I was only a child when my mum and dad took me to ride the Space Tower at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, an amusement park in the north of England. This forty-eight-metre-high rotating observation deck gave a panoramic view of all the attractions and seemed to be a great way to start the visit. I remember feeling hugely excited, in the giddy way you do as a child. But this excitement quickly evaporated as the father of another family on the ride at the same time as us proceeded to launch into a tirade of statements, including, but not limited to, ‘Why don’t you fuck off back to your own country, you Pakis!’ This was my earliest experience of racism, although I didn’t know what it was at the time. For my parents, who came to Britain in the 1960s, racism was an ever-present part of their early lives in the UK. To give you just a couple of examples, when my father first came to Manchester, he lived in a one-room bedsit, which cost him £5 a week. He was looking around for a better place to live and found a nice flat in the popular area of Didsbury. He rang the landlord immediately to go and look around, but when he got there, as soon as she opened the door, she paused, took a breath, and said, ‘Sorry, it’s already gone.’ This was not an isolated incident. For my dad, hearing people shouting ‘Paki! Go home!’ was a regular thing. I asked my dad how he got past this, and he told me that he just assumed it was a fact of life in the UK. He saw the warmth of some people’s welcome in the business community in particular, and so tried to overlook it. For many communities who came to Britain at a similar time as my parents, the response was fight or flight. Fight meaning integration, and flight resulting in building insular communities. The former was the more successful option, but a phenomenon that did require both sides to be open to the idea.
Growing up in the 1980s, racism was a part of my life. From being called ‘curry pot’ and ‘paki’ at school, to the fortunately rarer incidents of on-street racism, I took it for granted that there were a lot of people who simply didn’t like me because I was brown. While I wasn’t pleased about this, it felt like a social norm, part of how society worked at the time. Thankfully, as we moved into the 1990s and 2000s, racism became less of an issue for me. Some of this was due to my migration into the nice leftie middle-class bubble my career allowed me to enter, but I think a lot was genuinely due to racism slowly becoming significantly less acceptable in our society. I mostly felt blissfully unaware of my skin culture unless it was specifically pointed out, such as on one occasion early in my business career when a journalist asked me, ‘So, Vikas, how does it feel to be an Asian entrepreneur?’, a question to which my answer was simple: ‘I guess like any other entrepreneur, but brown?’ This may seem a fairly harmless exchange, but sometimes the ‘them and us’ in society only becomes apparent when pointed out. Over the past few years, however, I’ve realized that the racism I experienced in my youth is just as strong – it was just pushed a little deeper into the shadows.
For the first time in over twenty years, I feel brown. I find myself being extra careful in terms of how I dress, where I go, how I speak, what I carry and how I behave – not to conform to any new social norms, but rather so that people don’t mistake me for a terrorist, or make assumptions about my intentions. I am not the only brown person I know who has a ‘pre-flight shave’ at airports, nor the only one I know who is acutely aware of themselves on public transport.
Discrimination isn’t just a race issue. Around the world, people are economically, socially and culturally marginalized (and often face violence and displacement) because of their gender, skin colour, socio-economic background, religion, sexuality and political affiliation. You need only look to the United States to see the awful reality of systemic, institutionalized racism that has cost the lives of so many African Americans at the hands of systems that are ostensibly there to protect them. And the global protests following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 made it very clear that for many, enough is enough – and things have to change.
In this chapter are some of my conversations with leaders and activists who have dedicated their careers to exposing and fighting discrimination in all its forms – F. W. de Klerk, former president of South Africa, who talked to me about apartheid, Holocaust survivor Iby Knill, who shared with me her experiences during the Second World War, and actor George Takei, who spoke about his own experiences being a prisoner at a US internment camp. Activist Ai Weiwei spoke to me about arts and activism and actor Rose McGowan about her experience of gender discrimination, while Sir Philip Craven, former president of the International Paralympic Committee, talked about the discrimination facing those with disabilities. Nobel Peace Prize-winner Leymah Gbowee shared her views with me on the struggle for gender rights, alongside Melinda Gates who spoke of the solutions to gender-based discrimination. Ruth Hunt and Peter Tatchell discussed the challenges faced by LGBT+ communities, and the late Harry Leslie Smith and the Right Honourable Lord Bird addressed the challenges facing those in society who are impacted by poverty and economic marginalization. I also spoke to comedian and author David Baddiel about the role played by the internet in our experience of discrimination, and how it manifests in the digital world.
How has poverty changed in your lifetime?
Harry Leslie Smith: Poverty has changed a lot in my lifetime, though there are certain similarities and echoes which have always carried through. The poverty I experienced in my youth during the 1920s and 1930s was much more extreme than most hard-pressed people will endure today. We lived in appalling conditions – in doss houses in a rough neighbourhood of Bradford. There was no welfare state, homelessness was rife, and the poor lived in a libertarian dystopia where assistance was minimal, and misery was all-encompassing. There was no National Health Service, which meant that if you couldn’t afford healthcare, you died sooner, and generally with a greater degree of anguish, than someone in the middle or upper classes. Poverty today is all around us. Although it may not be as extreme as the 1930s, I fear it is heading that way because of many years of austerity, which has gutted the welfare state. I am starting to see a similar type of meanness towards low-income workers and the poor that I witnessed during the Great Depression. There is a feeling today, like in my youth, that this will not end. It’s my responsibility, as an eyewitness to history, to tell people the anguish of poverty can be eradicated, but only through action and political change – and that starts with voter registration. We have to get people out to vote more.
What is the role of government in the eradication of poverty?
Lord John Bird: To understand poverty, you have to understand the role government money has played. Our taxes have been invested into social security mechanisms which, at best, have become a form of hand holding. Social security, when it was first invented, was there to help people through a tough time and to move them on to success through training and provision. That was social opportunity hidden within social security legislation. In today’s world, social security warehouses people and because it’s warehoused people for so long, when the government tries to make changes, they’ve already sowed the seeds for their own destruction. They’ve harmed the normal acquisition of skills people need to provide for themselves, their families and their children. Government has destroyed the impetus for people to become entrepreneurs, and to build skills.
People still see ‘the poor’ as another species. If you scrape the surface of most white middle-class liberals in the UK who are doing quite well out of society, you will find, some generations ago, there was an individual who sowed the seeds of getting that family out of poverty. It may have been a grandfather who learned a new skill, or who was committed to starting a business. A generation later, that entire family no longer had to know about poverty.
For over ten years, I’ve worked closely with Mustard Tree, a charity in Manchester that supports thousands of individuals across the region who are impacted by poverty and marginalization. In the United Kingdom, we’re lucky to have a reasonable social safety net, but even that is like a thumb being held over a crack in a dam, as the pressure builds behind it. Like so many governments across the world, ours in the United Kingdom has prioritized wealth creation at a huge cost. Housing is unaffordable, jobs have moved to the services and financial sector, communities and safety nets have been underfunded, and the net result is a set of conditions that puts millions of lives in a precarious state. We are one of the richest countries in the world, but research (from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation) shows that the UK has a poverty rate of 22 per cent (that’s around 14 million people, one in five of our population) and 1.5 million of those have experienced destitution (including over 300,000 children). During the Covid lockdowns of 2020, at Mustard Tree we experienced demand levels that were off the charts, as families who had been just about getting by suddenly found themselves unable to cope.
What is the true scale of discrimination faced by people living with impairments and disabilities?
Philip Craven: I personally don’t encounter any discrimination that often, but I wouldn’t go to places or meet with people again if they gave me that impression. That said, I’m sure that much discrimination exists. The real way to change perceptions in society against these mythical ‘groups’ of people is through positive experiences, and not to just ram new laws down their throats. In some cases, however, these laws are necessary. Wider parking spaces, for example, mean that people can get out of their chair into the front seat of their cars. Education is imperative in all formats to do this, as it allows people themselves to change their minds about others rather than being told they have to believe or act in a certain way. Around ten years ago in the USA, Paralympians were called ‘super-crips’ by some people in the communities they themselves were supposed to belong to, perhaps because people couldn’t associate with them. But in truth, they are there to showcase what is possible when you really put your mind to it. You only change perceptions by showing yourself as being what you are. People won’t do it for you.
What does the term ‘disability’ really mean?
Philip Craven: The word disability is the embodiment of pure negativity and when it’s used as a catch-all such as ‘the disabled’ it’s even worse. Everyone is an individual, and those individual personalities should shine through, not the labels. Ask a person who’s getting a bit older and may have a visual, hearing or mobility impairment, if they’re disabled? They’ll throw that title off vehemently! They view disability as being a community they don’t belong to. I’m Philip Craven, I’m me. The fact that I use a wheelchair is immaterial. I am what I am.
At the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, we were staying at the Westin. They had an adapted bathroom, with a little sink that never emptied. I called one of the hotel team, who pointed out the sink was on a siphon, and that siphon had to be half filled with whatever you had spat out into the sink before it emptied. I told the hotel it wasn’t acceptable to have something this crude in a five-star hotel, and the response was, well, what do you expect, it’s a disabled sink in a disabled bathroom. This clearly illustrates the way people think, assuming we want something different when we don’t. If you’re told you’re disabled long enough, you start to feel it. I sometimes get asked if things changed for me after my accident. They didn’t because I damn well made sure they didn’t and fought against it. You have to throw off your impairments and make sure that you have the confidence to decide your own destiny rather than allowing others to decide it for you because you’re disabled.
What would be your message to those living with disabilities?
Philip Craven: You have to be yourself and decide what you want to do with your life. If you have negative thoughts at the moment, you have to see what other people have done in your situation, but realize it’s you that will change your life with the support of others, not others that will change your life for you. You have to get information in your mind about what’s possible, but you need determination to go and get it, and if anyone stands in your way, fight them like mad. Life’s a fight, it’s a struggle, and you have to take it to them. You are in a community with written and unwritten rules, but life is for freedom. You have to create your own freedom.
In 2019, with one of the charities I support, In Place of War, I went to visit communities in the north of Uganda, not far from the border with South Sudan, that had been impacted by decades of violent conflict. We were creating a series of programmes there to address the inequalities facing those with disabilities; in this case predominantly as a result of landmines. Using interactive drama workshops based around the ‘forum theatre’ technique, we discovered that it wasn’t specifically a bias against disability that was causing the manifest discrimination, but rather that, since the end of the war, hospitals had been built, meaning that individuals who had come into contact with landmines now survived with disabilities, rather than dying due to a lack of medical treatment. The communities we visited simply did not understand disability, nor did they have the language to discuss it. Being able to have that conversation moved the needle dramatically, even in the short time we were with them. And that’s true of so many forms of discrimination; unless we keep having conversations, we risk going backwards.
Right at the start of this chapter, I highlighted my own experience of racism. It takes only a cursory glance at the news to realize that the growth of right-wing populist and nationalist movements around the world in the past decade has brought racial discrimination back to the forefront. Our world has fought hard against this, and unfortunately it seems we must continue to do so.
What is race?
Dexter Dias QC: As a biological, scientific, genetic concept, race does not exist. The truth is we are a relatively new species and we are all just African migrants with different migratory patterns and trajectories. I find comfort in that thought about our shared humanity. But here’s the thing: if race doesn’t exist, and is in fact a social construct, a myth that has been meticulously assembled, why has it become one of the most important forces on the entire planet? The reason is the function myths perform. We tell each other stories to achieve purposes, to create meaning in the world, to inform and justify actions, to organize our societies – and ourselves.
The myth of race started to take off around the time of the Spanish Inquisition, just over five hundred years ago when the Spanish tried to establish that Jewish people were a different species, not the same as them. The idea of race really went viral, however, because of colonialism – a project that fundamentally depended on using the production of ‘race’ as a form of knowledge to justify the exploitation of people in other lands which were being appropriated and asset-stripped. By recasting them through the lens of spurious pseudoscience as inferior, somehow not human in the same way, a lot of the work of domination was done. The concept of racial difference is almost always a direct function of some form of exploitation, rubber-stamped under the banner of ‘race’. Race is very versatile. I always remember what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu says: ‘There is not racism; there are racisms’ – plural. That idea is very important in understanding what is happening in the world right now.
What is the relationship between race and identity?
Afua Hirsch: We take for granted the fact that we have racial identities that don’t coincide with anything real in the sense of biology or science. There are no genes that correlate to our notion of race. In fact, there are greater genetic differences within ethnic groups than between them. It’s easy to trace the history of how we came to see ourselves in such racialized ways. Race is an idea that was invented very specifically as an ideology to exploit people and land around the world, as the Europeans did during the period of imperialist expansion. As Ta-Nehisi Coates said, ‘Race is not the child of slavery, slavery is the child of race.’ To be clear, it was not just the Europeans who embarked on colonialism, but the European model of it was rooted in the ideological foundations of race and racial categorization, tools that served to justify the degradation of Africans to the extent that they were no longer regarded as human. The ways in which those ideas about race were socially constructed have endured and the evidence shows that they become internalized to the point where we self-identify through the lens of race. We need to continue to interrogate the reasons why we, as a society, have been racialized and the ideological content of that racialization.
In your view, what caused the racial segregation during colonial times that culminated in apartheid?
F. W. de Klerk: The concept of human rights is a fairly new phenomenon in human affairs. For most of history, even among the indigenous peoples of Africa, America and Asia, it was accepted that conquering powers could treat vanquished peoples and their territories more or less as they wanted. The behaviour of colonial powers towards the people they conquered was seldom restrained by law, morality or compassion, particularly in the Americas. Relationships between settlers and the indigenous population in South Africa were generally less exploitive and less repressive than they were in the Americas, Australasia and in many parts of Asia. Most colonial powers practised segregation against the peoples they conquered for a number of reasons: they believed that their status as Christians gave them a right to discriminate against pagans; there were often substantial differences in levels of development between the colonial powers and the people they subjugated; colonizers were often ignorant about the cultures that they encountered; they were usually motivated by determination to seize the land and the resources of colonial peoples; and they had an interest in keeping colonial peoples in a state of subjugation to prevent them from rising in rebellion. However, for much of their history, a majority of black South Africans continued to live in their own tribal areas where they were ruled by their traditional authorities (whose appointment was, however, approved by white governments in Pretoria).
In South Africa’s case, segregation had its roots in a strong view that each of the peoples of the region should be encouraged to develop separately. From the late 1950s onwards, South Africa embarked on a policy of internal decolonization that culminated in the development of ten homelands, each with its own parliament, government, administration – and often its own university. Almost 40 per cent of black South Africans lived in these areas and were, for all practical purposes, governed by their own people without any kind of racial discrimination. Six of the territories progressed to the stage of self-government and four were granted full independence that was recognized only by South Africa and each other. Nevertheless, most of the states had budgets and economies larger than those of quite a number of independent countries elsewhere in Africa. The policy failed because the territories set aside for blacks were too small and fragmented; because economic forces were drawing more and more black people into the so-called white economy; because the policy made no provision for the political rights of black people in the so-called white areas where whites were also a minority; and because the policy was vehemently rejected by a great majority of non-white South Africans.
What led to the abolition of apartheid?
F. W. de Klerk: There were a number of factors that led to the abolition of apartheid. Firstly, the clear failure of the government’s policy to achieve a just solution to the problems of the country; the rejection of apartheid by the overwhelming majority of non-white South Africans leading to a spiral of resistance and repression; growing international isolation and sanctions; increasing integration of black South Africans into the economy leading to substantial shifts in the distribution of income; emergence of the majority of Afrikaners into the middle class, with university education and increasing exposure to international attitudes; the acceptance by the end of the 1980s that there was no prospect for either a military or a revolutionary solution; the successful implementation of the UN independence process in Namibia following the negotiated withdrawal of Cuban troops from Namibia; the emergence of a new generation of National Party leaders after the stroke suffered by President P. W. Botha at the beginning of 1989; the positive influence of exploratory talks between white business and academic leadership groups and the ANC – parallel to the initiation of informal talks between Nelson Mandela and the SA government; and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the victory of free-market democracy.
Why are institutions slow or reluctant to respond to racism?
Afua Hirsch: We’re talking here about deeply entrenched structural inequalities that benefit the elite. It will take profound changes in our society to remedy those inequalities, and so most diversity and inclusion strategies focus on identities such as gender and sexual orientation, identities which have certainly been a source of structural inequalities, but have certainly not resulted in the level of inequality that race has when you look at distribution of outcomes in society. The hypocrisy of modern corporations can be seen in how they claim to represent certain values, but really continue to represent elitism and the concentration of power and wealth among a few, who can often trace their actual descent to people who benefited from colonial slavery. It’s so much easier to talk about diversity; it’s a catch-all that allows you to have people who look different in the room without acknowledging whiteness and how racism was constructed and continues to work. We always find ways of taking the safe route; even when we talk of racism, we lump it into a ‘BAME issue’, which is alien to real, lived experience.
How do media portrayals of race impact on racism?
George Takei: I’m an actor, and I know the power of the media, its stereotypes and its power to shape people’s attitudes towards groups of people. When Pearl Harbor happened, we had an Attorney General in California, a great man who knew the law and the constitution. He was the top lawyer in the State of California, wanted to become governor and saw that the top issue in California at the time was to lock up the Japanese movement and the Japanese people. This man, who knew better, got up and made an amazing statement as Attorney General. He said, ‘We have no reports of spying or sabotage or fifth column activities by Japanese Americans, and that is ominous. The Japanese are inscrutable, and it would be prudent to lock them up before they do anything.’ Just think about that. This is an Attorney General who used the absence of evidence, as evidence.
He became enormously powerful as the leader of the internment movement in California. He fed into the wartime hysteria, which travelled right up to the President of the United States. It was President Roosevelt who signed the Executive Order that put us into these barbed-wire camps. This Attorney General ran for governor, won, held two terms in office and was then appointed as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. You might recognize his name: Earl Warren, the so-called liberal Chief Justice of the United States. I like to think he was liberal because of his conscience; he never owned up to the role he played in California as Attorney General, but in his posthumous memoirs he wrote that his greatest regret was the role he played in the internment of Japanese Americans. But this was not something he was prepared to say while he was alive.
The Holocaust is recent history. Within the lifetimes of people who are still alive today, the world witnessed the systematic execution of over 6 million people because of their religion. Since this abhorrent act, we have seen genocide and ethnic cleansing take place around the world as predominantly authoritarian leaders divide and dehumanize people along racial and cultural lines. Throughout the twentieth century we have heard the survivors of atrocities speak to the world and say ‘never again’ – and we owe it to them, and to ourselves, to listen.
Did your experiences at Auschwitz change your sense of identity?
Iby Knill: Initially, after the liberation, everyone felt survivors’ guilt. Why did we survive when others didn’t? What do we now have to do in order to earn and deserve the fact that we were still alive? This is common with survivors, and colours the way you look at life and your own actions. You evaluate things on that basis and you try to be a better person. You try not to harm people, and try not to damage or belittle others because you have experienced yourself what it is to be belittled.
I had a nervous breakdown for the first three years. Had it not been for a very understanding husband, I don’t think I would have survived. My late husband had been a soldier in the First World War and experienced trench warfare. He understood the trauma of what I was going through. It took several more years to get some form of balanced mental state. I wrapped up those memories into a Pandora’s box, threw it in the sea and threw away the key. I would never talk about it or refer to it, nor would my mother, who had also been in a camp. We would never mention to each other anything about it. You pretended that period of time never existed. During my time in Auschwitz, it was impossible to isolate good from bad and so that period disappeared. To the extent that for those years afterwards, I could not speak German, which had previously been my main language. It is only now, since 2002 when I started my book, that I concluded it was time to put down what I had experienced and bear witness to it.
What was the importance of sharing the stories of Auschwitz, and what can society learn from your experiences?
Iby Knill: It’s very important for people to realize that you mustn’t allow a culture of us and them to develop. When you look at young people, they play together regardless of their colour or background. Somewhere along the line they start to feel that other people are different to them. I’m not saying we should all revert to childlike innocence, but rather that this feeling of equality should remain, that we feel that under the skin we are all the same. I find it very important to talk to young people about it, and make them aware of what the end result of a culture of dehumanization can be. I spend a lot of time talking to young people about the fact that our differences only make life more interesting, and more valuable. It would be very dull if we were all the same.
It’s sobering to realize that more girls have been killed in the past fifty years simply because of their gender than all the men in all the battles of the twentieth century. Even today, more than 3 million women around the world are enslaved in the sex trade, with millions more facing economic, social and cultural injustice simply because of their gender. The Rome Statute, which created the International Criminal Court, defines crimes against humanity as part of ‘a wide practice of atrocities tolerated or condoned by a government or a de-facto authority’ – and it is against this definition that we begin to see that women are facing, and have suffered, one of the greatest human rights atrocities of this century. The past few years have seen the systemic and institutionalized sexism in society laid bare for the world to see, and one of the most powerful examples of this has been the exposing of sexual abuse and sexism within the media through the #MeToo movement. Rose McGowan has been a visible and powerful voice in this movement, and I wanted to speak to her and others about their experiences, and why it’s so important to speak about this now.
Why do we still need to have conversations around sexism?
Rose McGowan: People have been shamed for coming forward for such a long time that we still need to have these conversations again and again. These conversations are ugly, nobody wants to have them – let’s put that out there. It’s not a walk in the park to come forward, it’s not fun, but growth is ugly and sometimes growth hurts. That’s the point in time we’re at now. Sexism has always been ‘tolerated’. The way I get treated in the media every day is wildly sexist, and I can go on Twitter at any time and just be flooded by sexist and nasty messages. So many people think or say, ‘I’m one of the good guys’, or ‘I’m one of the good women’, and I just say to them, be better. I’m no expert on race, but I can say that since I was fourteen, I can remember story after story of black people getting shot in America, and nothing has changed – we’re still talking about it, but people still aren’t being held accountable. We’re living at a time where people are being assassinated because of their colour, in a society that has been programmed to be fearful of different races. We need to unlearn what we’ve learned, and replace that with knowledge of other races, through their eyes, their writers, their media. We have to put ourselves into the shoes of the other and not adhere to the cult of ignorance.
What does feminism mean to you?
Laura Bates: Everybody deserves to be treated equally, regardless of their sex. Very simply and clearly, that’s what feminism means to me. Believing that women have the right to economic, social and political equality to men is the basis of feminism – and if you apply that definition, I hope very few people would be able to say they are not feminists.
I came to feminism firstly through personal experiences of inequality, sexual violence and harassment. In 2012, I had a group of such experiences in a relatively short space of time and that prompted me to talk to other women and girls and ask them if they’d experienced these things too. I was completely overwhelmed by the responses. I thought that perhaps one or two women would have an experience to share from some point in their lives, but every single woman I spoke to shared experiences that happened to them every single day. Women told me about experiences they’d had on the way to meet me that day, or how in their workplace, male colleagues would take clients to a strip club at lunchtime and missed out on deals. They told me how they were followed in the street, licked, touched, harassed, abused, you name it. The severity and universality of sexism shocked me. It made me realize how little awareness there was around it. The majority of women I spoke to told me that until I asked them outright about their experiences, they had never told anyone. Why? They thought it was just normal life and didn’t want to make a fuss. Sexism is a major problem, affecting women’s lives on a daily basis.
What is the scale and reality of sexism faced by women?
Laura Bates: Sexism is a huge, severe problem. We’ve received over one hundred thousand testimonies from women all over the world, and find there are certain themes which come up over and over again.
In the UK, when women try to speak out against gender inequality we’re often told, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are! Look at what women are dealing with elsewhere!’ But here’s the thing: in the UK every year, 54,000 women lose their jobs as a result of paternity discrimination, 85,000 women are raped and 400,000 sexually assaulted. The idea that women simply aren’t facing these severe issues in the UK is false. The issues women face are complex and interconnected. If we look at the objectification of women in the media or the harassment of women in the street, we see the same words and slurs used that may be directed at a woman facing discrimination in a meeting, or at the victim of domestic abuse. To write off and excuse certain elements of sexism and misogyny is simply wrong, especially when we live in a world with an epidemic of violence, abuse and inequality against women. Sexism is not a women’s issue, it’s a human rights issue. This is not about vilifying men, or victimizing women – it’s about people standing up to prejudice.
Why does so much of our culture reduce the value of women to their appearance?
Jameela Jamil: I don’t think there’s ever been a time where women haven’t been reduced to being much more than sex objects or carriers for children; we’ve rarely been seen with much more value than our appeal to men. What surprises me so much about the fact that these attitudes still prevail is that we had a moment in the 1990s where I felt change was really coming, and women were stepping into power, into different boxes, and out of the pigeon holes that we were pushed back into. This was the era just before heroin chic, where we had Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliott and so many new stories being told. We had female directors like Sofia Coppola rising through the ranks, and it felt like there was a real turning point where women were being very openly intellectual, bold and varied.
After this, it’s felt like the plot has been dialled back; maybe because we were making too much progress, and the patriarchy didn’t like it. Today, with the help of social media, we’re seeing the most aggressive assault on our appearance that there has ever been.
How is social media impacting on people’s image of themselves?
Jameela Jamil: The statistics show that we’re seeing the highest rates of teen surgery, self-harm and eating disorders that we’ve ever experienced. Women are under a visceral attack. When I was younger, you at least had to go out and find a toxic magazine, or ask someone for the £4 to buy it. Or look very hard for the hidden thinspiration accounts. You would have to actively seek out the kind of content that is now thrust in your face. Now, because of algorithms, and because we’re all complicit in pushing out this narrative of being thin and flawless, using filters and all that madness, it is the first thing we see when we open our phones in bed. Especially if you’re a woman, you are algorithmically attacked with imagery of women who make you feel bad about yourself, about your life and your looks. Teenagers literally can’t get away from it. As a young woman, if you want to take part in social media, you will see these crazy adverts for corsets, appetite suppressants, and so much more – whether you are looking for them or not.
Celebrities are so toxic, as is this influencer culture which has emerged. Ninety-five per cent of celebrities are complicit in the assault on women by not saying anything about it, by not calling out the use of Photoshop, and actually by perpetuating the narrative that looks are the most important thing by only ever talking about looks, and having surgeries without admitting it. Let me be clear, I don’t mind whether someone wants to have surgery or not, but if you have and you don’t admit it, you’re committing a crime against your gender.
How have your own life experiences shaped how you approach tackling the issues faced by women and girls internationally?
Melinda Gates: One example is family planning. When I started travelling for our foundation, I began meeting women who told me they had no access to contraceptives and because of that, no voice in their families or their futures. They were having more children than they could afford to feed, and they were getting pregnant too often for their bodies to handle. Their stories got me thinking about what contraceptives have meant in my own life. Because the truth is that they’ve meant everything. My family, my career and my life as I know it are all a direct result of the fact that I could and did use contraceptives. Bill and I waited to start having kids until we were ready. And we waited three years between each kid, because that’s what was right for our family. If you live in the US or Europe, it can be easy to take these options for granted. But there are more than 200 million women around the world who don’t want to get pregnant but don’t have access to modern contraceptives. I never expected that I was going to become an advocate for contraceptives, and I never, ever thought I’d be speaking publicly about my own experience with them, but I couldn’t turn my back on the women I met.
Why do you think women suffer so much injustice around the world?
Leymah Gbowee: It’s because of the way the world is shaped. We’ve never had an equal dynamic. If you go back, for those of us who call ourselves Christians, the sin of the world is blamed on women. Eve was the one who turned a perfect world imperfect. If you are the one taking the world from perfection to imperfection, there are punishments for that. The whole idea of patriarchy and the story of the foundation of the world have made things unequal from that time until now. There’s not much anyone can do about where we find ourselves. All we can do is continue our advocacy. At least you can see some rays of light at the end of the tunnel.
What is the power of education for girls in global development?
Melinda Gates: I write in my book, The Moment of Lift, about a ten-year-old girl named Sona from an impoverished community in India. My colleague Gary was in her village, Kanpur, on behalf of our foundation. Sona went right up to him, handed him a little gift, and told him, ‘I want a teacher.’ She followed him around all day repeating those same four words: ‘I want a teacher.’ He looked into it, found out why she wasn’t in school, and eventually some of our foundation’s partners helped her get back in. When I heard that story, I was so moved by the courage Sona showed by walking up to a stranger and asking for help with her education.
Education is power and girls’ education is one of the most powerful forces on the planet. If all girls received twelve years of high-quality education, women’s lifetime earnings would increase by as much as $30 trillion, which is bigger than the entire US economy. We also know that the more education a woman has, the healthier her kids are. The UN estimates that if all women in low- and middle-income countries finished secondary school, child mortality in those countries would fall by about half. We know progress is possible because we’ve seen it. After a major push to close the gender gap in education, most countries are now enrolling nearly equal numbers of boys and girls in primary school. But there are still gender gaps when it comes to secondary education, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia.
What would be your message to the generation of women and girls following ours?
Leymah Gbowee: Never despise humble beginnings. You can start by sitting on your front porch with a girl. In ten years, you may see that she’s gone on to do great things and she will look back on her life and say, ‘It was those five minutes a day I sat on this woman’s porch and interacted with her.’ No matter where you come from or where you started, know that your humble beginning will lead you to great things.
Laura Bates: You are not alone, there are thousands of us behind you. We’re in this exciting and positive moment with such potential for change. More young women than ever before are coming forward, helping each other and standing up for one another and carrying out incredible campaigns for change. You’re not alone, you’re on the right side of history, and when people get angry and try to silence you it’s because they’re afraid of your power and your potential. This is hard, it’s a battle, but it’s a battle we will win, and young women who get involved now will look back and be incredibly proud of what they achieved.
Are you hopeful? And how do you remain hopeful?
Melinda Gates: Very much so. I used to call myself an optimist, but my late friend Hans Rosling suggested that maybe a more accurate term is possibilist. His definition of a possibilist is ‘someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason; someone who constantly resists the overdramatic world view’. I guess you could say that a possibilist is an evidence-based optimist. I’ve spent the last twenty years or so travelling to some of the world’s poorest places to deepen my understanding of what life is like there. It never gets any easier to confront the realities of poverty and disease – and it shouldn’t. It’s important to bear witness to people’s lives and suffering, and it’s important to let your heart break. But that same work has also brought me into contact with extraordinary people who are devoting their ideas, their resources, even their lives to fighting poverty and disease and tearing down the barriers holding women and girls back. They do this work every day because they believe progress is possible. I’m doing everything I can to stand behind them because I do, too.
Jameela Jamil: We need to treat the impact of media and social media on women in a similar way to the public health approach to tobacco. We’ve got to a situation where women cannot find lives of moderation; I’ve seen it in my own friends who only eat too much, or too little – and feel psychologically impacted by the rhetoric. Shaming culture is unhealthy, it’s unproductive and it’s costing lives and life-years. It feels like this is the patriarchy’s way of making us take our eyes off the ball. Think about it: it’s a genius way to distract and rob us, simultaneously. If we’re spending every minute of the day worrying about our looks, we’re not thinking about business, studying or mental health. We’re not progressing. Is this because the patriarchy feel that if we become too confident and comfortable, if we stop waking up an hour earlier than men to get ready, if we stop eating less and sleeping more, that maybe we’ll have more fuel, more power, more confidence and challenge them? Look at how they treated Hillary Clinton and said she didn’t smile enough! Why do women have to smile all the time? What have we got to smile about at the moment? We’re having our birth control rights taken away, millions of us are being treated as second-rate citizens, we’re in gender despair. Why the fuck should we smile all the time? We are just supposed to be pleasing on the eye of straight males. That is the story we’re told from as soon as we can understand. It’s smiley Barbie. We just have to be smiley Barbie for ever.
As I write this, there are seventy-two countries and jurisdictions where same-sex relations are criminal acts, punishable with penalties ranging from a few years in prison to life imprisonment and even the death penalty. Just think about that for a moment and realize how utterly arbitrary it is to legislate against who you can love, marry and have sex with. The way LGBT+ communities have been treated is one of the greatest inconsistencies and inequities in a world that claims to have a human rights agenda. To understand more about one of the most pressing issues of our modern times, I spoke to two of the most prominent campaigners in the field.
What is the relationship between sexuality and identity?
Ruth Hunt: The notion of identity, of who we are, has become profoundly more important in the last decade. It’s become more important for people to be able to be unequivocal about who they are through a range of different labels – labels which are often then signalled through social media and other means. What we’ve done, however, is include protected characteristics as part of that narrative and begun to narrow the focus of ‘I’ as an identity, creating a rigidity that doesn’t really give people the space to change. When we look at sexuality and gender identity, we’ve moved away from sexuality relating to something that you do to something that you are. My identity as a lesbian is no longer just defined by my relationship to a member of the same sex, but comes with other identity factors – cultural, societal, social. And that’s a real positive because the root of prejudice is often overly preoccupied with what LGBT people do rather than who they are.
What is the link between LGBT+ persecution and human rights?
Peter Tatchell: The principles of human rights are universal and indivisible. They apply to every person on the planet. If you read Articles 1 and 2 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it’s very clear that the right to equal treatment and non-discrimination applies to everyone – no ifs, no buts, no exceptions and no excuses. Historically, even many human rights defenders never saw LGBT+ rights as part of the human rights spectrum. But the emerging consensus is that, based on the principle of universal human rights, LGBT+ individuals should receive the same human rights protections as everyone else. The struggle to get to that point has been long and hard. Even in the United Nations, at the Human Rights Council, for many years there was a point-blank majority refusal to entertain LGBT+ rights as human rights. It’s only since Kofi Annan was Secretary General that the UN had a leader who spoke out for LGBT+ rights in a consistent and sustained way. It was as recently as 2008 that the UN General Assembly first considered LGBT+ rights and even then only 67 out of 193 countries endorsed a statement condemning discrimination and violence against LGBT+ communities.
Are you hopeful for the future?
Peter Tatchell: History moves like snakes and ladders. It moves forward two steps and then back one – but despite the setback it is still one step forward. Sometimes, as we saw during Nazism, we can take many steps back, but the overall trajectory of human history has been towards greater human rights. Despite the faults with our world, people are on average better off economically and socially. Things aren’t as equal as they should be, but compared to fifty years ago, we’ve certainly made great strides to expand and extend equality.
When it comes to LGBT+ rights, the big flaw in the equal rights agenda is that it implies that we merely want to assimilate and integrate within the dominant heterosexual society. It implies we LGBTs have nothing to offer or contribute to society. It suggests that we simply want to fit in with mainstream straight culture as it exists; that we accept the dominant social norms and do not dissent from them. Some people may want that. But there are many things about LGBT+ culture that straight people could learn from. The average gay and bisexual man does not mirror traditional hetero masculinity. We’ve evolved a new way of being a man. I’m not saying that we’re not masculine, but that most gay men don’t have the same machismo and toxic masculinity that has been historically associated with male heterosexuality. We’re more in touch with our feelings and perhaps that’s why there are a disproportionate number of gay and bisexual men who work in the creative and caring professions. Conversely, lesbian women have made a disproportionate contribution to women’s advancement, being very prominent in the suffragette movement a century ago and in the 1970s battle for women to access training and work in manual trades. By breaking into those male-only occupations, they opened up new opportunities for all women, regardless of their sexuality or gender identity. In these senses, LGBT+ people have made a positive contribution to society and we’ve developed insights that straight people could learn from.
In this century, abuse and discrimination are rife on the internet. Social media in particular has given a platform to hate speech. During the 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the EU as just one example, I received a cacophony of abuse and racism online from the vocal minority who felt the debate around immigration was, in fact, an open licence for them to abuse people of colour. Comedian and author David Baddiel, and the author Matt Haig, both spoke to me very eloquently about online abuse and the negative impact of social media.
How has human nature followed us online?
David Baddiel: It’s interesting and frightening that we see the same behaviours online and offline. Our online life (for better or worse) constitutes a huge amount of our real life these days and the way that discourse exists online blends into real life. A concrete example is the election of Donald Trump. A man like Trump would never have been president without social media, and that’s not just because he’s on Twitter a lot. The voice of Donald Trump – arrogant, stupid, without empathy – is the voice of a troll, and that adds a very large constituency when it comes from social media. People with that kind of voice have found an identity on social media – not just on Twitter, but on Reddit, 4Chan and the many other places where trolls exist. Some people like to say that none of this matters, that it’s just ranting on a website, nothing to do with the real world. There’s an old-hat idea that ‘it just happens in the bubble of social media’. It’s not as simple as that. People get far too upset about stuff that perhaps doesn’t have a life outside Twitter, but I think the bleeding of the anger and the polarization that you see on Twitter into real life is an absolute real thing.
What can we do to curb social media abuse?
David Baddiel: The platforms have a very ambiguous attitude towards hate and lies online. They come from the position that everything that can be put on the internet should be put on the internet. If someone had come to you or me twenty years ago and said, ‘There’s going to be this technology that is going to allow everybody to share everything and see into each other’s lives,’ we would have said, ‘Oh wow! That’s amazing!’ We would have assumed it would increase the sum total of truth in the world. But it’s done the opposite. It’s increased the sum of lies, because people don’t tell the truth – they tell their truth, curated truths, and the sum of propaganda-esque truth.
Platforms don’t like taking people or content off, partly because they have a financial model based on having as many people and as much content as possible – but also because they simply do not have the technology to do it. There is a quote used by anti-Semites, mistakenly attributed to Voltaire, which goes, ‘To know who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.’ It has been shown on Twitter before with the image of a hand, with a Star of David, crushing people. It’s become a code for the anti-Semites online, and now they often use the quote without an image and it’s obviously very difficult for an algorithm to spot that. It’s also important to realize that it’s not just about trolls who are angry and give abuse, it’s about mob mentality, about moralistic pile-ons. People who go on Twitter and say, ‘Oh fuck off, I hate you,’ are much less important than those who think they are on the side of right and truth. Everything terrible in this world has been done by people who think they are on the side of angels.
How do our news and social media cycles impact on mental health?
Matt Haig: Fear is a very, very strong emotion. We experienced fear for real reasons of our own survival as we evolved as a species, but I think fear is used in cynical ways. It’s obviously used in cynical ways by terrorists – the whole idea behind creating terror is to make you feel fear. But it’s also used in all kinds of other ways. We are surrounded by things that are trying to make us anxious.
Marketers use the acronym ‘FUD’ which stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Marketers try to make us feel doubt, they try to make us feel fearful, whether it’s anti-ageing products to make us worry about growing old, whether it’s insurance, whether it’s politicians trying to make us feel anxious. Fear is a very strong emotion, and it’s very easy to manipulate. Our news cycle plays on this too. When something terrifying happens, we experience it in a different way to how we did before; we experience it in real time. We almost experience it as if we were there in a way we never did when we would only consume news twice a day. It just turns inwards and it even leads to destructive political behaviour or mental illness.
With the charity In Place of War, I visit changemakers around the world who are facing oppression, marginalization and discrimination. In practically all cases we see that activism and protest are two of the most powerful tools to create change. Without a doubt, social media has amplified much of the toxicity in society, but technology also enables movements in a profoundly powerful way, not just allowing groups to organize and communicate, but allowing the world to see their message. In the year 2000, it would have been unthinkable that protesters would have been able to overthrow or challenge the authoritarian leaders of the Arab world, for example, but in the 2010s, with the start of the Arab Spring, that is exactly what happened.
Why do we need activism in society?
L. A. Kauffman: Citizen activism has always acted as a corrective on governments, particularly those governments which only represent a small minority rather than a broad majority. History shows us time and time again that when established institutions become unresponsive or undermine people’s rights, activism has been the way that people have been able to make gains or protect those they already have.
What has been the role of art in political and social conversation?
Ai Weiwei: Today, art has a wider definition. Art can be made up of its elements: form, light, colour, or a line. But it can also be a design, an expression of an attitude, or a conceptual statement. If we understand this, then art is deeply rooted in our human activity. Artists themselves may not be conscious of the broad existence of art. Museums and art academies are often stuck in the past, chewing the leftovers of aesthetic judgements passed on from their grandparents. This old habit has been difficult to quit and we still see this antiquated understanding reflected in galleries and on museum walls.
Where do you find the courage to fight?
Gad Saad: My personhood does not allow me to be exposed to bullshit, to endure attacks on truth and to not respond. I am personally offended by falsehoods in the true sense of the word ‘offence’, not as a manifestation of the culture of victimhood. I am psychically injured when I see the endless attacks on truth and that carries more weight in my personal conduct than careerist aspirations. Am I just being a martyr? No. When I go to bed at night and I lay my head down, before I fall asleep I need to feel that there is nothing that I could have done that I chose not to do because I was cowardly. That allows me to go to sleep because I’ve cleared my very high threshold of what I consider to be proper personal conduct. You have to set your bar high enough to be defending the truth rather than your own selfish goals. Look, all the people in the world that have affected profound change looked beyond themselves, right? Great people rise to the occasion. You don’t have to be great in that you become a famous professor, but you could be great in your personal conduct, so when you lay your head down on your pillow you can say ‘I did all that I could’. Until we can foster that exacting personal conduct in everyone, they will keep deflecting the responsibility onto the few of us and then we will lose the battle of ideas.
What would be your advice to the next generation of activists?
Ai Weiwei: I have no advice because my experiences are limited to my time. That time will change and the next generation will face very different tests. However, they should understand that without meaningful struggle, the word ‘freedom’ is empty and life would be lived in vain.
L. A. Kauffman: Protest works when it’s done with intelligence. You have to be willing to use the stronger tools of citizen engagement if you want to make an impact, particularly when the odds seem against you. Within the toolbox of non-violent direct action, there are a huge number of tools you can use, including rallies, speak-outs, blockades, sit-ins, and other more disruptive ones. At a moment when the threats are so severe and unrelenting, we need to look at that toolbox as a whole, and use all the methods we can, collectively, to get the change we need.
The word ‘discrimination’ is interesting. In the most literal sense, it refers to the act of making distinctions, of observing, or marking a difference. This may seem innocent enough, but the reality is that discrimination has become one of the greatest weapons in modern society.
Race has been one of the most common dividing lines used to separate us, and as Dexter Dias QC told me, it’s a concept that simply does not exist in science or biology. Research shows that we are all, in fact, just African migrants with a different trajectory. I may ‘identify’ as Indian, but from sequencing my own DNA, I know that my ancestry traces back to Haplogroup L (maternal line) and Haplogroup A (paternal line). I am the long-lost child of two East Africans who lived almost 200,000 years ago – as are you, as all of us are. That is the beautiful truth of our existence, yet the myth of race was meticulously assembled to divide us, to organize us, and sometimes to exploit us. By creating race, we denied our shared humanity, and all of us are poorer as a result. Race is not the only dividing line, however. Whether it’s gender, sexuality, ability, income, political leaning, religion, caste, class or any of the other arbitrary tags we attach to ourselves – we find ourselves divided, and conquered.
It took the immediate horrors of two world wars (not to mention the conflicts before) for the world to adopt a universal declaration of human rights and, as Peter Tatchell said, those rights are universal and indivisible, they apply to every person on the planet. Front and centre of that declaration, Article 1 and Article 2 are the principles that not only are all human beings born free and equal in dignity and rights, but that they are all entitled to the rights and freedoms associated with equal treatment, without discrimination. This is a non-negotiable – no ifs, no exceptions and no excuses. Yet we continue to see discrimination and marginalization of our fellow human beings, causing suffering, loss of life and economic hardship because, while we have enshrined these rights to paper, we have yet to grow up as a society and live them.
Ending discrimination is not a social or cultural issue; it’s a matter of justice. We are no longer in the protracted infancy of our pre-industrialized lives. We are a technologically, socially and culturally complex species with the power and weaponry to extinguish ourselves. With that in mind, it makes sense that the best thing for all of us is to cooperate and make peace with each other. Although, as the German sociologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno identified, ‘Human progress can be summed up as the advance from the spear to the guided missile, showing that though we have grown cleverer, we have certainly not grown wiser.’ For there to be true equality, the concept of ‘justice’ must be interpreted and applied holistically – society is, after all, based on the principle that social cooperation makes possible a better life for all than any would have if each were to live solely by their own efforts.
Industrialization may be considered our adolescence, but society has surely now come of age and has strength through the creativity, innovation, technological and intellectual endeavour, which has provided us (predominantly in the occidental nations) with economic opportunity and greater wealth than at any point in human history. This has made society ‘clever’, but the gaping injustices we see now place us at a unique precipice in our story, where we need to understand that we are in this together. Society, as writer and philosopher Ayn Rand identified, is the ‘process of setting man free from men’. A view echoed by Rose McGowan, who described how we need to unlearn what we’ve learned, and view the world through the eyes of the other and not simply adhere to the cult and echo chambers of ignorance. And as Walter Cronkite observes, and allows me to conclude, ‘there is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.’
Biographies
David Baddiel is a British-American comedian, author, screenwriter and television presenter.
Laura Bates is a feminist writer and author, and founded the Everyday Sexism Project website in 2012, a collection of more than 80,000 women’s daily experiences of gender inequality.
Lord John Bird MBE is a social entrepreneur and life peer. He is the co-founder of The Big Issue and is also the founder of the International Network of Street Papers.
Sir Philip Craven MBE is a former Paralympic wheelchair basketball player, and was president of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) from 2001 to 2017.
Frederik Willem (F. W.) de Klerk is a South African politician and former State President of South Africa. He and his government dismantled the apartheid system and introduced universal suffrage, for which he was awarded a joint Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela.
Dexter Dias QC is an author and award-winning international human rights lawyer. He has acted in some of the most high-profile cases in recent years involving freedom of expression, murder, crimes against humanity, terrorism, FGM and genocide.
Melinda Gates is an American philanthropist. She is the former general manager at Microsoft and co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s largest private charitable organizations.
Leymah Gbowee is a Liberian peace activist. She was the leader of Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, a non-violent peace movement that helped bring an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. In 2011 she was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for her work.
Matt Haig is a British author. His bestselling memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive, stayed in the British top ten for forty-six weeks. He has received many awards and has been nominated for the Carnegie Medal three times.
Afua Hirsch is a writer, author, presenter, documentary maker and former barrister. She is currently the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Baroness Ruth Hunt is former Chief Executive of Stonewall, the UK’s largest charity campaigning to improve equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. She is a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords and co-director of Deeds and Words.
Jameela Jamil is a British actress, presenter, model, writer and activist. She most recently starred in Mike Schur’s series for NBC, The Good Place, opposite Ted Danson and Kristen Bell.
L. A. Kauffman is an American activist and journalist. Her writing focuses on the history and impact of protest movements, including the civil rights movement and the 2017 Women’s March.
Iby Knill BEM is an author and Holocaust survivor. She has written a book on her experiences, The Woman Without a Number.
Rose McGowan is an American actress, activist and New York Times bestselling author. She was named one of Time magazine’s people of the year in 2017.
Dr Gad Saad is a professor, evolutionary behavioural scientist, author and host of the YouTube show The SAAD Truth.
Harry Leslie Smith (1923–2018) was an English writer and political commentator, and served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War.
George Takei is an American actor, author and activist. He is best known for his role in the television series Star Trek and for his activism and advocacy for human rights.
Peter Tatchell is a British human rights campaigner. He has been campaigning for LGBT+ and other human rights for over fifty years. He is the current director of the Peter Tatchell Foundation.
Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist and activist. He has received many honours for his art and activism, including Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award in 2015.
