Along with Bristol and Liverpool, Cardiff was once one of the great ports of the British Empire. Great as in size, being a large and active port and at its peak, one of the largest port systems in the world. The coal mined in the Welsh Valleys, for example, would exit this island at Cardiff and then be shipped off to India to fuel the railway systems being built and run there.
This also meant that when Britain went out by ship into the rest of the world during earlier centuries than this one, claiming territory, goods or peoples as its own while it painted a quarter of the planet’s land maps pink, it would often bring the results of its plunders back through places like Cardiff. As can often be the case with geographical points of transition, many people and goods that first met this new land of the Welsh capital city would end up staying there.
I moved to Cardiff as a two-year old, with my family. We lived in a place called Riverside, near the River Taff that runs through the city centre and a short walk to the centre of town and the former docks area that had once seen such busy shipping activities. On weekends, my parents would venture into town and buy beans for roasting from the Costa Rica Coffee Co, a large coffee importing house near the docks that was thoroughly infused with the distinctive smells of ground beans and large roasting vats. It was here as a child that I learned the names of such faraway places as Columbia, Kenya or indeed Costa Rica, reading them printed on the hessian sacks that were strewn around the place.
Born in Brighton and so of English roots, I shared my neighbourhood with people whose roots were much further flung than mine — Jamaican, Yemeni, Pakistani, Nigerian, Palestinian, Hong Kongese. As a child, I saw scripts I couldn’t decipher in shop windows and heard languages or accents on the streets that were very different to the ones I heard inside my own house. Although there were parts of my neighbourhood clearly linguistically unavailable to me, life being a melting pot of cultures seemed perfectly natural to me as a child. It was just life. At my secondary school, I made friends with people that looked different to me, and learned to pronounce names that I wouldn’t be likely to find in my own family. Before I had heard of the word ‘diaspora’, never mind understood the meaning of it, I learned that the largest Somali community outside of Somalia was located in Cardiff.
I grew up in a fairly left-wing family, going on an anti-Trident march at ten years old in 1981 and developing a clearly anti-apartheid consciousness later that decade. In my mid-teens, I recall asking my father whether South Africa would ever see apartheid coming to an end and ensure equality for the people living there. Having lived through the Civil Rights era in the United States in the 1960s, he told me that it was possible that apartheid would come to an end too. A few years later, it did (although I doubt that anyone living in contemporary South Africa would call it a beacon of equality now).
I knew nothing then about the historical reasons why my world was one of such a cultural mix. The history curriculum I studied at secondary school — as I recall it — looked into the nation’s back pages and saw Romans, Tudors, the seed plough, the Industrial Revolution, and ‘the stand against Hitler’. It’s possible that the name of William Wilberforce and therefore the idea of Britain playing a role in bringing about the end of the Atlantic Slave Trade were also bit parts in the history I was taught as a youth, but I very much doubt that the term ‘British Empire’ came up once in those years of study, let alone learnings of Britain’s wider role in the slave trade. White abolitionists were heroes with a heart, whereas white slavers were brushed under the carpet.
In the 1990s, I left Cardiff and returned to Brighton for my undergraduate degree, with a BA in Humanities at the University of Brighton. After the upbringing I’d had and the environment I’d grown up in, Brighton came as somewhat of a slight culture shock. To be blunt, it seemed to be a lot more white than I was used to. Nevertheless, unlike many other predominately white parts of England, it was also very open-minded. I ended up comparing it to what I imagined San Francisco to be like — very hilly, coastal, large gay community, people taking drugs openly on the street, hippy boutiques on back streets, and an active club scene.
As a twenty-something young man in 1990s Brighton with no clear career goals and relatively limited interest in academic pursuits at the time, I wasn’t particularly compelled either way by the elective choices I faced once I’d managed to scrape it past the core modules of my degree. ‘War, Genocide, and Ideology’ was one of the options I recall being offered on the piece of paper on the student noticeboard that listed our electives, and that seemed too dark a way to spend three months.
I ended up signing up for two that I knew little about and didn’t then feel that interested to learn more about either, but as they both had a literary criticism thread running through them, it would mean I could continue to feed my voracious appetite for reading. ‘Narratives of Empire’ took a critical look at the development of the novel, through works of the likes of E. M. Forster, H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad and Kipling, invariably white men’s tales of imperial endeavours. ‘Post-Colonial Fictions’ flipped it around, and looked at the British Empire through the eyes of the colonised. I read Nawal El Saadawi, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Salman Rushdie, amongst others.
Over the course of the six months that spanned these two modules, I came to a dawning realisation of a national history that had been hidden from me. What Britain had done, off the island and out in the rest of the world, began to come alive in the pages of those novels and in the questions we discussed in our seminars. I looked out of the window of my classes at Brighton’s Royal Pavilion, a curious Georgian architectural fusion of ornate Chinese interiors and Indian onion domes redolent of a Taj Mahal outhouse, and saw my country anew. I continued my reading, learning of the genocide of the Native Americans through ‘Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee’, the abject horrors of the Atlantic Slave Trade from Ronald Segal’s ‘The Black Diaspora’, and of the period where all the European empires competed against each other in continental plunder in the period known as ‘the Scramble for Africa’.
Britain, of course, played key roles in each of these endeavours. I also learned of the corporate annexation of much of the Indian subcontinent that was ultimately delivered to the British monarch in order for Queen Victoria to also become Empress of India. I learned of the Opium Wars against the Chinese, of the carving up of the Middle East, of the ‘settling’ of Australia, the Bengal famines, the suppressions of the Mau-Mau uprisings, and the manifestation of concentration camps during the Boer Wars. As I built up a picture of the previously unknown British Empire, I began to feel a great sense of shame and even horror at what my country had done, out in the rest of the world. It turned out that the nation I had grown up with had intentional imperial amnesia and the darkest of pasts. It had a very large body count behind its self image of tradition, incremental change, self-deprecation, good humour and great music.
I wasn’t the sort of graduate that fell into a clear and obvious career path. I took a certificate in English language teaching after graduating, as a back up option in case I ever felt the need to leave the country and work overseas. Having discovered, however, that language had been used as a tool of oppression in imperial times, forcing native peoples to speak English over their mother tongues, I initially viewed language teaching as an extension of the imperialist mission and so tried hard to avoid falling into teaching. I scraped an interesting but frugal living in bookselling for a few years, and then drifted into the voluntary sector, nevertheless accepting the odd summer teaching contract when the need to do more than subsist became great enough.
The first couple of years of the 21st century saw the steady drumbeat of the Anglo-American buildup to the invasion of Iraq, becoming a seemingly unstoppable force in the wake of the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers. My revulsion at the return of imperial misadventures in Mesopotamia ultimately led to me turning my back on the UK and moving to Tokyo, succumbing to my fallback plan of becoming a language teacher as an escape route.
In Japan, I discovered the utility of a global common language, when a Japanese businessman recounted to me doing deals with a Russian in Moscow, using English as their lingua franca. My experiences also shone a spotlight on the limitations of only having one language, as many Britain-born people are bound to do. Knowing more languages opens the mind up to more perspectives, more cultures, more ways of doing and thinking about things. I began to learn Japanese, both as compensation for my own linguistic limitations and as an expansion of my horizons. I also happened to found a peace charity there.
Being a white, able-bodied, heterosexual, middle class male that grew up and now lives back in the UK, I have long recognised that in the grand scheme of things, I have been endowed with degrees of privilege. Although it may seem fatuous to say so when looking at the bigger picture of global inequality and social injustice, despite this, my life hasn’t always felt that privileged. It wasn’t until I was amply into my 40s that I fell into something that might actually be considered a career.
After two decades of professional drift, I became an Educational Technologist at City University London (City) and finally — luckily — found my vocation. Perhaps the competing fragments of my own identity — Welsh, English, British, European, global citizen, expat — made it harder to settle into a working niche, but as educational technology work inherently requires broad and overlapping perspectives, given the need to speak both technical and pedagogical languages sufficiently well enough to be able to move comfortably between the two, it seemed to suit me well.
City is known as a ‘commuter’ university, where a large number of the UK student demographic live within the confines of the M25 and travel in to university whilst still living in the family home. The student demographic looks a lot more like the cultural blend I knew at secondary school than the rather more monocultural environments I experienced as an undergraduate in 1990s Brighton or as a language teacher in Tokyo, and so City immediately felt like a more comfortable working environment than many others I had found myself in.
The field of educational technology I had somehow found myself in (or which had somehow found me) felt more benign a space to be working in than many others I could have ended up in, or indeed had experienced. There was a friendliness and an openness to the new colleagues I worked with, both at City and amongst those I met in the wider sector. There seemed to be a better gender balance than other technology sectors might have, even being slightly more female-dominated than male (in my then limited experience). There was a lot of ‘helping’ to the work too, with the nature of the work revolving around helping academics to make more effective use of digital technologies in their teaching, helping to figure out ways to improve the student experience by digital means, or simply problem solving.
City, then, felt like a more comfortable and familiar demographic environment and I had finally encountered a day job that fitted like a glove. Even in the years prior to COVID-19, I was always kept consistently busy with new projects and service requests, new connections to make and existing relationships to build further, training to design and deliver, or the constant strive to get ahead and make a bigger impact in what I did. Although Ed Tech has never been without its challenges — some of them quite substantial or profound — it nevertheless felt like a professional homecoming and a welcoming place. Having found a home for myself, I didn’t immediately pay much mind to whether it was explicitly much of a home for others that might be more excluded in other sectors. I didn’t immediately pay much mind to whether Ed Tech was a predominantly white space to work in, or find myself thinking much about the diversity of my profession.
Despite being very politically-minded, I’m actually rather cautious as an activist. My youthful memberships of CND and Greenpeace were not renewed after signing up to them. I have only briefly been a member of a trade union in the workplace, when I started out as a bookseller. The charity I ran in Japan was intended to support capacity-raising in the Japanese peace movement, but I also had a secondary ulterior motive of simultaneously furthering my musical ambitions through it. I can count the number of significant protest marches I have joined on one hand — the anti-Trident one mentioned above, the big one against the then-pending Iraq War that saw over 1 million people on the streets of London and which Tony Blair seemingly just ignored, and one of the very large ‘Second Referendum’ marches during Theresa May’s Brexit stasis periods, before Boris Johnson helped oust her and opened the gates of unwell on his fateful premiership.
There wasn’t a specific issue within Ed Tech or higher education that caused me to feel that the time had come where I needed to do something and stand up and be counted. However, there are sometimes occasions when the rising tide of a particular sentiment or historical moment becomes so apparent that you can’t not pay attention to it. It causes you to connect things to yourself and your work, whether they are explicit or not.
The River Severn bisects the coastlines of Southwestern England and South Wales and spills out into the Bristol Channel, ending up as a part of the Atlantic. Bristol, about 44 miles away from Cardiff, is where I often used to travel to as a music-obsessed young man to see the rock bands that didn’t quite manage to extend their tours into Wales. When I was even younger, Bristol had the nearest major zoo and ice rink to me, so my earliest memories of the city are of the place where I first saw the exotic animals I’d encountered in books as a child actually in the flesh and where I first experienced falling on my behind with a pair of ice skates tied to my feet.
Both Cardiff and Bristol are port cities on either side of the Channel of population sizes in broadly similar brackets, but their imperial stories differ considerably. Cardiff was a small town until the early 19th Century, when its prominence as a coal port fuelled its expansion. Bristol, on the other hand, was already a major port by mid-last millennium. Early voyages of exploration to the New World set out from Bristol and the city later became a leading hub for the Atlantic Slave Trade, with an estimated half a million slaves taken from Africa to the British Caribbean and North America on ships that had sailed from Bristol.
Several of Bristol’s public buildings and institutions were, until fairly recently, endowed with the name Colston. This was after 17th Century Bristolian Edward Colston, a merchant who also became a major figure in the slave trade when he became a senior executive in the Royal African Company, the monopoly holder of the English trade in African slaves. Long after Colston’s death, he became widely commemorated in Bristol landmarks, with a statue of him erected in Bristol Harbour at the end of the 19th Century.
May 25th 2020, two months after Britain implemented its first national lockdown to curb the widening outbreak of the new COVID-19 virus, an African-American man named George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. The killing happened outside a grocery store when the officer, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck for almost ten minutes despite Floyd’s repeated pleading that he couldn’t breathe. Floyd’s death was captured on a smartphone video by a nearby witness and shared on social media, a murder live streamed in near real time. A spark that set off a flame that would become an inferno, at least for a while.
The day after Floyd’s death, protests began in Minneapolis about the use of excessive force by police officers against black suspects. The protests proliferated across cities in all 50 US states and internationally too, creating a high watermark for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement that had begun as a hashtag on social media in 2013. Floyd was, tragically, only the latest in a long succession of African-Americans killed by police in the many decades that followed the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s.
While imperial and colonial roots could be clearly seen in the racial injustices and social inequalities of today by those that were aware of them or were prepared to see them, there was something about the unique circumstances of the conditions of the Covid lockdowns and the way that the pandemic disproportionately affected those already structurally disadvantaged in Western societies that made the killing of George Floyd a spark that lit a historic tinderbox. Floyd’s killing became a particular spark that would trigger a global reckoning with current and historical racial injustices in ways that the #RhodesMustFall movement, which began with trying to remove a statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town, or the killings of the likes of Michael Brown, Eric Garner or Breonna Taylor in the pre-Covid age failed to quite penetrate into global consciousness in the same way as Floyd’s live streamed assassination.
Perhaps, as Covid was a pandemic experienced pretty much simultaneously by the whole human family — a shared moment we all went thorough, albeit in different ways — rather than in pockets of nations or regions where many prior pandemics had remained, or perhaps also that much of our lives moved further online when it was mostly forbidden for so many of us to leave our own homes, the inequalities and injustices that some communities felt under Covid were greater highlighted by the nature of a shared global experience. The spotlight was on how badly some people are treated and how the system is often stacked against them. For once, many of us could not look away. Not this time.
A hundred years after the erection of the Colston statue, with growing awareness of Britain’s imperial past and specifically of Colston’s actions, there were several protests and petitions to attempt to remove his name from the fabric of the city. In most cases, these efforts did not succeed. During the global reaction that followed George Floyd’s murder, however, things came to a head. Bristol had its own Black Lives Matter protests, and the statue of Colston was pulled down and cast into the murky waters of the harbour.
Although Colston’s statue was later retrieved from the harbour floor, it was not returned to the plinth it had been knocked off. This particular moment seemed to resonate across the UK even more than George Floyd had, as it symbolised a reckoning with empire that had barely happened before in my lifetime. This was an action whose meaning was as clear as a bell, marking — it felt like — a turning point where Britain could no longer continue to brush the darker corners of its history under the carpet and pretend that the British Empire had been a thing of benevolent good for those peoples and territories it once ruled over.
Amidst this geopolitical moment of social tectonics, the aftershock from the killing of George Floyd led locked down Brexit Britain, via the felling of Colston, to a reckoning it had not anticipated. While there were subsequent counter moves against the new rising consciousness in the acceleration of the culture wars conducted by PM Johnson’s government, with their so-called ‘war on woke’, there was nevertheless a palpable sense of a need for change in the air.
Like many others sniffing the post-Colston prevailing winds and not for the first time, I found myself feeling that ‘something must be done’. But what to do? What difference can I, a privileged white male who is a little shy on the inside and a reluctant activist at the best of times, who has a demanding full time job and a family to keep me occupied in the day-to-day, what difference can I make to the reality of racial inequality and social injustice in the world?
If you want to play a part in making a different but don’t know what to do or how to start, privilege awareness can hang around your neck like a heaving albatross of guilt. It can make you think that ‘people like me’ are part of the problem so ‘people like me’ therefore cannot be part of the solution, or it can make it hard to just see the wood for the trees. It is one thing to be aware of one’s privilege, but if you feel that change must happen and that you would prefer to be a part of the solution, awareness alone is not enough. To know is a necessary precondition of making change happen, but doing is the how of change rather than the why of it. Nevertheless, all journeys must begin somewhere.
Earlier in 2020, I had signed up for one of the staff development sessions that my institution tended to offer its staff from time to time, a session titled ‘Active Bystander’ that focused on unconscious bias (one of the many shibboleths of the ‘war on woke’). I didn’t have a great sense of what to expect from this particular session, but I kept it in my calendar anyway as the first national Covid lockdown rolled into place and the biggest professional crisis of my career — how to move a university online in a week and then keep it going once online — continued to play out. ‘Active Bystander’, like many other events that would once have been held behind closed doors in a room on a London campus, also moved online.
When the time for the session came around, I sat in the lounge of my house and, still stuck to the screen, stepped away for an hour from educational technology earthquakes. I listened to colleagues sharing personal stories of the racism or other exclusionary social behaviours that they had experienced in their lives, both in and out of the workplace. I thought back to the Cardiff that I had grown up in as a child, that Welsh imperial port in the twilight years of its decline before devolution brought about its national revival, which to me had been a melting pot of cultures and where I had been barely aware of endemic racism despite the very real rough edges of the place at the time.
Our trainer talked about the ‘normalisation’ of bystander apathy and of barriers to intervention. She spoke of noticing the act of racism or aggression, of considering it as a problem, then feeling responsible for dealing with it, and of possessing the skills to act. She spoke of techniques to overcome the fear of intervening, of tackling ‘micro-inequities’ and using persuasive words, phrases, facial expressions and body language to maximise assertiveness in challenging situations. She also spoke of the 4Ds: Distraction (approach the victim with a reason for them to leave the situation — tell them they need to take a call, or you need to speak to them; any excuse to get them away to safety), Delay (wait for the situation to pass then ask the victim if they are OK, or report it later when it’s safe to do so, as it’s never too late to act), Delegation (tell someone with the social power or authority to deal with it), Do Something Now/Direct Action (directly intervene, for example, by asking the person to stop; immediately act or call out negative behaviour, explaining why it is not OK).
I emerged from the session not only with a small set of techniques for being a more active bystander but also with a greater understanding of some of the day-to-day racism that others experience and yet which often passes me by.
Two months later, George Floyd was killed and Edward Colston was not long for his plinth. Amidst the post-Floyd re-eruption of Black Lives Matter and Bristol’s take-down of a memorial to a slaver, higher education was one of the many sectors of British society that started to reckon with itself. With so many events migrating online, the barrier to attending HE gatherings was suddenly considerably lower than it had ever been and, much like many, I ended up attending an awful lot of online events. One, styled as WonkHE@Home, tapped into the new BLM groundswell and ran a Black Lives Matter session in the July of that year (links: WonkHE write-up, recordings and resources).
Although I was sat in the same chair and facing the same screen as the ones I’d accessed much of 2020’s Great Onlining from, this webinar felt palpably different from many of the others that had mushroomed up in the early stages of the emergency. There was lively opening music for while people were waiting for things to begin, which gave more the feel of an event to proceedings. There was clearly a clamouring at the virtual door, as the unexpectedly high attendance figures seemed to almost crash WonkHE’s Zoom account, spilling over into furious conversations on Twitter.
When the virtual doors did finally open, although we humble webinar participants couldn’t tell how many other people were there, it became evident that the event had attracted people from across the country, seemingly all eager to either join in with the chorus of ‘enough is enough’, to listen, or to figure out what actions they could possibly take to make a difference. Twitter became another active space where discussions took place, a digital open corridor outside the main room, where people could speak freely.
Once more, I heard tales of personal experiences of racism from within my sector, a strata of society that I’d long and seemingly mistakenly taken to be mostly liberal-minded and generally pretty inclusive. It was at this event that I picked up the notion of ‘white allyship’, which pointed towards something to do, even to be. Allyship, however, is not a magic bullet to end racism nor is there a script for white people to adopt in order to become better allies. It involves listening, learning, understanding and acting. It also involves acknowledging one’s own privilege and being prepared to accept failing whilst trying to be better. Nevertheless, the notion of allyship gave me a bridge between the guilt felt from privilege awareness and an ability to take effective action.
The speakers spent some time unpacking the term BAME, which I’d long been rather unsure about. Why should Black, Asian or other ‘minority ethnic’ people be bundled into a single category that essentially means ‘non white’? Categorising a multicultural and post-imperial society into the binaries of ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ feels very much to me like privileging whiteness.
One of the key messages of the event was of the need for white people to commit to anti-racist action for the long term, given that Black and Brown people had carried the burden for so long already. Although it was a road I felt that I’d been travelling down for some time already, after this event I resolved to become a better and more purposeful ally, to continue my own learnings and listenings, and to take actions too.
The companion piece to this article (once it’s written), titled ‘Further Shades of Grey’, will look at the continuation of this journey, including key lessons learned since attending the Black Lives Matter edition of WonkHE@Home and attempts to take action.
‘Shades of Grey’ is an attempt at some autoethnographical writing on race and racism. I began writing it in 2020 but didn’t complete or publish it until 2022. I hope I manage to write and publish ‘Further Shades of Grey’ in less time than the first piece took.
