Media

The Naga Munchetty row shows diversity is still about optics, not real change | Nesrine Malik | Opinion


There are, broadly, two designated roles for people of colour in the British media. The first is to be the “as a” person. You know the one: the person who is there to speak about their experiences of racism or discrimination “as a” black man or “as a” Muslim woman.

The second is to simply to be there – bringing your talent, yes, but also to add diversity to a lineup. News presenter Naga Munchetty discovered last week that the BBC sees her as the latter. It’s happy to have black and brown faces, but only as long as they don’t wander off the reservation and actually attempt to bring their experiences to bear on their journalism.

To be a journalist of colour is to always be managing these two demands. When to speak up about your experiences, to use the platform you have, and when to refrain from doing that when it all starts to feel a bit exploitative. When to lean into a debate about your identity because it is your responsibility, and when to bow out of what the writer Reni Eddo-Lodge calls “performing rage”.

The small number of people from minority backgrounds in the media makes these decisions even more fraught. There is something lowering, to me at least, in resorting to your personal experience to make a point that shouldn’t have to be made; in offering your very humanity and credibility as a professional to make an argument that should be believed without the need for these tithes. Comedian Nish Kumar, commenting on the Munchetty debacle, said that racism is like gravity: it’s not an opinion. To argue about racism feels like having to prove gravity exists. On the other hand, if not you, then who? It is uncomfortable: you will inevitably be told you are playing the race card, that you have a chip on your shoulder, that if you were really good at what you did you wouldn’t have to keep banging on about race.

These are the pitfalls of an industry, and a society as a whole, that seems to think of diversity as window-dressing, an exercise that produces the right optics without bringing about any real change. I call it Javid’s law, where a non-white person is brought into the fold, then wheeled out to show how their very presence “proves” their employer is free from discrimination.

Few do it with as much gusto and as unsubtly as Sajid Javid – who in his former role, when questioned about Islamophobia in the Conservative party, said: “For a start let’s just have a look at who the home secretary is in this country. As you’ve just described me, my name is Sajid Javid, I am the home secretary in this country.” Under Javid’s law one must always absolve others, and never call attention to legitimate grievances.

It sometimes feels like a circular firing squad. The media trap minority journalists in a ghetto where they howl at the moon about race – reducing their experiences to a spectacle of pain that sits alongside the other news items on economics, foreign policy and sport, or silences them completely so they are present, but have no presence. It is doubly frustrating, with all these pressures already bearing down, that when someone such as Munchetty makes the most banal, obvious point about how being told to go back to where you came from is problematic, she is taken to task for breaking the calm exterior of “professionalism” – a euphemism for keeping your mouth shut.

The reason we have this confused attitude towards the role people of colour can play is that, overwhelmingly, the gatekeepers of these discussions are white. Diversity is encouraged in the ranks below stairs, while those who get to rule on Munchetty, or decide whether there should be an inquiry into Tory party Islamophobia, for example, are far removed from the real-life consequences of their decisions. Esoteric adjudications about neutrality and professionalism do not apply to viscerally unambiguous topics such as racism.

This discrepancy applies universally – whether to those from working-class backgrounds, women or LGBT people. As long as marginalised identities are brought in to boost diversity but are invisible in decision-making meetings, we will do little to change our culture and norms, and bring about real power redistribution.

And here the tension rises in this very column. I will resist the temptation to offer my own little victimhood credibility nugget – after all, in this newspaper I have the privilege to write about whatever I wish. But whatever exception I enjoy does not disprove the rule – and I hope that you, dear reader, can also resist the impulse to demand I prove to you that gravity exists.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist



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