West Indians and their families have suffered at the hands of a racist system. Let us use this day to honour their contributions to this country
Being London-born of Barbadian and Indian parentage, racial difference was part of my upbringing. However, my first experiences of racism would be transmitted subliminally. I was a child of the 1970s, and programming such as The Fosters, Desmond’s and Empire Road, which portrayed the Black experience in Britain, couldn’t counteract the effects of the dominant media messaging coming from The Black and White Minstrel Show, nor overcome the persistent characterisation of Africa as the “dark continent”, and as “backward” and “savage”.
This racism came back into view with the Windrush scandal in 2018. The assertion that the affair was the unintended consequence of the hostile environment immigration policy was best countered by former Guardian columnist Gary Younge who argued that this persecution was “no accident” but rather “cruelty by design”. For Younge, a chronicler of the Black experience in Britain, the Caribbean and US, “this is not a glitch in the system. It is the system … A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect.”
Guy Hewitt is the inaugural director of racial justice in the Church of England, a priest and former high commissioner to the UK. He was born in London and raised in Barbados
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