Notes on Commonwealth Games: Black Organising in the Time of Erasure and Structural Violence
MAIA received 56 invitations to participate in the Commonwealth Games 2022 [CWG], hosted in our home city, Birmingham. These invitations were directly from senior leadership, from fellow grassroots community organisations and from other arts and culture organisations. The type of invitation varied, from large scale projects within the cultural programme, to governance and legacy initatives, to partnerships with our space, YARD and many others. We politely, but sternly declined. We won’t accept the 3 requests that came in this week either. Because we want to participate in an economy, better yet, an ecology that isn’t dependent on the pain, extraction and suffering of our kin.
This is not about the few good people working inside the machine. Rather, the very machine itself. This is about structural intent and complicity. At the same time it was announced that CWG was coming to Birmingham, we were campaigning against the mass deportation of our kin. People in our community were being — and crucially, still are — wrongly detained, denied their legal rights, threatened and unlawfully deported. To this day, only 5% people harmed by the “Windrush scandal” have received compensation. As a direct result of the Home Office’s scornful policies, people are still losing their lives. People are still making social media campaigns to fight for basic human needs and crowdfunding to cover legal costs. And throughout it all, a nationwide resistance against the State’s increasingly hostile environment persists. We must be consistent — we do not get to retweet a GoFundMe page in one breath and then glorify our colonial stronghold of the Commonwealth in the next breath because it’s bringing some money in.
We refuse to subscribe to this. Witness how this manifests within the cultural programme’s inequitable distribution of resource, feable attempts to “subvert” the narrative of the Commonwealth while doing absolutely nothing to challenge the systemic and structural violences enacted on global majority, queer and disabled people in this country and across the diaspora, the decimation of Perry Barr, the removal of social infrastructure in communities of colour, and the very harmful philosophy that necessitated the birth of the Commonwealth in the first place.
There is a video circulating the web of Martin Green CBE, Chief Creative Officer of Birmingham Commonwealth Games 2022, declaring there aren’t enough large-scale ethnically diverse arts and culture organisations in the city. He was using this as a justification, following recent analysis of the distribution of funding that found only 10% of investment from the cultural programme is going directly to Black, Asian and “Minority Ethnic” companies. What he doesn’t say is how many Black, POC and queer-led organisations he met with that wanted nothing to do with CWG. And how he knew there would be “commonwealth” discomfort and resistance when taking the position. And that resources, in our city of great disparity, could convince some of those organisations to bite the bullet. But others wouldn’t. He didn’t say this on BBC News, because he would then need to really talk about the way colonialism and imperialism is still alive and kicking within our systems and structures. He would then need to do the deeper, pragmatic work of dismantling this if he meant what he said about communities and legacy. Instead, he made out like we didn’t exist, that he couldn’t find us. Because that is much easier.
This is how erasure happens. It’s worth mentioning Green is also the Chief Creative Officer of Unboxed, the recently renamed Festival of UK 22 (FUK22) or as I still understand it, the Brexit Festival. We declined 29 invitations to join creative teams for this, with 25 of them coming through at extremely short notice. Perhaps another post to speak on the time it takes to build equitable relationships, instead of scrabbling for Black-led organisations in the final throes of a thing. But we declined for the same reasons — to shift from this culture of disposability and extraction and to be very intentional about reimagining possibilities, relationships and resources that aren’t dependent on the aesthetics of equity, rather the reality of solidarity. There is no shortcut around this, especially in the wake of xenophobia, racism and anti-migrant rhetoric that resulted in our departure from the European Union. We find ourselves asking the same questions with CWG.
It’s time to get very serious about what we mean by change in this country, particularly in the cultural sector, which routinely sees itself on the “right side of change” without committing to the practice. We make no more room for lip-service or faux-solidarity by way of secret Twitter DMs and off-the-record emails. It is not enough to call an art installation an act of subversion. It is not enough to call people “global majority” instead of POC or ethnic minority. How are you showing up? How are you advocating? When the heat is on, what do you commit yourselves to? When the money appears, where does your solidarity manifest?
The morality of an organisation exists within its annual budget. Prior to CWG & long after, what will your budgets, your governance, your spaces, your practices and your operating models say about your morality?
The bigger question for the city and indeed the country to grapple with is why complicity inside a vehicle that exacerbates our harm are the only ways to garner opportunity for Black and brown artists and organisations. Why is this the only time the city “desperately” seeks Black and brown representation for their programmes, governance and budget lines? Because that’s not just the problem of the Commonwealth Games. But the fundamental sour basis of the entire creative and cultural industries.
