Diversify. June Sarpong
The Final Number
Acknowledgements
The Ism Questionnaire: How the Nation Responded
Bibliography
Searchable Terms
Copyright
‘Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.’
William Sloane Coffin
The British humanist and novelist E. M. Forster famously wrote ‘Only connect’.* And he was absolutely right. While the Earth is vast, we live in a small world full of opportunities to connect with each other, and it’s only when we do this that the walls between us come down. Yet the majority of us seem to find this incredibly difficult, caught up as we are in the things that divide us.
In one sense, of course, we are more connected than we’ve ever been before. Whether we live in the remotest parts of the world or in great international cities such as London or New York, we can connect across the globe at the click of a button. So it’s a great irony that the economic gap between those at the centre of society and those at the periphery is ever-growing. Our great cities of culture and commerce are in fact cities of strangers, where individuals have rejected relationships with neighbours in favour of superficial relationships with an online community. We often ignore passersby as we get on with our lives. We may SMH (Shake My Head) at news-feeds that show injustice at home and abroad, yet somehow we continue on, unaffected by what happens to ‘others’.
And yet, as the MP Jo Cox argued so passionately before she was murdered in 2016, we have far more in common than that which divides us. This isn’t head-in-the-clouds liberalism speaking; this is scientific fact. Genetically, human beings are 99.9 per cent identical.* Our bodies perform in the same way – we breathe the same, we eat the same, we sleep the same – and yet we choose to focus so much on the 0.1 per cent that makes us different – the 0.1 that determines external physical attributes such as hair, eye and skin colour. This focus has been the cause of so much tension and strife in the world, yet by re-evaluating the importance we place on it, we have the power to change how it affects our future. What if we celebrated that 0.1 per cent rather than feared it? What amazing things might follow for our society? The need to do this has never been so urgent – thanks to the recent political upheavals of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, the rise of extremism and economic instability, we are now more divided than ever before – but the ability to change this is firmly within our grasp. To heal the wounds that have been exposed, we need to diversify, and we need to do it now. This is an issue I’ve felt passionate about for a long time: it informs my work, my relationships and my everyday life. And it’s more than a question of encouraging human kindness; I’ve long suspected that there is a hidden financial cost to our lack of diversity. The research that I have undertaken for this book has confirmed that.
I decided to write this book, often drawing on my own experiences, to present the issues that a lack of diversity is causing for us today, alongside the arguments for the social, moral and economic benefits of diversity. You’ll also find practical tools and ideas for how we might go about creating a new normal that is equitable, diverse and prosperous.
Why now?
On 28 August 1963, Dr Martin Luther King – for me, one of the greatest men of the twentieth century, without question – delivered his iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. I have always found his words, laying out such a powerful and clear vision for global equality and unity, and delivering a message of hope that we could all be part of, absolutely mind-blowing. He presented a comprehensive vision and framework for the much-needed journey that would get us there, and I firmly believe it’s one of the best examples of the type of society we should all be striving to create. Now, over half a century later, where are we on that journey that Dr King laid out for us, and what does this mean for humanity?
The sad truth is, it’s a journey that many of us are yet to embark on. Prophesying his own assassination, King ended his last speech with ‘I may not get there [to the Promised Land] with you’, and indeed he didn’t. And there have been claims that if Dr King were still alive he would be incredibly disappointed by what he saw: a world divided by gender, nationality, class, sexual orientation, age, culture, and, of course, the two big Rs of Race and Religion.
I would argue that, actually, Dr King would not be so disappointed in what he saw, but rather in what he couldn’t see. It’s what lies beneath the surface and facade of ‘tolerance’ and political correctness that causes the real malaise – the limiting viewpoints that are hidden inside us, that we rarely speak of but often think about and, worse, sometimes act upon. Whether they are conscious or unconscious, it’s these hidden, unexamined attitudes that shape the inequality we see in society.
The evidence of that is clear in the political upheaval that has occurred in both the UK and US recently. There are many parallels between the shock results of Britain’s Brexit referendum and the Electoral College victory of Donald Trump in the US in 2016. As a board member of the official Remain campaign, I was certainly not in favour of Brexit and put all my passion and energy into trying to convince the British public that Britain was Stronger IN Europe. The result was a painful and bitter blow, and one that still hurts. We will only see the true fall-out now that Article 50 has been triggered and the negotiations have begun …
However, we are beginning to see what this new world looks like. For many, Brexit represented freedom. Yet one of the worrying repercussions of Brexit, which the experts didn’t anticipate, is the rise in hate crime and the open season on anything or anyone deemed ‘other’. Since the referendum I’ve heard phrases such as, ‘This doesn’t feel like modern Britain’, ‘A victory for xenophobia’, and ‘The revolt of the working class’. The same seems to be true of Donald Trump’s victory in the US, with David Duke, the former KKK leader, celebrating it as ‘one of the most exciting nights of my life’. I feel huge disappointment for those who wanted us to stay part of the EU, and fear what might happen to tolerance of the ‘other’ in the US – but, more importantly, I want to understand why these results went the way they did, shaking up the status quo in response to campaigns which focused on immigration and fear. The short answer is that both Brexit and Trump were symptoms of our failure to address the issues of fairness and inequality in our globalized economy.
The majority of us recognize that there are things greater than ourselves that can unite us: the world we share and our common humanity. We know that the need for understanding, connection and solidarity as one human family is more urgent now than ever. The greatest challenges of our time demand our cooperation. But how do we achieve this? When we have been separate for so long, change is not easy. But it is necessary. That’s where this book comes in.
Why me?
The daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, I was born and raised in the East End of London, home to a diverse range of people. The part of town that I grew up in, Walthamstow – or Wilcomestu, as the Anglo-Saxons called it – means ‘place of welcome’. Coincidentally, the Ghanaian greeting for hello is Awaakba, which also means ‘welcome’, so being welcoming is part of both my British and Ghanaian heritage – literally.
During my early years, Walthamstow more or less lived up to its name. We had the longest street market in Europe, where you could get anything from anywhere. The older generation of market stall-holders were mainly white working-class survivors of the Second World War. They were community-minded, and would call out to you if they knew your mum, chucking you an apple or a bag of sweets from their stall. My school was like a blue-collar version of the UN and proclaimed the belief that diversity was an asset.