The Struggle against Racism at the Arts Council of Great Britain

When he took up his post at the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1979, one senior finance officer ^[i] found an august bureaucracy still rigidly shackled to an elitist past which, while attempting to respond to the “changing perceptions of the requirements of a multicultural society”, ^[ii] remained steeped in its own racial conceit, perversely trying to maintain its founding principle of ‘few but roses’.       

Almost immediately, having been instructed by one of his superiors ^[iii] to examine closely the accounts of the leading Indian arts festival in England, the finance officer recognised that the widely held suspicions amongst arts funding officers of innate dishonesty amongst Black arts promoters were motivated by inherent, institutional racism. In fact he found no evidence whatsoever that  the festival Director, Birendra Shankar,  who had been described to him as a “crook”, was anything other than an extremely generous man who had put his own home at risk to support the charitable company which every year organised the series of events known as the Sanskritik Festival. Soon after that a leading Black dance company ^[iv] in the west of England lost its Arts Council support more as a result of prejudice than because of apparent administrative failures which no-one was willing to confront, but which were used by the Arts Council, the country’s leading arts funding body, as the reason for withdrawal of funding.

When in 1979 the Daily Mail exposed the fact that the London Festival Ballet, which was financially maintained by the Arts Council and the Greater London Council, had refused to employ Black dancers, ^[v] the finance officer, David Roussel-Milner, protested. The response of the Secretary General, Sir Roy Shaw, was naïvely to ask what was his interest. He replied that his mother was Black, his wife was Black, his two sons were Black and the child his wife was then carrying would also be Black. ^[vi] Sir Roy did not have the courage either to deal with such a challenging riposte, or to take any action to persuade the ballet company to change its policy; so the officer contested the racist employment practices of the London Festival Ballet when attending the company’s board meetings. One member of their board, the notorious Westminster councillor Dame Shirley Porter, told him to mind his own business, so he wrote to Tony Banks soliciting action to force the flagship ballet company to stop its discrimination against Black dancers. He was then chairman of the GLC Arts and Recreation Committee but would later become a New Labour government minister. He had built a reputation as a politician who would fight racism and other forms of discrimination particularly in the arts having set up the GLC’s Black and Community Arts Board. However Roussel-Milner’s efforts to engage him were to no avail as Banks, although responding reassuringly to the letters and promising “...to ask for an account from Festival Ballet...”, ^[vii] did not attend LFB board meetings even though he was ex-officio a director of the company. He was not to know, of course, that the person who had written to him using his wife’s maiden name was actually an Arts Council officer who would know of his absence and thus the emptiness of his promises.                                                                                                Return to Home Page

Agitation for equal opportunity in the arts by a handful of officers at the Arts Council resulted in the setting up of The Ethnic Arts Working Group in February 1982 under the leadership of the Deputy Secretary General, Richard Pulford, with the task of monitoring provision for what came to be called ‘ethnic minority arts’ and of examining applications from Black artists. Pulford thwarted attempts by Roussel-Milner’s immediate superiors to limit his participation in this group, but the officer was in due course disciplined by his director, Anthony Field OBE, for his special attention to the group’s activities and his incessant efforts to expose racism at the Arts Council and in the arts generally. ^[viii] Eventually his anti-racist endeavours resulted in the termination of his employment in 1987, a severe heart attack eighteen months earlier being used by the new Finance Director, Anthony Blackstock, as the excuse to get rid of him Only after a long acrimonious struggle which was widely reported in the Black press did Blackstock succeed in driving him into retirement. Cynically the person chosen to represent the Council's governors at disciplinary appeal hearings under the chairmanship of Sir William Rees-Mogg was the only Black member of its governing council, the South African artist Gavin Jantjes. This was presumably to try to ensure that no accusation of racism could be levelled against the Council.

A particular example of outdated attitudes at the Arts Council which had shocked Roussel-Milner was the persistent use of racist terminology. When he took up his post, Black people were still usually referred to as ‘coloured’, while even as late as August 1987, in spite of all the efforts of his colleagues for more than half a decade, he was having to protest at the employment of the most offensive language, finding it necessary for example to write to Secretary General Luke Rittner about the continuing use by advisers of the phrase ‘nigger in the woodpile’. ^[ix] However the Arts Council did not exhibit any greater racist tendency than other British institutions, for eleven months later Thames Television were excusing the use of the same grossly offensive phraseology by Sir Jack Charlton during coverage of the football World Cup, and their defence was that it was “not meant to be racially offensive”! ^[x]

However, the campaign led by the officer to persuade colleagues to desist from their loathsome language had borne its first fruit in 1982 when the Council governors, following the advice of Richard Pulford, decided that henceforth, in its papers and at its meetings, all people of colour should be referred to as ‘Black’. While being widely welcomed by Black arts groups, this decision brought immediate protests from one prominent Indian member of the Council’s Dance Panel who complained to the Dance Director, Jane Nicholas, that she found the term “demeaning”, while a Chinese journalist at a Council press conference stated that he regarded being called ‘Black’ as an insult. This opened him to forceful argument from one of Notting Hill Carnival's leading supporters, Sabu Sebastian.
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Racial Tension at CRE Fostered Divisive Epithet
Lacking the fortitude to stand by the Council's decision while giving way to the quite obvious racism of the two dissenters, the then chairman of the Arts Council, former Labour Education Minister Sir Kenneth Robinson, decided to consult the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Mr Peter Newsam. The CRE itself, although ostensibly set up to fight racism, was then a hotbed of racial tension with Africans, Caribbeans and South Asians being encouraged by the Anglo-Saxon leadership to vie against each other for position. It has been stated that the question had been first passed by Newsam to the CRE Chief Executive Officer, Dr Aaron Haynes of Afro-Barbadian origin, who does not appear to have had a reputation of empathy towards Asian staff, but which individual actually cobbled together the phrase ‘Black and Asian’ is open to speculation and will perhaps never be revealed. Meanwhile, with Haynes denying authorship of the synthetic anachronism, the finger does appear to point in the direction of the CRE’s South Asian staff. From what Dr Haynes has written it is evident that the chosen designation was to become a prime cause of division between the races from the moment it was brought into use, and he has expressed himself in unequivocal terms:

I spent the entire time of my professional work in race relations fighting an alliance of Asian academics, Asian activists and a cadre of White liberals over this issue. It was indeed my refusal to buy into the term that I was accused of not being fond of Asians and a threat to their advance. I found this rather tiresome, but accepted it as a price worth paying for my principles. ^[xi]

It has been suggested that CRE Deputy Chairman Clifton Robinson, of Afro-Jamaican origin, might have been more keen to hold onto his position than, by opposing the obnoxious phrase, to go against the wishes of men such as Newsam and some of the CRE Commissioners recently appointed by the Tory Home Office. Haynes maintains that he felt helpless to prevent its adoption, although he was conscious of and warned senior CRE staff against the divisive nature of the suggestion. However, the political potential for keeping the Black communities separate was not likely to have long escaped the notice of the two quango chairmen. As white, upper middle class apparatchiks with considerable experience of the functioning of government, both honest as well as machiavellian, they could have been expected to recognise the latent capacity of the malapropic phrase for reinforcing inherent divisions between the various immigrant communities. Nevertheless, they might not have anticipated just how divisive and offensively racist the phrase was bound to be viewed by many politically aware Black people.

Harold Mangar, a Guyanese senior officer of East Indian ancestry (ie from the Indian sub-continent) ^[xii] had been extremely uneasy as a Caribbean person about the racial divisions being cultivated between the staff in the organisation he served. As soon as he learned of the proposed phrase, he also raised his concerns about the dangers its use might represent with his Chairman, who until then had not been aware of the proposition. Newsam promised to make enquiries and found that a number of CRE documents and papers, which previously would have employed the word ‘black’, had already been printed with the objectionable ‘black and Asian’ and he told Mangar that the CRE could not afford to recall and reprint them. Thus it was allowed to become CRE policy by default. In spite of warnings by Roussel-Milner and others that such a designation is at worst deeply offensive in its tendency to sharpen inter-ethnic antipathy and at the least a rather silly combination of colour and geographic adjectives, the Arts Council, however, was more than happy to adopt it for all their literature..

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The Curse of White Liberalism
A reading of the two volumes of Dr Aaron Haynes’s The State of Black Britain discloses his personal understanding of ‘Black’. Throughout Haynes employs the word as inclusive of West Indians and Asians just as the now unacceptable ‘coloured’ had previously been, the occasional use of which by Haynes serves only to indicate that his first volume was written over a long period before its publication in 1983. It is significant that this date was just one year after the adoption by the CRE of the divisive ‘black and Asian’, which stands in stark contrast to the unifying effect of the single word ‘Black’. Dealing with divisive policies Haynes wrote:

An analysis of the way in which the British Empire was held together by the process of “divide and rule” among the natives will explain the obsession white society has in detailing the minutest differences between Black groups. White society smugness in not giving Blacks their rights is cemented in the belief that so heterogeneous a collection of communities could not possibly coalesce to make an effective demand on the system. ^[xiii]

In his discussion of the story of CARD (Campaign Against Racial Discrimination), Haynes identifies how even liberal whites are usually unable to stomach Black people getting together to fight  for equal rights unless controlled by what might best be described as ‘white power’. Control of CARD, which had been founded by Dr David Pitt and others following a visit to Britain in 1964 by Rev Dr Martin Luther-King, was soon taken by white liberals “who had been quick to jump on the bandwagon of a mass movement of Blacks that, through its inspiration from Martin Luther-King seemed committed to non-violence, were able to mobilize support which would never have followed Black leadership.” He continued, “What killed this last voluntary experiment of a non-Governmental multi-racial approach to racism in British society was the reaction of white liberals when in 1967 Black members gained a substantial majority on the executive. The white liberals walked out of CARD with great trumpeting using the same press and television they had so shortly before used in the interest of the organisation.” ^[xiv]

White liberals were still playing their nefarious game when they took control of the Martin Luther-King Foundation, which had been set up by Lord Learie Constantine, Dr David Pitt and David Roussel-Milner within 24 hours following the assassination of the great African American civil rights leader on 4th April 1968. Once this organisation had served their purposes, the Foundation was absorbed within Christian Action and smothered by its leader, Canon Collins, with the support of a universal Black surrogate woman who was to be rewarded by those whose interests she actually served by making her a Dame of the British Empire (the equivalent of a knighthood). Seducing selected Black leaders has been a tactic of white power structures since time immemorial and the name of this Dame appears in the demise of too many Black initiatives apart from the Martin Luther-King Foundation: eg the Drum Arts Centre in Covent Garden, the Round House Arts Centre in Chalk Farm, the BBC Radio London Black Londoners programme hosted by Alex Pascall when she was a BBC governor, and CARD. This is not to suggest of course that she was personally instrumental in the disappearance of these or other Black enterprises, and it would be unfair to suggest that there are not others who have been similarly seduced by the English establishment while attempting to serve the interests of their communities as they see best. The ruling establishment in all Anglo-Saxon countries is ever alert to identifying those who might serve their purposes regardless of which political regime may be ruling.

Although at the beginning, when employing the excruciating expression, the Arts Council had used a capital ’B’ for the word ‘black’, it has since been stubbornly spelt by other governmental sponsors of the odious label with a small ‘ b’, further demonstrating their desire to avoid promoting the dignity of African peoples or, indeed, that of any of the other Black communities. ‘Black’ in the context of this nomenclature is not merely an adjective depicting pigment of the skin, but a designation identifying origins and encompassing all the history, culture and dignity of those so described. Similarly ‘Asian’ is a misnomer that is exploited to identify mainly those with origins in the Indian subcontinent or Indo-China while not including the Japanese and Chinese, nor the inhabitants of Siberia or the Middle East such as the Turks, Arabs and Israelis. But both words are totally misplaced.  It is ironic that, 500 years after Columbus made the mistake of thinking that the islanders he found on landfall in the ‘New World’ were Indians leading to the misnomer ‘West Indians’, the English establishment, in spite of all their knowledge gained particularly from their imperial past, are still promoting such linguistic and geographic sophisms.       

Thus the decision by those two gentlemen of the English establishment at the CRE and Arts Council arrogantly to impose their own choice of nomenclature for Black people upon the entire majority world exposed an insolent presumption which will increasingly stain any distinction their records of public service may have earned amongst progressive groups. For the descendants of those slaves, whose own African names were savagely suppressed to be replaced by the names of the same atavistic barbarians who had brutalised them, that such a choice should have been made by two senior members of the English establishment on the advice of racism-tainted members of another Black community will be shown by history to have been an intolerable assault upon the dignity of Afrikan ^[xv] and indeed all South Asian people in Britain.