addressed a political need but also created a problem. In the face of justified anger at the ways government policy was presenting immigration as a problem (which was causing direct stigmatisation of settled immigrants and their families), cultural arts policy and its activity sought to defuse into ‘harmony’ and ‘integration.’ (Hylton 2007:38).

“at precisely the same moment Khan was undertaking her research, a new generation of Black British youngsters was finding its feet. When a vocal minority of these artists began to develop a visual practice, they called it ‘Black Art’ and imbued it with a multiplicity of functions that owed (consciously or otherwise) to Pan-Africanism and Social Realism. Cultural Nationalism also had a place in the work of these artists, but ‘ethnic arts’ as the particular construct it was, was emphatically bypassed.”

Artist Rasheed Araeen in his response to the paper “The art Britain really Ignores” (written in 1976 but published in 1984) connects the conflation between the non-professional work of the newly arrived, still ‘not-quite British’ with that of trained, discipline-specific Black and Asian artists who were politically sensitised to the inequalities of contemporary Britain as an explicit act of political containment. He points out that Khan’s report: “has come out at a time when the (white) establishment is looking for a solution to what it calls the “black problem”. This has now been turned into the problem of so-called ethnic cultures in Britain. Not a strange coincidence!”

Hylton shows how the conflation of these two separate constituencies pervaded subsequent arts policy through various iterations of ‘diversity’ over the subsequent decades. For Hylton the actual nomenclature (ethnically diverse, culturally diverse etc.) is irrelevant, the implied sentiment remains “British born Black and Asian people are fundamentally different and in need of special classifications when it comes to the arts.”

Building on analysis such as Hylton’s, academic Sarita Malik’s work in public service broadcasting (2013) has shown how the the shift from multiculturalism to cultural diversity that Hylton charts (his study ends in 2007) becomes further depoliticised in a third phase of policy conception of diversity known as “creative diversity”. Here she argues convincingly (and recognisably to cultural workers implementing such policy) that:

“Creative diversity policies are underpinned by market, regulatory, and social motivations, meeting marketplace requirements and safeguarding ..interests … Basically, by renaming and reframing cultural diversity as creative diversity, three major, overlapping market, regulatory, and social predicaments are dealt with ... a depoliticized, raceless diversity consensus is achieved, taking the heat out of the multicultural problem, smoothing over difference, and deflecting claims of special treatment and rights because we are now all included in this intentionally culturally unspecific (and socially cohesive) creative frame.

Creative Case for Diversity which is presented as a non prescriptive, opportunity to ‘explore’ ‘enrich’ ‘embrace’ difference in order to address “challenges and opportunities in audience development, public engagement, workforce and leadership” obscures structural reasons for lack of progress whilst ‘welcoming’ difference. This smoothing of difference is also related to Sara Ahmed’s research on diversity work within institutions where she found that focus on ‘good practice’ in such settings “can require that you develop a habit of talking in mission talk, what we can call “happy talk,” a way of telling a happy story of the institution that is at once a story of the institution as happy” (Ahmed 2012:10).

Malik and Ahmed’s work draws attention to three important concerns that permeate cultural activity around diversity and impact individual workers directly: firstly a disavowal of racism and discrimination (in favour of ‘happy talk’), secondly a flattening of difference, and thirdly a conflation of the moral and business case for diversity (and subsequent tying of measurement of such activity to market based logic such as ‘innovation’, ‘enterprise’ and ‘future-proofing’).

Malik’s analysis is echoed by those working in the sector. Speaking in a panel discussion about democratising knowledge at London’s British Library in June 2019, Madani Younis (then Creative Director of Southbank Centre) said institutions should be wary of the de-politicisation of knowledge, “We live in an age where radical ideas that are being presented have had their edges smoothed” going on to say that such smoothing contributed to a “misnomer” that “we’re all in this together”

Such logic continues across the cultural sector. Similar to critiques put forward by Hylton and Araeen, academic Clive Nwonka builds on earlier work by Malik and others to show how schemes to promote diversity in the UK Film Industry took little notice of the actual experience of the people of colour in it. Nwonka’s analysis charts more recent terrain (specifically the conditions created by the post 2010 coalition government and subsequent strengthening Conservative majorities) but cites another seminal paper from 2007 as a pivot point to understand subsequent activity. The UK Film Council commissioned Barriers to Diversity written by Dr Reena Bhavnani, an activist and educator of South Asian descent has been described as a “decade-old review .. still pressing today” and “concluding with clear, actionable recommendations based on in-depth data” (Raising Films 2017).

The picture Bhavnani points to in her data is a male dominated industry where women and minorities feel marginalised. The extensive report (over 205 pages) is unlike comparably depoliticised and celebratory iterations found more recently on the BFI website. It uses the word discrimination 32 times, and warns against complacencey through perfomative initiatives, drawing attention to the attitudanal change required by descision makers. 13 years before controversies such as #baftassowhite, Bhanvani warns that the monocultural nature of the sector means it risks becoming irrelevant in the future and warns of a lack of trust between decision makers and BAME practitioners. Despite the inclusion of critical and dissenting voices, the language of Bhavnani’s report (admitting discrimination but presenting an economic case as a reason to address it) betrays the politically motivated diversity narrative of the report’s moment. The benevolent cultural spectacle of ‘including’ was flattened into the ‘cultural ‘ and ‘creative’ case for diversity which at its heart requires a clear ‘business’ or ‘economic’ case to serve its logic. Such uneasily tethered concerns as Malik showed us, connect equality to the market and ‘common sense’ rather than social justice. Seven years later the concept of social justice was firmly moved to the margins of the diversity argument institutionalised by the BFI in favour of the economic benefits of creative diversity by Ben Roberts, the Director of the Film Fund (now the Chief Executive of the BFI). In trade magazine Variety’s 2014 reporting on the latest iteration of the BFI’s diversity policy confusingly, but perhaps tellingly, entitled “British Film Institute gets serious about promoting cultural diversity” it is reported:

“Roberts is quick to note that the conversation should not be just about moral and social responsibilities but also about recognizing the commercial value in accessing a broader audience.“When people stop seeing this as a limitation and more as a commercial and creative opportunity, things will shift fundamentally,” he says. “It’s about looking at the positive qualities of variety across all backgrounds.””(my italics)

A year later BFI hired a Diversity Manager Deborah Williams, who came from the Arts Council to help embed the BFI’s Diversity Standards, an attempt to use their role as public funder to connect funding to diversity and intervene in an industry that was seen to be increasingly ignoring a huge potential workforce. In a press release celebrating the appointment of Williams, Roberts described the hire as “the most important next step for us in supporting the implementation of the guidelines and working with the industry on addressing perceived challenges to diversity, as well as supporting us here at the BFI as we strive to diversify the UK’s filmmakers.”

Nwonka charts the space between Bhanvani’s report and the launch of the diversity standards in his paper as a period in UK film diversity policy that firmly separates the political and moral from the commercial. Nwonka notes how the political maneuverings that resulted in the restructuring of the UK Film Council (UKFC) and BFI from separate entities into one after the 2010 general election was overseen by figures such as Labour MP Lord Smith as well as signed off by chairman Greg Dyke, known for his PR focussed diversity policy at the BBC:

“The presence of Dyke as the BFI Chairman is of particular significance. He was no stranger to the politics of diversity: fourteen years earlier, as the BBC’s Director-General, he had confessed that his staff were ‘hideously white’ and that he had presided over what Georgina Born described as a ‘quasi-legalistic’(2004: 202) diversity agenda, in which the ethnic minority presence at the BBC was massaged into the very lowest pay bands and into cleaning and security staff positions.What is significant about this new moment, however, is that diversity was not marked by the instrumentalist and enabling modes of rationality that the UKFC and BBC had previously traded upon. Instead, a new consensus emerged that attempted to establish creativity along with commerciality as the alpha and omega of policy – the transference of minority culture into a revenue stream through the ‘diversity is good for business’ discourse.” (Nwonka 2020: 32)

The hidden presences and absences within the histories of such papers and policies are important for piercing the myth that such interventions are neutral and rational. The stories of such policies are in fact embodied through their proximity to what Nirmal Puwar (2004) describes as the ‘universal somatic norm’. This somatic norm is predominantly white, straight and able bodied, and it is predominantly male. This fact was underlined to us during our Clore Fellowship learning residentials as a succession of white men in neutral coloured suits came to speak to us about their journeys into leadership, and the game of musical chairs many of them had played in leading the UK’s cultural organisations. Such musical chairs (both physical and conceptual) become important when we consider the influence of certain figures on cultural industry restructures and policy that address diversity despite having little in the way of lived experience of difference. This is contrasted by the virtual invisibility of Williams’ voice and influence — the hire to ‘embody’ difference who is presented with great fanfare but hardly cited again. Such disconnects at the highest levels have a direct impact on the way that cultural workforce then experience the sector both as workers and participants. One worker who experienced the BFI both before and after the UKFC restructure describes their embodied experience of this change:

To be honest I had a great experience ...It was at a time when there was more money around, before the Tories took over and all the cuts happened ...It was also just before the transition the BFI was making into a more corporate organisation…a few years later I passed by a reception where I knew lots of people and was refused entry … the pompous stupid penny pinching attitude they had was offensive and as were all the staff that year. So different to the community we had been building before.. It felt like the cold eyed financially austere corporatisation of the BFI had been sealed at that moment. I stopped going for two years after that. My feeling is that when it comes to diversity they cannot see beyond schemes, initiatives and statistics. What the BFI lacks is heart and soul. It fundamentally does not get that it is heart and soul that makes films and people with passion and love make the film community. Without this the cold eyed money pinching data crunching reality is all they care about. Awareness of how race, sexuality and gender need to be fostered differently is not part of their vernacular.

Puwar highlights the disembodiment of data in policy and reporting “numbers are not taken as a starting point that requires further in-depth interrogation of the terms of existence” and connects the necessarily performative aspect of diversity reporting, the part of it that is tied to law since the MacPherson Report, as well as the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000) as having an ambivalent impact on such disembodied neutrality. Whilst institutional racism is discussed, “the obsession remains with changing organisations (diversifying them) by getting more racialised bodies into organisations.” The intersecting concerns of disembodied data driven targets and bodily visibility whilst ignoring or leaving no room to discuss the real material conditions of ‘participation’ and ‘inclusion’ are examined more deeply in the following chapters. In this final section I want to consider how such policy both replicates and denies the structuring principle of inequality in the cultural sector - that of the concept of institutional whiteness. By showing how our policy inscribes ideas that whiteness is ‘neutral’ and ‘other’ is ‘additional’ or ‘diverse’, I want to think through how the very tools presented to address inequity actually embed institutional whiteness. Additionally, what is the impact of such narratives on the workers embodied in difference already working in the sector?

Dear White People

As someone who is considered part of the cultural sector’s ‘diverse workforce’ I have an ambivalent relationship to diversity documents. As report after report is produced and pored over, it is striking to me that people feel surprised that the numbers are as static as they are. As a cultural worker embodied in difference I am regularly in rooms where there are no people of colour, no D/deaf workers, no disabled workers, and no trans workers. It is not a surprise to me that we are underrepresented based on the working age populations of London and the UK, it is simply my reality. What does surprise me is the willingness to believe narratives of “progress” oriented in the “right direction” (Brown, 2019) circulating with data that compares the numbers of national workforce of BAME people in its measurement (15%) rather than locating its analysis in cities like London where a third of funding is delivered (Redmond 2019b) and where the figure of 18% BAME workers contrasts alarmingly with the BAME population of 40% (Ethnicity Facts Figures Service gov.uk, 2018) (and inexcusably when confirmed with the fact that the BAME under 15 population is 57% (Gardner 2019) or that combine the ‘diverse populations’ BAME, LGBTQ+ and disabled with that of white upper and middle class women to give vastly inflated narratives of progress (ACE 2016).

Such policy, and the data to back it up often gets reported in the various arts trade press from releases prepared by the funding agencies themselves, rarely including the breakdowns and analysis to clarify the headline stats.^[1] The wider analysis of such reports is often left to individuals on Twitter, or hidden (for cultural workers without institutional library access) in academic studies such as Hylton’s, Malik’s and Nwonka’s that don’t emerge into public view, or as in Hylton’s case quickly move to out of print.

It is important to note that often these analyses are undertaken by people either free of institutional affiliations (and therefore more precariously impacted by their double faced logic) or with a respectful distance from practical concerns (as in the case of academics). Both these constituents can remain quite distinct from policy makers themselves, creating echo chambers of knowledge that have little impact on the policies or those most impacted by them. While BFI announced in their latest report on their progress with the standards that independent insight on the Standards would be undertaken by Nwonka (BFI 2020) such alternative ‘academic’ (outsider) analysis, rather than ‘industry’ (insider) tends to be viewed with suspicion, struggling to be accepted by siloed practitioners who feel they know their industries best. Furthermore, it is difficult to effectively challenge reports after they have been produced if the flaws are inherent in the methods and logic of their approach. Without a fully accessible archive of critique that can be in dialogue with policy makers themselves, and reach newer entrants into the field, such policy becomes ahistorical (unable to learn from the past) and open to be politically instrumentalised by whichever politicians are shuffled into the realm of culture management at a given moment.^[2]

Even when such threads might be connected, collectively, the reporting and the critiques rarely comprehend “the impact of the conceptual and historical imagination of the universal somatic norm upon the everyday location of women and racialized minorities in institutions” (Puwar 2004:8). As cultural workers embodied in difference, we are subject to having to process (whilst being hypervisible) the ‘happy talking’ diversity narratives, the invisibility of most critique to help us process these narratives, and the isolation of working in predominantly white organisations (we are often one of only a handful of visibly different people in organisations and often isolated within largely white teams). The competing realities offered by these perspectives can end up feeling like gaslighting.

Writer and researcher Nora Samaran describes gaslighting as that feeling when you “keep having the same conversation over and over...when someone undermines your trust in your own perceptions and you feel crazy because your instincts and intuition and sometimes plain old perceptions are telling you one thing, and words from someone you trust are telling you something else” . Samaran describes the reality of someone who has been “told every day for their entire lives that their perceptions cannot be trusted — when in fact our perceptions are often bang on” resulting in “a systemic, pervasive, deeply psychologically harmful phenomenon, insanity by a thousand cuts.”

Samaran’s description of gaslighting provides a compelling lens through which to view Nwonka’s description of the ‘genre’ of diversity:

“the articulation of its policy represents a collection and system of related narratives that are articulated and refined over time in order to represent a particular core idea… open ended … post-racial …[with the] potential for infinite growth. Where diversity can be described as liberal disavowal of social exclusion, the diversity policy genre’s validity (and ability to sustain itself) is ensured by its quite overt reluctance to engage with broader social realities.”

For Nwonka, public debate fulfills a key facet of the diversity genre. One such ‘public debate’ in 2015 was triggered by the efforts of an independent distributor to secure support from the BFI for the release of a film Dear White People (2014). The film follows a group of Black students trying to navigate a predominantly white university partly through a provocative radio show where they point out racist behaviour on campus. In an ironic turn of events, BFI overturned their initial decision to not fund the distributor after a public radio interview which discussed the impact of structural racism in the film industry. Nwonka draws attention to the circulatory of such discussions:

“such public criticisms of the industry’s inability to bring diversity into being are neither new nor idiosyncratic: the same arguments are merely repeated ad infinitum ..The apparent willingness to engage in public dialogue on diversity offers the face of popular consultation while the basic ideological functions of the diversity genre remain undiminished.”

The use of institutionally instigated data and policy alongside the gesture of public consultation and benevolence certainly relates to post New Labour neo-liberalisation of the arts (Olah 2019), but it also shares much with the institutional indifference of government policy associated with much more Conservative values upheld by government agencies such as the Department of Work and Pensions who have been accused of “refusing to measure what it does not want to see.” (Mompelatt & Snoussi 2019). Such agencies drive ‘innovative’ changes such as Universal Credit after ‘consultation’ by choosing to measure their progress towards ‘innovation’ or ‘change’ via data rather than the lived experiences of those struggling and as a result of such ‘innovation’, they cause untold harm in the present. In its double faced articulation (both denying and appearing to dialogue with exclusion) in a sector that overwhelming thinks of itself as liberal and anti-racist, such thinking might also find its roots in what Paul Gilroy has described as the deceptively radical behaviours of “municipal anti-racism” (Gilroy 2010:192) in the 1980s. Here overtly political anti-racism (which later becomes defanged as diversity) policy instigated by the Greater London Council presented itself as radically motivated through highly visible activity such as public murals and billboards but also at the same time upheld the myth that that social justice was something that could be somehow ‘achieved’ “in terms of administration and management” (ibid).

As cultural workers embodied in difference, we are often the institutional bodies most cognisant of such "double tracking” (Mclaughlin 2019) as, statistically, minority workers especially those from visible ethnic minorities are the most likely to have experienced such institutional indifference throughout their lives from school onwards or even before (Mompelat & Snoussi 2019). I will expand on this further in Chapter 3. We are also as workers, placed on the ethical frontline of it, either made to participate in its fiction or left vulnerable to the negative psychological impact of its gaslighting effects. I will explore this further in Chapter 4.

Lift

As I am reading about BFI diversity policies, a sentence pops out that triggers some memories. Nwonka writes “BFI’s initial refusal of lottery funding to the New Black Film Collective ….to support the distribution of the US film Dear White People (2014) …” and I remember writing a similar sentence at the end of 2015.

I got asked to write a piece about the year in critical debate in film. It's a short piece, kind of slight and innocuous. I wrote it with a friend, documenting the calls for equity and representation like #oscarssowhite that year. We asked ourselves if we were bad feminists for liking male directors if we loved the female characters in their films, and paid tribute to the films we had enjoyed and discovered. We mention Dear White People in the piece, a film that called out racism in predominantly white places and had triggered this big conversation about if film exhibition in the UK was racist. In the piece I wrote: “In exhibition, 2015 was a year in which institutions and studios were called out for failing to represent and cater for a diverse audience. The BFI’s initial decision not to support the release of Dear White People, and Universal’s not to theatrically release Beyond the Lights in the UK seemed to show that “the man” didn’t much care to listen.”

I had been trying to process my first year working in cinema exhibition, a year of explaining my opinions and often finding them at odds with other people’s interpretations. I remember the London Film Festival screening of Dear White People, how many people turned out for it, came to Hackney - from South! I remember trying to explain what a big deal that was to people I worked with and them looking at me blankly, telling me that American indies didn’t do well in cinemas and the theatrical window was broken and that the distributor didn’t know what they were doing. I remember accepting that, but not knowing why.

That following year was the year that the Mark Duggan doc The Hard Stop (2015) came out. I read all these racist reviews^[3], written by white cis critics, ones that dehumanised the subjects, ones that even while praising the film thought it was valid to insert critique on the filmmaker’s decisions to focus on the emotional toll of institutionalised racism rather than spend time explaining and contextualising it^[4]. I heard the filmmakers get quizzed on the radio, asked to explain why audiences should watch a film about their friend without talking about him as a criminal, intimating their friend deserved what happened to him and didn’t deserve to be seen through their eyes. I wished I could have written about it and I wondered why it wasn’t a central screening in the programme, a space to connect wider audiences to an important story about London. I asked to host a Q&A. I was given the second screening, someone else did the premiere after asking me if I’d heard of it, because they had heard the screening “might be trouble”.

I try to unpick all these threads, to process how it made me feel, in a panel at a conference exploring research on Neurocinematics. This field of study was doing investigations into how the brain responds to film using an fMRI brain scanner. It was being used by film marketing firms on test audiences to cut trailers, but I wanted to know what this new area of study could tell us about the way that film programmers reacted to difference. I was wondering if all the white programmers who seemed blank faced after watching films I loved might just have different brains to me? Could our brains be trained to empathise across differences? Or at least I supposed, could I prove that feeling didn’t mean I wasn’t doing my job properly, but that it meant that the work was doing its job properly? I invited the director of The Hard Stop, George Amponsah along with a group of writers to discuss the research and we talked about how to care for work, how filmmakers could care for their subjects, and how as programmers we could in turn care for, write about them and help them find audiences.

I felt happy and proud as I went up to my room to get changed before dinner. Felt I’d cleared some clutter from my brain, found a way to talk about something I’d felt in my body.

In the lift on the way up, I saw two senior members of the BFI. I said hello and smiled, started telling them about the panel. One of them interjects and says

I’m confused and thrown, realise they are talking about Dear White People and I’m immediately direct; “because you did”. The other person says “that’s factually incorrect” a number of times. I can’t remember what I said, something about taking it up with the editor, pretending not to care, dropping into my accent and telling them it wasn’t my problem. Turning the tight space of the lift where I had been, complete, so feeling, so sentient, after thinking so deeply in the cinema earlier, before they came in with their whiteness, turning that feeling that they left me with into something that looked like anger.

But it wasn’t anger - because it was turned inward. It was my problem. And when I reacted in whatever way I did, there was surprise that I was so bothered. It was only a joke, they were playing, just talking. I asked myself repeatedly how my sentence had been factually incorrect. I turned myself in knots over weeks and months. Later the editor says that perhaps it should have been checked, and I wondered what I’d said wrong that needed to be checked.

I wondered at the time why they had so little respect for me. Wondered if that meant I won’t be able to get a better job.

I wonder now that there is an academic who said the same thing as me, who they invite to meetings and discuss their diversity targets with. Who goes on radio and holds them to account, do they secretly still think what he says is “factually incorrect?”

And if they don’t and they atone and admit that they were wrong after all these years and apologize and say they need to do better, will they know or even remember how it felt to make someone who already felt small feel even smaller, made them feel like the lift doors were closing in on them?

Later at a new job, one I think is more important, demands more respect, I explain why I am a little wary of the people in the lift.

My manager laughs, they’ve heard me recount it already. “that’s really bothered you hasn’t it?”

Compliance and containment

What is the personal cost of the mismatch between narrative and reality when the work that we do, or even just the fact of our employment means that we become complicit in forms of “‘doing diversity’ and ‘promoting equality’ [that become] complicit with racism”?

– Ahmed, Sara & Hunter, Shona & Kilic, Sevgi & Swan, Elaine & Turner, Lewis. (2006). Race, Diversity and Leadership in the Learning and Skills Sector.

In 2006 Sara Ahmed undertook a piece of research with colleagues into diversity into higher education establishments. The project’s report was never published. In her 2012 book On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life Ahmed describes the moment the paper is rejected:

“It doesn’t take long for management enthusiasm to turn into hostility. In an audit panel, the auditors do not even address the findings of the research. They focus on what the project has not offered. There are no numbers. There is too much theory. It will not be useful for practitioners. There is too much focus on racism (surely you are exaggerating, how can there be so much?)”

The axes on which Ahmed and her colleagues’ paper was rejected are telling when we consider the comments from Darren Henley that data is important for making the case to the treasury. ‘Data’ (“Numbers”) and ‘recommendations’ (practical and not theoretical) make such reporting “useful”. Simplicity and clarity is key, the kind of document you could deliver to a cultural leader with a full inbox and little headspace and even less time. Such supposed clarity and neutrality implicitly denies and obscures the very real political maneuvering we have already seen is behind such ‘useful’ documents and it evokes the supposed rationality of the idea of Puwar’s ‘somatic norm’.

In The Phenomenology of Whiteness (2007) Ahmed writes about discussing institutional whiteness with a room full of white academics. She describes the ways that in the section for questions, the impulse to change things is raised, how can the spectre of whiteness be resisted? What can be done? She clarifies these impulses as acts of containment and deflection:

“The desire for signs of resistance can also be a form of resistance to hearing about racism. If we want to know how things can be different too quickly, then we might not hear anything at all.”

For Ahmed questions such as ‘what can white people do?’ Presents the questioner as the white subject with agency and dominion over the rest. Such questioning and centring also deflects the white subject from being implicated in the critique. Ahmed’s reading brings an additional critical sphere with which to analyse Hylton’s observations of the ways in which diversity policy handles difference by treating Black and Asian artists as “fundamentally different and in need of special classifications”. Such labelling functions to contain difference, but it also underlines it as different, outside of the ‘norm’. Reading disembodied diversity language through the lens of the phenomenology of whiteness, brings into sharp focus another insidious effect of the ‘genre’ of diversity for cultural workers embodied in difference. Enshrined in the language that presents whiteness as neutral and ‘includes ‘diversity’ (non white bodies) through special measures, is the assumption “that even bodies that might not appear white still have to inhabit whiteness, if they are to get ‘in’.” (Ahmed 2007:158).

I will return to the theme of whiteness in subsequent chapters, but such an analysis gives us a fresh frame with which to assess the institutionally instigated work of activists and thinkers like Naseem Khan and Reena Bhanvani. Perhaps the co-option and selective readings of their reports has its roots not in their active concessions and capitulations to language and tone, but more to the more latent and insidious resilience of ‘institutional whiteness’, that ‘neutral’ atmosphere of establishment that is ever present in the conception and reception of the reports.

Naseem & Reena

I’ve been thinking about Richard Hylton’s critique of Naseem Khan’s The Art Britain Ignores (1976) and what that tells me about whiteness. When I mentioned that report to Sarita she asked me to consider why people had listened to that report at that time and I’d just been reading Naseem’s memoir and I said something like “because she was white passing and Oxbridge educated and that’s not me”. And I hadn’t considered the layers of what that might mean and how conflicted that might be.

I didn’t know about the report until I found Khan’s obituary from a random google search which led me to her memoir, and I noticed her biography straight away:

“Naseem was the daughter of Abdul Wasi Khan, a doctor from India, and Gerda (nee Kilbinger), the daughter of a German trade unionist, who had come to Britain to learn English. Abdul was resolute in his admiration of Britain and determined that his daughter would become a part of the British establishment, sending her to Roedean school, near Brighton, and being delighted when she won a place at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, to study English."

I was so struck by this combination of biographies; mine and Leena’s in one person; and the date of her death - as I was birthing and nursing Leena, her children were nursing her through her final days. And when I read the memoir I really thought through her divergent worlds, the ones of community activism, her travels to India and Pakistan, and I thought of my own travels and how they had not felt as easy as she seemed to find them. And the complicated relationship to whiteness her father presented her, as he paid deference to white institutions and felt such pride in her but enacted heartbreaking neglect towards his other dark skinned daughter from his first marriage in India. And I think about the stories in her memoir where she is living in Ladbroke Grove and being an activist running the newspaper “Hustler” and there is a moment when internal rifts mean that she is labelled “bourgeois” because she is “half-white” and only her name is proof that it is only “half” and she says “I am weary of all the suspicions and paranoia and the anti-whiteness and I’m tired of living in a half-world of angry shadows.”

And I think about my parents and how they named me Jemma, and what that did in the other direction. Like what my friend Elhum said about how her name was difficult so people ignored her, I wonder did I get through a bit more because I was legible? Did Naseem find it easier in India, at the Arts Council, at Oxford because of her skin? Was she treated with suspicion in her activist spaces because of it? And I think about her father who wanted so badly for her to fit in with the spaces she ended up navigating, and the details in the book where she hints at her divergences with her husband who was white. And I wonder at that nexus, and how you navigate whiteness from there? When you birth children into the world who seem whiter than you, and does that make you conciliatory, hopeful, does it make you “politely” argue “in non-confrontational” terms as Hylton says she does? Does it make you smooth out the edges, to make it more comfortable in some spaces, and less in others.

“I can’t get invisibility out of my mind ...A sudden sense overwhelms me — we don’t exist. There are no Indians anywhere else … just here on these hidden Sundays. When the teacher sweeps the big rubber across the blackboard at school, everything vanishes. There is just the blackboard. Just like that. As if we — and no more than we — were never there”

Was that her getting got by her own whiteness, by playing into their missionary language of benevolence and conquest?

And I think about other women, from all backgrounds who have told me they see the same thing as me, decry institutional racism but when I reach out for help, they smooth out the edges, implicitly tell me to be quiet. Were they just trying to get by?

And I think about my own internal critique of Reena Bhavnani’s paper when I first read it, thinking it was too conciliatory —not enough, written by another South Asian ‘collaborator’ — as I burned through the anger and the frustrations of my own conversations with whiteness. Then I read this report just published today where they talk about the “diverse workforce” (Film + TV Charity 2020:13) and their disprortionately bad mental health and it doesn’t mention discrimination, or racism or homophobia and I go back to Reena’s report and I see all the times she said those words: told them. I reflect again on the length and the care of that report, the patient tone of it. And I google her and I find another obituary, another battle with cancer, one from a year after that report was published and see that she was an activist, a founder of Bristol Black Sisters. I wonder what contortions she had to go through to move from speaking freely with her Sisters to finding the right language to write about institutional racism for the institution.

I wonder what choices and changes she made, which injustices she named, and which were left unsaid. The ones she deleted, the ones that were too much.

The obituary makes me want to ask her so many questions. She was so much like me: Indian, went to a grammar school, went to Bristol university and she had two children, mixed just like Leena.

I wish I could ask Naseem and Reena how they felt, and what they felt, and how they thought, and how they wrote and moved around with all those stories.

In class last week Aditi pointed out Audre Lorde died of cancer. And I thought how both Naseem and Reena died of cancer too and that's the day I sent the last email to BFI and resigned from British Council, because at times this year when speaking back to whiteness I have felt this pain in my bones and body. If you refuse to be a collaborator, refuse to be complicit in their contortions and choose instead to tell the truth but in the wrong places, where it is not received, but can only be funneled back into you, where else can it settle but in your bones, your body, the soft tissues of your hope?

Disembodied Futures

I think one of the things that I have learned from being in these film industry spaces is that in order to be heard I have to have all my ideas formed before I speak and that personal (emotional, physical) are irrelevant when discussing film or injustice.

In speaking with cultural workers for this research, I became aware of just how much language I had internalised without really considering what it meant. When I really considered what diversity policy appeared to say about me, and other individuals I knew, it became clear to me the language of diversity dehumanises those it seeks to include, disconnects them of lived experience, historical or future agency. By constantly signalling a mythical moment in the future where difference might be included, diversity policy swerves the lived realities and difficulties faced by cultural workers in the present and renders invisible those that might have left in the past.

The disembodiment of the ‘happy talk’ of diversity was recently demonstrated very clearly by a recent report into mental health in the film and TV industry by Film and TV Charity (2020). Bearing all the hallmarks of a publishable report with “useful” information, lots of “numbers” and no mention of racism or any inclusion of theory, it describes a complex, deeply upsetting set of circumstances where:

“87% of our workforce have experienced a mental health problem, well beyond the 65% UK-wide. Worse, more than half have considered taking their own life, and 1 in 10 have taken steps to end their life. We saw increased risk factors for the freelance workforce, who make up the majority of our industry. And for those who identify as BAME, LGBTQ+ or disabled, the numbers and risk factors are significantly elevated.”

The last line of this section is given a small section of the report entitled “The picture on our diverse workforce” (my italics) and brings together BAME, LGBTQ+ and disabled in one heading: “Our research indicates that BAME, LGBTQ+ and disabled workers are not feeling well supported in the industry and are impacted significantly more than their white, heterosexual and nondisabled counterparts as a result.” (ibid:13) After outlining some headline stats about how the different groups are impacted by different aspects of mental health, the section ends with what is essentially the business and creative case for better mental health:

“Our industry fully understands the business and creative case for ensuring a diverse and inclusive workforce and has committed time and funding to a variety of laudable schemes to attract diverse talent into our sector. Yet, our research suggests that we risk a revolving door, with our diverse, talented workforce more likely to consider leaving the industry because of concerns over their mental health and lack of support.”

In a paper that outlined how members of the workforce were hurting themselves, depressed and considering suicide, and considered how those issues were disproportionately felt by ‘diverse’ groups; discrimination, homophobia or racism was not mentioned once and the worst loss to the sector from the harm done on these marginal bodies was that they might not be able to contribute labour to the workforce. Reports in the industry press (which is likely how most decision makers will interact with the report) completely ignored the disproportionate impact on marginalised workers (probably because this detail was left off the press release) and no analysis was given on the possible reasons for this disparity.

Most disturbingly of all, was a ten year plan for change which ended with “Share learning and celebrate success,” a truly reprehensible mobilisation of the 'happy talk’ of diversity reporting. Reading that I was left wondering if anyone was worried about (or even saw) the present realities of those disproportionately at risk of harming themselves. What would happen to them, left unaddressed, in the ten years the report says it would take to enact ‘change’? What had happened to the many before them?

As I write this paper, both BFI and ACE have committed to target driven funding to address the disparities in representation across marginalised identities. Such schemes create much attention, and appear to present a solid commitment to change. However in continuing to ignore the lived realities of those already in the sector who are working to the very edge of their comfort, and failing to reflect on past harm done by centering the benevolence of those in positions of influence, these ‘progressive’ measures risk creating what Angela Davis has called “a difference that makes no difference” (Eckert 2015).

At a time when we have one of the least progressive governments of recent times, one which proudly broadcasts itself as the most ethnically ‘diverse’ government cabinets in history, yet is actively complicit in policy and legal decisions that brutalise the most diverse populations of the UK, targets which favour visible diversity can surely not be seen as markers of radical change. Such measures may well shift the numbers by the next section of reporting, but without changing the material conditions which marginalised workers will have to navigate, such change can only be tokenistic. Given the historical connections between central government articulations of difference and cultural policy on diversity, we must now, more than ever turn a critical eye on such initiatives and ask if such measures can make more than cosmetic change.

More radical, meaningful, change that truly includes in an equitable manner might not be as easy. It will require noticing the thing which has become invisible through its ubiquity. It will require noticing how whiteness feels and lands in different bodies and it will require an important unlearning of the reliance to immediately promise a ‘new day’. For Ahmed, this conceptual reframing is key to addressing the harm of institutionally instigated narratives of diversity:

“A phenomenology of whiteness helps us to notice institutional habits; it brings what is behind, what does not get seen as the background to social action, to the surface in a certain way. It does not teach us how to change those habits and that is partly the point. In not being promising, in refusing to promise anything, such an approach to whiteness can allow us to keep open the force of the critique. It is by showing how we are stuck, by attending to what is habitual and routine in ‘the what’ of the world, that we can keep open the possibility of habit changes, without using that possibility to displace our attention to the present, and without simply wishing for new tricks” (Ahmed 2007:165)

In Ahmed’s description, ‘phenomenology’ (studying the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience) is the opposite of institutionalised diversity work. In its lack of simple ‘tricks’ or ‘promises’ it appears impractical, theoretical, philosophical. It is not useful. However it is through the practical labour of workers embodied in difference trying to make their way through institutions structured by whiteness that such structures come into view. It is through this ‘working through’ that such workers have to do that the real barriers to true inclusion of difference become starkly visible.

For the next two chapters I want to explore in more detail how two of the diversity genre’s favourite administrative ‘tricks’ which seek to make hyper visible institutional accommodation of difference — the professional development programme and the public programme — actually end up entrenching the whiteness of organisations further.

Chapter 2 - A (Host)ile Environment

“decibel was predicated on a model of an aid/loan program whereby the uncritical use of training and support perpetuates a particular image of helping people who apparently cannot help themselves.”

— Richard Hylton The Nature of the Beast. Cultural Diversity and the Visual Arts Sector. A study of policies, initiatives and attitudes 1976 - 2006

“Colonialism makes the world ‘white’ which is of course a world ‘ready’ for certain kinds of bodies, as a world that puts certain objects within their reach. Bodies remember such histories, even when we forget them. Such histories, we might say, surface on the body, or even shape how bodies surface. Race then does become a social as well as a bodily given, or what we receive from others as an inheritance of that history.”

The dream, the illusion perhaps, on either side, that full assimilation was possible, that the people who came would over two generations really sort of disappear into the host community and become more or less indistinguishable from them; that dream of assimilation was buried on both sides. In that moment of crisis, Black people discover the complex things that make them Black can never be traded away. That's the moment when the idea of assimilation dies. People say we are not going to stay on the terms of becoming just like you.

In the previous chapter we discussed how diversity narratives tended to focus on the gaps and shortcomings of those excluded from the sector rather than the behaviours of those that do the excluding and how policy favours visible change backed up with data to address problems with representative diversity. Such policy is often implemented through the visible funneling of diverse bodies through professional development schemes. In this chapter, I build on Puwar’s ideas of the ‘somatic norm’ of establishment to critically look at how professional development programmes function to uphold Ahmed’s understanding of ‘institutional whiteness’.

I will draw on my own recent experience of emerging from a professional development programme as well as interviews with others who have emerged from early career development programmes in the visual arts and in film. Through these embodied experiences I will show how the ‘success’ of such schemes is predicated on a kind of enculturation, an assimilation to the norms of whiteness, and consider the impact of inability, or refusal to conform to such norms.

The hopeful performative

In his study of the visual arts sector’s diversity policies, initiatives and attitudes Hylton (2007) traces ACE’s practice of targeting Black and Asian emerging curators through training schemes in the visual arts back to 1990. Such schemes were structured by the logic of ‘cultural’ diversity which privileged visibly diverse workforces as a measure of progress. Such logic assumes a neutral playing field which needs to accommodate proportional representation but with no real consideration of why such parity might have been historically unachievable. The issue becomes a ‘pipeline’ one which is framed in various ways. Initially presented as a way to address the ‘limited supply’ of people embodied in difference, now such schemes are more likely to present themselves as a benevolent or pragmatic ‘foot in the door’ for those ‘underrepresented’ in the sector. Whilst this slight reframing may feel like a progress beyond the hand wringing of organisations who have historically wondered why they get so few applicants from ‘diverse’ backgrounds’, the existence of such schemes still focuses on a performance of benevolent ‘investment’ in the ‘underrepresented’. A thorough assessment of the behaviours and habits of those that have most benefited from the exclusion, and indeed, in many cases have contributed to it, is consistently missing.

I want to begin this exploration with an acknowledgement that such schemes are well meaning and often instigated by incredibly committed individuals who genuinely want to create change in the sector. I have worked at institutions where such schemes have been instigated and am fully aware that they still remain, at times, difficult to secure funding and support for. They address real inequities such as the need to support certain groups to navigate unjust practices such as unpaid traineeships and internships and also to circumvent unethical recruitment practice such as hiring from immediate circles which exacerbate the monocultural nature of the arts. Whilst working in organisations where such schemes are delivered, I have felt that they were truly making an intervention and that I was part of something positive. However when placed within the history of diversity initiatives across the arts and the experiences of those who have been through such schemes, it has become apparent to me that such schemes are as Hylton describes “short changing those who [they] purport to support and letting those [they] claim to challenge off the hook.”

Through a slight reframing, one can see how such activity intervenes by opening only conditional access to a select few and requires the sector to do nothing to change their wider practices. In many cases in fact these schemes absolve the wider sector completely and actually reward them for such bad practice by providing them with highly qualified visibly ‘diverse’ candidates who are then subsidised through funding secured for the scheme with no need to change such entrenched practices that created the need for the scheme in the first place.

Such schemes are often predicated on the numbers generated by the diversity literature we examined in Chapter 1, so woeful statistics become both instigators of the activity and the ways to promote the activity and the organisations doing it. Such schemes embody the “hopeful performative” (Ahmed 2010: 200); a way of ‘doing’ diversity as activity that “might be understood as generating its own promise” (Ahmed, 2012:67). So if we are starting with a diversity narrative which begins with a statistic of low presence in institutional settings, then announcing a scheme to increase such presence becomes a hopeful act of change in itself. In the naming of the issue (the low numbers), providing a pro-active, seemingly impactful solution becomes a positive thing. This assumption of doing ‘good’ then leaves little room for an alternative reading or a more critical appraisal.

However, when we look closer at such activity, we see what is missing from the public narrative presented. In marketing and recruiting for such schemes, language becomes about active intervention, it is ‘ground-breaking’ and creating ‘real change’. Such language might suggest that such schemes are new. As demonstrated by Hylton, these discussions, ideas and interventions are hardly new, however, within the world of the scheme, a new timeline is created. So when advertising, a scheme can present progress from the last few years, or even just the last edition (x amount of trainees moved into permanent positions) and not have to place its activity in the context of numbers not changing over decades despite delivering activity that is broadly the same structure as professional development in the past, or in other sectors in the arts. In this sense such schemes also inhabit the world of what Ahmed has called the “non-performative” where something does not do the thing that it appears it does.

I'm bringing something to the table but nothing is really being given back to me except this idea of an opportunity which is only quite limited, you know. It's almost like even the opportunities we're given, they are barriers in some sense to our personal development. Even though they're presented to us as opportunities, in reality it is just a way for these organisations and stuff to say, oh look, we helped a bunch of x people get in who are underrepresented in some way. That was something that came up. I remember one of the very first sessions, I remember them just showing us these graphs of the UK like how many women are in the UK And how many black and brown women are in the UK? And etc. and because the room was full of 15 mainly black and brown women, they were like, look, you're underrepresented in this industry but this is what we're doing to help. There were so many of you that applied, aren't you lucky to be one of them? We're going to help you in and then you know, it kind of feels you have it, when that's your first step, it fills you with this false sense of like security like oh things are changing and then you get your place in these companies and all of us [laughs] kind of felt the same. Like yeah, it's not actually that helpful or we're being taken for mugs or [laughs] I don't know.

This “non-performative” activity is packaged in the devising of such a scheme. The scheme then provides an opportunity for other members of the industry (often the same people who are responsible for the recruitment practice, the funding conditions and the working environments that are responsible for exclusion) to take part in further non-performative acts. For example, it is not unusual for administrators to send emails to people in the sector who can help ‘spread the word’. Emails will contain statistics such “People of colour make up 4% of the [insert artform] workforce” as the instigator of the activity being shared and with an energising call to arms included with an invitation to tweet the scheme to their networks. In the process of sharing that ensues, ‘well-meaning’ members of the industry pass these calls out to their networks (usually as monocultural as the sector itself and largely devoid of the people as ‘diverse’ as the people they seek to engage) and feel that they have shown ‘commitment’ to ‘change’.

Such activity can become for the ‘beneficiaries’ a “technology for reproducing whiteness: adding colour to the white face of the organisation confirms the whiteness of that face.” (Ahmed, 2012:151 Italics in original).

The disconnect between what such schemes appear to do and what they end up doing is explored by Hylton in his critique of a curator traineeship as part of ACE instigated decibel. He draws attention to the way such schemes present ‘host’ organisations as part of the offer to trainees, but withhold the agency that might make such an opportunity meaningful, given it is rarely “clear on what basis a prospective candidate could make an informed judgement as to whether such opportunities were appropriate for their career.” He goes on to suggest that such practice upholds the idea that “Black and Asian people are so eager to work in the visual arts sector that they should be grateful for any opportunities - however shoddily conceived - that are put their way”. Hylton’s critique shows how in the conceiving of such schemes as “hopeful performatives', diversity processes that actively present themselves toward ‘positive’ change, actually replicate a dynamic that disempowers the very people they supposedly seek to empower.

Such institutionally instigated policy presents itself as progressive (the advertising and projection of which is a direct benefit to the instigators) but ends up having what Paul Gilroy describes as the “effect of appearing to reduce the complexity of black life to an affect of racism”. In the flattening of difference to a dynamic between neutral whiteness and visible otherness, how can these schemes not replicate the injustices of institutional whiteness which they were devised to address? The issue becomes one of access, if the arts truly want to ‘include’ ‘diversity’ then should these schemes not need to demonstrate that the sector will accommodate the people that enter them?

I want to turn in more detail to how despite the intentions of those designing and delivering them and despite the projected ‘happy stories’ that they generate, such schemes inadvertently endorse social dynamics that continue to uphold institutional whiteness and racism.

(Host)ile Organisations

I think though, that in a way, these cultural spaces are catching up to what other like institutions have been doing for some time. Like thinking about state institutions and how sophisticated they are in expressing the kind of ways in which minorities are very much included in the state but then you see that actually it's language games and the reality is not that actually. The state operates to exclude….But I think it's harder to negotiate in culture because they give this impression of inclusion.

Professional development schemes within the cultural sector which provide training and support often include paid ‘traineeships’, placements at ‘host’ organisations such as the ones decibel provided. The use of the term ‘host’ brings to mind Hylton’s critique of the ‘conciliatory’ language of Khan’s report which described newly arrived immigrants' relationships to their “host-country”. In Hylton’s critique of cultural diversity policy he points out that the language in Khan’s report, taken out of its original context, became a key bedrock for the ‘happy talk’ of ‘cultural’ and ‘creative’ diversity policy in the ensuing decades.

The choice of ‘host’ to describe an organisation in the context of institutionally instigated diversity policy, might then be understood to be the ‘natural’ choice of word based on habitual use. However, how do we compare this use of ‘host organisation’ when applied to contemporary entrants to the arts today?

When diversity becomes a form of hospitality, perhaps the organization is the host who receives as guests those who embody diversity. Whiteness is produced as host, as that which is already in place or at home. To be welcomed is to be positioned as the one who is not at home. Conditional hospitality is when you are welcomed on condition that you give something back in return. The multicultural nation functions this way: the nation offers hospitality and even love to would-be citizens as long as they return this hospitality by integrating, or by identifying with the nation (see Ahmed 2004 : 133 – 34). People of color in white organizations are treated as guests, temporary residents in someone else's home. People of color are welcomed on condition they return that hospitality by integrating into a common organizational culture , or by “ being ” diverse , and allowing institutions to celebrate their diversity . (Ahmed 2012:42-43)

Reading Ahmed’s description in 2020 evokes images of borders and deportations. In the present such a word, “host” evokes the hostile environment, Brexit and freedom of movement. These evocations are not actively tied to this word, people who write the descriptions of professional development programmes do not consult the Home Office. The word host is used out of ‘habit’ not active malice. However by connecting this word to diversity initiatives, we connect it to bodies embodied in difference. The word host then takes on a new meaning and begins to tell us something about where such bodies are placed in the cultural sector and who does the placing. As Ahmed (2007) showed us in the last chapter, thinking through how whiteness is experienced helps us to notice institutional habits. Through this lens, my interviews with those who had been through such schemes, became a way to study how whiteness structures organisations, how whiteness shows up in every day interactions and indeed how ignoring institutional whiteness might be the single most relevant reason why after decades of professional development programmes the numbers of marginal workers in paid employment continues to remain seemingly unchanged.

When speaking to individuals who had gone through such early career schemes, the subject of benevolence came up regularly. Many underlined how numbers were used to draw attention to that benevolence:

I actually remember on the first day they actually specifically went through application numbers, how many people got through like the first stage and stuff. So it was really like you know, you guys, it's like the golden ticket in Willy Wonka. You know, you guys, you know, are the special ones and I remember thinking, I was sitting there, I was like you know for me coming from up North, when I was a kid, I'd go there as a special thing. To be there, I was like holy shit, this is crazy, I was like this is, I'm really lucky. I felt really lucky but then to have it really hammered down like you know, you're here, you should feel really special. I was like I do feel really special but I was so panicky as well

I forget now if it was said, if we were advised of it during the interviews or if it was in our first week there but it was something that was repeated frequently is that we should be grateful that we were there. And so...it already set up this dynamic that like this was through the generosity of our white benefactors, that we were there.

In the two testimonies above, a dynamic of luck, the pressure and responsibility of being given the “golden ticket” creates a burden. An implicit contract emerges; “we should be grateful”. The image of the golden ticket is infantilising, a detail underlined by the ways such schemes are often structured. The feeling of being infantilised is not just through the limited choices such as not being able to choose where you will be ‘hosted’, but also through the ways that decision making is disseminated in certain bodies and the colonial histories that evokes (“white benefactor”). As trainees enter ‘host’ spaces a realisation that labour is disseminated differently in different bodies emerges too:

They say “you should feel lucky” because “you're the best” and “they had so many applicants”, “this is an amazing opportunity” and then you get into the role, into the job and you're like oh I'm just here to make tea. I was like yeah this is a good opportunity to see how everything works etc. and it was a nice small team and the people may have been nice. I mean that's questionable but some of the people may have been nice and then you realise after almost a year, you're like, oh I haven't actually done anything or I tried to ask for other opportunities and I haven't been given them. And also, you know, because the way the structure worked and the way it was explained to us, you kind of realise that they are putting up this amount of money or whatever and so the organisation themselves were not actually paying you that much. So it's kind of like cheap labour for them, if they really, you know, you realise, you're in a sector that has, you know, underrepresented groups and like all industries, whatever, but then you're like oh but they're supposed to, it's it's the arts and it's supposed to reflect society etc. You're like if they really wanted to do it, they would've just hired someone, if they wanted someone to make tea who was black or brown, they could've just hired someone to make tea who was black or brown, do you know what I mean? Then you realise, oh they're actually paying this person £4 an hour of the £10 an hour they're earning.

As in the previous account where the interviewee realised that what the mentorship they thought they had been offered was actually something else, in this account the realisation that the terms of their engagement as originally presented to them (a commitment to inclusion or even just to meet some nice people) is thrown into question when one realises that the exchange benefits the ‘benefactor’ more than the supposed beneficiary.

This inequitable relating can be experienced as the whiteness of the spaces reasserting themselves. Such inequitable relating intersects with histories of colonial dominance, extractive labour practice and patterns of racism. Such histories and practice might have existed already and gone unchecked before the arrival of a ‘different’ body, or they may have arrived due to the arrival of difference. For some this is a familiar space to move in to, perhaps they have been there before, compliance becomes an easy way to fit in:

I was very much like the tea person but people didn't ask me to do it. I just did, I think I was, I really wanted to be liked and be grateful and all of this shit.

I think growing up in an Indian household, you know, as a woman I've just kind of been like “just get on with it.” “Don't cause any conflict or anything” whilst with my friend, she comes from a similar background like from my area but she's always a bit more upfront about things like when she's feeling uncomfortable and stuff. Whilst when I was there, there were certain situations where I was like, “I don't really want to do that” and it's just like “no just put up with it” because I always thought in the back of my mind as well because I wasn't told till really late that I wasn't being kept on. So I just kept on thinking, if I want to stay here, just make, you know, to have that security, just keep making a good impression. So I was like “just do the best you can and make them happy.”

In the second account, another key abusive power dynamic emerges.The silence and withholding of information by the ‘host’ “I wasn’t told till really late that I wasn’t being kept on” becomes a driver to do things that the trainee really doesn’t want to. This relates to what an earlier interviewee said about the ‘mentor’ who ‘dangled’ a job. Here the inequitable terms of engagement are clear, the conditional offer of inclusion hinges on fitting in and being quiet, “just get on with it” and “make them happy.”

It is not always possible to be quiet or perfectly fit in, perhaps because you expected something different, because of other experiences in the past, or because a sense of disbelief that what you are experiencing could be real makes it harder to comply:

I came from like I said my previous job, it was great you know, open, tolerant, liberal, you know, and then I was just like I can't believe these people exist. It was just casual all the time. I get banter, I'm banter queen, I can take the piss out of people, take it back, but this was next level. It was quite insidious, some of the stuff. I remember one time someone said something, I couldn't hear, he said something about Indians and it was quite offensive. I think... someone said oh she’s Indian so I knew something was said but I couldn't do anything because I had to answer the phone [laughs]. I was just like, what the fuck? I messaged him, what did they say? Oh na, nothing, nothing. I was just like [gasps] and that rattled me. I don't know why they did it, why... And it felt weird serving them all tea, you know, all the white people. They must've picked up on it as well. I was just like “who wants tea? Tea? Tea?” You know when you realise just like... Just like, they didn't want me there.

In this story, by embodying difference they start noticing the whiteness of the place, as they observe the whiteness and react to it, they come to draw attention to the whiteness, but it's “insidious”, hard to hear, they are told its nothing, perhaps they imagined it. Serving tea takes on a new significance when it is accompanied with racism. Not just for them but also for their colleagues. By just being there, this person began drawing attention to a problem that only became a problem by their presence, their presence then becomes the problem. (“they don’t want me there”). This feeling of being unwanted as connected to an organisation’s discomfort with difference was a feeling that was raised repeatedly. Many workers talked about how senior members of teams would talk proudly about the participation in schemes but never once actually spoke to them. Others mentioned that because of their ‘difficult’ names, people did not address them, almost as if, despite the officially generated, visible, open armed acknowledgement of their presence to the outside, once inside they did not, in reality, truly exist.

This relates back to the question of how much these schemes can deliver on the promise to meaningfully accommodate the individual embodied in difference without considering the environments of the ‘host’ organisations themselves. One worker in the arts ‘included’ in an organisation at the highest levels, shared a story that revealed something important about the assumption that access, ‘a foot in the door’, is really progress in itself. On sharing that they had been refused a visa to travel to the States with a white board member (on the entirely white board), the board member seemed shocked and said, “but you’re one of us!” This exchange is another way to understand the ‘specialness’ of being chosen. Being chosen makes you special, which means you are assumed to have become like ‘us’ (even if the ‘choosing’ was ostensibly for difference) — white, free to move and cross borders with ease. This way of thinking is related to what Ahmed calls “institutional lines”:

“Becoming white as an institutional line is closely related to the vertical promise of class mobility: you can move up only by approximating the habitus of the white bourgeois body. Moving up requires inhabiting such a body, or at least approximating its style, whilst your capacity to inhabit such a body depends upon what is behind you. Pointing to this loop between the ‘behind’ and the ‘up’ is another way of describing how hierarchies get reproduced over time. It is here that we can begin to complicate the relationship between motility and what I call ‘institutional lines’. Some bodies, even those that pass as white, might still be ‘out of line’ with the institutions they inhabit.” (2007:159)

In Ahmed’s analysis, what is “behind” us are the intersections of class, able bodiedness, privilege, an ‘easy to pronounce’ name, that help us to conform and follow the line to become ‘like us’. When we show that we don’t conform, for example by displaying that we don’t move through borders with the same ease that they do, we draw attention to us being ‘out of line’. Such a dynamic can get exacerbated when one is embodied in difference in other ways that require a reminder more often, such as when a worker needs visual descriptions, a signer or a note taker in order to participate. By drawing attention to the different terms of engagement, one draws attention to the assumptions that your engagement is based on. Questions of access for ‘BAME’ workers are usually understood to be concentrated in the bodies of the workers themselves (as evidenced by their perceived need for special measures such as trainee or professional development programmes) rather than through changes to the environments they are entering, which are assumed to be hospitable to the bodies they proudly invite in. The issue of ‘access’ is recognised and made mandatory and official for d/Deaf and disabled workers but in practice such legislation makes little impact to their inclusion, rather more quickly drawing attention to the inhospitality of our cultural spaces to anyone who does not fit the somatic norm. This lack of accommodation (backed by the huge underrepresentation of d/Deaf and disabled cultural workforce) even when explicit needs are expressed shows how resilient and exclusionary institutional whiteness is. The disregard of the talents and lived experiences of those who do not fit the “somatic norm” of the cultural sector (white, middle class and able bodied) is embedded in such a contortion. Such disregard has much in common with government policy on ‘inclusion’ throughout society which disproportionately tends to focus on the behaviors and poor life choices of the disenfranchised rather than structural factors that might have led to that disenfranchisement (Mompelat & Snoussi 2019).

Similar to wider societal dynamics where we have many examples of how institutional indifference engenders mistrust toward authorities, such as the police and local officials, interviewees talked about the shock of understanding the inequitable dynamics of the white spaces they were entering. Many said that they had never really thought about race or whiteness until it showed up in these spaces. Many outlined how such schemes made them much more distrustful of the sector’s commitment to their inclusion and much more keenly aware to the discrimination of the sector:

No one prepared me, it was a massive culture shock because I actually came from a different really open tolerant workplace you know, some of my best mates I made there and…It makes me think, They've never hired a brown assistant after me. I was thinking what was it that year that prompted them to join the scheme because when I was there, they could not care about diversity. It felt, there was already another intern there when I started so it was very bizarre. I know they treated me really differently to the other ones though I think I was the first not to travel with them, must have been a first for their assistants, not to go, but I didn't get invited.

This description shows how the scheme in this ‘host’ organisation has functioned as a ‘non-performative’. Participation in the scheme has fulfilled its use for the organisation, but it hasn’t fulfilled its promise to the trainee. The trainee is left wondering why they were included, what the ‘host’ thinks of them and why they treated them differently. The ‘host’ is not required to explain themselves to the trainee and therefore can remain unchanged and go back to its norms.

‘Success’ and ‘Progression’

“The idea of leadership suggests both a narrative of human progress and the peculiar quality to effect it.Thus white people lead humanity forward because of their temperamental qualities of leadership: willpower, farsightedness, energy”

Part of the reason that we collectively have such a skewed understanding of the terms of engagement for different cultural workers within the arts is because within diversity narratives, positivity and progress are the only narratives to emerge in any meaningful way.

An obsession with numbers and data, and on demonstration of “good practice” (Ahmed 2012) means we rarely get to hear the real experiences that are behind those numbers, and even rarer still do we have a chance to collectively reflect on possible solutions and ways forward based on both positive and negative experiences.

BAFTA, Creative Skillset and BFI commissioned Succeeding in the film, television and games industry: Career progression and keys to sustained employment for individuals from under-represented groups (2017) bills itself as “the first research of its kind, and the first time individuals from under-represented groups have been asked, in such a coherent way, to comment on what has made them successful” (my italics) (BAFTA et al 2017:2) The research responds to the now familiar statistics of ‘underrepresented’ groups. The report makes no mention of people leaving the sector, but the focus on progress and sustainability implicitly suggests that this is an acknowledged area to address. The paper takes an approach to this issue that is symptomatic of most diversity policy: it turns structurally created barriers into issues that can be addressed through gatekeeper sanctioned ‘opportunity’ and individual dedication and ‘improvement’.

In the paper, actor Riz Ahmed (one of the very few non-white ‘success’ stories the UK film and TV industry can claim under the age of 40) reveals that a scholarship to an exclusive private school and later a place at Oxford University, allowed him access to “white middle class social codes … which have helped him navigate the industry”. He also shares the oft cited story of the generous assistance provided by theatre producer Thelma Holt (who could be understood in relation to the ‘white benefactor’ trope we saw emerge earlier but here is presented by the paper as a well chosen “enabling champion” or “mentor”) that helped him to pay the fees to go to drama school. In contrast Ron Bailey, a working class sound mixer from “multicultural Camden” says “I think the hardest thing was to get into a social group of that mixture, and feel comfortable and confident.” Without the benefits of the access to the social codes that Ahmed had, Bailey has to work out how to demonstrate “relevant characteristics and approaches”. These approaches are remarkably like the submissive strategies some interviewees employed when faced with the their host(ile) organisations:

“I was keen, dedicated and easy to get on with. I was a likeable character and people wanted me on their projects … I wouldn’t say ‘I’m not doing this, this isn’t working,’ I would say, ‘how can we find a way to move forward?” (My italics)

A close read of the report shows that the “common factors of success” that are identified are in fact individual survival strategies in the face of structural inequality. In this way, lack of support from employers to progress their career is reframed as an opportunity to “take an active role in their own career progression”. Not being given the work they love turns into “finding an outlet to achieve creative satisfaction”, withholding of skills and opportunities becomes a need for successful individuals to be “finding and embracing opportunities to learn and develop skills”, feeling isolated by having to navigate new social codes in monocultural spaces is solved by “demonstrating relevant characteristics and approaches”. Later on in the list of factors that help successful individuals, the paper mentions “developing strategies to overcome negative experiences” and finally concedes “external influences around company infrastructure and the wider industry” might have some bearing on the success of the individuals.

At no point is discrimination, racism, ableism, or sexism mentioned, although in the section about strategies to overcome negative experiences the gentler and more passive word ‘prejudice’ is used to describe “prejudice or bias based on race, gender, race, disability or class”. The conflation of prejudice or bias in the cultural industries is something that is evidenced by the increased uptake in ‘unconscious bias’ training in recent years. However concepts such as prejudice and bias assume a level playing field where people of different views meet as equals. Racism is better understood as “prejudice plus power”. On the basis of this definition the use of prejudice smooths over the inequitable social dynamics that minorities face in monocultural spaces. (Edchange.org, 2020)

Conciliatory language such as prejudice and bias, allows a continuation of the sentiments we saw in Chapter 1 “that we are all in this together.” It allows a continual disavowal of systemic inequality as the possible root for the need of so many iterations of diversity policy over the years. Even more worryingly, this sleight of hand is the very basis on which professional development programmes that present themselves as providing access are conceived.

Professional development programmes vary sector by sector, but are generally presented as giving a ‘head start’ or ‘enabling’ individuals to ‘gain skills and experience’ and access to networks of people who might help them progress. The components of such programmes usually consist of a mixture of classroom based training, one to one brokered meetings, coaching and placements. As demonstrated in Chapter 1, by providing access to those who are ‘most successful’ in largely monocultural sectors, means participants are taught largely by white people. Any people of colour who do appear exhibit the behavior of ‘success’ (positivity, pragmatic, professionalism) that are outlined above. If people talk about difficulty, it is usually in the context of overcoming such difficulty and presented as a sign for the need for skills such as ‘resilience’ (we will discuss this more below). It is perhaps not surprising then that many of the people I interviewed talked about a ‘culture shock’ when they actually entered the buildings they had been invited into. Others, older, and more used to institutional behaviour were more prepared and less likely to participate further:

Anyway so by the time I arrived I was like about 30, I know what I want from here, I don't have to, you know, I'm not, like I say, reverential or deferential. So but quite quickly, getting to grips with the sort of institutional tendencies and ways of being, I could see that there were some deep problems and I think one of the reasons is that I had a work placement. So I was studying but I was also working and I could see a lot of the institutional problems that were just there for no reason and so I was always like taking what people said to me with a pinch of salt really but then the problem is you see, I always felt ...a lot of, I thought, sinister, quite cruel, quite hierarchical interpersonal relations. So on graduating, I just had that feeling already. I wasn't out into the field thinking, I want to work for an institution. I was like, this is bullshit, you know, I love art but all of this stuff is bollocks and a way I found an outlet, not to just say oh this is bollocks because I wasn't interested in that but immediately I found ways of operating in the world that bypassed institutions completely more or less.

Such voices rarely get an airing in a setting where the aim is to prepare people to enter organisations and stay in them. In my conversations with cultural workers I was struck by (and identified with) the alienation felt by individuals who came to understand the terms of engagement in the arts differently. Many spoke of not wanting to enter cultural buildings after having worked inside them:

I think about the bodies within these institutions who are harmed in, you know, the creating of these programmes and... I, yeah. It feels overwhelming and I often feel like I don't want to participate in it and that includes like going to, you know, to experience something or view something because, yeah, as a participant I worry that I end up kind of co-creating the violence ….Like from time to time, I'll work on my own little projects like I'll make something, I'll paint something and that will feel nice but it won't, I'll very rarely go beyond that. I still don't really go to museums or galleries anymore ….I'm probably missing out on lots of really interesting things but I mean ...I'm feeling like... I want to know what's going on, even if I'm not that excited about it. I know that there are amazing artists doing amazing work, I just don't want to experience that in an institution.

Such alienation is surely the exact opposite impact that is desired through such schemes. Not only does this interviewee no longer work in the arts, they also no longer participate in the cultural life of institutions. I will examine this alienation more closely in the next chapter, when I look at the ethics of programming in spaces located in cities as diverse as London, but the point here is that such alienation was directly a result of a programme that they were told would benefit them and help them to participate in the cultural life of the UK. Having experienced something quite different, trust with such cultural spaces has been irrevocably broken. The profound alienation that this worker felt is important information about the reality of how accommodating to difference our institutions really are. Such accounts pierce the myth that any difficulties one might face are located in the individual, and can be addressed through ‘training,’ coaching, or working on management skills. By excluding these narratives from such programmes, individuals embodied in difference become isolated, alone and feel they have few choices if they feel discomfort - either they choose to no longer participate (and are deemed personal failures), or they conform (and are deemed ‘successes’). I want to turn to the possible harmful psychological impact of such a choice in the next section.

Assimilation and Fragmentation

“When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s…..As we begin to recognise our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. ”

In their recent book Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation, On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (2019), David L. Eng, a Chinese humanities professor, and Shinhee Han, an American psychotherapist, chart a twenty year project to try to unravel the possible reasons for a spate of on campus suicides by East Asians. In the book they focus in on East Asians, because of the real life events they respond to but also because of their specific role in American society. Racialised as other (they are not white) but also designated as ‘model minority’, Eng and Han argue East Asians have a special access to the possibility of assimilation into the norms and ‘benefits’ of whiteness. Here they provide another frame similar to Ahmed’s ‘phenomenology of whiteness’ by presenting race as a relation, that is:

“A continuous, modulating historical relationship amongst subjects mediated by socio-legal processes of social inclusion and exclusion. Race is as much about skin colour and physiological markings as it is about a wide range of disparate social and psychic experiences of segregation and assimilation, absence and belonging, integration and dissociation, inclusion and exclusion.” (Eng & Han 2019: 120)

In their study they place this model minority status in relation to the lack of historical framework available to young people about East Asian exclusion in the US. This leaves an absence for those wanting to place individual feelings of alienation that arise from exclusion from the norms of American society (“whiteness, heteronormativity, middle class values, Judeo-Christian religious traditions”). Using psychoanalytic theory they show how raised as model minorities, East Asians are taught that whiteness might be an ideal to aspire to, however “a series of failed and unresolved integrations” evoke a sense of loss and profound depression (what founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud termed ‘melancholia’). They locate their study in a contemporary American framework where “a putatively colorblind and postracial society suffused with proliferating discourses of multiculturalism and diversity” meet with ongoing daily reminders of “racial discord and violence” as evidenced by the lead up and fall out from the 2016 presidential election as well as movements such as “Black Lives Matter”.

Han and Eng’s thinking is a compelling framework through which to build on the work of Puwar and Ahmed when thinking through the embodied experiences of cultural workers ‘included’ through professional development programmes that transplant them into monocultural (but ostensibly liberal) spaces. Cultural workers embodied in difference might come from disparate backgrounds and therefore will have specific experiences in the sector, but at the point of application and selection into professional development programmes they enter a ‘special’ status into a ‘creative class’ (Brook et al. 2018). Thrown together by the nomenclature of diversity language, they become a monolith in relation to whiteness (or Puwar’s ‘somatic norm’). As they are repeatedly told, their presence is rare and different to the sector’s norms, their tenacity in getting there gives them ‘model minority’ status. Having applied to enter by responding to the rhetoric of diversity policy, they are told, and perhaps believe, they are the ‘included’ and about to enter a sector that welcomes them and wants them to succeed.

However, as they enter these spaces, they experience “a series of failed and unresolved integrations”, this “suspended assimilation” means “ideals of whiteness are perpetually strained — continuously estranged. They remain at an unattainable distance, at once a compelling fantasy and a lost ideal.” We can see this dynamic in the interviewees descriptions of wondering why they had been treated differently, or in committing to suppressing their instincts and to “just get on with it” or to “make them happy.” In another interview a worker describes how they had been told that the scheme would provide “loads of experience” (experience here can be seen as a way to ‘integrate’)

They said “You'll get loads of experience” and then yesterday when I was trying to find reading material to bring for you, I found like a really, I must've been a kid when I wrote it. I sound like a kid. It's like an exercise thing where you map out your ideal week, things you definitely want to do and things you don't want to do. And like for things I wanted to do, I put stupid things like I want to go out for lunch with clients and you know, I want to see things, I want to meet people and then for things I don't want to do, specifically put in caps locks, I DON'T WANT TO BE THE INTERN. Like you know, I don't want to make the tea, I don't want to be the person that goes to the post office, answering calls all day, doing admin and then thinking back to there, it's like that's what I did for that whole time. It's crazy and then there's just like, I remember there would be specific days when I'd be there and I'd be given a really shitty task to do and I'd be like, remembering back to being told you're the lucky ones. So it's just like, you know, put up with or then you know, once in a while do something they think they can spare, something that's connected to the job I thought I was getting and so you just put up with for months and just get on with it.

Here the the interviewee describes the tasks that would have demonstrated their ‘integration’ instead they are asked to do things that keep them in a “suspended assimilation”, they take comfort in the “compelling fantasy and lost ideal” of the message they received when they were ‘chosen’ : “you’re the lucky one”.

The psychological impacts that we began to explore in Chapter 1 - a feeling of being gaslit, are sharpened through Eng and Han’s analysis. They locate the sadness, helplessness and lack of self worth that ensues from “the inability to get over unattainable ideals of whiteness” as “less an individual than a social transaction” (ibid.) That is, by underlining how race is imposed and constructed by society, their work shows how in focusing in on the individual cultural worker, professional development programmes for marginalised cultural workers uphold the myth that failing to ‘progress’ in the arts is “an individual failure to blend in with the collective” rather than the reality that it is a “legally and socially sanctioned interdiction.”(ibid.)

Eng & Han’s point about young East Asian’s lack of access to history is doubly important here. Not only do most of those labelled ‘BAME’ not get mandatory histories of colonialism, migration policy and social justice movements in school —histories that would help them to understand the political loading of such separate nomenclature as BAME and ‘immigrant’ and ‘migrant’ in relation to Britishness and citizenship — they are placed into environments where historical precedents of past diversity work is also erased. They are presented as breaking new ground, no evidence is given to us of others having struggled in the same way. Any failure to enjoy this lucky opportunity, cannot but be placed within ourselves, as anxiety, stress, illness rather than directed toward where it belongs - in the problematic and ineffective institutional thinking around diversity that has placed us there.

it was clearly not a space for me and it was not a space in which I could exist freely and so I think that I was hyper aware of every single moment not putting a foot wrong, making sure that I was doing everything that was necessary to survive in that space and that, like the emotional and intellectual labour that that took meant that there wasn't space to think beyond that. And our nervous systems take such a battering and I don't think we even can acknowledge that. Like it's not, our society is not built to be cognisant of the way in which our nervous systems are affected. What does that mean for us to be putting our bodies under that or no, actually not us putting our bodies, our bodies being put under that state of anxiety. It's inevitably going to have long term effects, yeah.

In addition to such individual trauma, the hypervisibility (blogs, testimonials, photos of happy smiling trainees) required by such schemes make participants complicit in inadvertently exacerbating marginalisation. In playing into the ‘happy’ myth that these schemes create, participants end up playing a strategic role in what Stuart Hall describes as “incorporation”, a process by which an institution “responds to opposition, not by attempting to stamp it out, but by allowing it to exist within the places it assigns, by slowly allowing it to be recognized, but only within the terms of a process which deprives it of any real effective oppositional force.” (Hall 2016: 50)

Such ‘incorporation’ combined with memories of trauma, not only replicates the work of racism by making visibility conditional and controlled by those with the most power, it also makes strategies for survival and resistance more difficult. By teaching workers that the ‘happy talk’ of diversity equates with success, it attaches shame and failure to feelings of unhappiness or discomfort. Such dishonesty makes strengthening bonds between workers and intergenerationally harder to nurture. I myself have been disappointed in my attempts to speak to other workers who seem to deny or dissociate from my reality of navigating the sector. Many interviewees spoke of judging one another, or about people who bought into myths of exceptionalism, or didn’t ‘pay forward.’ Whilst such critiques are important to discuss, they don’t account for the ways that diversity initiatives interrupt the possibility of true collectivity, both due to the low numbers of workers, and because of the lack of contact with those who came before. Critical mass, historicity and freedom to be truly honest about our realities is important for true equity, as is access to such information and networks that renders workers “capable of making complex choices in the furtherance of their own liberation.”(Gilroy 1984: 197) rather than simply passive recipients of benevolence.

The idea of liberation is closely related to the idea of imagination, the idea that things might change or could be different, an idea which is at the very root of political activism. A key theme about imagination emerged from my conversations with workers. Not only did they express feelings of being conceived of as actor in someone else's imaginations (through being termed ‘diverse’ BAME, or acknowledged only selectively) some felt robbed of their imagination entirely:

I feel like I was able to access my imagination in ways that I can't now and that, I think that's the thing that I'm maybe still grieving. That I don't, there's something about that experience that's stunted my ability to imagine.

Access on the conditions of ‘professionalisation’ ‘incorporation’ or ‘assimilation’ –basically ‘fitting in’– is granted in exchange for the loss of being able to imagine something different. Understanding that exchange is another way of understanding the question of retention in the cultural sector, could it be that we have lost those that wanted to imagine something better than they were offered? Through offering participation on such terms have we stunted individuals abilities to think change or equity is even possible?

This frame and the real lived experiences of those who are least visible must be the starting point from which to understand a report like the one commissioned by Film and TV Charity (2020) which we discussed at the end of the last chapter. The disproportionate rates of ill mental health in the ‘diverse’ workforce cannot be understood without fully appreciating both how whiteness and the ‘somatic norm’ structures our societies and social interactions but also how such inequalities and dehumanization are replicated in the arts sector’s diversity policies.

This unease might be dismissed or kept at bay through management skills such as resilience training, coaching or survival strategies such as simply keeping our heads down and ‘getting on with it’. But at what cost? Do we not deserve more than to ‘survive’? Sara Ahmed describes skills such as resilience as a “technology of will” a “command to be willing to bear more”. As such, resilience and teaching that advocates for it become “deeply conservative technique[s]] ... especially suited to governance: you encourage the bodies to strengthen so they will not succumb to pressure; so they can keep taking it; so they can take more of it. Resilience is the requirement to take more pressure; such that the pressure can gradually increase. Or as Robin James describes, resilience “recycles damage into more resources”(2017:189)

Eng & Han’s work shows us the true cost of such ‘recycling damage’ on highly intelligent, highly ‘successful’ people, those who appear to be able to ‘take it’ can be devastating. It opens out another group of people unaccounted for who might have left the sector, unwilling or unable to “take more of it.” Burnt out. For the remaining bodies that we encourage to harden, to feel less, to ‘turn damage into resources’, how will they imagine something new if they spend their time blocking out all the things that are wrong? The leaders we produce surely can’t possibly be ‘changemakers’ moving forward or confident to challenge the status quo. They will be dislocated, dissociated, depoliticised, lacking in imagination and, most importantly, subject to psychological harm.

The Line

Last month I was with someone and we were talking through a work problem. It became a conversation about power and how I wielded it. It had seemed to them I was taking over. I reassured them that in future, they didn’t need to make that assumption, I said confidently, “oh you don’t ever have to worry, I’m never trying to take over, that’s not me”. And they said well you did do the Clore Leadership Programme so you must be interested in being in charge.

So I started researching Clore and found out it was instigated 15 years ago, because venues were failing and people were leaving their jobs. But one thing that stuck out that I can’t shake is that the director of a museum in Liverpool had committed suicide less than a year before his retirement. In the article I read, it said:

“the stress of performing his duties impeccably had apparently become too much for him. Foster's was an extreme and individual case, but it left no doubt that something had to be done.”

And I can’t help but think, why did they think, we need to build stronger people, why didn’t they think something has gone badly wrong that someone just before they were about to retire felt they could not go on? Why didn’t they just do what Jack Halberstam says “Tear it all down!”?

And I remember I thought I was so terrible at everything, And how I had been disappearing myself through my voice and my body, so that I thought I needed some training to learn to speak and to stand. And in our training session that covered presentation style, we were taught that effective presentations are 38% your voice, 55% non-verbal communication, and only 7% your content. So the best way to deal with what Audre Lorde describes as “self-denial, self-effacement” in institutional settings, was to do the power pose before you came on stage.

To stand with your legs slightly apart, and about 93% of other stuff I didn’t listen to.

“What do you do when you are on stage and can’t connect with the person you are talking to, or the audience that is watching you?” I was asking a question about doing filmmaker q&a’s where I had felt out of my body. I was talking about working in front of audiences that were almost always white.

How do you feel powerful when the context in which you are speaking is set up for you to feel disempowered?

And when that blank face looked back at me, which I’d seen so many times before, when I saw that, I thought about what Audre Lorde had been talking about in that essay about the Master’s House. She wasn’t just talking about patriarchy, she’d been talking about racism that thought it was feminism.

And it’s a question I returned to when I was asked about if I’d been searching for power through Clore, and it takes me to thinking about the journey I have been on.

Because Clore has changed my life but not in the way it was supposed to. The tools that I have acquired, well, they can’t be kept in a box.

They are lessons that are still settling, working inside me. I’m learning about feminist leadership from Adele, and what it really means to make space. I learnt about how hard it is to enact the care I have wanted, I learnt that even though I don’t fit easily, I fit more easily than others.

I’ve been clumsy even though I’ve wanted to be careful and I learnt that I need to slow down and really listen, that it's not all about me, that there is not a hierarchy of oppression or a right and a wrong way to learn or unlearn.

But I don’t know how to process what I’ve learnt in the space that has opened up for me.

Where to go and how to make sense of the ending? When those who ‘gave me the opportunity’ to move into this space, accidentally showed me how conditional it was to enter it?

How to process that Clore sits on the legacy of Charles Clore born and brought up in the East End, the child of immigrants like me. That Clore was a renegade, a capitalist, but not a gentleman, who mounted the first hostile takeover and pissed off the establishment. How to process that the present guardian of that legacy could tell us on our graduation, that we have that name now, and we need to be careful what we do with it. And for that guardian to tell us ‘I know you all want to change the world, but remember that the places you end up in charge of, we’ll be the ones coming to them, and well,

And then being told by another guardian of another legacy, another woman, who leads an organisation that says it wants to create “a fair society in which people could achieve their potential, free from prejudice and disadvantage” that she feels those eyes on her when she is speaking at conferences, at events, and she knows that the feeling is a desire for her to move out of the way, but there is more work to do, she’s not finished, so we need to come together, and find another way?

And what do I do with the fact that one of these ‘change makers’ and their friends ‘like us’ have been moving around on the board of the Southbank Centre. Where Madani was Director for less than a year. Madani who told me things that helped me to trust myself, who encouraged me to speak up for myself, who backed me for all the same reasons I didn’t back myself.

And not only me, I wasn’t made special by that attention, it wasn’t bestowed only on me, not because I was part of an inner circle or a clique or club.

And I think about the “loop” Ahmed describes between the “behind” and the “up” as how “hierarchies get reproduced over time”

And I think about what is behind me, and in front of me, and backing me, and pushing me. I think of all the conversations I have had from the top to the bottom and I think about long meaningful conversations with people who are younger and more ‘junior’ and others with those older (but not always more ‘senior’) and how after listening to them all equally,

Chapter 3 The Sunken Place

— Pratibha Parmar 1989 cited in Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness hooks

“As a writer reading, I came to realise the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer…..It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl - the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles travelling to the surface - and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world.”

– Toni Morrison 1993 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

“I am waiting for them to stop talking about the “other”, to stop even describing how important it is to be able to speak about differences. It is not just important what we speak about, but how and why we speak. Often this speech about the “Other” is also a mask, an oppressive talk hiding gaps, absences, that space where our words would be if we were speaking, if there were silence, if we were there. This ‘we’ is that ‘us’ in the margins, that ‘we’ who inhabit marginal space that is not a site of domination but a place of resistance. Enter that space.”

In the last chapter we saw how professional development programmes build on the language of policy discussed in Chapter 1 to deliver a cosmetic element of such narrative. We saw how such activity says more than it does, using visibility of difference to demonstrate change whilst leaving material conditions markedly unchanged and leaving cultural workers complicit in their own marginalisation. I want to turn in this chapter to look at another aspect of such institutionalised diversity activity, and another ethical frontline for cultural workers embodied in difference - the public programme.

At the end of my Clore Fellowship in August 2019, I wrote a piece called The Arts are in the Sunken Place: How do we Get Out, which outlined my experiences of working in public programming as a cultural worker embodied in difference. I likened the feeling to The Sunken Place, a metaphor writer Jordan Peele envisioned in his film Get Out (2017) for the feelings of helplessness and subjugation that are experienced in a society built on systemic, institutional racism and where privileged groups can assert power over the less privileged through psychological, economic, and cultural oppression. Through drawing on my own experiences as a public programmer, as well as embodied responses to public programmes through twitter posts and interviews in this chapter I consider the embodied experiences of cultural workers on the front line of delivering such activity.

Critical Complicity

The nexus of the global financial crises, government instigated austerity and the commercialisation of the spaces where we experience art has been largely accepted as the new normal by politically neutral common sense languages of funding applications and reporting mechanisms . As we saw in Chapter 1, such capitulation comes directly from government policy and language thereby tying it to wider economic policy and cultural and political shifts towards the arts. Such language and attitudes pervade social policy at every level and disproportionately exclude ‘diverse’ populations (the majority of Londoners who are not ‘metropolitan elite’ middle or upper class) from key public resources and institutions. (Snoussi & Mompelat 2019: 22). In the publicly funded arts sector the ubiquity of such language and policy flattens difference, even as it celebrates it. Nirmal Puwar describes how such language inscribes “social cloning in terms of social connection, theoretical persuasions and politics, as well as comportment and manner”. Underlying such language of inclusion is “an unspoken small print of assimilation a 'drive for sameness’” which provides “administrative logic for regulating and managing ‘cultural difference’” thus resulting in a kind of “guarded tolerance” for difference (Puwar 20014:124)

Such ‘sameness’ is upheld at every level in the cultural sector. Criticality in the age of click bait, public relations and dwindling print publications has struggled to find space. Whilst self-generated publications provide a limited space and demonstrate the talents of a large cross-section of talented writers from a range of different backgrounds, they still account for a small part of the media landscape. In less precarious publications, spaces with wider, older, and more affluent readership (the core audiences of our arts venues), the lack of diverse editors and the perceived tastes of readership means it is generally a hostile environment for writers who wish to critique established norms.

The space of critical writing in arts and culture is highly mediated. Entry into it is predicated on the ability to conform to the same norms that we saw being played out in Chapter 2. The process of precarious writers pitching to ‘busy’ editors who work in predominantly white organisations is fraught with inequality and even the most well meaning of these are often pressured by their own higher ups to drive traffic and business to their publication and sites. A culture of expediency and a lack of investment, results in what Puwar has described as a “combined nexus of cloning” (where those who have worked out the best language to pitch an idea that will readily chime with past activity and forms) and “professional patronage” (those who have already written for respected publications, have academic recognition or social media profile) are the ones who have the most successful careers.

Such a culture of ‘likeness’ (and its attendant sibling nepotism) creates structural visibility and invisibility for different voices. Puwar’s critique of visibility in culture is deeply relevant here and worth quoting at length. Written over 15 years ago, her words ring alarmingly true and now must extend beyond ‘women’ of colour to all marginalised genders (to encompass womxn, trans people and non binary people):

“Whom and what people can speak for is a revealing measure of hierarchies of inclusion ...Within the writing of social and political theory, the white man rules, he is still central. Within feminsit theory, the white divas have a monopoly over its oration. Women of colour struggle to get into this central ground. They are certainly invited to speak but the queen bees of feminsit theory remain white. Structures of whiteness pervade academic and political relations. They have a huge bearing upon who has the authority to speak and in what capacity. There are normative figures who manage to escape racial marking and can thus speak generally, even while they don’t escape gendered marking. Their racialised particularity, however, remains invisible precisely because it is the norm. For the woman of colour… the slot that is made easily available for her is one where she offers herself as an anthropological spectacle. There is vast open space from where social documentation of oneself or the so-called communities one comes from can be provided. The room for self-commentary is especially forthcoming when the testimonies are able to induce pity, tears or, more recently, a celebration of diversity. There is a particular propensity towards hearing her speech from this selective vantage point in all fields, whether politics, literature, academia or the arts.” (Puwar 2004:74)

Puwar’s description of the spaces available to different ‘voices’ chimes with my few experiences in the field of criticism and is directly related to discussions about public programming below. For writers, often a pitch is ignored repeatedly, unless you are known directly to the editor or there is an obvious fit with what they are already working on. Another common practice is to ‘take a chance’ by offering a small space in which to explore an extremely complex idea, or to question every element of a still forming piece that lays outside the editor’s experience. For burgeoning writers, especially those embodied in difference, not used to or even cognisant of the norms that are expected, such experiences can be wrecking, burning through still forming ideas and leaving them vulnerable to the same isolating social dynamics at play that we saw in Chapter 2. Puwar describes this struggle between in/visibility (in full embodied presence or in written form as voice) as manifested in: “a burden of doubt” (the lack of belief that someone out of the ‘norm’ can deliver to the standards expected), “infantilisation” (through giving small bits of space and little time as well as editing practice which appears to ‘refine’ the writing), “super-surveillance” (where small mistakes are pored over) and a “burden of representation” (where ones embodiment becomes the sole measure for one’s inclusion, for example being asked to cover only Black art if you are Black, or only films depicting marginalised gender if you are a marginalised gender). These dynamics have a cumulative effect that turn back in on the individual creating “undue pressure” which “can itself induce mistakes which are indicative of the anxiety and nervousness produced, rather than of the actual abilities of the person under scrutiny.” (Puwar 2004: 62).

In his essay The New Conservatism: Complicity and the UK Art World’s Performance of Progression(2017) writer and artist Morgan Quaintance lays out in a detailed, deeply researched essay running over 4000 words, “a tendency within the UK art world in which institutions and individuals who may present or think of themselves as agents of change and progression are actually agents of stasis.” This explanatory quote is not in the main body of the text but actually taken from the extensive responses between himself and one of the institutions he identifies in the piece - Frieze. Matthew Slotover and Jennifer Higgie, senior members of the company, question at length the logic of Quaintance’s argument. They begin by dismissing the whole thing “This piece is so full of errors and deliberate misreadings that it is hard to know where to start” to projected illegibility “Morgan’s piece is a bit unclear to me regarding this new conservatism’… so not exactly sure how to respond” and then later feigned fragility “It’s exhausting!”. Artist Russell Newell, a supportive bystander to the comments responds to these concerns in the first instance in the manner we might hope an editor would work on behalf of a writer, thanking them for responding, and pointing out that their response might not be about the article’s inaccuracies “as you have only pointed out but only one” and suggesting that in fact their heated response is not because of the articles credibility, but it is in fact “full of points of view that you disagree with.” The exchanges between Slotover, Newell and later Quaintance reveal something about the tactics that institutions employ to contain critique from the outside but also provides an insight on why such critique is so rare to emerge. Slotover and Higgie do not consider the point both Newell and Quaintance later make, that perhaps they just see the situation quite differently, because they have quite different world views. Instead they continue to ‘correct’ them, feign being ‘ambushed’ and attempt to contain and deflect.

Whilst editors who are committed to finding new writers and voices outside of their immediate circle and knowledge do of course exist, in the more than a decade since the financial crash and the slow downs in spending and investment due to austerity, they tend to be under pressure which means cultivating the care and knowledge base to truly nurture new voices is often avoided in favour of simply drawing from a familiar pool. The result is systemic complacency where ideas that circulate come from a monocultural set of viewpoints from those who can survive this nexus of social dynamics that Puwar described and is enacted in the comments on Quaintance’s piece. Add to this the pressure for writers to be ‘professional’ (to conform and build relationships to continue to be offered work) and have a social media ‘brand’ in order to progress (which means keeping gatekeepers happy so they will continue to provide access). The easiest way to navigate such tensions is to present writing that doesn’t go much further than description, resembling extended marketing copy rather than a grapple with the tensions inherent in the context, and body of the work being examined. As more art and culture is produced and consumed from ‘diverse’ perspectives, the perspectives that provide the critical lens through which to read it and place it within the political and social moment and situate it within historical activity remains in the most influential and well read publications, resolutely monocultural. The result is that whiteness as a lens to view art remains the norm.

The importance of critical reception and subsequent social media and popular discussion is a vital part of the ecosystem by which the value of cultural production (whether the art itself or the presentation of it) is measured. It is a vital part of how decision makers decide what to greenlight, who to profile and how to present work. Even in the field of less ‘establishment’ publications, where supposedly counter cultural ideas can be explored, the need to appease their own ‘establishment’ of celebrities and their fans is always a consideration when presenting work. In 2015 when I wrote a largely innocuous (and largely self-policed) piece entitled “why are we looking to the entertainment industry for our feminist leaders?” online for for i-D, I was informed by the editor that it had been put up, but “we edited a few bits as we don't want to offend Lily Allen etc, let me know if all ok with you.”

More recently, Yolanda Bonnell a theatre maker in Toronto, who is Ojibwe and South Asian, asked that her show bug, about “women of an Indigenous family navigating addiction and inter-generational trauma”, be only reviewed by people of colour. The Guardian (bastion of ‘progressive’, ‘liberal’ values) published an article which asked three of their critics (Lanre Bakare, Catherine Shoard and Arifa Akbar) to discuss the request and its validity. In a roundtable discussing the article in Exeunt magazine, writer Naomi Obeng along with a group of artists, critics and academics artfully dismantles the contorted logics behind the liberal establishment’s defence of their ‘neutrality’. This defensive behaviour articulates itself in ‘debates’ on what criticism is, who should do it and its logics permeate editing practice of writers deemed ‘marginal’ ‘emerging’ ‘unknown’ or ‘raw’.

This at least is a rare bit of public record on such viewpoints, usually such contortions are performed through a private inbox, whilst one is still writing, often resulting in a piece that is compromised. If one goes into the piece wanting to truly examine a complexity or grapple with discomfort often this has to be done while justifying that you can in fact write. What often ensues is another form of gaslighting where one is grappling with issues that the editor as Newell astutely points out “simply disagrees with” due to an inherently different world view. Such exchanges unfairly marginalise emerging writers, giving them less access to the space and generosity where fully fledged critique from truly new perspectives can grow. Add to this the prohibitively low fees attached to freelance writing (between £150-200 is standard for a feature) we have a situation which means that to add a protracted back and forth with an editor in addition to grappling with a knotty subject becomes hard to sustain in the long run. Subsequently complex ideas can rarely find the ecosystem to grow and criticism remains toothless or is largely advanced in less visible (often more academic and therefore harder to physically access) publications or through a few tweets on Twitter that is read as a ‘call out’ or ‘pile on’.

The social dynamics of such encounters are rarely placed in their historical and institutionalised contexts. While gaps in education attainment are being addressed, and in some cases there is progress, diverse populations of London and the UK are still disproportionately likely to be impacted by the structural racism of institutions at every stage of their lives (Mompelat & Snoussi 2019: 12-21). In Natives: Race and class in the Ruins of Empire (2018) Akala writes about how the racist prejudices of teachers contributed to him being marginalised and alienated from learning spaces and how small comments and slights that disproportionately impact young people embodied in difference affect one’s self esteem as adults. Reflecting on the disparity between the experiences of wonder he was exposed to through trips to museums and galleries, books and other knowledge, yet shown in a myriad ways how he must know his place, he wonders “is state education designed to encourage more Darwins and Newtons, or to create middle-management civil servants and workers?” Such a question might just as easily be posed to media outlets, if working practice that replicates and favours an established way or a ‘norm’ and ignores how that norm is racialised and elitist, how can we expect to allow new forms of critique to emerge? And in denying that dynamic, what harm might be being enacted towards those whose experiences with institutions might have negative histories already?

Historical patterns of relating and silencing are institutionalised and exacerbated by the commercialisation of our critical outlets. People embodied in difference cannot always expect an advocate who will work with them, decentre themselves and see what can be learnt through an editing encounter. To return to Akala’s question, is it enough that those outlets might want to ‘include’ ‘new voices’ without understanding the care and work it will take to truly include and get the critique they supposedly want? Do we want those who will self-silence, self-censor and deliver something more palatable? Or do we really want to listen to the voices and instincts of those who might make old ideas newly felt? If we want the latter and not the former then what care might we need to enact, what prejudices will we need to overcome, what power might we need to rescind?

Crack

In June 2019, on a plane back to London, I sat down and wrote a lengthy twitter thread about my experience attending The Flaherty Seminar^[5] for the first time. I was so inspired and excited by the event, I wanted to share all the filmmaking I’d seen, give a sense of the visuals, the conversations, the feeling. I wanted to think through, by writing, all the complexities of attending such an immersive learning space, of how the unfamiliar experience of watching non-fiction experimental cinema together in a room almost half full of Black and South Asian people had reconnected me to the possibility and love of the collective act of watching such work, even that which I grappled uncomfortably with. I wrote something that wrestled with these themes and touched on many more, and the post gained some traction with those not there, so I thought I would pitch a longer piece somewhere to develop the seeds of the thoughts.

I approached a magazine, whose editors I knew a little. After a long period of waiting and chasing I was passed to an editor I didn’t know, who told me they would give me 800 words and that:

“ it would probably be best to focus in on a couple of films or filmmakers that you felt captured the flavour, rather than try to cover too many bases”.

Wanting to document my experience I attempted this challenge, approaching it with the criticality that I had learnt at the seminar. Approaching the piece as a respondent and archivist of the event, I tried to make space for the films I had loved and wouldn’t have space to write about at length. I felt anxious at how much description needed to be included in such a small space, it took me a long time to send a draft. I had been researching June Givanni’s Black Film Bulletin (BFB) and had found an edition which documented another Flaherty Seminar in 1994, which included a write up of an Asian Diaspora programme, in about the same amount of words as I’d been given. Without the space for analysis, I tried to approach it as a piece of archive, like the one in BFB. To concentrate on what films were seen and who was there. A political act of recording something which might not have come into view in that space, like the BFB was. On receiving the piece, the editor didn’t ask me what my approach or thinking was to the piece, I was simply told it needed tweaking and given a list of considerable edits (with no extra words) including an edit reading

“can we avoid a list of filmmakers most readers probably won't have heard of do you think?”

There was no space in the patronisingly benevolent tone of the email that we might discuss the piece as equals, or the possibility that writing the names of filmmakers might help their names circulate. After getting another two rounds of edits and after tearfully consulting with a friend who validated my struggle and shared my frustrations, I reworked the piece and it grew to double its size.

“into consideration your questions on clarity, earlier notes and is now much truer to what I found most interesting about the seminar.”

“I don't think I can give you what you need and what I want to say in that 800 words.”

The editor replied and said what I had written was “much better in my opinion” and that I had

Another round of wrecking “small edits” which burrowed under my skin, made me question my ability and energy to get it right. Tucked away in a room while my daughter played without me, grappling with a text I no longer wanted to write,

I realised I’d been paid £190 to feel ashamed, have the memory of the event clouded, and unable to look at a copy of that magazine again.

I wondered why the experience had cut so deep. I thought through my past experiences with words. Accusations of plagiarism at primary school, looks of disbelief when I held exam results, being told to “package my ideas better”, being told not to use “rough language”.

And reflecting on it I finally saw what Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination meant when she talked about reading as a writer. About that moment when we start to see not just what is happening but how it has been allowed to happen. What permits, what contains it. The sight of the fish, happily existing in its world, but then coming to see the fishbowl, “the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world”

“This work isn’t for us”

“The UK’s most prestigious public art galleries are seemingly taking it in turns to present their blockbuster black art exhibition. Never has black art history had it so good...But do these exhibitions offer new insights and bring us any closer to really knowing the artists they profess to celebrate? Or alternatively are they symptomatic of the obligatory once-in-a-decade African American exhibition or the black British survey? Are the politics behind these shows more significant than the politics within them? Does a fixation on black artists and the past reflect an institutional ruse for not dealing with black artists in the present?”

In much the same way editors’ failures to rescind power directly augments and contaminates cultural criticism, similar failures to recognise and rescind power directly impacts the work that is programmed in our cultural venues. In an article in Art Monthly reflecting on a resurgence in hugely popular survey shows of Black art that had emerged in the UK in 2016-2017 Hylton observed “a correlation between the absence of criticality and the availability of substantial funding for retrograde initiatives.” In a podcast outlining why he had written the article, Hylton discusses how he had been reading a number of reviews assessing high profile shows such as Tate’s Soul of Nation (2017). Noting the huge marketing presence of big survey shows such as this, he noted the largely celebratory reviewing of the shows, which seemed to uncritically celebrate the works, largely as if they had never been seen before. Pointing out that many of the artists in the show had recently exhibited in other similar shows, Hylton questions the narrative in the mainstream press:

It's part of a whole system of presenting these shows in an uncritical way, ahistorical way….not discussing where this work, or where the show's actually going. What are they actually trying to achieve? ...For a broader populace perhaps through the show’s market and their power through, not just through the institution, but through the coverage they receive they do achieve a wider recognition of histories that may have not been known, but there is kind of more problematic way in which the institutional narrative of the show is hidden by the reviews.

Hylton suggests looking at what is happening in the galleries before and after these shows to really understand what he describes as a “pathological practice” of curating survey shows where in the region of 40 Black artists are in the same space as just one (white) artist might have shown in, just before or after. Drawing on his own research into the survey shows of the 1980s when they first emerged, he clarifies whilst their content is formed similarly, the context has been reframed. Previously such shows were a “begrudging way of dealing with a kind of new emerging practice” now these shows tie in with a more consumption led “general high profile, dynamic of contemporary art.”

Listening to Hylton I was struck by his suggestion to examine how space was used both in the world of journalism and criticism, but also in the actual physical space of institutions. The word ‘pathological’ stood out, which evoked that feeling of being gaslit we examined in Chapter 1. That feeling of The Sunken Place, the place of the non-performative of Chapter 2. As a cultural worker embodied in difference, whilst the history that Hylton has charted and studied might not be available, the disconnect between the celebratory narrative of ‘plenty’, of diversity and plurality cannot help but rub against the whiteness of organisations which is felt every day. What Hylton is drawing attention to is conditional visibility, something we saw play out in Chapter 2, where visibility and invisibility are permitted and even presented as positive acts which one can selectively view, on reflection, as progress.

Creating the effect of this “progression” is partly based on the ‘spectacle’ of bodies such as those who emerge from trainee schemes, but also through the similar high octane presence of difference generated through events such events as group shows, one off seasons and long running theatre productions that present marketing potential for the performance of diversity. A closer reading of such work and activity often reveals a much more complex, and less celebratory narrative.

Kara Walker’s huge installation in Tate Modern’s 3m high and 155m long Turbine Hall Fons Americanus (2019) is a good example of such spectacle. Reviews made reference to Walker’s distinction in being the first Black woman to take on an installation in the huge space almost every visitor to one of London’s busiest cultural spaces will have to pass by. In an interview in a piece commissioned by The Guardian an explicit link is made between this commission and other high profile Black shows such as Soul of a Nation (2017) at Tate and Get Up Stand Up (2018) at Somerset House (Brinkhurst-Cuff, 2019) and various headlines across the press presented it as a “fierce and funny diatribe (Spence 2019)” or “monumental rebuke” to the evils of empire (Bidisha, 2019). Whilst reviews written by people of colour grappled with the burden of representation, no real analysis emerged^[6] about the terms of presentation, an assumption being made that being granted access to such a space was a sign of progress in itself.

In a review in the less visible (behind a paywall) and therefore less shared and discussed Art Monthly, Quaintance grapples with this dynamic head on, asking “What renders Walker’s brand of ‘critique’ so attractive and so appealing to institutions keen to virtue signal?” Pointing out the historical distance and lack of overt connection to Britain in the piece he draws attention to the disconnect which allows the institution of Tate (who had just a few months before released a statement on their historical links to the sugar trade and empire) to “perform a ‘difficult’ political engagement with empire, race, art history and gender discrimination without actually engaging with the structural factors that make these things a reality.” Quaintance draws attention to the monumental display of Black pain in the piece that “overwhelmingly white tourists stare, photograph and video” to “banal and disturbing” effect. By drawing attention to the rupture between such literal abjection and the absence of the piece’s engagement with the contemporary lived reality of British citizens’ daily experiences of Empire through institutionalised racism which functions on “plausible deniability ... always covert, indirect and administered with bureaucratic detachment”, Quaintance poses the question of who the art benefits. His answer is the curators at Tate, and the institution itself. Rather than an impactful swipe at a fallen Empire, Quaintance suggests the existence of the artwork itself becomes “just another depressing symptom of its endurance”.

Quaintance’s observations are deepened when seen in relation with bell hooks’ concept of “Eating the Other” (1992), an essay where she explores white liberal consumption of art made by and about those embodied in difference. For her “white racism, imperialism, and sexist domination prevail by courageous consumption. It is by eating the Other that one “asserts power and privilege.” Such assertion of power and privilege is also related to Ahmed’s idea of institutionalised diversity initiatives functioning as highly visible performances of “shock” that organisations could possibly be “white, elite, male, old-fashioned …. behind the shock is a belief that the organization does not have these qualities: that whiteness is in the image rather than in the organization” (Ahmed 2014). Through this lens highly visible programmes never intend to grapple with the difficult realities in our societies which institutions are directly implicated in, but simply function for the purpose of “changing perceptions of whiteness rather than changing the whiteness of organizations”. This can end up inadvertently reproducing whiteness “as that which exists but is no longer perceived” (ibid.)

Art which centres whiteness in this way (displaying visible difference for white consumption) can have a gentrifying effect on cultural spaces. This gentrification might not be overt, it may even be that an audience enters a space for the first time through the programming of such work, being told by press and marketing that that work is for them. However as the experiences of such artworks lands in bodies differently, a message is sent about who that space truly belongs to. The combination of latent feelings of unease that emerge from encountering work that appears to be about you, or to serve you (as a body embodied in difference) but ends up alienating or discomfiting you is a disorienting experience.

A recent example was the extremely successful run of Jackie Sibblies-Drury’s Fairview (2019), directed by Nadia Latif at the Young Vic. Reviewed almost entirely positively by the left leaning arts press’ mostly white critics,^[7] coverage left audiences unprepared for the actual experience of watching the play if one is not white. At the end of the production, which articulates how a middle class African American family is subject to racist projection and judgement in every aspect of their lives, the cast encourages white members of the audience to stand on the stage to experience being subject to the scrutiny that people of colour face every day. By switching perspectives with the actors, the play ends with what has been described as “a daring challenge to the white gaze” (Billington 2019).

Watching the play towards the end of this period of research, I was reminded of Quaintance’s review of Fons Americanus and Ahmed’s writing on whiteness. As I looked at the white figures standing on stage I caught sight of a woman crying with her partner comforting her. As I sat in the audience, I felt emotional, but not through catharsis, but a sense of claustrophobia and helplessness, a feeling of the futility that such complex feelings of embodiment could be shared and exchanged for the price of a theatre ticket and reflected on over an expensive glass of chardonnay in the bar afterwards. The moment didn’t feel like a reclaiming of space robbed by whiteness, but rather a sad articulation of its stubborn pervasiveness. Rather than conceding space for the people of colour in the audience, it ended up reinscribing how scarce that space is and just how much space whiteness takes up, even when we are performing its disavowal. As I watched the woman cry, I felt even any emotion I might have had being co-opted, rather than the people on the stage being watched, I felt examined and scrutinised from the stage, and manipulated into feeling something (gratitude? empathy? nothing?) for those who had stepped up there to perform some sort of ‘allyship’ by making themselves visible. I wished I had not had to participate in what felt like an empty gesture towards a praxis we so desperately need. In an insightful thread on twitter theatre maker Malakaï Sargeant evokes the embodied sadness and grief in such moments:

the last 2-ish years there seems to have been a real desire from programmers to import shows by African-American playwrights that really don't resonate with Black British audiences + it's increasingly clear that – with all the trauma porn it features – that this work isn't for us

maybe I'm naive to not expect to see Black trauma on stage? or, much more likely, gatekeepers are more keen to programme US over UK Black plays as it creates a distance for white audiences to still experience guilt but have the excuse of "at least this doesn't happen in the uk"

Generally speaking, I think the difference between contemporary African American + Black British playwrights is that the US imports we get all seem to cater to whiteness/let it off the hook. I'm not seeing that from my peers here, that's just not the story we're willing to tell

Is this why it took brilliantly written plays like Leave Taking 30+ years for it to be remounted + celebrated? If that's the case for one of the most celebrated Black British playwrights, what chance do the seemingly forever emerging artists have?

It's so exhausting seeing shows like Fairview, Notes From the Field + Pass Over where African Americans pushing Black trauma narratives are being staged in some of our biggest producing houses – only for actual Black British theatre-makers actively working in the industry…

feeling the need to convene collectively after such shows for literal emotional support + to positively validate our blackity Black existence in babylon. it's not like our stories aren't as important, skilful or nuanced so why is it so difficult to invest in homegrown talent?

Sargeant articulates evocatively the levels of theft to “homegrown” talent and audiences. The image of groups convening collectively after such shows “for literal emotional support” and “to positively validate our ...existence” shows how little space is truly given to the lived realities and embodied reactions of audiences who are supposedly represented by such work. The idea of space is important in terms of location - Sargeant is a Black Londoner and theatre maker. To that end he would like to imagine it's possible to see the reality of his existence be staged in that city, and imagine the possibility that his reality might be validated. Running throughout his thread is the sadness evoked by one of his first sentences “its increasingly clear that ….this work isn't for us”. Such alienation from cultural space feels connected to recent research which spoke to Londoners from working class backgrounds of all ethnicities, who spoke of the “alienation and disorientation” (Snoussi & 2019: 20) as new places opened in their neighbourhood, all catering to the influx of wealthier residents to areas of London whilst sidelining or erasing the spaces which had been sites of pre-existing vibrant histories and culture.

Sargeant’s evocation of a sense of a ‘huddle’ or protective embrace private from public view could not be more polar opposite to the institutionally instigated narratives of the ‘spectacle’ of diversity. It is clear that in both cases (that of Fons Americanus and Fairview) the people benefitting most are not those embodied in difference, but those who are least impacted by the marginalisation of that lived experience and the performance of racialised pain. They are also the ones afforded the widest and most influential platforms by which to critique it.

How to redress such a state of affairs? Critics such as Hylton and Quaintance have drawn attention to the fact that such programming requires the complicity of artists participation to continue to flourish. In his introduction to The Nature of the Beast Hylton draws attention to “the dearth of criticism or resistance by Black artists to such initiatives and attitudes” and their acceptance of “dubious forms of arts patronage”. For Quaintance “the system (that is the art world) is totally dependent on their participation in it to survive. By simply withdrawing their affective labour, their cultural and symbolic capital, their work from circulation within exploitative inter-institutional networks, artists and arts professionals could reclaim that power and finally torch the tired myth that moral or political compromise is always, at some level, the fundamental structural inevitability of creative practice.” Advocating for collective action, rather than “performed individual withdrawals” Quaintance imagines an alternative state of affairs where enacting a politics of refusal might mean a better sense of ownership.

Such collective action is something I wholeheartedly endorse after having the luxury of study and alternative spaces in which to examine and discuss cultural landscape, but it is not a reality I could always imagine. Whilst one could read such lack of imagination and failures to collective action as acts of individualism, and selfishness, exacerbated by a poor critical landscape, they are also as we saw in Chapter 2 exacerbated through isolation and the entrenched whiteness of cultural spaces. As we saw there individual workers are subject to a series of “failed integrations” in predominantly white environments and also subject to the group dynamic. One could think of this as assimilation, or dissociation but in predominantly white spaces, one could also think about whiteness as a behaviour and way of acting and thinking that becomes contagious. Freud describes how in group settings “every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest.” (cited in Eng & HAn 2019). In considering the psychological impacts of whiteness on young East Asians, Eng & Han considered the psychological impacts of when “the demand to sacrifice the personal to the collective interest is accompanied not by inclusion in - but rather exclusion from - the larger group” (Eng & Han 2019). As in the previous chapter, whiteness here becomes an institutionally inscribed barrier (validated by the predominant group mentality) to frustrate liberatory modes of expression - it is therefore a discriminatory barrier to equity.

Resisting such incorporation is of course possible, but it requires a great deal of prior understanding on the terms of engagement. As we saw in the previous chapter this transparency is completely absent in institutionalised narratives of ‘inclusion’. Such a context makes the concept of politically motivated refusal a complex rather than directly obvious choice. Such a state of affairs means it takes great strength of will and self education to resist and refuse, one has to become politicised to the ways institutional racism functions in order to be conceded the same space as is afforded to others. In the next section I want to consider what the material reality of refusal (or even pragmatic participation) looks like when workers are navigating taking up cultural space.

The Year of the Strong Woman

A feminist movement that proceeds with too much confidence has cost us too much already.

When we consider movements towards change in the arts, one visible and substantial change which is backed up by data and hiring practice, is the increase in cisgender, white women taking up leadership roles in the arts. As we saw in Chapter 1, the numbers documenting this change are often used as part of narratives of ‘progress’. Puwar notes the difficulties inherent in seeing such numbers as a real marker of ‘change’:

“the relative degree to which white women are the somatic norm, on the grounds of whiteness, get overlooked. The extent to which their whiteness grants them a certain level of ‘ontological complicity’ with normative institutional cultures, even when they are, on the grounds of gender and possibly class, ‘space invaders’, remains hidden.”

As we saw in Chapter 1 through Nwonka’s description of diversity as “genre”, policies such as BFI’s Diversity Standards create endless possibilities of public disavowal of inequality whilst remaining silent on the material conditions of those excluded and those that do the excluding. In employing the institutional nomenclature of plurality which flattens a myriad of differences into one term ‘diversity’, Nwonka highlights how such schemes allow different categories of difference to “be opened and closed at will by the industry when it is to their advantage to do so.” This idea of genre, not only allows multiple versions of diversity progress to be written but it also allows infinite programming opportunities to engage ‘underrepresented’ ‘underserved’, ‘hard to reach’ audiences and multiple opportunities to perform public disavowals of inequality despite what less positive data or actual experiences of audiences or participants might reveal.

In this next section I want to show how public programming activity that emerges in this context whilst presented in terms of a disavowal of elitism and an opening up of space actually ends up replicating the resilience of the institutional “somatic norm”, and ends up closing off public cultural spaces to those constituents that most represent the demographic of its local populations.

When the BFI’s diversity standards were launched in 2014 they cited a female helmed film Suffragette (2015) as one of the projects that met their criteria. On completion less than a year later, in October 2015 it opened the London Film Festival (which was that year dubbed ‘The Year of the Strong Woman’ by its then director Clare Stewart). The Festival included a symposium co-hosted with Women in Film and TV UK (a membership organisation for women working in creative media in the UK) and the Geena Davis Institute, which described itself as “the only research-based organization working within the media and entertainment industry to engage, educate, and influence the need to dramatically improve gender balance, reduce stereotyping and create diverse female characters in entertainment.” The links between the event and the policy were explicitly stated in an answer to a written question posed to parliament by Lord Taylor of Warwick who asked “What steps [the Government] plan to take to promote gender diversity in the UK film industry.” Baroness Neville_rolfe responded with:

“This Government is committed to promoting diversity in the film industry. We support the British Film Institute's (BFI) newly launched £1 million Diversity Fund, which works to provide professional development opportunities to people from underrepresented groups, as well as funding to organisations that are looking to support diversity projects. As part of the recent London Film Festival, the BFI supported the Geena Davis Institute's symposium on Gender in the Media, and has also recently extended its Diversity Standards to cover all Film Fund Lottery schemes which support film development, production and distribution, and widen access to film in the UK.” (UK Parliament, 2015)

However, this gender equality that BFI appeared to advocate for didn’t reflect the reality of the London audiences that BFI Southbank is situated in. Whilst the international aspect of both London Film Festival and the Geena Davies Institute appeared to nod to plurality and the progressive potential of film to connect people with different lived experiences, in reality, having three upper-middle class, conventionally ‘successful’ white women lead the keynotes (BFI CEO Amanda Neville, WFTV Chair Elizabeth Karlsen and Hollywood actor Geena Davies) suggested an explicitly imperial world view. Furthermore, Suffragette and its ‘diverse’ team of filmmakers and actors had themselves been accused of a historic myopia and racial insensitivity when they posed in t-shirts for a spread in London’s Time Out magazine (Clarke 2015) with the slogan “I would rather be a rebel than a slave”(a line from a speech given by Emmeline Pankhurst). Critical consensus in media outlets pushed back on the subsequent furore (started on Twitter) - which also drew attention to the entirely white cast’s erasure of the contributions of women of colour to the history of women’s organising in the UK - by drawing attention to the fact that the story focussed on a working class woman, conveniently ignoring the fact the story fused elements of various published memoirs, neglected their class consciousness and solidarity in favour of an individualised narrative. Besides playing into self serving myths of separation of class and race which have no real meaning to most working class London communities, the further irony that this ‘working class’ story was presented by women so far from the lived realities of present day working women in the city it depicted (and where it was being presented) was conveniently ignored.

In an official response to the online critique of the insensitivity of the choice of the t-shirts, Time Out refused to engage with the real histories of race and racism that have divided the women’s movement since its inception in predominantly white geographical locations. Instead they focussed their attention on clarifying what Pankhurst really meant by it and the context in which it was said. The statement ended with:

“Time Out published the original feature online and in print in the UK a week ago. The context of the photoshoot and the feature were absolutely clear to readers who read the piece. It has been read by at least half a million people in the UK and we have received no complaints.”

After comissioning a piece that had clearly banked on clicks and sharing based on the art direction of ‘feminist’ sloganeering emblazoned on Hollywood A-listers, such dismissal of audiences who engaged with the content exactly as it was intended (to drive clicks to their site) is at best hypocritical and at worst an openly gaslighting insult to those who might have seen something different in the instrumentalization of a political moment that excluded and erased them. The reference to receiving no complaints (something we will return to in Chapter 4) is a telling measure of its perceived validity. Is there another way that the absence of official ‘push back’ might be considered? Rather than endorsement of its viewpoint could the silence in fact be a silencing, or even disenfranchisement, a result of the film and its accompanying marketing’s complete irrelevance to the people which it in the name of ‘feminism’ it unthinkingly excludes?

Snap

I’ve been thinking a lot about the times I have been silent and the times I’ve participated even though it felt wrong. All the times I have privileged being visible, and recognised, and supposedly validated instead of listening to that knot of unease in my stomach.

“Snapping does not, however, always, involve a conscious act of resistance. Snapping is not always planned. Indeed snapping can get in the way of a best laid plan. Snapping can be about the intensity of a situation: when you are asked to do something and you experience that request as too much, this time, even if you have done it before. Something can be too much, before we even know it is too much. When we snap we don’t always know what we are doing. And when we snap, we do not always know where we are going. And yet we snap because of what we have been doing; we snap because where we have been is no longer where we can be.”

Is it that event where I was asked to speak about Suffragette and I talked about trying to see myself in the film and I talked about Sophia Duleep Singh, but I also talked about being able to

on screen, and because the woman was working class, and she reminded me of my mum?

And then when I said that, Helene Pankhurst, great grand daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst said:

Or was it when I was asked to speak at an event about Women and Power and everyone was wearing T-shirts with names of powerful women on them, and talking about how powerful they were? And how at that event I wanted to talk about that, about how the activism they bought for fashion, it actually had roots in the names of the children that Black mothers and fathers had lost,

which racist police physically killed and the racist media dehumanized and erased?

And how my voice had faltered so many times during that talk because that place couldn’t hold it, but also because there was no care.

That morning the keynote speaker had not arrived. Munroe Begdorf was invited because the organiser wanted a voice “outside of filmmaking that could widen the lens” and “discuss her experiences as a trans-activist”. But they didn’t explain that when they announced her. Only after the TERFs complained.

And they hadn’t considered she was the only trans person invited, and her visibility in that white straight space allowed whiteness and transphobia to emerge with such ease, in a vitriolic letter that misgendered her repeatedly.

Was it standing on stage in ‘solidarity’ and it became clear nobody had thought through what it meant for her in her body to be with those bodies

So instead it was all the same bodies, showing exactly why hers couldn’t appear

Realising they had tried to summon her with a token. A gesture, an object, exchanged for a good feeling,

Was it trying to explain those complicated feelings to people who didn’t have them, or didn’t see what I’d seen

Was it the fact that that happened just after I’d had Leena, and people kept bringing up her skin?

Or was it that moment that I understood how those dialogues worked together when I read Gail Lewis’ Unsafe Travel (2013), a text that describes feeling alienated at a feminsist conference and refers to another piece as a possible reason for that feeling. The piece called Birthing Racial Difference: conversations with my Mother and Others (2009) a letter to her mother about her making sense of how whiteness had shown up in their relationship.

Was it being at Black Star Film Festival^[8] in Philadelphia with 100s of Black and Brown bodies? Not seeing a white person for days? Of feeling so much space and so much understanding, of seeing what that could do?

Was it being on stage with a group of artists of colour and realising that by sitting up there in the Chair’s chair I was complicit in their framing.

Was it realising that when my voice caught it wasn’t nervousness, or fear, or incompetence or lack of talent,

“When you don’t take it, when you can’t take any more of it, what happens?”

Eating the Other - Serving the creative case for Diversity

Public programming ties commerce (via ticket sales and audiences) to what are inherently social dynamics, creating a transactional relationship between audience and institution. As we saw in Chapter 1 such conflations are at the heart of the creative case for diversity. As a public programmer, often working in institutional settings and presenting work that depicts ‘difference’ to majority white audiences, this conflation becomes more problematic. As described in the example of Fairview, often programming an event or programme requires serving up conflict, capitulating to what Quaintance (2017) has called the ‘new conservatism’. By being tied to market logic of profit and spectacle, but performing a set of values that align with more radical politics through public programming, visible hires and carefully curated editorial and marketing, the result is activities that “undermine progression, or benefit from the same oppressive structures and exploitative logics that many artists, arts professionals, and a large proportion of the general public are either fighting against or oppressed by.”

As cultural workers embodied in difference we are on the ethical frontline of such capitulations. We are often in the minority when arguing for the inclusion or the exclusion of something in a programme. Recently as filmmaking by women and people of colour has become more ‘marketable’ discussing the ethics of programming something you know will get a paid audience and excellent reviews is a difficult space to navigate. It can be easy to centre whiteness when programming and it can be easy to be traumatised by shared viewing experiences where it becomes clear that the audience around you is not connected to work in the same way as you expect. At times like this, it feels like work and audiences are being mined, extractively. It is difficult to know how and if to participate. In 2017 when watching Get Out (2017) at the BFI which had a large Black audience due to some word of mouth online, I was disconcerted by the ways that Black audience members became as much of a viewing experience for the white audience members as the film. The reactions of white audiences members underlined the whiteness of the space and problematised my viewing of the film. Similarly to my experience of watching Fairview, despite the space apparently being taken up by ‘difference’, the white audience’s reaction revealed to me how spaces “acquire the ‘skin’ of the bodies that inhabit them” and “take shape by being orientated around some bodies, more than others” (Ahmed 2007). Despite a critical mass of people of colour, their inability to appear neutral to others more used to frequenting that space or to just watch the film in anonymity as other white people can, means their ‘arrival’ emphasises the persistent whiteness of the space. Such reactions take up both physical and psychological space when one is embodied in difference. Can programming work that depicts and attracts certain bodies change the shape of spaces that have taken the form of others? Who does such work belong to? And where should it be seen? Who should ultimately profit from such exchanges? These are considerations that often show up in the form of unease and discomfort in my body when I am working and viewing art and spending time in cultural spaces.

In the world of publicly focused market driven programming, the idea of profiting from the work of marginal voices, is often understood in terms of endless discussions of ‘cultural appropriation’ and takes the form of an oppositional and simplistic debate which often play into unhelpful stereotyping and a confusion of power dynamics.

One recent controversy at the BFI Southbank concerning their forthcoming (April 2020) ‘Thirst’ season showed how such arguments play out in an increasingly commercialised cultural sphere and what conversation is avoided as a result.

In February 2020 the BFI announced a season entitled Thirst: Female Desire on Screen. Programmed by a freelance film writer the programme was essentially a vehicle for her to launch her book of essays on female desire She Found it at the Movies (2020). The author, an American living in Nottingham, had been writing about female desire in film magazines such as Sight & Sound and Little White Lies since 2017. BFI unveiled the season with its artwork which looked suspiciously like the artwork on Thirst Aid Kit, a podcast about female desire led by Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Pearson. Adewunmi and Pearson tweeted their surprise at not being invited to participate in the season and a heated debate ensued on Twitter where a largely white community on ‘Film Twitter’ (cultural workers, programmers, writers who knew and liked the programmer socially and through her writing) collided with a culturally and socially diverse Black female contingent of Black Twitter, who followed and loved the podcast. Both sides mocked one another for their perception of the situation.

What played out in this exchange was a conflation hooks describes in her essay “Eating the Other” between critical comments and ‘complaints’. For hooks such conflation often creates a false sense of power dynamics whereby politically motivated objection over co-option becomes fetishized and repackaged, reducing “protest to spectacle” stimulating “longing for the “primitive”” (in a debased form). In such a context “separatism” or what hooks calls “Black nationalism” is reduced “to a gesture of powerlessness rather than a sign of critical resistance”. Instead of creating “communities of resistance” such calls for recognition simply create “communities of consumption” (hooks 1992:33)

Such dynamics emerged in this example as conversations became more heated and ugly stereotypes of white proximate victimhood and racist tropes of Black female aggression began to surface in the exchanges. Adewunmi and Pearson were accused of “galvanising” a huge following to “bully” an individual, questioned as tp why they would air such grievances online when they could have just emailed the organisers.

And to do this on Twitter, mobilising your large followings to harass another woman, is shameful behaviour. Could have kept it in the DMs or email. But no. This website makes people cruel

Anyway @xxx is one of the sweetest, hardest working and smartest film people out there. She has been writing on female desire for years. The idea she would ever steal ideas is laughable. She doesn’t need to. Her own are good enough.

Others accused them of being ‘insane’ ‘stupid’ ‘deranged’ and ‘deluded narcissists.’

nothing but support for @xxx who is an exceptional writer who has a book with an absolute avalanche of talent coming out and is having to endure harassment from two deluded narcissists who frankly should be out of a job for it

BFI eventually released a statement where they said they “accept” the artwork was too similar “apologise(d) for the erasure” and ask “everyone to move on.” Their statement while acknowledging and attempting to defuse the conversations on Twitter, treated it as a ‘customer service’ issue, rather than as a critical debate they failed to engage in, for which they have true accountability. As hooks describes: “the commodification of the difference promotes paradigms of consumption wherein whatever difference the Other inhabits is eradicated, via exchange, by consumer cannibalism that not only displaces the Other but denies the significance of that Other’s history through a process of decontextualization (my italics)” (ibid)

What seemed lost in the ‘debate’ and BFI’s response, was that this conversation that we needed to “move on from” was in essence a fight for cultural space based on displacement, denial and decontextualisation through their commodification of their cultural programming. By privileging market consumption and opportunistically instigated programming practice — the programmer had a book to sell which seemed to hit a target audience of young, middle class (mostly white) women — over meaningful historically and geographically placed learning, BFI failed to consider what including the programme might mean to audiences it rarely engages with. In two tweets which were ignored by the BFI and any of the programmer’s ‘defenders’, Adewunmi and Pearson drew attention to the central locus of the issue that a publicly funded institution located in one of the most diverse boroughs of London might have wanted to to take reflection on - ‘Thirst’ was a Black slang word (which was nowhere acknowledged), and Adewunmi (a Black woman) was from London and had contributed significantly to making that word popular in the context in which it was being used.

It’s important to note as well that “thirst,” in the context of excessive sexual desire as we use it now, has roots in black slang. @thirstaidkit

There are layers to the insult of erasing us from @BFI’s “Thirst Season.” One of our hosts, Bim, is from London. It makes a certain kind of sense to include her and her work, but here we are. Idiots, right? @xxx

On what grounds could a public institution based in one of the most diverse boroughs in London, a city where 57% of young people under 15 are BAME, consider using a Black slang term in its marketing, but not consider or include the work of a Black woman from London who had a considerable following of exactly the demographic that would reflect the city in which it was located? What message does that send about who the people working in that building are interested in (and used to) conversing with? And what does this communicate about who might be most comfortable in that space? A tweet after the release of BFI’s statement made clear what damage the exchange had left behind:

In Reclaiming our Space (2019), Feminista Jones writes how she uses her online platforms to “challenge discourse, inspire and motivate people into action, and amplify the narratives that often go ignored by the mainstream media, which usually center Whiteness and White experiences.” Jones 2019: 4) Online spaces become a refuge, a space to “be heard and supported” (ibid:5) . Jones’ words evoke an impulse similar to the one Sargeant describes to “convene collectively”. This relationship between these closed spaces of healing, refuges from institutional whiteness, and validation (‘call ins’) as opposed to ways to calls for accountability (‘call outs’) can be best understood in relation Ahmed’s concept of diversity work as ‘pushy work’:

“Diversity and equality are not mainstream and to treat them as if they are mainstream simply means the message will not get through. Without an institutional push, without pushers, nothing happens…..You do not have to force what is mainstream; something is mainstream when it is part of the organizational flow (it is the way things are going)....[it means not] having to push for, or drive forward, agendas that organizations often say they are for, but show they are not behind. (Ahmed 2017:108-109)

It is perhaps telling then that Pearson and Adewunmi took to Twitter before they approached an institution like the BFI who rarely demonstrate (unless pushed to) that they would be either aware of or responsive to such concerns. On watching the furore unfold on Twitter, I thought back to the times when programming (and the audiences it attracted) had sent a clear sign to me that a cultural venue such as BFI Southbank was run by white people for white people, with little understanding of the lived experiences of the large proportion of the population of the city in which they exist. Incidents that may not have got coverage in The Guardian (Bakare, 2020) or been highlighted by those with such a huge following on Twitter, so they were ignored, unacknowledged and unaccounted (and unaccountable) for.

Such experiences as this must be understood in the context of an increasingly inequitable city, where community spaces are decreasing and increasingly gentrified urban spaces (including our cultural spaces) are places of consumption, unable to cater to or acknowledge the contemporary and historical presence of London’s diverse neighbourhoods. It must also be considered in relation to studies and anecdotal evidence that our cultural spaces are not merely potentially irrelevant to many of the communities that they exist to serve but that their institutional indifference to those publics actually actively encourages disengagement (Soussi & Mompelat 2019). In this sense, Ahmed’s concept of diversity work as ‘pushing’ then moves in both directions: increasingly the monocultural and commercialised nature of our cultural buildings generates alienation to actively ‘push out’, and the same venues seem surprised and unable to fully respond or fairly categorise when (and if) they receive a ‘push back’. Such institutionally inscribed alienation problematises policy speak about audiences such as ‘hard to reach’.

I want to explore this concept of push and refusal in more detail in the next chapter.

#BehindEveryGreatCity

In October 2018 Taylor Le Melle, an independent curator, in collaboration with freelance programmers Qila Gill and Tendai Mutambu curated the inaugural Experimenta debate at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. The event was funded and managed through the BFI London Film Festival where I was working as a programmer at the time. Instigated partly by Rabz Lansiquot’s research on embodied spectatorship and black liberatory filmmaking practice and partly by a film programme curated by Tendai, a group of Black artists thought through the relationship between representation and praxis. Black people with years of lived experience, academic study and artistic practice between them considered their positions on representation on screen and how that related to those same subject’s agency and sovereignty in practice.

A short walk away from the convening, at the BFI, a group of women gathered for a photo. In the invitation sent out to participate, the Festival Director sent out statistics on the percentages of films directed by women at the festival and highlighted areas where they had achieved 50/50 gender representation “or better”.

In the email subject line: LFF Social Media Moment Celebrating the Contribution of Women to the UK Film Industry she highlighted the “wonderful photo of the women’s protest in Cannes that was led by Cate Blanchett and travelled around the world” — and added “of course, it is almost a year to the day since the birth of the #MeToo movement”

The invitation ended with with a hashtag from the mayor’s office who were going to share the image under hashtag #BehindEveryGreatCity which apparently championed the contributions and achievements of women from all walks of life, on the occasion of the centenary of (some) women’s suffrage. {Some added by me}

These two staged occupations inhabited vastly different worlds, but happening at the same time, they became connected and came to articulate a gulf that I was trying to traverse.

When I sat down to write about their connections, I came across a talk Taylor did with Raju Rage in 2017 at Wysing Arts Centre on the occasion of Wysing’s exhibition “Opening the Channels.” They interrogated the idea of giving platforms to "many voices" of encouraging polyphony even when the results are not sweet and harmonious but discordant and unsettling. What does it mean and what does it take to encourage dissonant voices: voices that call us out, voices that warn us of things we don't want to believe?

Taylor and Raju’s discussion raised ideas about the economies of language and strategies of silence and turning away; of speaking and listening.

What is in the detritus of a hashtag #BehindEveryGreatCity pasted on a photo that doesn’t look like the people in the city I grew up in?

What could open up when we refuse to participate in empty gestures, when we address some but not others?

How can we open out that silence to address the injustice that the need to turn away is based on?

What can be gained from speaking in a context where you might be rendered illegible?

In conversations with marginalised people who work in the arts this year people have talked about tiredness and isolation, how that creeps up on you and makes you ill.

How we might try and articulate that to others, even other marginalised people and how a gulf opens up in that telling. By piercing the performance of conformity, these moments of truth telling and seeking open up channels that have been muted. By drawing attention to unease, you create unease in others, to paraphrase Sara Ahmed, in the process of shaking something the instability becomes embodied in you. In the process of shaking, things fall over before they have taken root, stronger clearer new shoots fail to grow.

In the past year I have tried to be intentional about addressing that unease in my body. I have sent my thoughts in new directions, read in different places, shared time with different people and in different spaces.

I have spoken a lot in some places and stayed silent in others. I have noticed the difference between choosing silence and being silenced. I have turned into some embraces and turned away from others. The unease didn’t dissipate, but it was met with a different force.

Chapter 4 - Pushback

“The institutionalization of whiteness involves work: the institution comes to have a body as an effect of this work. It is important that we do not reify institutions, by presuming they are simply given and that they decide what we do. Rather, institutions become given, as an effect of the repetition of decisions made over time, which shapes the surface of institutional spaces. Institutions involve the accumulation of past decisions about how to allocate resources, as well as ‘who’ to recruit. Recruitment functions as a technology for the reproduction of whiteness.”

“Everywhere we go there is pressure to silence our voices, to co-opt and undermine them. Mostly of course, we are not there. We never ‘arrive’ or ‘can’t stay’....Yet when we few remain in that ‘other’ space, we are often too isolated, too alone. We die there too. Those of us who live …. Invent spaces of radical openness … For me this space of radical openness is a margin — a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a ‘safe’ place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance.”

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinise not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it … Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a growing process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.

— The voice of Audre Lorde The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action 1977

This chapter is dedicated to my community of resistance. I write my own embodied experience of using my voice to articulate myself, and record the testimonies of those of other cultural workers embodied in difference, as well as revisit my own voice in dialogue with theirs

In October 2019, when Madani Younis’ departure from the Southbank Centre was announced, a number of colleagues contacted me privately to ask me what I had heard and what I thought. I felt disoriented by their surprise, and also by their questions. I realised they asked me in part because they knew I was undertaking this research or because they knew that he had been my Clore mentor, but I couldn’t help but despair at the questions because it highlighted to me just how disconnected they were to my lived reality and of the structural issues that cultural workers embodied in difference deal with every day. The disorientation I felt when being contacted in this way was also in part because I had spent the last year of my Clore Fellowship 2018-19 in a completely different reality to the one that I had previously inhabited. I had spent the last year attempting to divest from whiteness. As I described in my Clore provocation paper:

When I first started my fellowship I tried to imagine a job in the sector where I had more influence and autonomy. It was hard to imagine what role I could play if I were to authentically live my values. adrienne maree brown in her book Emergent Strategy says “We are in an imagination battle” (brown 2017:18). maree browns’s invitation to imagine whilst we are in an imagination battle is another articulation of The Sunken Place. It is an invitation to, as a cultural leader from a minority background to acknowledge that the horror film we find ourselves in at times is a result of someone else’s imagining, not our own. It is serving someone else’s comfort, not our own. If I were to imagine a different way, and pay attention to my own imaginings, my own comfort, then perhaps new things I paid attention to would grow.

My Clore Fellowship allowed me to imagine something quite simple. During the Fellowship, save for some mandatory activities and some selected friends and family. I completely and utterly divested of whiteness. I muted all white people on Twitter and Instagram. I only met with non-white artists and cultural leaders. In the spirit of imagining, I freed myself of expectation and I focussed on deep connection. This was not about negating the many deep connections I have with white institutions, artists, friends and colleagues. It was a rebalancing of my attention, an acknowledgement that society’s centre is not a reality that reflects mine or many people I relate to. I centred myself and people I could immediately relate to.

In divesting in this way, I became more aware of the gulf between what I had been ignoring, or had dissociated from whilst working in my institutional job. I realised how institutional logic had permeated my consciousness, how the institutional whiteness of organisations had stopped me from accessing vital vocabulary, critique and information that could have helped me to place why my experiences of the sector seemed so vastly different to others I worked with. I had used my Fellowship to focus on unlearning what Ahmed describes as the ‘invisibility of whiteness’:

“Whiteness is only invisible for those who inhabit it, or those who get so used to its inheritance that they learn not to see it, even when they are not it.” (Ahmed 2007)

The process was a steady process of ‘coming to know’ as well as coming to feel. It helped me to understand the ways that I ‘fit’ and didn’t fit and why. I had begun the Fellowship feeling I had many shortcomings that I needed to address. I realised toward the end that there was actually just one. That one piece of learning was actually an unlearning. I came to see that ‘not seeing’ was not simply my capitulation but as a direct result of the institutional whiteness of the organisations in which I had been working. I saw that it was likely that I had been recruited and continued to ‘progress’ to an extent due to my ability to conform in scenarios such as interviews, my ability to write in institutional language. I realised that this conforming was something I had learnt in many institutions throughout my life. I also realised that the discomfort I felt, and difficulties I came up against and the extra energy that I seemed to consume compared to other colleagues (of all backgrounds) was related not so much to what I physically embodied (a cisgendered South Asian woman from London, from a relatively stable but modest background) but rather how, where and when I succeeded to, or failed in, conforming to the universal somatic norm of whiteness in any given situation:

I think about knowing that my parents really came from nothing and in a way could go back to having that. Like I guess that's where I locate it which is like not a location that most people that work in the film industry recognise as even a beginning point really. But it's been super interesting like thinking through who I gravitate towards in certain spaces and how I find certain people and the people that I connect with and often it is around class in the UK. It's often people who come from working class backgrounds that we seem to find each other and seem to find a sense of looking on the outside. Like we never can really go inside some of these relationships... And there's like a handful of people in the film industry who I just think, okay you understand how I feel in this space and then everyone else I'm like, I think they just all think I'm like a complete weirdo and I feel very like socially inept in those situations even though I'm not like a socially inept person.

If we go back to the stories of Ron Bailey and Riz Ahmed in Chapter 2, both individuals come from similar socio economic and social backgrounds, however, Ahmed’s private education allowed him access to certain codes that helped him to communicate as himself. By an understanding of how to communicate as an equal, Ahmed didn’t need to employ Bailey’s methods of appeasement in order to be accepted.

This is one example, in real life these dynamics are complex, they cannot just simply be measured by ethnic categories, socioeconomic categories, or by simplified conversations about privilege and bias. Whilst calls for proportional funding based on demographics is important, what is lost in these conversations (as we saw in the case of the progress on gender) is a discussion of how institutional whiteness can be maintained, defended and indeed weaponised even after the arrival of those embodied in difference.

As we have seen throughout this paper, diversity narratives make hypervisible narratives of progress and happiness in the administrative side of the sector. Whilst pain is explored in art works and programming, often such pain is detached from the lived realities of the populations it seeks to ‘represent’. What is steadfastly ignored and silenced are the experiences of those that are struggling, do not progress, or choose to leave the industries that they enter.

As we have seen diversity policy — which has become inflected with the values of an increasingly marketised, privatised, rationalised, entrepreneurial and commodified public sector — concentrates its attention on cosmetic interventions. These interventions allow an engagement with the public aspect of institutional duty in a gestural way. Such activity allows organisations to steadfastly concentrate on the benevolent act of bestowing inclusion, or addressing ‘inadvertent’ bias rather than the more complex and insidious ways that structures and individuals might actively exclude. Hence diversity policy becomes about display, a way to dress something, a one way (ad)dress presented as a (re)dress.

Such logic then pervades how we view ourselves; by presenting diversity as a pipeline problem, any problems subsequently faced by individuals cannot be read as problems with access, they are simply to do with perception and behavior (BAFTA et al 2017), things that individuals must learn to overcome. I want to look a little closer in the next section at how institutional indifference throughout our society and by our cultural institutions validates that internalisation.

Silencing

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies that you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian , because I am myself - a Black woman warrior poet doing my work - come to ask, are you doing yours?”

We saw in the previous chapter how complaints and critiques that circulate online can be framed as ‘call outs’ rather than ‘call ins’. A ‘call out’ in its simplest sense is to criticize something or someone and ask for the critique to be addressed or responded to. They can be seen as loud, vocal missiles hurled at the institution. Such ‘call outs’ appear to be all powerful, the institutions, whose reputations are a key part of their ‘public relations’ appear ‘vulnerable’ to them. However, call outs are also often ‘calls in’ one of a limited ways to communicate, to be heard by an impenetrable institution. By calling out, you ask for a way in. You ask to be heard in private after shouting loudly in public. Or perhaps you have already tried to speak at length in private and not felt heard. So you decide to go public. So a ‘call out’ can also be a way to attempt to equalise a power dynamic. In Chapter One we saw how a ‘call in’ instigated by an institution can also be used as a way to perform public relations through a gesture of public support when we considered the example of BFI’s decision to fund the distributors of Dear White People (2014) after initially rejecting it. The gestural aspect of such moments is apparent not just in the ways that responses do not address structural reasons for the need for such a debate, but also by comparing such moments with times where no such dialogue is proffered. Such moments of institutional silence tell us about the conditional penetrability of organisations and how such silence has further silencing effects on others who might speak up.

Take for example an open letter like the one written by filmmaker Kolton Lee. In it he recounts decades of interactions with predominantly white funding bodies in the UK film industry. Despite the letter giving an account of the structural barriers to inclusion that we see borne out by the data on Black British filmmakers and screenwriters, Lee’s letter, once it goes public, is shared mostly privately by those who work in the industry. There is no public response from any of the funders mentioned even though he mentions many by name. Whilst it is a first person subjective account, and it is very possible there are divergences in perception of events, the point here is that the silence around the letter speaks volumes about who decides how diversity should be addressed. Through speaking with other workers it has become clear to me that information on how to address structural inequality is not driven by those who have faced the barriers and seen how intransient they are, but those who have found a way to make it through and are willing to say that it is possible (and desirable) (BAFTA 2017).

They are just sort of moving through something that was made for them. Whereas we're moving through something that wasn't really made for us and constantly having to pretend that we're smoothly navigating it because that's what people want. They don't want people that are drawing attention to the fact that it's hard to get through because it automatically sort of appears that there's something wrong with you if you're finding it difficult. But the sort of reaction to that is very much about, is about being paternalistic and giving opportunities like let me do this for you now that you've told me. It's never about meeting you at a level of mutual respect and I'm just thinking about that thing about you don't, you only apologise to people that you think that you're equal to.

What gets upheld in those moments of silence are myths of exceptionalism (that the true ‘talents’ get through) and also the neutrality of institutional decision making. It is also worth mentioning here research that has found that decision makers with the most power to make change disproportionately believe in the meritocracy of the cultural sector (Brook et al 2018).

The silence from the institution speaks volumes to others who might be facing similar barriers, who might agree with much of what is said in a letter like Lee’s - but a lack of public engagement shows an indifference to that reality, demotes it to a ‘perception’. A message is sent that these details are not relevant, they do not need to be addressed. Hence there is no visible evidence that if another person were to vocalise such concerns that attention would be paid to them, so as we saw in Chapter 2, the best thing is to ‘just get on with it’. This silencing means myths of exceptionalism, of the need to modify behaviour to get ahead and the need to be discreet and professional (i.e. not to criticize powerful people but rather to seek their patronage as we saw advocated in the BAFTA research) become internalized and rarefied as desirable traits. This reveals the conditions of entry ‘in’ and the traits of those left ‘out’ and how they become tied to ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ critique, and hence another way of drawing attention to the characteristics of the ‘universal somatic norm.’

Such signalling has another atomising effect which we saw in Chapter 2. If those that have found it difficult to get through cannot share their experiences with those about to try, a cycle repeats where individuals continue to suffer structural problems alone. Many times during the exploring of this subject a phrase came up “not all skinfolk are kinfolk” suggesting that one could not always trust other workers embodied in difference to validate the truth of what we said. What became clear to me was that enacting true kinship in itself was an ambivalent and ambiguous act when all those embodied in difference have their differences flattened in order to be included and then are isolated and sometimes made to compete in the environments we found ourselves in:

I’ve been thinking about something Imran said, like, I mean, I think we've forgotten how to be friends. I keep thinking about this thing which is like you always get taught in like training and professional development which is like this is an industry based in relationships. It's all about relationships and you know, you see these very performative friendships and alliances like life time producing and directing partnerships, you know. It is really you know, it's very much about deep alliances that kind of brings you forward in this industry and given that it's so hard to forge those deep relationships across race and across socio economic background, if we also can't do it with each other then we're kind of lost because we are really alone. And how I really feel is that the only way that we will get anything from this is for us to unlearn that suspicion and find our people. Realising what an open person I am naturally and how actually I'd closed a lot through just being around people that aren't good to me. And then in this last year and a half, I've really embraced that openness with people that I trust. Noticing how I feel in certain situations as opposed to how I feel in others. And it made me think about all of those things that we don't, yeah, we don't give each other. We don't, it stops us from forging really deep friendships as well because we're fighting so much in these other spaces too. Just like another way of disempowering us and stopping us from coming together I think.

In another example of a call out, art critics The White Pube circulated a meme of an embarrassing on stage misidentification by a non-Korean speaking journalist, of a Korean actor from Oscar winning film Parasite (2019). The post was shared on Instagram and Twitter as a screen grab of the moment of the misidentification from the online video and the caption:

“Tfw you are a white film critic who can make racist mistakes and carry on carefree even after being told by the literal people she is interviewing on stage at the BFI that she just asked a question about the the mother character in Parasite to the actress who plays the housekeeper :)” @thewhitepube (10 February 2020)

“Honestly when will white people know when to say no, pick a person of colour instead, I will just make a fool of myself etc. etc.” @thewhitepube (10 February 2020)

Within the meme was an institutionally sanctioned error, and a critique about the individual human behaviour that enabled the institution’s ambivalent and clumsy approach to diversity. Their address was direct, irreverent and spiky but the critique itself was valuable to an institution that presents itself as a place of learning and expertise in international film culture. In the online comments, discussion from Korean speakers discussed how the sudden visibility of Parasite due to its Oscar win had revealed how foreign language filmmakers and their teams were treated differently to their Hollywood counterparts, raising important points about the presentation of such work. Despite gaining thousands of likes on Instagram from The White Pube’s young and critically engaged audiences, no response was given by the BFI. The individual did not respond and most importantly the video (along with the misidentification) remains on the YouTube channel with no editorial note acknowledging the mistake. Whilst critics of such behaviour might decry the personal nature of such ‘callouts’ and the personal cost of such hypervisibility on an individual on a platform such as Twitter, what is rarely considered is what it might feel like to be a marginal person navigating an all white space and see errors like that go completely unnoticed, unaddressed and unaccounted for. When such indifference is also accompanied by vocal celebration of a ‘foreign language’ Oscar winner about structural inequality, we have another very obvious gaslighting scenario and another very clear message as to whom such spaces belong to and a distressing dilemma for those who participate in such institutions:

I wonder if we just have to participate in a lie to advance basically? If you refuse the lie then you also don't get to participate. Basically you either self segregate yourself from this industry by telling the truth or you participate and segregate yourself from the truth, do you know what I mean? There's no, I don't think there's a way to survive like exist in this industry as your full self and seeing the full picture of what's going on.

Such online criticism is often described as a ‘storm’, an ‘outburst’, a ‘vent’ or a ‘rant’ but really these criticisms are leaks. They provide vital information about blockages and breakages in the system. (Ahmed 2012) They provide information on what needs to be addressed for people ‘outside’ of the norm of the organisation to be more comfortably accommodated. The silence that greets such ‘leaks’ sends a clear indication of what is cared about and cared for and a clear message about the possible futility of speaking up.

Leaks

Whilst institutions might be able to maintain silence seemingly unaffected, for individual workers, holding on to silence for a long period of time can come at a price, and in my interviews with cultural workers embodied in difference, many talked about how silence made them ill and demoralised.

Speaking out is related to Ahmed’s “feminsit snap”. Ahmed writes that “Snapping does not, however, always, involve a conscious act of resistance. Snapping is not always planned. Indeed snapping can get in the way of a best laid plan.”. Snapping which can precipitate a leak, or a speaking out, can be the result of a series of events that pile up on top of an individual. For Ahmed snapping does not have to be negative, in fact the energy leading up to the snap is most toxic. Snapping can be a form of seeing something, naming something that you just felt. It can lead to an exit, a liberation, from having to fit.

In a work situation though, such snapping is not always linear. Such ‘snaps’ can lead to immediate complications in social dynamics. When people I spoke shared their experiences of saying things, they described people asking if they were ok. If something had changed at home, they seemed “unhappy”. Once they start articulating discomfort, the atmosphere changes, becomes thick with tension and many others describe feelings of unease, as if there were conversations about them that were happening without their knowledge. A number of people talked about looking at emails that they shouldn’t have, in response to feelings of feeling out of place. Telling those stories felt humiliating, sharing how uneasy, how paranoid we had been. In those exchanges we found validation with each other, in exchanging these stories, we also exchanged tools and sources of comfort.

Ahmed (2018) has described how such snaps, or complaints, can create collectivity. By sharing our leaks, we became leads to one another, connecting to each other. We had been atoms, separated by tokenism, by bad hiring practice, ‘bad retention’. We were isolated and we could only individually hear institutional silence but we realised by connecting that we had all been speaking, showing and knowing.

The Undercommons

I have been in dialogue with a group of women of colour who have been through a professional development programme and are now trying to navigate progressing in their careers. They are friends and we've had many conversations about this over a number of months, some of them I’ve been talking to for years.

I didn’t want to record all of our conversations. I just wanted to talk and see what came out.

The day I did record, we talked for like 4 or 5 hours. It was so cathartic. We cried and laughed. The next day as I came to transcribe I managed to delete 3 hours of that conversation and I was in pieces. Not because just because of the work lost, but also because I was thinking about how much pain and uncertainty that we had all shared alone. I had thought I could pass it on with this document and I felt such responsibility with that. It’s not paternalistic, although they are younger than me, they were looking after me too, they made feeling into words for me. But I really genuinely feel like I have this weird position where I swallowed so many things for so long and progressed this far, which seems so far away to them as they are all so much more precarious. Now I’m gathering all the things they have swallowed so they don't have to swallow for as long as me, and putting it back where it belongs, sending all that toxic, enmeshed whiteness and internalised racism and forced compliance into this paper.

My phone died this morning, and I lost a big chunk of the end of our conversation which was obviously heartbreaking, but in the midst of losing that I was just thinking that having that conversation was so important, and actually I didn’t need it recorded as I know it all already, our stories are all too sadly familiar and just lay on top of each other’s.

There were resonances that were so strong and specificities so painful. The bits of the recording that were lost that lived on in my body were conversations that shared how paternalistic ‘mentors’ became, trying to perform benevolence when in fact enacting helplessness. Turning a structural problem into a personal one. Asking questions like “but what do you want to do?” and having to say something but really you just need a job, but they can’t understand that, because at some point they got lucky and they have decided that wasn’t luck or benefitting from inequity, it was merit, something that was special about them that you don’t have, but they feel this sense of needing to show you that they understand, are trying to help, and perhaps they become more aware of their lives in that moment, more aware of the monoculture and so they try to insert themselves into your lives, tell you the critical race theory they have read, or the Black partner they are with, instead of asking you who you are, finding out, spending time.

They wave more “opportunities” in your face, more schemes “you should apply for that” and they say there will be a bursary but then there isn’t or then there is but they haven’t budgeted enough money, so then you have to tell them, and become the problem, the difficult one, but if they’d asked you what you need to survive instead of thinking about what they wanted to be seen to give then maybe there wouldn’t have to be someone who was the problem.

We talked about a complete lack of understanding of our lived realities, that diverged so starkly from our knowledge about them, someone said something like “we understand them, we’ve been looking at them our whole lives” And I think about all the white school teachers, and all the white lecturers and all the people I have begged for a job and how they haven’t seen me or ignored me when I’ve bumped into them and ghosted me, given me terrible work to do, and how I’ve always smiled and been happy, so detached from my body because they detached me from it.

How they couldn’t understand all the shame of telling your parents you didn’t have a job, or were doing another internship, or another programme that paid nothing, or having to send your parents money because they were poorer than you, of being far away from home and being told to come back if you didn’t have a job, of getting a job and being racialised and humiliated but staying there because you had to and having to tell your family that it was great and how there was no vocabulary in place to name it for what it was.

How do we name this labour that we are so lucky to have where we are a subsidised workforce, making tea for white people or answering the phones or just being ignored?

And then when you wanted to stop being the grateful one, the emerging one, and started to ask for more, they said you were entitled, ‘needed to muck in’, weren’t interested in the ‘real work’ but then you see others come through and they don’t have to do any of it, because they never have to be grateful so that thing that they tell you about being lucky, that way that they treat you as if they can help you if you just work hard, it just a way to disempower you wrapped up in a way to help you.

It's not about making the tea, it's about getting to a place as quickly as possible where someone will make tea for you, where someone will field your calls because you’re so busy. And people who don’t have our home lives, where housework was the same as real work and no labour was denigrated, or had our parents who told us to be good, and grateful and listen to white people, the people who had public school educations, the people who know how those people work, what they respect and what they don’t, they don’t do that housework. They elevate themselves up quicker and we see that.

It’s discrimination, because we felt it, because we felt it and others didn’t, that's differential treatment, it is real. But in the way that diversity was spoken about, we were the lucky few that had made it in, and we should be happy we’d been included. And sometimes we buy into that because we have to, and we’re told it’s “unconscious’ and it's in our heads and they are ‘trying’ so hard so if we work really hard then it won’t be trying for us for too long or people that realise quicker the terms of the game and had parents who named the racism for them they find a way in and through or out and free, but we’re never free really there is always a cost.

Or the ones that buy into that narrative and kept our heads down and how that head down meant we couldn’t look around and see each other, help each other. How that head down meant we moved towards being as unfeeling as them. And you convince yourself that being disconnected like that from your feelings and bodies might be the way to have more choices, but you don’t know, because no one has told you that your feelings and your bodies give you more.

That feeling more is having more choices, the feeling less is what they want you to feel and that dissociation means depoliticisation.

We talked about not being prepared for the kind of racism faced, that it took so long to process, name, to undo. Someone said “I hadn’t really thought about racism before I came into this programme, now I think about it all the time”. And the feeling of being gaslit, rendered helpless as people deny racism and decide that we need training and they repeat the cycle over and over again. And that helplessness is not ours but it is whiteness, leaking into every corner, that helplessness becomes written into every policy, every conversation you have with the people that say they have come to help you as they talk about “progress” and “complexity” and 10 year plans because change takes time. And then that helplessness that manufactures that time, that helplessness that is whiteness, turns again into us, as we talk together and we cry and see the truth and it seems insurmountable “what are we going to do?” “where are we going to go?” and it feels like a road that we’ve travelled too far down, we’re trapped.

And that moment we realise we exist less than them, and they make us rely on them to render us visible. We participate thinking we might become visible and if we stay around long enough, we hear people start to say “wow they are great” “wow look at you, the future of the industry” but when it comes to making those words into action, into the power that controls the industry, they actualise those words in white mediocrity that is always so much more brilliant to them than their bestowed Black and Brown excellence.

And what is it that we wait around for in concrete terms? What happiness can be gained when the terms of engagement are so contorted and two faced?

This call to wait which we must answer with positivity, to not be a cynic or a hater, but we are living in the present and by imagining this mythical ten years that they have been imagining forever, they rob us of our imagination, but also our present existence. Make us detach and feel less just to get through it.

We talked about that selective visibility, the contact to sit on panels, to lead projects of their making, to be present in videos and write blogs, but silence about jobs, about problems, silent about whiteness and racism. And we smile in photos because that’s what you’re supposed to do, but when we see those photos, we see something else, we see the lie, and what does that do, what do we do with that feeling that has no validation? How can we process it? So we push it down into our bodies, where it was never meant to be, we become sponges for the toxicity that was never of our making.

Transforming Silence

These conversations were the fuel as well as the fire for my own circulation of complaint writing. I wrote a letter, full of memories, full of realisation. The letter became the basis of this paper. The letter wasn’t an open letter, it was for behind closed doors, but I opened it out, I shared it with others. It travelled into other bodies. It was my truth and once it was written it couldn’t be stopped, my truth increasingly clarified into an articulation of the truth. Stories came back towards me, long letters and messages, embodied responses. It started to take on a new meaning, partly to do with myself:

It doesn't matter in a way to me if the institution listens which I doubt it will because you know who am I really, in the face of all this history. But in a way in the articulation of it, I understood it better and that to me is a thing that's been robbed from me, from being in those spaces is that clarity, that framing that stops you from knowing what's happening.

In the process of writing it, I asked for help. People sent me edits, many were about feeling. People were worried about the vulnerability. My friends gave me strategies for sharing, helped me be careful about what I shared in the letter. I balanced out the feeling with fact, a little like this report here. Because in dialogue with others, the feeling took on a whole new importance:

In all honesty, I wasn't surprised by anything you said. I was just surprised that you'd gone through it because I didn't think you had because I think for a long time, I thought you were really stable and I didn't... I think I always just felt too emotional for a lot of spaces and angry and I felt like other people weren't which is why I'm getting emotional now because I've realised everyone's gone through similar stuff.

Ahmed’s work on complaint (2016—) is a form of gathering “testimonies”, in keeping her research process open and unstructured, she wanted the “stories to come out, fall out, in whatever order they came out.” (Ahmed 2019). In my own unstructured conversations and through the circulation of my letter parts of my own story fell out too. As we started examining why we had spoken out (either through complaint or to each other thus refusing dissociation) we shared the journeys to speaking out. I shared stories about my family, about myself, that are also in fragments in this piece. Beyond the actual events that had harmed us, we talked about who that made us, how we connected better to who we actually were. Many people talked about legacy, about their parents, the foundation of political activism that they stood on that allowed them to understand what activism could do, why voices mattered. Such conversation allowed us to connect with a fuller, more specific part of ourselves and think about why it was important for us to to speak out, and to fully feel and express those feelings.

For a long time during those conversations I wondered what I was passing on to my own daughter, where my criticality could be rooted to. Having grown up in a home with parents who really wanted us to do well, to assimilate, what was I going to pass down to my daughter? Through talking to others, who didn’t have those overt political educations there were more intimate stories, smaller signals, permissions, or pushes:

I remember my mum always being like telling me stories about how she would rebel against this as a child and like she would have to go for Quran classes and they would get like hit, caned if they didn't do the work or they showed up in a way that was not deemed appropriate and so my mum, every time she went, would wear nail polish which wasn't allowed. And so she tells the story about how her younger sister would try and scrap the nail polish off her finger nails before the class but my mum would like, even though she would get caned every time, she would still do it. So I feel like maybe there's that kind of, it gave me permission to see things differently.

I really loved what you said about the story about your mum because my parents, so my dad was really active in student politics. Like at his university and like I think like kind of like a vigilante like on campus and I always knew that and it's so different to who he is now but I always knew that story and also my parents eloped they didn't get arranged marriages and they eloped and then they went back to their respective houses and then lied that they weren't married for a bit then got caught out. So those two things which I could hardly reconcile with the parents that I had growing up but they were things that I knew and I think you're right, there is something about those stories and not necessarily what you see your parents do but what you know that they've done that do give you some sort of blueprint of what is possible.

It was on these personal histories that our experiences of speaking out began. They were an important backdrop to my own speaking out, they became an important source of strength to the voice of my inner critic which articulated to me what we so often internalise through seeing institutions react (and not react) to complaint and dissent:

“you are a bully, the real harasser, a feminazi; you are punishing and puritanical. You are accused of wanting their jobs for yourself. You are called neoliberal feminists if you use internal disciplinary procedures, as colluding with management; you are accused of conducting a vigilante campaign or a witch hunt when you have exhausted those internal procedures.” (Ahmed 2018)

Such internal voices (which are also implicitly sanctioned by how cultural institutions seek to contain and silence or ignore such voices) stop us from imagining what might be possible if we were to speak out. In the last part of this chapter I want to think through what such acts of articulation might tell us about the moral and ethical values of our cultural institutions.

Collective Critique

In April 2019, a group of Queer & Trans Black, Indigenous people of colour prepared a statement to hand to the organisers of ‘Images Festival’, an experimental film festival in Toronto, Canada. The statement was not meant to be shared publicly, but to be handed out to select people at the event as an embodied ‘collective critique’. The document had a postscript underneath some observations and recommendations; “This document was collectively prepared by the QTBIPOC participants of the 2019 Images Research Forum. The Images Festival is a longstanding institution with a lot of power and resources, and it is the responsibility of the people guiding that institution to act in alignment with their stated political principles.” It was given to me by someone who attended the festival and I later met the person who wrote it. The event where they shared the piece is filmed and shared online. The link is in the bibliography.

I watched the video of Saj and Priya and the other forum participants delivering the Collective Critique statement at images for the first time. It's so different to see the statement being delivered, to see the gesture of it in full. It is such a different articulation of the labour of it. It reminds me of when I first read it and I shared it with my work ‘friends’. I was excited by the language, the ease with which the collective demanded that their perspectives be properly used, that they were seen in their full selves, the standards of representation that they demanded as minimum. I had shared it in the hope that I might be brave enough to say what I felt, to talk about things I’d not yet articulated about the ways difference was being spoken about, viewed and presented. I remember assuming the people I had sent it to were people who were my friends, I assumed they would know exactly what I was talking about, be open to a conversation.

But a few hours later there was an email that thanked me for sending it and offered a counter critique back to me. One that drew attention to the framing, the context, the broad considerations at play. A response that contained the critique as embodied in the collective whose expectations had not been met, one that humanised the institution by expressing connection with the difficulty that would be processed and addressed by them as well meaning individuals, doing their best. In that process of defending the thing that was being critiqued, the labour and realities of those embodied in difference, like me, were sidelined and contained, and made specific to a reality that was other, it wasn’t part of ‘ours’. And its connection to my reality, well, at that moment it was cut, stopped from growing into a dialogue with ‘friends’.

It stopped the story of my sending it, and the story inside that impulse to send being told.

My request to discuss the statement turned into a request to have ‘discursive’ conversations and that request as it was deflected told me that it wasn’t my place to send that instruction their way. Or that that critique could not be absorbed in the place where I sent it, it slid right off or it fell completely flat.

When I watch the video back now, I see two participants speak about the act of radical friendship, the gesture, the work, the rigour, the intention of creating what one participant calls “the speculative space for new imagining”. How those moments that questions are contained instead of held and allowed to address other bodies, they

constrict that imagination, stunt it. And that stunting is not friendship, a relationship based on two equals, it's a learnt dialogue between people conditioned into dominance and submission, it's an instruction to be silent even when we mouth the words of dialogue.

I pass around the statement again later in the summer, gathering together with newly formed bonds of friendship. We are a ‘Fellowship’, we have formed a collective over the space of a year, worked together, to actualise within a structure we don’t always feel comfortable with. Within it we critique it, complain about its limited world view, its hierarchies, its unreasonable demands that discriminate against the most precarious, the most marginal, that replicate the shitty world that we are trying to change. I listen, but I feel overwhelmed by the cacophony so I put up pieces of paper for people to write what they feel, I type it up with Adele, type it up like the statement, I pass it around as an example. I suggest we give it to the organisers, and to the future cohorts so they have a vocabulary, so they can begin where we left off. And people who talked so much about what they didn’t like are now so very quiet.

The language is too political, it is angry, it is too critical, it's negative and unconstructive and I say yes let's talk about that and I step away from owning it, I pass it over to others to finesse it, to translate it, to smooth out the edges.

As I watch Saj deliver their address to the group, I see their act of friendship extended and I realise how disembodied the statement might have seemed, without that gesture of friendship, the tearful hand of hope. And I wonder about intention, whether it can be always translated in these spaces which are full of fear and shame of getting things wrong, of not having things, of having things taken away.

I wonder what kind of friendships can grow in this space, if we haven’t unlearnt scarcity. And I think about bell hooks talking through the night with Eddie George and Stuart Hall. About their ‘broken voices’ the pain contained in that suffering - the sound nobody wants to hear. And how that they heard each other in ‘a deeply soulful way’ but that finding that space, away from the edge, is a journey in itself, sometimes in harm’s way.^[9]

I try again in the autumn with a different group, this time with a small gesture, a small hand of hope. I feel this I say, do you feel it too? Would you like to meet and maybe talk and think through? And some people are silent, some people don’t get it, some deny and defend, but a few people send hands back and I pull myself up. And the stories start coming and I start writing my own.

I write about the last 10 years of processing this mess. Of the disconnection between what was said and what I lived. Of the fatigue of having no control over my hypervisibility and invisibility. The exhaustion of feeling like I had only just arrived when I’d been there for 10 years and no one had noticed, even when I’d sat next to them every day in an office. The weariness of having my viewpoint only selectively used.

And I write it and send it to others. Some people tell me it's too emotional. Don’t send it, send the letter with the recommendations, the one that’s more practical and useful.

and the truth is not always angry and powerful - sometimes it's hurt and confused.

Especially when you are reaching out in hopeful ‘friendship’ towards those who erased you, and clinging on to a hope if you can just explain to them in words, you might be able to come back from being disappeared. But then Tega comes with a pen, changes and rearranges, and says something else. “It's ok to be vulnerable, but not everyone deserves your pain”.

And so I send this edited vulnerability in private, and the things that emerge make me sadder than ever. A realisation that my reality cannot fully be comprehended with all the refinements, and edits, and conversations in the world,

And I realise the letter wasn’t really intended for them, it was for me to see me for me to re-appear to myself. I realise the letter needs to be sent to the past and the future,

So I start sending it in those directions and I get emails, and phone calls. Messages of validation, pleas for me to leave, Campbell tells me ‘leave now and don’t waste the next 10 years of your life’.

And I think about waste, the people I have met and spoken to who have wasted so much time feeling discarded, so much time feeling crazy, sad and alone. And so many of the conversations we held just went into the air, but some were recorded and when I had them transcribed I was so scared to read them in case we didn’t make sense. I realised I’d learnt that, this fear of illegibility, I’d learnt to expect this from all the spaces I’d been in, all the blank faces I’d seen. But when I read them they shone with clarity and insight. They had a throughline of understanding, a mutual respect.

And each interlocutor had taught me something, but as I was talking I was also teaching myself.

And I think about that thing that everyone says to me when I leave a job, or when I went on maternity leave “thank you for challenging us” and how I have never understood it properly, until I looked at those transcripts, how I have been pushing and pushing against a big wall.

And when there is no wall, a conversation emerges, it's not a challenge or confrontation but a radical opening. A space where no one is rendered illegible, no one has to move into silence, or move from centre to margin or margin to centre, but the whole space opens up to into a space of liberation:

“not a site of domination but a place of resistance’ Enter that space. This is an intervention. I am writing to you. I am speaking from a place in the margins where I am different, where I see things differently. I am talking about what I see.”

Telling the Truth

I have learned about how power works by the difficulties I have experienced in trying to challenge power.

In my conversations with others, I learnt how it was our personal histories (and not the inner critics which Ahmed described) that put us on the ethical frontline of dissonance in the cultural sector. Because these histories were in our bodies, they meant something to us. This was the feeling of unease I was trying to process when I was thinking through my role as a public programmer and when navigating spaces as a participant in culture.

Repeatedly people discussed how detachment, rationality, professionalism seemed inappropriate when such empty gestures caused such harm. One person talked about the trauma of speaking in front of an all white audience and talking about race and being heckled in person and online. When the online comments kept coming she wondered why the organisers were “doing customer service” with racist audience members.

In the face of such dehumanization, embodied writing, ‘telling our truth’ became more important than institutional accountability. A complaint (whether official or as simple as an email addressing problematic behaviour) can be a way of cleansing ourselves from participating in something we feel complicit in. We are reflexive, we try to better, be vigilant of next time being pulled in. We try to live by our ethical codes, but in the process of drawing attention to the problem, we become a problem that cannot easily be addressed (Ahmed 2017).

I genuinely didn't want anything, genuinely just wanted to tell the truth and genuinely naively assumed that telling the truth had some function to it….And one of the things that I've been saying is like I can't tell you what I want because I can't imagine a situation where this would go away. You haven't made it go, you need to make it feel better for me in order for me to imagine how I could fit in it. And the other thing that I've been saying to them is the reason why you don't know what to do with me is because I don't fit and if I don't fit but you still think I'm of value then do you not think the thing needs to change rather than I need to change? ….So it goes back to no “but what can I do for you?” And now I’m this person that writes these long emails and texts and messages and sends all this reading. But for me, it's not just been about getting a job, but like drawing attention to what has been taken.

Like for me it's been very much like I've just wondered if I even exist in that space.

In a conversation with someone I am asked “have you grieved?” And towards the end of the year, on the run up to the election in December 2019, I feel so much loss. Through learning about all the ways that the values of our cultural institutions uphold the values of our government during this period of research it became harder to understand how I could participate. How could I process a government that mobilised the same politics of representation that I saw the cultural sector do by assembling a ‘diverse’ cabinet but enacting such profound harm on the populations of the country that were supposedly now ‘represented’? It has become harder and harder to participate in cultural institutions that can’t seem to grasp the twisted logic that they replicate. Speaking to a friend on the day after the election, they tell me they left themselves a note on their phone to consider for later:

The moment

The morning after the election, I went to talk to Rabz in Peckham. We ended up talking about mothering, about navigating the city when you are Londoner, about changing social class through your work, how that can have a gentrifying effect on your life. I shared the churned up feelings of having Leena, how that had become linked with the divisiveness of the election, about how the election had brought into stark relief a gulf of relating in my family that went deep. Rabz talked about their mother, Barby, what she has passed down, how she has prepared them for such processing by being able to name how racism functions in these cultural spaces we find ourselves in.

We talked about dislocation, belonging, Rabz described a practice they have of walking around parts of Brixton Market, parts they grew up around, claiming the space and the memories, engaging with it, rather than hardening themselves to the changes.

The conversation was just a moment, a morning coffee between art friends. But it went deep, and stayed lodged. I walked back home, to Hackney and looked around me properly for the first time in what felt like months. Looked past the new shops and cafes, attached to the new builds and walked in and out of the Asian supermarkets. I picked up some fresh fruit and veg, and went home and wrapped dumplings, made soup. I listened to music that made me dance.

As I was walking around, I remembered the most recent Experimenta debate, from October 2019 which Rabz had curated. How I had felt more disembodied than ever at the beginning of this film festival as I looked down the barrel of q&a after q&a, gentrified interactions piled on top of one another. I stopped by the event in between these q&a’s took a moment to listen and see the last few presentations. I caught Adam Farah share their work MEDICATED SUMMERS / BENEFITS TRAP / ENDS PORTALS what they describe as a two-part momentational* sequence, momentational being defined as a pronounced dwelling on the ephemeral – influenced by Mariah Carey’s queer disidentificatory theorisations of THE MOMENT.

In that moment, it felt radical to me that someone would stand on stage, prepare with poppers and just talk, completely in their own voice. It shifted me to see the space around me differently, to not feel occupied by whiteness, to stage an occupation on it.

In the discussions that followed about pop music and cultural references, Rabz said something like, “it made me think of all the things I’ve taught myself not to like.”

Conclusion The beginning of the End (originally written in February 2020 and updated June 2020)

To be able to imagine should hold a power of freedom beyond expectation and institutional bondage. Instead, the imagination has been capitalised as a bartering tool of culture to dictate who defines culture and who culture belongs to - who is allowed to imagine and have those imaginings exist without being gaslit, undervalued and undercut. Despite this, what I continue to learn is that Black cultures - in all their hues, impacts and differences - carry the art and life of performance and theatre in their bones as both a radical form of expression as well as a tool of survival. Kano teaches me that the Imagined Theatre I wish to form is true and unapologetic work that comes from the freedom and validity of the imagination, ourselves and our communities. So, if I want to tell Britain to “Suck Your Mum”, I can. And I will.

I feel that the process that is recorded on these pages is just the beginning. I feel I have just cleared some space in which to now actually work and find ways forward to participate in the cultural sector. I write at the end of this period of study ambivalent about my relationship to the sector. I have an institutional job that I am going to return to, but it is difficult to comprehend as I sit down and write this as it leaves me conflicted as to the next steps of this piece. I have advocated in this paper, for reform.

STOP

In the tunnel vision required to write a piece this length, I miss the news. The day I press send on the paper, my friend Dion comes over to celebrate. We drink some champagne, I am wired and edgy, full of connections that I have made in this paper. I talk too fast and too much. Not all of it makes sense.

He starts talking about coronavirus and I am confused. He tells me this virus is going to be huge, it is going to impact everything. I am not ready to hear.

A few weeks later, I return to work after 15 months away. It's the 23rd March 2020 and lockdown is announced in the UK.

I am grateful I can work from my home so as not to be contaminated by whiteness.

Before I go back I share the research with my manager. I say “I wanted to share it with you (in confidence) because it raises some things that are important to me that you understand before I return.”

I am questioned about my public commitment to the organisation, my “public face”, I think about Ahmed’s writing on recruitment as a “technology for reproducing whiteness: adding colour to the white face of the organisation confirms the whiteness of that face.”

“The paper is also about how the constraints of institutions impact some people (unfairly and in discriminatory ways) much more than others. So being a 'public face' is something that is a more complicated thing for me than it might be for you”

As the virus spreads fear, a conversation about inequality, about care, about state sanctioned indifference gathers momentum. I apply it to my work. Articulate it into possible action.

Meanwhile she is “busy keeping us afloat” because we must show that we are worth saving by the government.

I try again, point out that this is not how equality works. Point out how it has not worked for me. Say I am not made of metal, I am not a hammer. Say that the industry will be socially cleansed if we don’t pay attention.

When I first sat down to write the conclusion to this paper, I was heavy with grief. It was difficult to move to the space to make ‘actionable recommendations’ or create an ‘executive summary.’

I realise that between now (June 2020) and the date I originally wrote it (February 2020) that this paper doesn’t advocate for reform, as I had originally thought, but rather documents the personal costs of individuals attempting institutional reform, unsupported and unrecognised in cultural institutions that replicate the indifferent harms of the state.

I haven’t made any recommendations as to how. Partly this is because of the scale and depth at which I would like to work. But partly it is also an issue of trust. I have met and learnt from many people in the space of the last year and a half who have wonderful ideas about reform. However, their work is committed to movement from the ground up, and this paper will perhaps be read in a different direction. Or perhaps it will not be read at all, because I don’t have a two page summary that can summarise the complexity of all that is contained in its pages. But it is a resource of testimony that is hidden in our sector. This paper contains much of the truth about ‘inclusion’.

The world is collectively demanding an end to harm. An end to racialised (and all) inequality. The world is collectively raging at those who have too long enacted exclusion while performing benevolence.

Perhaps off the back of that truth telling, some real work can emerge, some real change.

The worldwide Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the global uprisings triggered by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade and many others in the US have triggered protests, anger and a deep period of grief for those in the UK who remember Joy Gardner, Sean Riggs, Cynthia Jarett, Mark Duggan and the many more who have died in the hands of the state. Many are mourning the disproportionate number of Black and Asian key workers who have died of coronavirus. Many like Belly Mujinga, who died keeping a key service running while being treated with the utmost contempt both by the public they ‘serve’ and the authorities that are supposedly there to protect them. These realities show it is not yet possible to exist as a person embodied indifference, in any industry or institution in the UK, the fullest sense in the arts, an a hostile environment that increasingly seems to privilege self-interested individuals in a market economy rather than nurturing a network of relationships between people.

It is now clearer than ever that these are the things we need to take care of, to articulate and to fund. It is not enough to be diverse and multiplus, it is not enough to display this visibility without care and understanding. Recruitment, training, professional development, prize giving and positive discrimination are all worthless in the face of the historic theft to British culture enacted by those who continue to most benefit from the fruits of it. important things we must consider, but within these considerations must exist another.

What evidence is there that anything can realistically be demanded of this harmful system beyond survival? What evidence is there that those who have benefitted from us being grateful whilst they are entitled, brazen and arrogant can now care for us?

Everywhere cracks are appearing, in the arts, the media, the state, the higher education sector. Everywhere, these cracks are being hastily plastered over.

As Black people and those who stand with them burn with rage at decades of injustice, decades of white supremacy, white institutions and leaders say they are ready to ‘do the work’.

Is it us, who have been excluded, setting about winning the hearts and minds of those who have indifferently excluded for decades? Writing and consulting, colluding and becoming complicit in our own subjugation?

Is it asking those who have for decades been unable to read, to hear or to see, to now understand, that how we withhold or enact our understandings of one another, how we reflect and grow in the face of our interactions with one another, must be connected to wider politics and entrenched societal behaviours? It is key to the success of us being included and it is vital if including us is to give us the liberty of participation as well as the equality of existence.

The result of a relatively short period of deep study, during a time of internal transformation and hopefulness for me as I find my way with my daughter, but set in the backdrop of political shifts in Britain that at times has caused me to question whether it

Is it desirable or even possible to exist in a country where as Gary Younge recently wrote in The Guardian “racism, cynicism and intolerance on the rise, wages stagnant and faith that progressive change is possible declining even as resistance grows.” Younge’s piece speaks about society as he sees it from his socialist perspective. He could just as easily be describing my view of the cultural sector as embodied by the most generously funded ‘public’ institutions populated by a largely monocultural “creative class” end up replicating and upholding the worst and most dissonant inequalities of our society. But Younge’s final lines in his powerful piece, the last of his writing as a staffed member for The Guardian, a predominantly white organisation of which he had been part of for 20 years are equally resonant for me as I consider the future of my participation in the cultural sector:

“The propensity to despair is strong, but should not be indulged. Sing yourself up. Imagine a world in which you might thrive, for which there is no evidence. And then fight for it.”

Radical hope, radical reimaginings, radical friendships have been forged through this piece. But these forgings cannot be read, bought, sold, consulted on. They are not a product, to be exchanged.

This has been more than gathering information, more than writing a history. More than collecting testimony. It has been a spiritual revolution, an internal awakening.

The energies of this awakening and the many others that led to it, must be gathered, nurtured outside the gaze of whiteness, away from its structures of benevolence, its structures of mediations, its newly built structures of guilt and performative allyship.

Epilogue

Enough

Towards the end of the research, I'm with Rehana and we go for a drink after we’ve put our babies to bed. We end up in a bar we haven’t been in for ages, at a time we would never be there anymore after the babies, but also after the gentrification. We talk about being mums and our kids and our relationships. We tell our birth stories.

I tell her about how the research is making me realise how these institutions make you forget so much, like how every stage of this process has dislodged a memory that I have kept hidden and buried, and how dislodging them has been a process of grief for myself, but also a release from that feeling that I embodied lack.

How talking to others about our experiences had been so heavy and emotional but we’d done it in spaces that meant something. Community spaces where people made us free cups of tea, or my house after a home cooked meal, or in the time that someone cleared for me to speak my thoughts that seemed disorderd, but in dialogue with theirs and in the transcripts, rang with our collective clarity and purpose,

Rehana reminds me of the first time we met, on a panel, the two South Asian women talking about a filmmaker that wasn’t South Asian. The framing of the event, the make up of the audience, some combination of that resulted in a kind of protest from three women in the audience, all white. They objected to our embodied readings, told us to locate the work in history, in the people that the filmmaker had made the films with to not say what we saw and felt, but what was really there.

And perhaps they could have been prepared that we were there as respondents and not historians, that our perspectives were being shared as the films travelled through time into the present and we were talking about making sense of them through our eyes, but they weren’t. So we had to sit there and hear that negation of us.

I didn’t remember the details of that moment. I remembered the feeling of panic that I felt from feeling that I didn’t belong triggered, but not the details and not the words.

Just the physical intensity of processing the projected hypervisibility and invisibility and staged speech and silencing combined.

And yet numbness because I was on medication to numb the amount of processing I was doing every day.

And Rehana tells me she made a film about it, and it changed her practice entirely. And she doesn’t say this exactly, but I hear something like her new attunement to whiteness, a reorienting of her relationship to it. Almost a line on what she would and wouldn't accept. A point at which she begins to move out deep from her location, not the proximity that whiteness placed her in. She says she told herself:

When I go to Adele’s house to write this paper, I watch Michelle Citron’s What You Take for Granted the work Rehana references in hers and learn about “fogging” this process of disappearing that women who worked in sexist and racist places did and I look up fogging and see its a management strategy for containment. A way of blocking negative energy, a way to avoid the ‘snaps’ that Sara Ahmed shows us we need^[10].

I remember all the things that were happening that year, some of which are in this paper, and I remember how ill I had been, and all the ways I’d tried to actually make myself disappear like those women in the audience tried with their words. And I write to Rehana, and tell her and she writes back. She says it is hard to hear what I’d been absorbing and carrying in my body, making it ill through a kind of toxic osmosis, absorbing things that didn’t belong to me or in me and says “honestly I'm struck with how lonely you must have been”

And I think about how we met that day, but how we never talked again because that space that felt thick with my feelings of shame and humiliation, my feelings of being wrong left no room for our friendship to grow. And how when we were thrown into another, different situation we connected through the births of our children, born just weeks apart. Connected easily and openly through our love of them, a love of care and caring, and the honour we felt attached to that act. And how that care marks our dialogue, even when it stutters, we work on it, and through it, handle it with care.

In birth it is the moment where the birth becomes real. It's the moment that women think “I can’t do it”, but it's the moment that what they’ve been waiting for for so long is most inevitable, it’s a shift, a merging and emerging of ourselves and a new body.

And I think about other friends and their bodies, and how transition for them is another kind of movement, the journey into a new body over time, a reconnection of the self to the body free from the confines of what we have been taught to accept.

And I wonder at all our parallel movements, and the synergies I feel, and energies they share and how much I have to learn about every single body that has been through a transition. An expansive opening out of the centre to accommodate what once seemed just on the margins of imagination. To accommodate what seemed impossible into the reality of the lived.

And as I travel home on the train from Scotland, from being with Sue and Adele, writing in the Women’s Library and hearing about their lifetime of placemaking, a lifetime of organising, a lifetime of imagining and learning I don’t feel lonely. I think about all the times I’ve been cared for in the process of thinking this through, and how deep every conversation and piece of learning has lodged and how so much of what didn’t belong to me has become dislodged.

And yes it's written here, but it's no longer mine, it's their mess to clean up or it's an archive, a reminder of all the times I’ve seen a blank face but the thoughts I have tried to form have really made sense.

So I don’t know what more can change through you reading these words, but I know I’ve moved through something and so,

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The research that enabled this paper was funded partly by Clore Leadership Programme & partly by AHRC.

The research was supervised with care and attention (and friendship) by Sarita Malik at Brunel University

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[2] This gap has been acknowledged by the recently announced Sir Lenny Henry Centre For Media Diversity. The centre will: 1. Create an open archive of diversity publications by academics, broadcasters, unions & trade bodies. 2. Build & support institutional memory of best practice. 3. Conduct new & focused research on diversity. 4. Offer analysis on diversity initiatives & policies (from Marcus Ryder Twitter 10:14 AM · Feb 26, 2020) @marcusryder https://twitter.com/marcusryder/status/1232609864171454465

[3] In his review for The Evening Standard David Sexton describes the film as “wholly unbalanced” due to its choice to focus not on the police, but on the subjectivities of the film’s subjects who were friends of a man who was killed by police. He describes these men as “consumed with hatred for the police” describing their views on police as familiar ranting about frustration, disrespect, and then, inevitably, “losing it”. And music made in tribute to their friend as “a lot of crass rap music about Duggan as a hero.” He ends the piece by saying that while the film “a rare and valuable insight into the anger, alienation and absolute enmity to the police among many young black men in Tottenham” the film also “makes you feel sympathy not only for its subjects but also for those, here unseen, unheard, who have to cope with that every day.” i.e. the police. (Sexton, 2015)

[4] “One flaw in this film is that it doesn’t address the investigative reporting of David Rose in the Mail on Sunday, which suggests the Duggan killing was a byproduct of the police’s mismanaged operation Trident.” (Bradshaw 2016)

[5] https://www.flahertyseminar.org/welcome The Flaherty seminar is an annual week long immersive film event in upstate New York. The Seminar began in the 1950s – before the era of film schools-when Robert Flaherty's widow, Frances, convened a group of filmmakers, critics, curators, musicians, and other film enthusiasts at the Flaherty farm in Vermont. For more than sixty years the Flaherty Seminar has been firmly established as a one-of-a-kind institution that seeks to encourage filmmakers and other artists to explore the potential of the moving image. The films of such directors as Louis Malle, the Maysles brothers, Mira Nair, Satyajit Ray, Agnés Varda, John Cassavetes, Marlon Riggs, Yasujiro Ozu, Pedro Costa and Joris Ivens were shown at the Seminar before they were known generally in the American film community. New cinematic techniques and approaches first presented at the Seminar have routinely made their way into mainstream film. A central tenet of the Flaherty Film Seminar is non-preconception: filmmakers and films are not revealed until they are screened.

[6] An exception is Rianna Jade Parker’s piece on Art New which went up on 26 February 2019 as I was finishing this paper. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/kara-walker-tate-modern-fons-americanus-1202678828/

[7] A notable exception was Naomi Obeng review in Exeunt Magazine Published 27 January 2020 which was deliberately posted after the end of the show, and grappled with more ambivalent feelings triggered by the piece but didn’t talk about the institutional frame which further problematizes it. http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/review-fairview-young-vic/

[9] “In an intense-all-night conversation with Eddie George (member of Black Audio Film Collective) talking about the struggle of oppressed people to come to voice, he made a very ‘down’ comment that ‘ours is a broken voice’. My response was simply that when you hear the broken voice you also hear the pain contained within that brokenness - a speech of suffering; often it’s that sound nobody wants to hear. Stuart Hall talks about the need for a ‘politics of articulation’. He and Eddie have engaged in dialogue with me in a deeply soulful way, hearing my struggle for words. It is this dialogue between comrades that is a gesture of love; I am grateful.

‘This work isn’t for us’