I don’t hate the Arts Council (article)

I don’t hate the Arts Council (article)

Through almost monthly blogs, articles and talks on social media over the last two years, I have sought to highlight how Arts Council England (ACE) has consistently failed to achieve racial equity in its distribution of funding. This might be considered slightly obsessive, or as a personal attack based on acrimony. But that isn’t the case.

ACE is an organisation which fascinates me. It seems to be continuously on the brink of transformation around inclusivity, but it never quite makes the leap. From the side lines, I’ve been willing it to make the changes necessary for it to continue to be relevant in the 21st century.

But as they say, ‘it’s the hope that kills you’. But it is ‘hope’. And that doesn’t come from animosity but from a place of relationship. I have a strong, but complex bond with ACE.

A strange relationship

Having initially funded my first project Tribal Tree, they then withdrew funding 7 years later despite the project’s obvious successes. The funding was reallocated to support the redevelopment of the Roundhouse, located just across the road from our building.

I was crushed and unsure what my next career move would be. But it was ACE again, a year later, that sponsored my place on the Clore Leadership Programme. That led to my next project MeWe360 that ACE helped launch with an initial investment of £1m. And eight years later came Create Equity, whose early development ACE also funded.

Having been the cause of an existential trauma, ACE was then a key part of my recovery and growth as a social entrepreneur. But it was also part of my growth as an activist. While at Clore, I carried out research on race, power and identity. That research – a personal enquiry – drives my current thinking on structural inequalities and my motivation to do something about it.

ACE has created this beast that hounds them and continues (at least for now) to fund my projects. It’s a strange relationship: with one hand I gratefully receive its support while with the other I write regular critiques on its inability to fund in a racially equitable way.

Why do I seemingly bite the hand that feeds me? Why not just take the money and be quiet?

Silence, power and racism

My silence would be tantamount to being racist; endorsing a system I know to be racially inequitable for my own benefit.

ACE is the largest funder of the arts in the UK by a long way, with more funding than the other major arts funders combined. Its dominant position means that as well as distributing its own budget (c.£943m in21/22) it exerts considerable influence on how other funders distribute their grants as they regularly support organisations in receipt of ACE funding.

ACE’s scale and ‘financial pull’ means that were it to distribute its funding equitably, a likely outcome would be that all arts funding would become more racially equitable. But the major block is that currently ACE is not able to distribute funding in a racially equitable way. After fulfilling its obligation to fund the major museums, galleries and theatres, it has insufficient money left to do so.

90% of ACE funding is allocated to incumbent institutions. Even if the remaining 10% were diverted to BAME-led organisations, ACE would still not achieve racially equitable funding. This is what I call ‘incumbency bias’ and is not necessarily a problem in itself. My challenge is that ACE remains silent on incumbency bias.

Ibram X. Kendi’s work on anti-racism provides a frame on which to position such organisational silence. To be an anti-racist organisation you must act when faced with processes and procedures that deliver inequitable outcomes. According to Kendi, the act of naming systemic inequalities – simply talking about them – is in itself an anti-racist act.

Silence, he says, is the opposite. ACE’s silence makes it complicit in maintaining a racist system. My almost singular focus on ACE over the last two years is not because they are the only holders of silence, but because they are by far the most powerful.

If I were to remain silent (or inactive) in the face of ACE’s inability or refusal to fund equitably, I would also be complicit. Such silence, according to Kendi, would also be a racist act. Uncomfortable as it is, and I sit far from comfortably when writing these articles, there is no hiding place for ACE, or for me, when it comes to taking an anti-racist position.

Champions of a better system

I am a product – at least in part – of ACE’s various funding programmes over the last 25 years. I could reasonably be considered its poster child; one of its too few racial diversity success stories. But to remain silent would be to abandon all the learning and leadership that ACE has enabled over the past 25 years; it would be to waste the money they have invested in me.

Racial inequity cannot be allowed to stand simply through our complicity or silence. It must be challenged. In this sense, we who call for a fair distribution of ACE funds, who point to its policies and practices that prevent it, who suggest possible solutions, should be seen not as ‘haters’ of ACE but as champions of a better funding ecosystem, of which ACE is a major part.

In the upcoming outcomes of its spending review (October 26th), ACE has another chance to reimagine what great arts organisations of the future might look like. And, just as importantly, who will get to build them.

ACE is on the brink of another opportunity to transform itself. My hope springs eternal – that this time it will distribute at least 7% of its NPO funding to racially diverse organisations and publicly commit to racially equitable funding (14.4%) by 2031. And if it genuinely can’t, then it should take responsibility, as the dominant arts funder in the UK, to say so and to cede some of its overwhelming power to others who can.

This article was first published in Arts Professional

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My Motivation (video)

My Motivation (video)

Our most powerful motivations are often rooted in our lived experience.

In this 60 second video, I share personal motivations which have driven my work over my career as founder of Tribal Tree, MeWe360, Skin in the Game and Create Equity.

These projects are about cultivating human potential through personal development, community building and system change.

Malcolm X perhaps sums it up best:

“I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.”

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A Personal Reflection on Getting Old! (article)

A Personal Reflection on Getting Old! (article)

My resistance to emerging social norms like gender fluidity makes me feel old. Attitudes have ingrained over the years and now seem stuck despite logic to the contrary. My kids have no such problem, their young brains adapt quickly. I increasingly feel on the wrong side of the saying: ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’

Just before Christmas (pre-lockdown) I tore my calf muscle playing tennis. My doubles partner heard it snap standing at the net. I have never torn a muscle, or broken a bone. This injury is another sign of age and physical degeneration … a stark and unwelcome reminder that I can’t take liberties with my body anymore. One of life’s cruelties is having to reconcile a mind that is still willing with a body that is less able. 

But what is harder is the torture of hair loss and the sudden fret when your memory fails and you can’t recall a name. Or worse, when you forget the name of someone you were introduced to just minutes earlier.

There are upsides. I am more patient and lose my temper less. My basic DIY skills seem to be improving with age. I’ve also started to teach myself to play the drums again – I learn more slowly now, but I am better able to apply myself.

I value life and am less judgemental about all its weird forms, even though they still unsettle me. I’m willing to share my house with the odd mouse rather than trap it. I think: “live and let live!”

Given a choice, I would never swap age and experience for youth. But that doesn’t stop my grief at its loss, especially when it comes to accepting rather than just tolerating new and necessary social norms.

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Letter to my 16 year old self (article)

Letter to my 16 year old self (article)

Dear 16 year old Kevin,

It saddens me to think of you with the anxiety of any 16 year old trying to find themself, made a thousand times harder because who you are has been shaped by racism. It has become part of you. It runs so deep that you will learn to split your personality to fit in, be normal, be acceptable, be white. 

I wish I could tell you that racism, the unpicking of it and putting yourself back together, understanding it and healing from it, will be painful but ultimately rewarding work. Work that you will come to love. 

I wish I could tell you that dyslexia doesn’t make you stupid and that your mediocre exam results won’t matter. That much what you were taught was perception, not truth. That you weren’t taught much of what you needed to know to face the world with genuine confidence, and that ‘front’ you showed was not of your making. 

I wish I could tell you that being all of yourself is okay, that being black is okay, really okay. Not just because you’ve heard it said and because you were told that’s how you should feel. But because you understood the truth of it and the truth in it: that we are all the same. That we are all human, even though sometimes we can be inhumane.

That it all turns out okay and that I wouldn’t have done it any differently.

I wish I could tell you that you are ready for it all and that most of the battle for happiness and contentment is learning to love yourself and trusting your instincts. Trite as it sounds, it’s true.

I know, from watching Back to the Future, that tampering with my past would risk changing the present. So, I wouldn’t tell you any of this for fear of it taking you down a different path. But I do wish that somehow I could be there to ease the pain, just a little. 

Without you, there would be no me. Thank you for your resilience, for being a dreamer, for staying optimistic and for believing the world might be better one day, even though you didn’t know when and how. This resilience and dreaming have stayed with me. So, thank you. Keep dreaming.

 

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Framing Skin in The Game (video)

A two minute video on Skin In The Game and my process for developing it.

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In the Middle – Why I’m Writing this Blog (video)

Growing up in the seventies there was no such thing as a middle-class black man. The type of person I am now simply didn’t exist then.  I was very aware of my working-class status and like many black children, then and now, I felt less than someone who was white.  The older I got, the more conscious I became of being poor and working class – and the more I wanted to escape it, but I was trapped. Messages in the media, from teachers and my family was that education would allow me to escape poverty, improve my social status and integrate as a black boy in a white society. Although I accepted this, deep down I never truly believed it. Buried inside me was a belief I was less intelligent than my white classmates. Despite this, I put everything into studying for O’ levels and ended up with 5, all at grade ‘C’. This average performance confirmed what I already knew… that as a black boy I inherently lacked the intelligence to do better.

By the time I left school most of my friends were white and middle class. Every summer I was invited to Scotland where one of their family had a country cottage. I always said no and never knew why.   I had somehow contrived to turn myself into the beginnings of a middle-class black man, who wasn’t totally comfortable with his old black and working-class friends or his new middleclass white ones.  I got along fine in both groups but was conscious of not truly fully belonging to either. Rather than integrating me in society, my striving for educational success had made me a misfit.

More than thirty years on I want to claim my identity, and to understand what I am – a black man from a poor background who, despite the various contrivances to get there, is now middle class. I no longer feel alone. Unlike in the seventies, there are more and more middle-class black men and women. We have made progress as a society but in an increasingly divided world, there is still a huge amount to do. I’m wondering if my earlier sense of being in between social classes, might now somehow be helpful in bridging divisions in our society. That there may be a need for those who can move between class and cultures. A role in connecting people with different lived experiences.  For this reason, I have decided where possible to use personal stories to give an emotional rather than intellectual engagement with the complicated topics I will post about. The stories are intended as points of connection, not meant to illicit sympathy but hopefully some empathy and understanding. This is just the beginnings of an idea and something I want to develop through the blog by:

  • Exploring my identity as ‘middle-class black man’ 
  • Looking at news and current affairs through this unique perspective
  • Deepening my understanding of how identity, power and exclusion play out in society 
  • Using the above to come up with a project that even in a small way will make society better

This all probably sounds more organised on paper than it feels in my head as I write it. But my blog is an attempt to reconcile where I’ve come from with who I am now. To explore my ambivalence around the social justice issues that are important to me. This won’t be an orderly or carefully curated exploration, so the themes within each post and across the blog may at times seem a bit random. Also, the goals set out above may change as I add more posts on the site, have conversations and deepen my thinking.

I will start the blog anonymously as Middle Class Black Man for a combination of reasons:

  • I’m not confident in my writing
  • I’m sharing personal stories which leave me feeling vulnerable
  • Having not fully understood it or acknowledged it, I want to explore ‘middle class black man’ to understand fully who this is and what it might bring to me and to our society  
  • So MCBM is about protecting myself and exploring my status/position in the society and how I might use this to shape my future work.

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