Why I’m talking to Medway about race

Columnist Zahra Barri visits the Medway Culture Club

Medway Culture Club carnival

When I tell my friend I am interviewing Camealia Xavier-Chihota about her charity, Medway Culture Club, she asks me what it is she does. My friend always takes an avid interest in my hard-hitting journalism. Last week, I told her I was interviewing someone about their pioneering work with Peter Andre. So, when I say that Camealia is trying to end racism in Medway, she almost chokes on her latte. It was not dissimilar to when I told her I no longer read Heat magazine and now read Closer because it contained more humanitarian issues centring around Amal Clooney’s fashion choices at United Nations conferences.

“End racism…in Medway?” my friend asks.

I see the enormity of the cause weighing her features, brows furrowed. I understand her perplexity. It’s akin to imagining a world without any wars, or something equally unattainable like the Beckham feud finally being resolved.

“Ambitious!” she says.

“Why?”

However, she quickly changes the subject back to an analytical assessment of the implications of Brooklyn Beckham’s current Instagram post. Yet, her awe at my description of Camealia’s work makes me think. Why is trying to end racism weightier than endeavouring to solve homelessness, or more complex than eradicating child cruelty or domestic abuse? The answer lies in both its practicalities and aesthetics. Let’s look at the latter.

Take a stroll down any Medway High Street, and one can see homelessness, but it’s a lot harder to see racism. Racism is largely systemic, and as with all things systemic it’s corrosive yet subtle. Like how ‘everyday sexism’ is often undetected, there’s ‘everyday racism.’ This means it’s experienced by the individual who tolerates it rather than reports it. Therefore, conceptually, racism is far less tangible to the majority of the white population of Medway¹. This perpetuates what I like to refer to as ‘Bernard Manning-like rhetoric’ that claims that racism doesn’t exist, the ‘I’m not racist but…’ brigade and the ‘I don’t see colour’ bandwagon. Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race because of this. It seems that unless it’s as blatant as Kent Reform councillors in Maidstone smiling with Nazis parading their discriminatory iconography, the non-ethnic majority of Kent don’t see discrimination. Oh wait, that actually happened. See our sister publication, the Kent Current, proudly the only Kent publication to report it and one of only two media outlets in the UK to do so nationally.

Which brings me to racism in the media, the very mechanisms of power which are built on historically racist and colonial systems. The racism that gets reported in the mainstream mostly publicises incidents of extreme racial hate crimes, whilst at the same time perpetuates racism, xenophobia and islamophobia. The Daily Mail had to apologise for defamatory Islamophobic rhetoric in 2016. This is why social media, if used as a vehicle for democratisation and not merely self-optimisation (selfies), amplifies the public’s consciousness. In the same way that #MeToo helped the feminist movement, social media has enabled victims of racial discrimination to not only tell their story but actively record it.

There is no better example of this than the documentation of George Floyd’s tragic racist killing by American police. This all but shattered the perceived aesthetic of racial harmony from the white Western mainstream in a post-Obama world, and in the spirit of this column, Camealia tells me this horrific globalised issue made her want to set up a localised incentive: “Like many, I felt deeply moved and compelled to be part of the solution. Medway Culture Club began as a vision to celebrate cultural diversity and promote racial harmony.”