Sabrina Chevannes:
Because I have this debate with so many people and most people don’t agree with me.
My brother agrees with me. It’s interesting, but there’s not many people who agree with me, and it’s around the issue of racism in the UK versus the US.
Now obviously there’s a lot of press and there’s a lot of media attention around what goes on in the US and it’s brutal.
It’s scary.
It’s horrible, don’t get me wrong.
But I have this theory. I’ve lived in both countries, spent a lot of time over there.
I have a theory that I think that racism — and it’s a different type of racism — in the UK is worse than it is in the US, and everyone thinks I’m nuts for saying this.
But here’s my take on it, right?
Is that in the US, you obviously have the police brutality that’s going on.
But you have guns.
We don’t.
Give us guns, it could be a whole different picture.
But, you know, you have the more obvious kind of racism, but also I think in a much larger country you have a higher number of black people.
You also have a higher number of black people in more prominent positions.
I feel like in the US that black people dominate music, dominate sports, and I think from my experience when I was over there, the depiction of black people was mixed because they had what they called the ghetto types of people they didn’t like, and they had those wealthy black people who were dominating some of the scenes.
In the UK, I asked a few people to name 10 famous British black people who are not an actor or sports person.
How many can you name?
And I didn’t get many names.
People struggled to find anyone who was successful who wasn’t either a movie star or a sports person.
So football really, and they don’t need anything else in that sense.
And that disappointed me and I felt like it said something else about racism in the UK.
And my thoughts are, when I was over in the US, I never had a single problem with the police.
Any interaction I ever had with the police, they were actually really, really nice to me.
They were really respectful.
And I don’t know if that was circumstantial or something about myself or whatever the reasoning was.
I never had any problems.
I might have just been right place, right time as opposed to the other way around.
And I just didn’t see the sort of things I see every day in the UK.
And the UK for me, it’s more subtle, right?
It’s not people getting beaten up necessarily on the street and all that kind of stuff and the N-word flying around necessarily.
I mean don’t get me wrong, there have been cases of that.
It’s more like people will disregard a person of color for a position or work or the way they talk down to them or the little quips.
They’ll say, “Oh, you actually have brains,” sort of thing.
And that sort of little things, and it’s built into culture.
And I feel like I see some form of racism at least on a weekly basis doing what I do and that really freaks me out when I come to see it because I’m like, how is it that prominent in the year 2022 with all this amazing stuff around us and so many people of color doing wonderful things and proving that not every black person deals drugs, is always a criminal, or that kind of stereotype?
And so I found that.
So for me, in a way, I see racism more in the UK in that sense than I have done in the US.
And I’d love to hear your take.
And like I said, 99% of people disagree with my view on this, but I would love to hear your experience based on when you lived in the UK versus when you lived in the US and how it’s been in terms of racism and how people have treated you.
Liana Fricker:
Okay.
So the question is, is there a difference between racism in the UK and the US and what’s been my experience with it?
Hmm.
Okay, so to that, I would say racism is different everywhere because cultures are different, right?
Again, like inspiration, it’s something that you breathe in.
You breathe it in from the stories you’re told, the stories that you tell yourself, the images that you see, and the structures that keep these things in place.
And so depending on the cultural fabric of the society that you’re living in and its history with colonialism and difference, it’s going to look like a lot of different things.
In the US, you definitely have a lot of black people who have visibility within culture.
But not business.
And so then what it means is when you are black in America, you see only a certain number of options.
And because a lot of those options are then built around the systems of racism and bias, in particular institutional racism, you have a lot of people trying to feed themselves from an incredibly exclusive, limited cup at the expense of places where you could thrive.
So it is different.
What I’ve seen in the UK is the history of colonialism, I think, changes the dynamic.
In my experience, I think that you will always have people who want to maintain structures of power because it benefits them.
And those people will tell whatever story they need to tell depending on their audience to ensure that that facade is never lifted.
And then you will have people who then breathe that in, for good or for bad, who then enforce it.
And that includes ourselves.
Because when you look at, say, professional occupations and that’s broken down by race or ethnicity — black people, Pakistani, Asian, mixed race people are represented in different proportions than white people depending on the industry.
And so when I look at those stats, I find that really fascinating.
So I think to myself, okay well why?
Why is it that black people make up less than four percent of water and energy employment?
No judgment.
I’m interested as to why.
And then when I dig into that why, that will lead me down — okay, well what does education look like?
How much are we exposing people to these as career options?
What are the career options within that?
What’s the pay?
What’s the salary?
Black people are, you know, 42% of education in the UK.
But I think then what jobs are they doing there?
Because from what I see and hear, we don’t have a lot of black teachers.
So where are they?
Right.
So this is why I love numbers.
I love data because it tells a different type of story and allows you to think differently.
Because what happens is the divisiveness, I think, forms this layer of distraction that separates us from our own power.
If we want to see more representation in the arts, we need to stop telling kids who want to pursue art that they’re never going to be able to make a living at that.
Accountants?
Hmm.
You can’t pull artists from where they don’t exist.
If we want to see more representation in science, we need to democratize that knowledge.
We need scientists collaborating with game designers and illustrators to make these concepts easier to understand.
So people don’t feel intimidated by language.
When we are doing these things, we can have a more productive conversation about racism.
Sabrina Chevannes:
Yeah.
And when will that be?
Liana Fricker:
Well, this is then where everyone’s own power comes in.
Why we have to really be aware of the stories we’re telling ourselves.
For every person who sees black excellence as only a rapper is every person who misses the future scientist.
There was a swimmer — I don’t remember his name.
This was a few Olympics ago.
He was a black swimmer.
He was saying that all throughout high school everyone kept telling him to play basketball because when we think about the physical build of a really good male swimmer and a basketball player, they are the same.
But they were pushing him to basketball because he’s black.
I wonder how many times Michael Phelps was asked to get out of the pool and get on the court.
Sabrina Chevannes:
I mean, but also black people can’t swim is also the other thing that they say.
And I had that at school a lot.
They were saying that because my bones are denser, I would be more likely to sink.
I mean, I don’t even understand the physics of—
Liana Fricker:
Exactly.
And that’s why all of this — you breathe it in.
You breathe it in over and over in different ways, in different rooms.
It’s the white teacher telling you that three days after your black grandmother told you that because the story is permeated around.
Well, it’s the basketball coach reading an article and only seeing black players or some bit of propaganda about the dominance of black people in sport.
That means that they don’t see a mathematician.
They don’t even see a swimmer.
They only see a basketball player.
Whereas if you are white, you get to have duality.
You can be more than whatever it is.
And so we really have to watch ourselves.
For us people who sit outside of the status quo — whether you’re a woman, whether you are black, all of these things, LGBTQI — what stories are you breathing in?
And then breathing back out again?
Because we replicate what we see.
And if these are the stories that we’re going to put back out, that leads to apathy.
Why should I bother?
Why should I pursue math?
Black people are rappers.
Why should I pursue tennis?
Black people play basketball.
Why should I do science?
I’m a girl.
