Several people have challenged my continued use of the term BAME. I remain ambivalent about this change. The fight to end the use of the BAME acronym seems won. A key recommendation from the government’s report by the Commission on Race and Racial Disparities (the Sewell Report) is to disaggregate the term BAME. Arts Council …
Article published on Arts Professional Huge energy has been expended by Arts Council England (ACE) on distributing the £1.7 billion Culture Recovery Fund (CRF). There is a clear need for this distribution of funds at pace: the money has provided life support to many large institutions that would have struggled to survive lockdown measures without …
A decade to change what should have changed decades ago I have been in discussion with Arts Council England, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Nesta and the British Film Institute (BFI) amongst others about Create Equity’s campaign to get the sector funding equitably (in proportion to the BAME population) by 2031. Based on today’s …
The kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard (like the murder of George Floyd) dominate the news and social media as it rightly sparks upset, the telling of personal stories, outrage, and calls for things to change. When you have a specific manifestation of any discrimination the calls to action sometimes overrides the deep-seated causes and …
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, many BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) creative entrepreneurs existed in an invisible space between the public and private sectors. Both sectors had consistently undervalued what they do.
Interview with Kevin Osborne for The Times, UK by James Hurley.
Racial inequality in arts funding will not be resolved by grants alone. A BAME-led investment fund would be a pragmatic and transformative solution.
Dear Darren / Sir Nicholas, Arts Council England (ACE) has tried everything it can think of to improve diversity. The effort has been immense (this should be acknowledged) but the results, in your own words, have been ‘disappointing’. Your recent calls for the Arts Council to do better on racial inequality going forward are welcome. …
I’m walking down a busy west end street. In front of me a few yards ahead is a man, crouched on his feet, almost in a fetal position on the steps of a church. His right hand is rubbing his head. I intend to walk past, making the conscious decision not to look again, in …
Through social media, people often ask me what they can do about racism. There is no simple answer but certainly, it requires a deeper commitment than spending half an hour scrolling through your timeline on instagram. Racism is centuries old and so ingrained in society that many of us don’t know we are being racist …