A #BlackLivesMatter reading list

The long and winding career road that led me to UHR’s door included a long-ish stint in the marketing department at Waterstones – in my day it had an apostrophe, grumble, grumble. I’ve still got friends and colleagues there, and in preparation for our Directors’ Debate Room session on Wednesday 22 June at 3pm – ‘Black Lives Matter: How can the HR Director support, and challenge the VC and Executive Team?’ – I’ve tapped those colleagues for a list of books published in this area. If you choose to use it, it’s the beginnings of a ready-made self-education list. Why not invest a hundred quid and grow a mini-library for yourself and colleagues to share?

One of the clearest lessons for your (white) team from the current Black Lives Matter protests is that we need to undertake that self-education, that we can’t expect even close black friends and colleagues to do that for us. Why should they? For those of you ahead of this, fantastic. The next task then is to carry colleagues along with you, and some of this might help.

My credentials in coming to this issue are those of a fairly typical middle-aged white bloke. Brought up in Leicester, one of our most multi-cultural cities, I’ve got life-long learning from that background about the successes and failures of integration. A second significant chunk of my career took me into health and social care charities – here, strong black voices are everywhere, valid and powerful. In one role I was the only white man in a large team. This experience only serves to teach me how little I really know. And I’m far far far from having gotten this all right. But even if our society was consistently trying to, wouldn’t that count as a step forward?

White privilege, white fragility, white silence.

We all know these concepts are hugely complicated, difficult, emotional, and many in our university communities might feel they’d prefer it if they remained somewhere in our most peripheral of visions – that being a very privileged position to adopt. But our BAME colleagues are forcefully telling us that the work needs to be done. Naina Patel’s recent blog Nothing like enough, reminded us that as HR teams we are used to thinking about work in the EDI field, and that much progress has been made – and yet still, in areas like black career progression and student attainment gaps, and access to our high-status courses and institutions, we’ve done “nothing like enough”. Umar Zamman of Sheffield Hallam gave us a really honest and personal take on his own experiences of racism: it might be a pretty humbling read for many white readers with no equivalently powerful lived experience of discrimination.

Both articles start with George Floyd, and the American context is interesting to me. One major difference between the US civil rights movement of Martin Luther King-era America and now is that the #BLM protests have majority white support, which just wasn’t in place in the 1960s. Does that mean that now is the tipping point? If so, how do university HR teams throw their weight into the campaign? I think, for all of us no matter our seniority, we can start by allowing ourselves some education time, and we can read and read until perhaps we start to understand. To me this feels like a tiny but essential ask, though as we’re already decades behind on the task some urgency is needed.

On the Waterstones list there is something for everyone no matter where you start: fiction, history, polemic. ‘Small Island’ by Andrea Levy is one of the best British novels of the last 20 years. It tells of the post-war black experience, of pilots and teachers and engineers that had been relied on to help provide wartime victory but who faced racist ill-treatment the moment the fighting stopped. That might be an easy way into this conversation for those who are feeling most challenged by it. The top ten suggestions from my friends read as follows – you’ll know some of them from your own research.

It’s Not About the Burqa, Mariam Khan

(Links carefully not provided, you know your own favourite bookshops…)

Black and British, David Olusaga

Natives, Akala

How to Be An Anti-Racist, Ibram X. Kendi

Brit-ish, Afua Hirsch

The Good Immigrant, Nikesh Shukla

I Will Not Be Erased: Our Stories About Growing Up As People Of Colour, gal-dem

Slay in Your Lane, Yomi Adegoke

Me And White Supremacy, Layla Saad

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge

Pick one. Start.

These last two are increasingly the essential books in this early-stage education round. Saad’s ‘Me and White Supremacy’ is a tough read, a workbook that asks of its readers deep and thoughtful introspection about how they act, and what they believe and say. Reni Eddo-Lodge’s ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race’ is the first book written by a black British woman ever to have been the bestselling book in the country – that alone feels astonishing. It tells white readers fair and square that they have to catch up with the whole issue, and quickly.

Has it taken a specific brutal murder thousands of miles away to overcome our inertia? There is no team better placed than HR to support an institutional learning journey, to help our universities past the emotive but in some ways symbolic issues – statues, and problematic historical philanthropy among them – and onto the core issues that affect BAME students and staff right this second. And there’s no guarantee even your best efforts will be enough to overcome that inertia. The entire package of issues is unwieldy, and to some apparently baffling. Eddo-Lodge talks of watching white people close down when the subject of racism comes up, “like treacle is poured into their ears, blocking up their ear canals. It's like they can no longer hear us.” If you, in your HR team, with your diplomacy skills and your communications skills and your ability to negotiate the professional and the personal and your flair for systems and policy, and your concern for organisational reputation and ethics and values – well, if you won’t start to lead these difficult conversations, who will? The truth is you’ve already begun and are doing lots. But if a little extra reading is needed, to help connect your whole team to the issues, the emerging language of this discussion, and the deep sense of injustice underpinning the whole black experience, then every little helps.

I’ll be updating this article and sharing the full list of reading suggestions in around ten days. Please contact me with your own thoughts and suggestions of resources we could share via the UHR network that have been useful to your own thinking.

Our Directors’ Debate Room session is intended as an opening action in UHR’s support for our members in this area. We’ll be taking the temperature of our HR Director members on this issue, trying to understand how far we’ve gone, how far there still is to go, looking for good practice where it is already out there, and for easily replicable wins – if they exist. We’ll use this as a springboard for helping other members of the team. We hope HRDs can join us on 22 July. Can we make a short and direct path from this particular long and winding road?