Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 10 June 2020
It is a privilege to speak in this important debate. We hear that phrase often. However, today, I am also a bit ashamed of that privilege.
The international outcry and protest following George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police—those who should have been his protectors—reminds me and everyone in the chamber that our privilege is at the expense of the rights and opportunities denied to others, because we live in an unequal and unfair society.
I thank Councillor Graham Campbell for giving me the opportunity to sit in on a call on Monday evening with contributors from Scotland’s BAME community, who told us about their lived experiences of racism. It was harrowing, disappointing and hard to hear, because it meant that I have failed that community. We all have. We have failed it by not doing enough to tackle racism or to take the action that Anas Sarwar talked about. The contributors asked us to listen and to understand; most important, they asked us to act.
For me, the most shocking revelation was that casual name calling, abuse in the street, and the actions that Brian Whittle so passionately described earlier—all of which are overt, easily recognised forms of racism—were to be expected. I find that chilling.
However, what caused most harm and frustration to those involved in that call was the systemic, institutional racism that is born of the privilege and unconscious bias that hurt them the most. More than one family had had to change the school that their children attended, because they experienced lack of understanding and support when their children were subjected to racial abuse. Such behaviour is appalling in itself, but the failure of the schools and education authorities to address it adequately was devastating for those families.
Those people’s experience was that their isolation and uniqueness in the workplace or on boards made them feel like tokens, and that their contribution and value was merely as part of a tick-box exercise. Again, Anas Sarwar spoke about that. I have it written down to say, “Just google chief executive officers, then google diversity officers, and it is laid bare in the images that appear.”
People also talked about their employers’ workloads and caseloads being distributed not according to employees’ professional expertise, but on the basis of their association with a client group on the basis of their race. We need to do better, and we need to take action now.
I was very reluctant to say anything in the debate about my experience, because it is not about me or where I am in our society. However, I want to share with members an experience that showed me some of the possibilities offered by another country’s endeavours in recognising the appalling acts that have been perpetrated on minorities in its recent history. With the Presiding Officer, I visited Canada, where we attended a visit to the legislature in Winnipeg and were given a tour of the Canadian museum for human rights. Establishing a museum that recognises that aspect of our history has been called for here.
Among the Canadian museum’s goals are that it
“fosters an appreciation for the importance of human rights, spurs informed dialogue and invites participants to identify the contemporary relevance of past and present human rights events, both at home and abroad.”
It also
“exemplifies Canadians’ commitment to freedom and democracy and aims to ignite an informed, ever-evolving global conversation”
in our world, and it seeks to offer
“a credible and balanced learning resource”.
Visiting the museum was a profound experience for me—very much so because man’s inhumanity to man is there laid bare so that we have to examine it. To see displays on all the major instances of genocide that have happened in the world on one floor filled me with a sense of despair about the human condition. They included material on Rwanda, Srebrenica, the Holocaust and the Holodomor, the last of which has not yet been recognised by the UK Government as an instance of genocide.
However, the museum covers even more. It includes themes that I think that we should adopt in whatever action our community decides to take, with consultation, to address the issues in our own society. Our approach should be about witness and lived experience, and the accurate capturing of ethnic minorities’ stories and first-hand experiences. It should be about truth—the acceptance of the true horror of what our past has been and the detriment that it has caused to certain communities. However, the greatest theme should be education. The Canadian museum offered many tools to help younger and older children to address the othering behaviours that we all have, such as unconscious bias. There was even an opportunity for them to take part in mock civil rights court cases examining what had happened in Canada. Those are all excellent examples of how we can educate people and effect reconciliation.
In Scotland, we do things differently. Our National Theatre of Scotland is known as a theatre without walls. If we are to build a museum of human rights, I want it to be one without walls. We have to take our message on racism into every community and every school, and whichever approach we adopt must be accessible throughout Scotland and to everyone. We are now in the 21st century and this is the age of the internet of things. Let us not simply remove plaques but replace them with interactive information and signposting to the history of our streets. Let us develop maps that tell the stories and the history. Let us move forward and take the right action, so that we can truly say that we have listened and that black lives matter.
16:19