BLACK HISTORY = WORLD HISTORY
…an innocuous enough statement of the obvious, and a self-evident principle underpinning much of Black Limelight’s output down the years.
In our ‘post-truth’ landscape, as political dereliction runs its course and scapegoats are sought, such commonplace assertions require increasingly vociferous defence – none more so than the uncontentious assertion that Black lives ‘matter’. In the face of glaring inequality and a crumbling postwar consensus, it is as if these three little words distill a threat to western hegemony so egregious that only a sustained, concerted and well-funded ‘culture war’ can maintain the complacency to which the global north has become accustomed.
The UK, in its barely-managed and self-induced decline, has fallen prey to crushing external pressure and cataclysmic internal convulsion. For a union perenially mired in befuddlement at the overlapping of race and nationality, our faultlines are all too predictable. In purely unscientific terms, the 30% recalcitrant racist rump from which we must seemingly fight a continual rear-guard action has swelled to 40%, artificially buoyed by dirty money, algorithmic manipulation and a fatally compromised press with a vested interest in bitter division.
Some hard-won improvement in educational achievement aside, we remain ravaged by endemic racial disparities in health, housing and employment. One needn’t be a social worker, a recruiter or even an ethnic minority to see it – merely ‘woke’ (that sneeringly misappropriated new-right pejorative for ‘socially aware’). The orchestrated denial of these shameful realities has now passed from pathology to national psychosis, and obscures the path to progress – just, of course, as it was designed to.
At the time of writing, established human rights legislation, as enshrined in international law, is under threat from vindictive populist governance in an ideological tailspin. It remains to be seen whether electoral change alone is capable of effecting the cultural shift required to recast the UK as a genuinely mature plurality. ‘Not in my lifetime’ may be the current, gloomy prognosis, but creative anti-racism fixes an eye to the future and to the removal of obstacles to fulfilment for the next generation. Our cowardice in failing to dismantle the machinery of structural racism will leave a much diminished legacy.
Design has a responsibility to both reflect reality and to open up spaces for imagination and aspiration. For Black Limelight and a vast network of community groups, activists and campaigners, this drives each keystroke and click of the mouse….
