We are a movement of activists, animateurs, academics and ordinary people who all want to live to see an anti-racist city. We are the community.

We are people with lived experience of racism.

We bring our knowledge and experience of our roles as race equality policy practitioners.

We represent the interest of all people who continue to live with racism in our city.

And we want to try something different.

our mission is simple

• An anti-racist city

• Keep race on the agenda

• Hold institutions to account

• Passing the baton to future generations

OUR STORY

The 4th June 2020 more than 5000 young people, elders, and families stood united for the largest rally for the Black Lives Matter protest in Centenary Square Birmingham. It was Birmingham’s response to yet another senseless murder of a Black man.

Many of us had been here before, in the 1960s, 1970s and more significantly the 1981-85 uprisings.

We could now predict the play book. It’s wasteful cycle of outrage, noise and silence.
Race, is back on the agenda.
There will be a commission...
There will be a report...
Outsiders will be brought in to investigate, units opened and refreshed.
Then, as the outrage subsides, race will once again fall off the agenda...
Until the next murder!

We have been here before and are likely to be here again because all we ever get is “performativism” the pretence of doing something but never actually doing anything meaningful.

We set up structures, but ‘structures’ don’t deliver and there is no learning about what has or hasn’t worked – there is no progress or deeper understanding of how systemic, embedded, societal racism operates.

The anti-racist reactionary movement has been in a perpetual loop: one step forward, that is driven by a hiatus of activity in responding to the here and now; two steps back, until it falls off the agenda AGAIN!

The perpetual loop continues.
Anti-racist measures are “hard.”
Let’s just follow a ‘tick box’ approach.
Like climate action there is no sustainability.

Anti-racism is more important now than ever before because here in Birmingham, we are a minority-majority city with 70% of pupils of colour in our schools.

• People have come saying they are committed but they don’t know what to do.

• We all agree there are no priority sectors, all areas need equal weight if we have any chance of moving forward

The battle of Digbeth, February 1978