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OCTOBER 2020 Column
WHY WE MUST EMBRACE OPTIMISM AMID TURMOIL
2020 has been one of the most difficult years we have ever had to endure. But, says David Olusoga, despite this, the anger and frustration we feel can only benefit us in the long term – and we’ve already started to see that
AS WE enter the final months of 2020 - the year of Black Lives Matter, toppled statues and an unprecedented national conversation about race and racism – how should we feel about it all?
Should we be generally optimistic or pessimistic about the future?
Should we conclude that what happened this summer - here in Britain and across the world – was an historic moment of change, loaded with potential for yet greater transformation?
Or should we draw the opposite conclusion and assume that what we have just witnessed was merely a passing moment, an event rather than the beginning of a process?
INGRAINED
As so often the case for pessimism is the easier of the two to make. Pessimism is justified because of what it is we are up against - the idea of race.
Centuries-old and deeply ingrained within our society race casts a heavy shadow over the modern world.
Like many of the most powerful and most toxic ideas it has become so normalised that many of those who are advantaged by it are unaware of their privilege.
To make the case for optimism is to ask that millions of people who live their lives under the shadow of race to believe that
Companies big and small now acknowledge the structural nature of racism
in the near future they might escape into the light. That is quite an ask.
Optimism is often dismissed as wishful thinking but this year the case for optimism has to be made because in 2020 events have taken place that no one would have predicted back in January.
If, for example, someone had told me nine months ago that by Black History Month 2020 the statute of the slave trader Edward Colston, that had stood for 125 years in the centre of Bristol, would be lying on its back in a council lock up covered in graffiti and scratches, having been torn down by protestors, I would have dismiss them as a fantasist.
Yet in June we all witnessed Colston’s bronze effigy, all eight foot three inches of it, dragged to the pavement and thrown into the harbour from which over 2,000 slave trading expeditions set sail.
From that moment onwards 2020 has been a year of impossibilities made possible.
Another unimaginable event took place in September when the Colston Society, which for 275 years had celebrated and memorialised the reputation of Colston voted for its own dissolution.
WORSHIP
After the events of the summer the excuses and self-rationalisation that for so many years had been successfully deployed to justify the worship of a man who traded in human flesh were simply no longer viable. The game was up. The cause was lost.
But perhaps the most significant changes of 2020 have been those focused on changing the future rather than reassessing the past.
At the beginning of 2020 thousands of British companies, corporations and institutions talked-the-talk about diversity and inclusion but could not find the institutional will to change their internal cultures and recruitment practices.
Now, in the final months of 2020, companies big and small and whole sectors of the economy now acknowledge the structural nature of racism and have committed themselves to new courses of action on diversity and inclusion that in some cases are radical and potentially transformative.
Some did much more than
PANDEMIC PROTEST: Bristol’s statue of slave trader Edward Colston was torn down in June
issuing statements in support of Black Lives Matter and launched internal audits of their processes in order to better understand how their cultures and practices incubated structural racism. Schemes to bring black people into jobs and into leadership positions are being launched across the economy.
More is needed but the commitments made in 2020 exceed what anyone realistically expected might be achieved at the beginning of this year.
In my own industry TV a host of new initiatives have been launched and just this month ITV stood up to the critics who condemned the dance troupe Diversity for performing a routine inspired by Black Lives Matter on Britain’s Got Talent.
ITV not only offered their backing to Ashley Banjo, pictured far left, and his dancers, the broadcaster took out full-page advertisements in national newspapers affirming their determination to and defend the rights of this group of young black people to use dance to express their feelings about the historic events we are all living through.
The easier route for ITV would have been to distance itself from the affair. In another year something like that might have been the outcome. But not in 2020.
In an interview in June the legendary American activist Angela Davis described 2020 as the year in which “we are finally witnessing the consequences of decades and centuries of attempting to expel racism from our societies”.
MOMENT
The rise of Black Lives Matter, she argued, has created “a moment of possibility”.
“What we are offered,” Davis counselled, “is the possibility of reimagining and recreating” the future.
In 2020, a year unlike any other, the arrival of Black History Month should inspire us seize the possibilities Davis speaks of, and demands, change that up to now we have dared to even imagine.
If ever there was a year to put pessimism aside and embrace optimism this is it.
