BRIG Chair’s 2024 Reflection

The third full year activities of the Birmingham Race Impact Group (BRIG), which has grown significantly in scope, operations and influence within the City of Birmingham and the West Midlands. Its values and principles, its understanding and analysis of racism, and its methods of working as a ’critical friend’ has been understood and welcomed by the institutions with which it has collaborated.

This year’s BRIG Annual Report – 2023/24 (read here) lists an extensive range of achievements across the various sectors of civic life. Following sustained conversations through meetings, seminars, workshops and mini-summits, BRIG has facilitated the production of ‘position papers;in the education, employment, housing, criminal justice, health, further education, sport and voluntary, and the community and sectors, among other similar publications. When these are taken together, in concert, and acted upon simultaneously, they will represent one of the most effective strategies to comprehensively dismantle racism that Birmingham has witnessed in this century.

Another achievement worthy of mention is the ‘The Seeking the Pioneers Race History Detectives’ project in which young people will be trained and deployed to gather, archive, and distribute the struggles of anti-racist campaigners since WW2. A critical appraisal of these accounts will form the basis for, and inform, future anti-racist action.

There are other achievements worthy of note, particularly our attempt to produce data driven strategies. But the one event of the greatest consequence has been the build-up over the last year towards the public signing of a pledge at a recent BRIG summit to make Birmingham and the West Midlands an anti-racist place by 2035, alongside the launch of the ‘Birmingham Race Disparities Overview’ dashboard which our ‘Metric Group’ worked with the ‘City Observatory’ on. Both, the most senior leaders from leading institutions, including universities, NHS boards, West Midlands Combined Authority, Birmingham City Council and the West Midlands Mayor, as well as the Police and Crime Commissioner, stood shoulder to shoulder with leaden community, faith and voluntary sector organisations to make an unconditional commitment to creating anti-racist structures and cultures.

This year started collaborations with national agencies such as the Runnymede Trust, Black Equity Organisation (BEO), Operation Black Vote (OBV) and Stand Up to Racism (SUTR - Birmingham). Of note was the pre-general election work on supporting workshops on the creation on ‘Black Britain’s Mandate’, Black Voter Registration Campaign and organising locally with SUTR Birmingham, Kings Heath United Against Racism and other community groups to defend our communities and ensure Birmingham remained stronger during last summers pogroms / racist far right riots.

BRIG activity took a major leap forward with its acquisition of the BRIG café, which has now become a meeting point for anti-racist discussion and debate, book launches, seminars on identity, and culture evenings that explore the immense diversity within Birmingham’s rich cultural heritage.

I have been privileged to serve as a Chair of BRIG since its inception and to work alongside colleagues who have shown such dedication, commitment, and resolve. I am also grateful for the unconditional trust and confidence that major trusts have increasingly placed in us.

But what has been personally inspiring and gratifying has been the active participation by the younger generation from all ethnic, religious, national and linguistic backgrounds in embracing anti-racist thinking and behaviour with such vitality, energy and innovation. They are the future of BRIG and the future of our city and region and will carry us into a brighter and more fulfilling future for all.

Together with our partner organisations like the Stuart Hall Archives Project, and Birmingham City University, and many other community-based organisations like Punch Records, we are now poised to make a paradigm shift in the way we conceive an anti-racist way of living and working in a culturally diverse society which is both challenging and deeply satisfying.

Sitting in the BRIG Café, sipping masala chai and eating a hot samosa, while engaging in a discussion about the complex construction of identity one gets a sudden glimpse of what a truly anti racist place can be. Our challenge is to repeat this experience across the many different institutions in the city that circumscribe our lives.

One thing is certain. Even if we don’t succeed in our anti-racist endeavours during our lifetime, the next generation of BRIG activists inevitably will.