Adulting - #101 Social History, Media Ethics & Public Speaking with Jason Okundaye

Episode Date: May 9, 2021

Hey podulters, in this episode I speak to Jason Okundaye. Jason is a journalist and he is currently writing his first book, Revolutionary Acts : Stories of Love, Brotherhood, and Resilience from Black Gay Britain . We discuss the three things he wishes he had been taught in school, namely social history, media and media ethics, and public speaking. At the end we speak about identity politics and how our attitudes towards it and the ‘privilege’ discourse are changing, which I personally think is quite an interesting topic. Especially as this podcast has centred itself around those things for a while so it’s always refreshing and interesting when you find yourself growing out of - or growing beyond - an idea! I hope you enjoy listening (can’t believe this is episode 101) as always please do rate, review and subscribe! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Revolutionary Acts, Stories of Love, Brotherhood, and Resilience from Black Gay Britain. We discuss the three things he wishes he'd been taught in school, namely social history, media and media ethics and public speaking. And we speak a bit or a lot, I'm not sure, at the end about identity politics and how our attitudes towards them and the privilege discourse are changing, which I personally think is quite an interesting topic. As adulting and the conversation I've had on here have centred themselves often around those things.

And it's kind of interesting and refreshing, I think, when you start to grow out of or grow beyond a belief and start to think maybe that it's time for the conversation to kind of change. And yeah, I hope you enjoyed listening to that. I found it an interesting conversation. And I still can't believe that we're on episode 101. Well, enjoy. And as always, please do rate, review and subscribe. Bye. Hello and welcome to Adulting. Today, I'm joined by Jason Akundaye.

Hi there, I'm Jason Akundaye. I'm a writer and journalist who is based in South London and I'm also the author of the upcoming book Revolutionary Acts which is a social history of black gay men in London, specifically South London because that's my beat. I love that. I mean, first of all, congratulations on your book um how are you thank you very much I'm very excited for it but I also know that it's like a huge responsibility because I think in some ways it's kind of the first book in its kind purely in terms of charting this kind of history and it's you know it's based in it's a story that's based in Brixton and it looks at the lives of six different black gay men in terms of their activism and their relationships in different parts and i think it's part of my mission to kind of really bring black british gay history to the forefront and

tell a very different story of the nation to look at what was happening to you know certain demographics under the thatchers throughout the 90, throughout the early 2000s, because I think these are stories which are not necessarily marginalised, but just not even thought of as things that matter. And I mean, we know that these years were difficult for Black people and difficult for queer people. We don't think about those who are caught in the middle. I think that's so true. I guess it's kind of like, is revisionist history, I guess, the right way of framing it?

It's going back and like re-getting those stories that just haven't been given any airtime previously. Yeah exactly that and I'm really enjoying the process I mean I'm at the research very early research stage still at the moment and I think what I'm liking is that I'm just developing friendships with all of the men that I'm speaking to because I want to you know I want to be comfortable with them and I also want them to be comfortable with me I don't want it to be a process where I kind of just come and interview them and then go away and write the book I want it to be like really involved and engaged and mutual so yeah it's it's been a real blessing to my life not just the book itself but also the kind

of networks and relationships it's let me allowed me to form with a entirely different generation of men like me. I imagine that must be really emotional. What is the response when you reach out to these men? Are they sort of like so excited to be featured? Do they feel grateful? Is it like kind of alien to them? What's their kind of reaction been when they found out that you're kind of delving into this history that they lived but maybe never saw?'s a little complicated i mean they're always very enthusiastic i think in some parts it's also almost an omission for some of them but they've said you know what we've been really bad at recording and sharing our own history so it's kind of good that you've been curious and you've come in because there was almost a kind of fear

that you know no one would have done it um because you you know, I mean, a lot of these guys are, I mean, I think the oldest is 71 and the youngest is 51. And the history has been recorded in some places, in like some archives and some, say, articles or interviews, but there's not been like a cohesive story told. And I think that they've all individually said, you know, they've been interested in like developing this kind of story, but no one's actually done it.

And I think that it's good for them to, for it to be in the hands of someone who wasn't part of it but has like a stake and interest in it and is able to really mutually um go through the memories and the history and really interrogate it and also challenge it in some ways because i mean the kind of circumstances that they were living in and the kind of organizing that they were doing are actually vastly quite different to the circumstances we live in now and what's great is that it means that they are whilst I have so much to learn from them they also have a lot to learn from me and so it's a really mutually beneficial relationship because I've obviously followed you have your Instagram account that's is it black and gay back in the day is that is that what it yeah that's gonna be the same as and so that did that when you started that which was quite recently wasn't it was it this year or yeah that was in February

was that just past like a personal passion project that you were like I'm gonna start I really want to in in like find out about this get into the archives and discover these stories and then then the idea for the book was sort of born out of that actually no so the book came first so I've been working on the book since last year honestly it was such a long process I don't think people realize how long it takes um I mean I didn't realize how long it would take I mean I got signed to my agency in June of last year I think and I started working on the proposal a bit quite soon after once I established what I wanted to do I started to work on it properly from around September and I thought it'll be fine I'll get it done two months easy and god so many rewrites and having to

you know structure it and figure out how you're going to bring together these people's stories and make it into like a cohesive narrative and figuring out how much myself I wanted to put into it and how I wanted to write it it was actually very tough it was really tough and it took like it took months um to develop and the archive actually happened quite randomly i mean i think initially it was um mark thompson's idea uh mark thompson is the person who i work on it with and who's one of the key people who's in the book and he had originally set it up himself because he just had the idea in a shower and i kind of saw it i'd actually been thinking about doing the same thing but i just hadn't ever put anything to action i remember i I had a little...

You know when you create an Instagram account blank and you just save a name? And I had it there. And I basically messaged him and I was like, let's do this together, actually. Because first of all, I have the Instagram skills. I was slightly horrified about the way he was cropping things and sharing things on there, which we both laugh about.

And I was like, I'm going to make this a bit more savvy. So yeah, we then launched it together and it got a really remarkable response I don't think we expected the response that it got and it also I think importantly showed like actually people are really interested in this and they're really keen on this and it's not just black people it's not just black gay people it's not just gay people it's lots of different people just found really fascinated and thought that the stories we're sharing were really wonderful and they thought the pictures were really intimate and yeah it then led to lots of different editorial opportunities for Mark and I and it was it was just a wonderful project to

have worked on and it happened completely randomly but yeah I think some people assumed that the archive came first then I had the idea of the book but no the book has been like ages in progress right I see yeah so I didn't know that because obviously I didn't realize until I think you announced your book that that was coming but um i think it is a really important thing to and this is such a simple thing that you said earlier which i think is really interesting we talk about like intersectionality and actually it's a really problematic part of what happens where we divide people into groups and forget how many like crossovers there are in that venn diagram of like people that oh you know like someone who's queer and someone who's black and they're never really as you said earlier recognizing that there's so many instances in those little

intersections that we have of like identity politics that actually have huge crossovers and then people don't they seem to forget to look in the what are the what are the crossover bits of venn diagram called um god i'm not a math person i have no idea but you know what i mean from that description um and i guess that kind of leads us on to but tell me if i've completely misinterpreted if this what what you were saying with your first thing that you wish you'd been taught in school which is about social history which i've interpreted to mean sort of the way that society identity and people interact but please tell me if you meant a different thing no i think that's broadly correct and what i mean by that is that i think social

history is also sometimes called the history from below and it looks at the lives of ordinary people and the you know effect that the state perhaps has on their lives um and how they interact with each other and how they build communities and basically it makes me think about what defines a lifetime and it's not necessarily the activities of the state it's you know the people below who live under it and i remember at school um all of these i just remember everything i learned was military history i went to a really weird private school where they were just obsessed with all of the world wars um it wasn't the bulk sum of what we learned but it was royal history military history we would only learn about you know certain political role actors and i remember always always thinking why did these

people come to represent the nation and why do these people come to represent what we describe as you know british history or american history or whatever and why can't we learn about the lives of you know people who have been on the ground because i think that if we were to take if you were to look at your own individual life and the kind of life that you've known and the communities that you've been around you wouldn't just define that by what was going on at the very top level you'd define that by what was going on in the ground and I also think that sometimes you get the most interesting stories there now there's some bits of history that I really like that look that you know royals or wars and stuff like that but I also just find a lot of it I used to find a lot of it really dry and really boring

really detached and it kind of made you forget about the fact that you know there were millions of people um implicated in these um different power struggles between say different European powers or whatever and yeah that kind of engineered my interest in actually getting to these stories um and legacies that exist because i think part of the way i think about it is that the most interesting and inspiring historians i know are always you know members of my family or friends who are older than me and who are able to narrate their lives with significant clarity so someone who is in the book but I also interviewed for the Guardians Black Lives series um Ted Brown um I remember when I wrote that editorial for him

we had been on zoom for three hours and he just narrated his life from beginning to end and honestly it was one of the most fascinating pieces of history um that I ever ever witnessed and the fact that I had to get it down to like 2,200 words was obscene. I mean, people really praised that piece. And I had to be like, this was like 5% of this guy's life. And what I was told, I just literally had to cut it down so much. There were stories of really remarkable people, which are actually a lot more interesting. And also tell you a lot more about the nation um about history

and about how people lived than the kind of text we're learning that we get in schools so yeah i just i kind of wish that you know we were encouraged to look more and study more think more about the everyday person and thinking of a way to capture these people's memories and histories and incorporate that into how we study and think about history is really important. I completely agree and I think that I had that same kind of like abstract feeling towards history where it just sort of felt kind of irrelevant to me and overdone and just sort of I don't know I never really meshed I'm really upset I kind of dropped history when I was quite young because of those exact feelings where I just kind of I don't know why I'm here I'm really not interested in like the Battle of Hastings or whatever we're learning about.

Whereas actually then, as you said, I remember having really similar conversations like with my grandmother about when she moved over from Ireland to the UK, back to London and sort of like her own personal history grew up in Clapham and like what the world was like. And I was like, God, this is fascinating. Also, this has happened like in the last 50 years. And this has told me more about society, culture

and the cultural climate of what it was like back then than I've learned in my whole school experience um and it is fascinating that we sort of now we definitely do it and this think piece and you write definitely great articles where I was just saying before we started recording a really good piece that you just did with some young girls talking about you know how do they feel that that they're gonna their lives are gonna be when they finish school where are they gonna live um and it was really I felt like I got such a well-rounded interesting perception of like what teenagers and younger people are thinking living in London that I ever would have done when I'm sure in 20 years time will be the

think piece about you know what it was like to be in London during this pandemic and it probably won't have anywhere near as much flavor or like perception as as that piece that you did and it's really important to know like what is it like to live through history I mean we always you know say that we're currently living through history with the pandemic um with Brexit and things like that and I feel like the history books all they're going to talk about is you know the different political actors I mean when we look at the history of the pandemic um obviously what's going to be focused on is, you know, Boris Johnson mismanaged it, but he still managed to do really well politically. And the questions about, you know, did the pandemic sink Labour and blah, blah, blah.

And obviously those are, you know, particularly relevant, but they don't necessarily exist in our everyday social lives. I mean, I'm someone who, you know, talks and thinks about politics a lot, but it doesn't define my life. And I don't know whose lifetime is defined by just what's going on above them. So, yeah, I think that day's piece, you know, when I spoke to these teenage girls, it was really wonderful. And it was also a little sad, you know, when they spoke about the reality of what it was like being a teenage girl in London,

the effects of the pandemic on the cityscape and how they felt that, you know, gentrification, the increasing hostility of the city in many ways, including like pollution, a lack of social spaces for young people and things like that, and how the city has been decimated by austerity has a real impact for them and, you might influence you know where they decide to move to in the future and i think that sometimes we might just get statistics where it says you know this percentage of people have moved outside of london and you can't get kind of like headline answers being like oh people have moved for greener stuff or for work but you don't actually get into the nitty-gritty emotional reasons for why people might be deciding to move on from the capital um and that is living through history and that is as much a history

of the nation as whatever boris johnson and kit starmer are doing in a funny way i guess like in in your book i mean you said you haven't said how much you're getting you haven't decided exactly how much yourself you want to give away but this it'll be an incredible piece of your own sort of history and and lifetime do you feel nervous because I didn't realize I for some reason thought you're the same age as me but I think you're um a little bit younger do you feel nervous about how much you want to say or how much you want to tell of this portion of your life do you feel like it's going to be very soul-bearing or are you quite excited to document and archive these years which are like super formative um it's interesting isn't it um i think that

i'm still not sure about how much of myself i want to put into it because you know i want to i definitely want to put myself in dialogue um with different men and kind of have that intergenerational discussion and emphasize those elements but i also'm so yeah, I'm so cautious and worried about how much of myself I'm going to end up putting into it and then reading it back and being like, oh gosh, you know this was really exposing in terms of the kind of like raw emotion of what I'm detailing

and also the kind of comparison of experiences as well. I mean, one of the chapters that I have is going to be looking at homophobia in the media and the ways in which activists organise against the media as well and i've had my own troubles with media when i was a young student where there was instant um over some tweets which i can't be asked to repeat um back in 2017 it was and the stories that were written about me ended up outing me to a lot of family members who didn't know and that was actually quite awful and then

that experience kind of reminded me of what some of the men were sharing about the ways in which the media used to conduct themselves and the way that they were kind of forced to disclose in certain different environments not just media but also say police stations or at hospitals um about their sexuality or about say the hiv status or things like that so i kind of felt like as much as you know there's been some some there is some significant difference in the media landscape and I won't present that it's identical it was interesting how much I was able to relate with some of their feelings and experiences that's so terrible I actually I saw an article about that time and that happened to you which I think you wrote and it sounded like one of the most difficult things and I'm sure we'll talk

about that a bit actually when we come on to the next topic, but I'm so sorry that that forced you to have to come out. I mean, that's the pressure that the kind of like lack of care with which people deal with things like sexuality, which by forces external to us are seen as like something so important that it just has to be hidden or whatever to then be the same vehicle that sort of pushes you to disclose it. It's just really fucked up, I guess yeah yeah exactly that um yeah there's not even much

more to say on that it was just it was just quite fucked up and it's not something that I like to you know think about too much because I mean in a weird way also kind of is responsible for why I'm a writer now because you know I wrote that Guardian piece and it was like my first I think it was like my first piece in the major newspaper and I remember really weirdly I'd only wrote I okay the reason why I had written it was because I was like look all of this shit is out about me um I'm gonna be applying for jobs because I was about to go to my final year of university I was really worried that any job I applied for was just going to google me and like see all these articles about me so I was like I need to write something so that even if they do

google me they at least see this and at least see me kind of speaking for myself and you know hopefully they have some sympathy so that's the only reason why I wrote it and then I just got a really lovely response people were just like this is amazing this is really well written you were really good have you thought about a career you know writing and I thought well no I only wrote this to literally just save my ass a bit um and I had done some writing at university but I'd only done it in like the capacity of my like university positions or if there was a particular topic that I wanted to weigh in on um I hadn't thought about it as a career but yeah weirdly it then kind of set me on that path and it got my got my foot in the door at the Guardian

as well and I eventually started you know writing bits and bits until it developed into an entire career so yeah as much as it was an awful experience it also kind of launched something different for me so I wouldn't it's not that I'm glad it happened or anything like that but I I guess everything happens for a reason yeah and sometimes from the most awful things it can it can kind of jar you into doing a certain thing which turns positive but yeah as you say it doesn't mean that it sort of negates what happened before um yeah what was your intention then before you were going to become a writer what were you intending on doing or you weren't sure um strangely I always wanted to be a teacher I always wanted to be an English teacher um but I remember thinking I'm way too messy to be an English teacher.

And I have like too much mess on my social media in public. So I kind of just abandoned those dreams. But when I was, when I was a sixth form, I had an illegal job, not illegal because it was illegal, but as in my sixth form didn't actually let us have jobs, but I used to sneak out during like free periods or like whenever after school to go and work and it was at a tuition

center called explore learning um where you would teach kids um maths english verbal reasoning you know different skills and i actually really enjoyed it and i really thought that i'd actually really love to like teach classes one day and i've not ruled out the idea of doing it in the future either you know secondary school teaching or university teaching but yeah that's something i'd always wanted to do but i think that i've also heard from you know some people who have become or trained to be teachers that there's a kind of conflict between them having certain ideologies or opinions and becoming teachers and then it's like they're kind of vetted to make sure that they don't have views which are seen as anti-british or anything like that and you know

certain views are taken as anti-british even if they aren't necessarily anti-british and even if they are anti-British you know people are anti-British for specific reasons to do with you know imperialism and racism and you know everything that's fucking going on at the moment so yeah it kind of was ruled out for me um and then I just ended up taking a really dry boring job in policy for two years because I that was a job I got and I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life so um yeah that's what ended up happening there that's so interesting I mean I I said the same thing but I wanted to be a teacher because I had the most incredible English teacher when I was in sixth form he was called Mr Brown and he wore a brown suit and a brown tie and he's from Glasgow and if you weren't if you weren't really concentrating his voice was so monotone

he didn't really see anything at all. But I loved him. So I used to listen really intently. And he tells most amazing stories about psychology and philosophy. I teach about James Joyce through telling you about, he was just the most interesting man. And I was so in love with him in every kind of sense in that I just was in awe of this intelligence

and this knowledge of the world. And I don't think since then there have been many people, I've spoken to so many incredible people on this podcast but I think that when you're at that impressionable age if you have a good teacher you will never ever forget them there is something about um those people that and I and so I then maybe that's an ego thing actually maybe I wanted to be like make someone feel like that but after that I kind of had the same thing at the back of my mind where I'm like maybe when I'm 50 like if I retire away from doing what I'm doing now maybe then I'll go and be a teacher because I do think there is something really special about it and I think like especially

people who love English teachers that there's such a specific group of people who want to be English teachers do you know what I mean it's such a type yeah well it's interesting that I wanted to be an English teacher because actually I think that the teachers who I had the best relationship and who were kind of like most formative with me were actually my history teachers um and it's interesting that I never studied history at university because I now I think that the kind of work I do is very associated with like a particular kind of history but I also don't think it's the kind of history that they're doing in the academy so I mean it does make sense um but yeah i remember i was we used to do like you know russian history and british parliamentary history and international relations looking at like the

outbreak of the first world war and things like that and weimar germany and i found it i did enjoy a lot of it except for british parliamentary history was surprisingly shockingly bad um but i enjoyed a lot and my teachers used to make me feel really enthusiastic. Actually, recently, one of my history teachers passed away from cancer. I think it was cancer of the tongue or something like that. And it was actually really sad because, being totally honest, I didn't love school and I didn't love everyone there. And not to say if some of those teachers passed away, I wouldn't care, but it's more that I wouldn't have necessarily stopped and be like, oh, that's actually a really sad loss for that school. Because, you know, I'd never returned to that school

and I don't really think about it and I don't really engage with any of its alumni stuff. But I was really quite heartbroken that he had passed away because actually he, in some ways, had been very formative for me thinking about, you know, history. And I nearly applied for a university because I had such, I had better history teachers than I did um anything else I mean in the end I ended up studying sociology anyway um but yeah that was a that was a really tragic moment

I was really grateful to him because he just I think that they those history teachers really taught me how to write as well and how to incorporate and really how to argue too I think that more than anything they taught me how to really argue make a case for something and I think that a lot of my kind of art school writing takes on this kind of like strong argumentative tone and I think actually that comes from history more than any other subject that's so interesting and yeah and learning to debate I remember even having like debating class and things but I'm really sorry for your loss it is sometimes those things do really kind of like take the wind out of you when you don't even know that you're sort of like holding space for that person because you might not have thought about him for

however long um yeah yeah i hadn't to be honest i had i really hadn't i remember just like my best friend just like messaged me from school best me being like keith has died and i was like no like this is awful i didn't like we didn't even know he was ill so i guess you know he was keeping it um private yeah it was terribly sad news it was real a real loss I mean thinking about this like social history kind of idea I bet if you interviewed like every teacher that would be just like the most incredible kind of like walk through what the world has been like because they I guess see everything and a witness to sort of especially the most formative years of young people um well I'd love to interview every teacher about

me um and every teacher who you know taught me at a certain age because I don't know about you but I always have this weird kind of amnesia about my teenage years that's just I think that's because I intentionally tried to forget about them because I just didn't love them but I'd almost like to know like what was I like at that age and you know what memories do you have of me if you have any strong memories at all because you never you you can be surprised what memories people hold on to of you actually yeah and I think I guess it's different for everyone but especially for me as a teenager I think I really didn't know myself and so I was like play acting and trying on so many different hats and like I always wanted to be the class clown and then I wanted to be like the clever one and so it'd be interesting because

I'm sure that like adults are so much more perceptive than children in certain ways I'm sure they would have been able to see through to who I probably was at that age whereas looking back my own mind I actually yeah I agree with you I don't really know what people would have thought probably that I was a pain in the arse yeah and I also wonder what they think if they think anything at all of what I'm doing now as well if they expected that um from me um because in some ways and not to this is gonna sound really arrogant but in some ways i've almost become like the star out of people from my year group from that school um i guess you know social media following and things like that but i mean i don't know anyone else who's

writing a book i mean there's some people from my school who went on to be like really professional hockey players and have kind of like achieved like profile in that sense but yeah it's it's strange like i'm an alumni of that school and I'm writing a book and I guess I guess like you know being honest that's like quite a significant thing and hopefully hopefully it's a success when it comes out might be like an alumni of that school I don't know I'm not expecting them to like recognize me I don't really care that they do or anything like that but yeah I just wonder if anyone would see it and what they would think basically and does it make you feel like how do you feel with that that knowledge sort of like do you feel proud or does it make you feel uncomfortable like do you want I'm sure that

people will have seen your writing it's sort of like inescapable that someone hasn't come across it but it's always nice if someone acknowledges it in some ways uncomfortable actually weirdly um I don't know if I saw one of my school teachers now i think i would cross the road just i didn't want to have that conversation um i think that some of my writing it's not necessarily exposing for me but it's like i write about you know sexuality and being a black gay man in britain and things like that and at school i didn't come out i kind of i always say like i wish i could turn back this clock and just come out in school um but i mean i didn't because like both my brothers were there and if I was to come out

in school it would get back to them and then get back to my family so that's the reason why I didn't otherwise I just would have because it was like obvious enough um but I remember there was actually a teacher um who I was really sure it was my history teacher um also the kind of um deputy head of sixth form or head of sixth form i'm one of them um i was really certain she was a lesbian like very very certain and i remember that there was an incident in school where there was like i can't remember exactly what happened but there was a really bad homophobic incident in school and i remember chatting with this teacher about how you know oh it might be nice to like put up some posters you know about um some like

stonewall posters saying like some people are going to get over and having that conversation i remember being so close to telling her this i'm gay i was really close but i just didn't i don't know why i just i literally just didn't have the confidence to i just didn't and it wasn't that i wasn't confident in myself because like outside of that i'd already been dating boys outside and like some people like outside of that environment already knew that I was gay and everything I was like totally comfortable with it in myself but I just didn't want to tell her even though I knew she was gay as well I just I knew she was um and it's strange yeah I wonder if I was to ever see her again I'd wonder if she ever remembered that conversation

because in a way I think she knew what I was trying to tell her and I think she could tell but she wasn't gonna like egg me on or like you know make me tell her anything about which is you know obviously her being professional and considerate and not putting any pressure on me um but yeah I wonder what it's like now to kind of see that this person who you know didn't really have the confidence to come out to you then is now actually writing about these things in quite like public places and is like very clear and strong on that so um i'm gonna go on to a second thing because actually it ties in quite well it's media and media ethics and um i want to i want to know what you mean by this and and whether it's because you're obviously now in the media very very vocally as you just said um you have got quite a big platform i read

a lot of what you write i just said before i didn't realize how much of your articles actually relevant sometimes i don't even that's bad isn't it i need to read who writes them i'm just reading stuff lots of it's you um so yeah tell me what you meant by that what you'd learn yeah i think i wish i'd learned more about how the media operates exactly and how it influences people too because i think that I never got a good strong sense of that until I started doing my own thinking about it when I was at university and you know outside of university

as someone who works in the media as well because even something like the BBC, understanding the BBC as like a politically contested side I think is actually quite essential to anyone's education, it's important to know that for example at the moment there are lots of different white rings of genders about what the future of the bbc looks like i mean um places like the adam smith institute want the bbc to be a subscription service but the conservatives want

the bbc to kind of like be disciplined into wielding their own agenda to cultural hegemony but i think that when i was a child i mean i didn't see media as completely neutral i knew there were white wing papers and I knew there were left-leaning or liberal-leaning papers. I knew that. I wasn't that stupid. But I didn't get the sense of just how much the media controls and shapes the political landscape and how indebted

these two forces are to each other. Even, you know, recently with the whole, like, Meghan and Harry Oprah interview, what was discussed i think what was actually most important that was discussed there was the fact that you know journalists are invited to dinner at buckingham palace and the event to throw at them to keep them immaculate and i kind of think that what is probably most likely holding us back from any kind of like

republican revolution or real discontent with the royal family is the fact that the media is keeping in line because they keep their welfare they are well paid off um and they are you know gifted with all sorts of luxurious things to keep the public on side and it means that we don't live in a democracy i think once people you know start to understand the disproportionate power and influence that the media wields we realize that we do not live in a democracy we do not live in the in the age of free neutral unbiased information and we are consent is constantly being manufactured by these papers and i think that i remember when we would um in my history lesson actually something that we would do sometimes we would have sources and

sources paper and we would sometimes say have like newspaper sources and we might say you know oh this newspaper might be biased because it's right wing or whatever but we wouldn't really deep dig into you know the problems of like ownership of certain papers and you know masculine commercial ownership of papers and just how much this is you know shaping opinion and ideology and yeah i think that and also even media conduct as well because i think that's something that really passed me by um education wise so obviously this happened when i was in primary school the kind of um you know like the whole like news of the world scandal where they were like hacking phones and things like that i mean i was a

private school student then i don't really expect to be taught that in primary school yeah but i feel like that should have inspired you know more integrated curriculums looking at media conduct and media ethics and i think that's that's a lack of like media education if i could go back and do my a-levels again my school didn't offer this but i would have done a-level media i think that would have been really important really helpful to not just my career but also understanding the the politics of it and the ways in which you know journalists conduct themselves and actually be able to interrogate that and looking at you know what ethical journalism is and isn't because you know when I had my issues with the press they turned up at my doorstep um it was really awful I felt I this was probably the worst part

of it was totally behind the scenes rather than the you know articles which are kind of there for life it was actually the fact that you know they would turn that's my doorstep and were kind of trying to harass my mother and my mother was like freshly grieving my dad and it was just like such a horrific intrusion and it just made me think that no one actually warns you or educates you on just the way that the media conducts itself sometimes you find out the hard way and i then think about you know every time i see like an article of you know people being exposed or doxed media even if it's someone that i really disagree with or someone who you know you might think is justified and being gone after i still think that so many people are kind of so many of us are kind of just like at the kind of just under the boot under the crushing boots of these like media influences and

it's not just newspapers as well it also extends into social media and it then like overlaps with different institutions too so something i've been thinking a lot about a lot recently is mugshots um mugshots of people who are wanted or have been arrested for certain crimes and i just always think like why is it necessary for us to see mugshots of these people now there was a recent kind of um social media storm around um cold harbour police station in Brixton because on their social media there were just lots of different mugshots of black men entirely black men um lots of them quite clearly struggling with the mental health issues and the reason why it kind of like exploded on the internet was because they published the long shot of a black man who looked

very clearly distressed um and his offense was that he had been begging after he had been cautioned and the way in which it was presented was basically to kind of be like you know we're keeping the streets safe and keeping this person off and it's like which communities are the police keeping safe you know it's one question and I obviously have thoughts on that, but it was also like, what is the purpose for reproducing these images in a form of media? It's to intimidate

and it's also to kind of define, you know, what we consider a citizen who is worthy and a citizen who is, you know, worthy of protection and is worthy of being integrated into nation and to show us very visually who the undesirables are. And that happens you know on the social media accounts of these police officers but it also happens papers as well and that's why like increasingly

i've moved towards like a view that mugshots should not be included in newspapers or on social media sites because it's entirely unnecessary i don't need to see the face of this person you've arrested because what purpose is it served particularly when the faces are disproportionately that of black people of people who are disabled of people who come from certain class backgrounds and will have those particular class signifiers on their bodies um so yeah i i really wish that we had a more robust education of this because i think that everyone needs to be more alert to media ethics and you know the influence of media is only growing not just because of you know newspapers but also because of social media and i i think that you know we weren't properly braced for

social media as well and kind of social media conduct social media ethics i mean the only thing that i remember being educated on in terms of social media in school was cyber bullying and to be fair i think that was necessary because you know like people are trolling and people are you know sharing horrible images of other people as well. But that kind of put the onus on just, you know, individual social media users and their conduct. But it didn't look at the ways that institutions can use social media or other kind of forms of information communication to really bully, to manipulate, to characterize villains of the public. And, yeah, I just think that's really missing. That's really lacking.

I think you're so right. It's such a crucial education, which also, like you said, we couldn't have foreseen how much we would need to be able to arm ourselves with this understanding of how manipulated these stories and information are and how manipulated we are as readers as well

into believing, like you said, certain narratives. And you said something like, oh, I wasn't that stupid. I knew X, Y, Z. But I don't think, I think, as you said, like, we didn't understand, we were taught these really obvious biases. You know, you have this paper, which is left leaning and this one leans to the right, and they might have these implicit biases or whatever. But even on a really, this is such a baseline level. But when I first started, but when I first became an influencer, I got flown on a trip abroad and it was with lots of other journalists and one of the journalists works for quite a famous women's magazine and she was talking about how oh it's so annoying now because you have to declare

gifts because years ago what would happen is you know the beauty brands would just send over like a Chanel bag to your desk and say happy Christmas so and so and basically that would mean we need to be number one on your like the best moisturizers to use or whatever i remember sitting there and thinking what because i would obviously as a young girl like read magazines and i would take those lists as gospel now i know this is so much more like frivolous than what you're talking about but even that just really shocked me and the fact that also it's like everyone knows everyone who works in media knows that it's all bullshit we know these lists are made up it's it's trade-offs, it's gifting, as you say, which is interesting because in the influencer world, gifting has come under such scrutiny, but that's been happening with journalists,

media and things for years and years and years. And you were saying about people being outed, like I guess more recently, like Philip Schofield, like now that I'm more in this industry, you do hear stories of people like, oh, it's because so-and-so had this. And so, you know, they did a deal with him and they said, you know, he's got to take the front page. And you just think how unethical, how unhumane and how have we got to this point where we agree to this? Like I'm saying we as well as being part of someone who's technically in the media.

I'm sure maybe I've subconsciously sort of agreed to, I mean, I definitely do it with advertising on some sort of level, but I mean, with these more insidious things, well how have we created this this group of people that sort of are happy to take these bribes i mean i don't know it's it's a weird thing when you dig into it we talk about the media it's sort of like a mass thing but it's a machine of people it's not you know ai no i think that's very true and i think that we need to be clear about just how extensive lobbying is i mean i remember when zara sultana the labour mp for coventry south i think it is um first was elected

parliament she kind of actually was showing on her social media like the extent of lobbying in this country like she was being sent like hampers from heathrow which you know obviously it's all mps and i just remember thinking why has no mp ever you know just taking a picture and showing the extent of which you know mps are receiving this every day and also something that I found really funny was like you know these British politicians are being bribed by like a tin of biscuits and like a teddy bear whereas in the US they are bribed with like hard cash and like actual like luxury things but even I mean I'm not gonna like shit on PRs or anything but like even as a journalist sometimes you get like in your inbox being messages being like,

are you working on like a gift list? You know, which should be interested in putting this product on this. So I don't read lists anymore because I know it's just, you know, it's just, you know, PRs or whatever company has,

you know, influenced and tried to put itself in the top spot for this. And you can't really trust the recommendations on there. I mean, I'm kind of in habit always based in that, you know, I'm obviously work in habit always based in that you know I'm obviously work as a writer but I also have like a social media platform as well and I talk about like tv and film and some of my writing so sometimes I get gifted things like not many

I mean the things I can mostly get gifted are books which I quite like because they help me fill up my bookshelves and I like reading them but sometimes I get gifted um you know those kind of like hampers um so sometimes it might be amazon Studios or MTV and they will just be full of like little goodies. It's mostly innocent because it's like it's usually just to do some promotion for a show. But it also means like if I accept this, you know, gift box from Amazon Studios in promotion of whatever show, does that mean I also now have to kind of like mute my criticism of their like working conditions and you know the fact that you have like Amazon drivers having to like piss in bottles if they have time to do that at all um it's difficult I think that

it's about the kind of like brand and reputation management and how happy you are to kind of be part of it I mean sometimes you can just accept the gifts and i personally don't think it's necessarily a huge deal on an individual level to accept the gifts if you're not in the realm of politician sometimes you're just you're just an influencer you're someone on social media and that's not necessarily to like minimize the influence of that but it's not this i don't think it's there's any point in pretending it's the same as like political corruption and i think sometimes like influences can sometimes be held to that standard and it's like we don't have to act like these are all the same chill you know um and so yeah i i feel i get you i feel strange about gifting um and the kind of benevolence that's expected then towards a certain company or brand i mean i

remember i was recently like gifted the book and i tweeted something i posted it on my story but i was like you know i have a criticism of this book and i'm gonna say and i said it and um the person just replied saying oh thank you but i remember i remember acknowledging like she shared every other like person posting the book on her story but she didn't share mine i guess because it had a criticism which is fair if you don't want to show share something that says something negative that's totally fine but it just shows how much it's about like gift i'll give me this um i'll give this to you and you say something really nice about it so your followers can buy it but i might not feel like that even if it's been sent to me totally and i think it's so interesting because

obviously i'm an influencer i do actually get gifted i mean i've asked me gifted less purely from like a waste point of view so you get sent so much crap and i literally i'm this is wasteful but i do still get some things and you're not obliged to post it so i often don't post so i really only post i love getting food and alcohol which is bad but i do because it's just you can't really say no to a free food but there is yeah this is kind of this implicit understanding that you if you're accepting this gift and you're going to share it you kind of can't say badly about it which is obviously a complete false economy and it's it's really not helpful and it's exactly what we were talking about with the lists in the magazine thing but the irony so probably going

off topic but the irony of the influencer thing is i find that people are much but like you said i remember that mp sharing that hamper and i remember being absolutely aghast but because it's always sort of been a part of influencer culture to get gifting the lay public are now aware of that as a concept and have as you said like a very low threshold for kind of letting influencers do things which is great we have the ASA like people are really strict about things but it's just fascinating that it took like as you say something which has much less sway in terms of like it's not political I'm not a politician but they're held to much a much higher standard than sort of people are who literally work in the house of commons and I found that really like there's almost like

a public what's the right word like a dissonance of understanding between when we're closer to something where we find it easier to critique whereas there's so much like distance between I guess us and politicians that people almost don't have the energy to sort of, not everyone, but I think general public are just like, oh, well, they're corrupt anyway. Do you know what I mean? I totally agree with that. And I think it's that, but I also think there's like an extent of misogyny as well. There's this idea that, you know, influencing is easy and that it's not real work and you know therefore um you know it's open to significant criticism so i remember i think a good point is like you know during the pandemic you know influencers who were jetting off to dubai were kind of like named and shamed the social media and kind of like held up as like you know what's

going wrong with our society and like the peak of selfishness and things like that and i just kind of remember thinking like look it's annoying it's annoying to be sat in your house you know during the pandemic and seeing people jet off to these different locations because they're wealthy enough to do so but also what's driving this pandemic and what's you know kept these numbers so high is the fact that we had meat packing factories still open and workers and supporters were conservative conditions and you know we had a government which was you know happy to let body's power high um to save the economy which was not even saved um so i often think that sometimes there's a kind of deflection and distraction and it's not to say that you know people can't criticize because people are allowed to criticize you know any industry and i kind of

think that if you take on the role which is public facing then you are kind of open to scrutiny obviously you know within certain limits i think that that doesn't mean that you're open to abuse but you will be open to challenge or interrogation and have to kind of answer for scrutiny, obviously, you know, within certain limits. I think that that doesn't mean that you're open to abuse, but you will be open to challenge or interrogation and have to kind of answer for yourself. But I just thought, like, is this, like, Love Island star going on holiday the thing that people need to be riled up about? No. It's annoying, sure, but it's not the peak of,

it's not everything that's wrong with the united kingdom you know no but i guess it marries everything that we're obsessed with which is just like kind of that reality star drama mixed with politics it's literally like a telenovela playing out like it's like we've lost all sense of as you say like a scale and understanding of like it's definitely annoying i definitely think obviously don't break cover balls and fly to Dubai that's just why would you do that but as you say like it's the drama of it all it's like everything's suddenly just become like we're living in a sitcom it's not there's no real kind of which is what I find interesting because when I log on to Twitter and obviously you're a very good tweeter avid tweeter and you're often like doing it like

taking the holding people to account you're discussing is really importantly and sometimes I look at my Twitter feed which is actually mostly young journalists in their 20s, to be honest. And it's got way more to say for itself, like that feed and that stream of consciousness and all those opinions than any of the papers. If I picked up any of those papers on a given day. And it's just fascinating how like there's definitely obviously we need to buy real papers. And this whole thing about, you you know it's a dying industry but kind of if you when you do have these stories that are kind of just nothingness it's no wonder that yeah we've just got a whole generation that just looks to you know social media for the news rather than tabloids and yeah traditional print

i mean media's newspapers are curated in the way that your social media timeline is not. I mean, my Twitter is literally just me going off on my thoughts about something with kind of no filter and obviously a certain paper has to set a certain agenda, it has to say things with certain lines, it can't be seen as contradicting itself,

it needs to, I mean, I think that contradictions are beautiful. I contradict myself all the time because thoughts are complex and no one has entirely consistent thoughts and i think this idea that you know we need to be absolutely consistent everything is unrealistic because that's not how people think um but you know a newspaper has to hold a certain line or if they abandon a certain line they've got to have a really roundabout reason for abandoning it i mean today's day of the um you know the local elections and all of these different papers which had you know been praising kirsten before his forensic nurse and all of that are now kind of changing their tune but they're doing it in such a way that they're

not making concessions to the fact that certain people had these criticisms of him in the first place they're just diagnosing new issues and kind of saying you know oh well he was good for basically you know people went from saying you know this is someone who's going to save labor and bring in a new era to then saying yeah he was always meant to be good for the transition but now it's time for someone else and it doesn't it doesn't so much contradict what they've said before and it still holds a certain line but it also completely ignores the fact that the issues that are now blowing up the kizdama were predicted by people who don't ideologically align with what these papers and what these colonists have been saying so yeah it's i you can never really if you just i wonder what

it's like for people who just read newspapers to shape their opinions and what or even what my outlook would be if i just know that newspapers to share might shape my opinions i think that social media is kind of a force for good in some ways. And obviously everyone's timeline is an echo chamber and it depends on what you select and the size of you. But yeah, it allows me to actually like properly engage and properly think through things. Whereas I think that newspapers proclaim to have done the thinking for you,

I guess it's the significant difference. Whereas, you know, Twitter timelines are snippets of information and like different people's thoughts and you kind of construct them and interpret them and form your own conclusions. I think you put that perfectly and also I watch that critical thinking like play out I've seen it with you where you've like disagreed with someone else that I know that you like have really similar beliefs to and then I'll read both things I'll think oh that's interesting I hadn't really thought about like that and it gives me the

space then to think oh I wonder what I think whereas I agree like my mum reads papers cover to cover and I bet that she walks away and she's like as you you said, the thinking's done for her, she's done great. That's what I need to know about the day. Fantastic. I'll store that and I'll remember that for next time. Whereas I guess, I think this is more exclusive to Twitter than other platforms. There is a lot of that working out that you get to be a part of. Not always also because obviously everyone has this fear also of changing their mind.

You have the one school of thought where they're working out and, you know, you're doing the critical thinking. And the other side is once you've made your bed, you've got to line it and you cannot possibly suddenly go from liking Keir Starmer to disliking Keir Starmer. Because people will be like, but you liked him yesterday or whatever. That's a really damaging part of social media. But I guess I think it is because I follow lots of journalists who are my age or age who are changing the form a bit of what it means to be someone in the media. Do you think that's true? Or does it come up as a problem if you don't want to write in a certain way? Has it been an issue for you? Or do you think the landscape of media is just going to have to change to fit around this new, it's not really new, but a different way of doing things.

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there's such a death of opportunities that I don't expect to get a staff job it's just too impossible and because these jobs are not so scarce people are moving around less like some of the editors that I was working with years ago are in the same position at the same paper still now because move and go where you know um so because a lot more of us are kind of just you know working for ourselves and there's a real decline in like local journalism opportunities and being like trained in-house it kind of means that you know we're training ourselves and we're becoming alert ourselves and that makes us inherently critical of media in the way media is done and so it means that we kind of set our own rules and

we also have to stand out by having set our own rules and by having you know written writing and speaking by the rules that we set rather than the rules that are set by you know mainstream media and i think just going back to what you were saying before about you know how much you know these like different spaces can influence you to change your mind i mean one of my really good friends actually told me this morning that um his mum had been like a ferocious kiasama defender um because she had been reading guardian columns that were in favor of him but marina hyde came up with a column basically saying that he's useless and his mum has now been like i agree with that yeah kiasama useless so almost as if overnight because she's been following the guardian line you know a selection

of guardian journalists her view has just been shaped and it's i as much as i'm not a fan of kiss thumb i wasn't infused by that i didn't think oh great now she's seen the light i thought look how easily people can just be views can just be shaped by just a columnist opinion rather than them actually doing any kind of independent thinking and the implications that that has for like everything else beyond Keir Starmer, beyond the Labour Party and our views of other things is just alarming. But I think also there's like people are a bit reticent to going at it. First of all, it is hard for people to kind of take a decision which goes against the status quo.

So if your friends are all Guardian media and that's all you've ever read, even if deep down you're somewhere like starting to question it it can be terrifying to kind of take that leap and look for something that's on the opposing line but I definitely I now come to things basically saying I have no fucking clue because that's happened to me so many times where I think I've formed an opinion and then I read a piece and I think oh no I agree with that and then I think it is really scary to think god I obviously don't know what I'm talking about at all then if I can change my mind that easily on something then I read a piece and I think oh no I agree with that and then I think it is really scary to think god I obviously don't know what I'm talking about at all then if I can change my mind that easily on something then I think right there's obviously I need to learn about this a lot more um and I wanted to go back quickly actually to what you're saying about I just was thinking

about how many times it's funny watching the generational difference between like your generation of writers and the older ones who seem constantly threatened by what you guys are writing and saying on twitter um because yeah because you all do kind of have your own voice and you're also not worried about saying things and you don't sort of act in a way that's like traditional media kind of like bum licking up to whoever is the the current favor of the week um do you do you enjoy that kind of conflict or do you find it a bit like stressful or it doesn't bother you I mean I kind of like the conflict because I think that you know they do feel threatened they do know that you know we are often more talented and better thinkers than them

um that you know people are increasingly turning to looking at you know younger journalists and what they have to say about certain things because they realize that actually they're giving them fresh independent insights and not just following the line of paper or they're not just being lobbied by some politicians who write things in a certain way or they're not we're not just you know consolidating class interests or whatever in papers but I also think that it does also lead to some abuse I mean I've gotten some abuse from politicians even in like senior journalists for articles that i've written in like tribunes so i remember i wrote an article looking at um the context of blarionism and the reality tv in the 19 in the early 2000s and i was looking at how the kind of social policy landscape of blarionism kind of um influenced the media landscape intelligence of television shows and what

was considered entertaining and who was considered degenerate and it was quite a straightforward argument and it was really you know it was i made sure it was backed up because it was a broad argument to make by you know things that were actually happening so like for example the un in i think 2008 had directly condemned the labour government saying that its policies were leading to children being exploited in reality television shows like super nanny or whatever and i just had some of these like centrist politicians and journalists being like oh you know this just abuse being like how did this person get his degree you know uh this person it's never it's never actually about the argument also it's never anything

there's never a response to any of the points that you make it's just abuse about you and a kind of character assassination and being like oh this person's just like left radical and some of it also gets quite racist a lot of the time but i think an example of that is you know my friend moya she wrote um an article for the guardian she's the golden political editor and she's my housemate as well and she wrote an article for the guardian um about kia starmer basically saying like you kind of stand to nothing and a bunch of really awful journalists politicians whoever they were um basically started saying like oh as if we can take her seriously because she'd written some pieces for like stylist magazine and it was just an ignorance the fact that you know if you are like a young journalist you end

up writing about really disparate topics and you can write a serious political article and you can also write something that you know someone might consider more fluffy and that's fine you know like i'm going to be writing articles about love island this summer when it's on that doesn't mean i don't have serious political analysis it just means i live a rounded life like lots of other young people that doesn't make me really unique it's not like oh i can do both it's like most of us do both like lots of us you know have really rounded lives but yeah there's a kind of like abuse and there's so much like there is so much derogatory um treatment towards you know younger journalists who are independent minded um i think some of it's jealousy and projection being honest because you know i

wish they could be us um but most of all it is it can be it can be very unpleasant i think that it can also be quite demotivating as well, because sometimes, you know, these people might help influence a big publication. I mean, luckily the kind of publications that I work at tend to either be so big that it wouldn't matter if one editor didn't like you. So say, for example, The Guardian is big enough that if some editor or some columnist doesn't like me,

it doesn't matter. Like one thing I've always said about The Guardian is that no matter how many times I criticize it publicly, they let me write for them so it's fine or you know we tend to work at or we tend to write for magazines where the people who are editors are like close to our stage and also tend to have similar views as well so like i mean i've got an editor who i work with on my close friend's instagram story so sometimes it can be that close um so yeah the kind of like different generations it is quite stark and sometimes the relationship there can be that close um so yeah the kind of like difference generations it is quite stark and sometimes the relationship there can be very not nice I think that's interesting I

actually remember reading that piece that you wrote about um Blair Wright and like TV because I remember thinking as well about how much I'd realized that the c word I didn't like like I don't think you should say it but about like that kind of like class degradation and that time in my life and I remember thinking I've completely kind of forgotten about Asbo's and I think you spoke about um what was that show you are the weakest the weakest link or whatever in that piece didn't you and I was like oh my god I forgot that there was a massive chunk of my life that was completely dictated about this idea about like unruly lower class youths who were going to come and like smash up your garden or whatever and I'd completely forgotten that that had been like quite a big like okay thing that people would talk about like

when I was young and I'd forgotten about that and I was like it really kind of made me realize you like how it's funny because you never really see those things anymore and then I saw I think maybe around the time that you'd written that piece that there were people were bringing up again um you are the weakest link whatever is that what the show was called was it just called the weakest link it was weakest link yeah and just how and all of those kind of programs and like benefit street and all the sort of like poverty porn and like just really odd takes and um yeah nothing to say apart from i remember thinking that article was interesting and it really it just made me revisit a time in my life that i'd completely forgotten and just

chalked up to like history. And then actually now, like knowing what I know and living the way that we live and speaking the way that I speak and thinking about that being so normalised is really odd. And that leads into, you know, media ethics as well, right? the sun would be publishing like the names and faces of really young children who had been given asbos or at least that was proposed by some like certain like new labor cabinet ministers to do that and you know there would always be like stories of you know different unruly youths and what they've got up to and that kind of can that kind of manufactured consent for you know the nation's children to be treated that is kind of underclass and so thinking about that relationship between media and politics is really really incredibly important because media just kind of helps set and build consent

for the policy agenda which politicians want um yeah and that and that matters i think that's something that you just don't become super aware of because i remember as a child you know i was growing up in council estate and i don't love going on about my background but um i remember just like there was always the talk about you know ho did use and the c word and as opposed I remember thinking sometimes you know is this me because I'm from this background and you know myself and my friends and my brothers I guess we fit the profile of who these politicians are talking about and what the media is talking about and then obviously you'd see it on shows about like super nanny or wife swap or whoever this idea of you know I'm ruining children and all sorts of other shows as well.

And stuff about, even stuff about like fat families and things like that. And it just kind of ended up internalising yes it's like the politics political genres of the day but also how complicit is are all forms of media with establishing those ideas and making it people think that this kind of declaration is okay because you know what when people go back and watch those weakest link um shows they're just like shocked they're absolutely shocked about that they're like that was on primetime television not very long ago but at the time you would have watched and not batted and idled and i wanted people to think about you know how do you get to a point where you can get to this level of you know degradation persecution of minorities and it

can just happen before your eyes and you're completely numb to it you know because at the time it would have gone past undetected it just was something that was just sort of like you were allowed to say it like i don't i think there was definitely understanding that it was like it's obviously not nice but it was like it was like that yeah it's exactly what you said you're giving people permission to say look you're a nuisance or you're whatever and it also completely emancipates the system the state and the parents from like these as if children what do they just exist in a vacuum and just pop up and then are just absolutely like hell raisers as if they've like where have they got this if they were naughty like where does that come from um yeah yeah talking about media ethics you tweet something i was just trying

to look for but i can't remember and i guess this is kind of like swinging through back the other day the complete other way and you were like the one thing i worry about now is like what do people actually think my work's any good or are they literally just getting me but on to talk to them or to write them because I'm black and gay and I guess that's in a really weird way sort of like a full pendulum swing to the other side where it's still unethical but it cleverly kind of masks itself as being ethical is that something that you're starting to question more? Yeah, I question that because sometimes, maybe this just comes from me being critical. And I remember when I went and met my editor at Faber

for the first time, we just went for lunch together. And I remember saying that, you know, I get a bit worried sometimes that, you know, there are some sections which can be really obsequious to like different black writers or black gay writers and kind of say, you know, oh, we love your love your work this is amazing but sometimes you don't know if they actually love it that much or if they're over commentating because they're like oh you know you're young and you're black and gay you're diverse and therefore we need to we need to be

seen as supporting this and sometimes it means that you know you're not sure of a proper quality assessment of the work that you're doing either you know the kind of literary work i'm doing or even just like the articles that i put out and yeah it does make me question things because sometimes i read things with black journalists and i think this is not very good or this is not very well researched or this is not very well written but they will be getting lots of praise and hey maybe people actually genuinely do think that they like it but i also wonder do people feel like they can't like constructively criticize an article because you know we need to be seen as, you know, supporting each other or people want to be publicly seen as, you know, bigging up this like black writer or something? Yeah, there's kind of difficult tension there.

No, it is really interesting. I think the one thing that's also interesting is that years ago, there would have been so many young white male, especially writers who probably were shit and people were like, oh, that's fine because your dad's's so-and-so and they never would have been like critically questioning that like you are like they would never have been like oh my god am I actually not that good they'd be like great thank you walk through the door and by the way I do think you're a good writer but I think I do agree but I think um I think now oh god sorry I'm talking for ages but like I guess going into like some of the things that happened um I can't remember when it was beginning of this year with like online again in the same generation people are being like look we can't just use identity politics as something to be like a tick box we have to like keep each other in check and sort of not give free passes just

because we're trying to change the narrative around things so I wonder if that is going to but then that's then that's dangerous because then you don't want to tip the balance again where it like allows people to be outright racist or outright discriminatory or like um prejudice whatever like it that's why it's scary to kind of call it not that I would call it out but like going into that critical sense then I just think it's so that exactly as you said, there's such a tension there and it kind of can make or break a certain situation, if that makes sense. Yeah. Well, I think it's easy for people to kind of,

and I don't want to like name anyone's names or examples, because that's just messy, but I think it's easy for people to kind of like bring up their identities as a way to kind of deflect criticism or to you know insist that people support them i mean i could easily kind of like demand that people support me because i'm a black gay journalist and i'm owed that or something but i want people to support me because they like the work that i'm doing and that they learn something from it and that they think that i'm talented and they're invested in my growth and my career um but yeah there's a kind of tension

because you do want to be able to actually have that kind of like inter-community um discussion and criticism and you know i hate the term hold people accountable because i often think like why do i need to be accountable to a bunch of strangers which i think is totally fair um but be able to say you know like this is you know a dangerous ideology or to say like this is not an idea which we should stand for and we shouldn't just accept this you know uncritically because it's coming from someone who is from the same identity group as you i mean there can be you know conflicts and differences and how people think i mean i think something recently was that say um for example the kind of like um visuals and activism which propped up in response to the um murderous the very sad murder of Sarah Ephraim there were actually divisions in

terms of feminist responses to it I mean there was some division between what the organization that popped up called reclaim these streets was doing and the kind of money they were raising where they were putting it as compared to what sisters uncut were doing and it's like you can't you know say that there's one coherent woman's view on the kind of like organizing or the response that's needed to this kind of violence we are all diverse and the kind of views that we have i mean not every black person for example believes in the abolition of the police like i do um not every black person believes in ending deportations like i do and so i think that we need to kind of stop using identity as the ground zero um for our discussions and our analysis and even particularly

i mean i always i'm always cautious of this because sometimes I think, you know, like, how much do I want a white person weighing into black issues or something like that? But sometimes I think, like, we don't necessarily need to preclude people from conversations because of their identity if they do have something valuable to say and if they do have something valuable to teach.

I mean, I'm more likely to take directions from someone like, say, Owen Atherley, who's like one of the white editors of Tribune than I am from like say owen atherley who's like one of the white editors of tribune than i am from kemmy badenock who's like a black conservative np so yeah i think that i'm really i'm really glad that you know as i've gotten older i've really let go of this idea that i need to like align with people of my ethnic group or my sexuality i mean i've seen like three different black gay tories on twitter um who emphasize that they are black gay Tories because no one does identity politics like Tories to be honest and it's kind of like I can't

pretend that there's mutuality between other ideologies or any kind of ground just because we have we come from you know the same identity groups it's just not the case I mean even in my household we don't have the same ideological views i mean my younger brother and i are both like quite left-wing labor my mother's more centrist my older brother i think is more centrist as well so yeah i'm really i'm pleased for there to be more kind of like inter-community criticism dialogue and i'm hoping that over time we start to see you know more articles more writing that really interrogates black communities i mean something that i'm really interested in is interrogations of class amongst black people i think that's kind of inspired my experiences of private school because

i came to private school and i was on a scholarship and i was like from a poor background and it was quite obvious that i was as well as much as i tried to hide it and i remember like a lot of the time people asked me like oh it must have been really bad like all those middle-class white people I'm kind of like well yes but also some of the middle-class black people were also quite awful and they held they held certain views like they would be like really condescending about people who lived in council estates like I did and I kind of thought like you know there isn't there wasn't some kind of like racial solidarity or cohesion there like people do have certain views which might be in formal class and just because they're black doesn't mean that I can't

criticize them or hold them to account I hate that term but yeah that's the thing I can't criticize them um for that or be clear about the kind of like biases which can exist within groups so yeah I'm really just fed up of identity as the ground zero of every kind of criticism yeah me too but I remember thinking like when i first was like coming to understand about intersectional feminism intersectionality and all this stuff when i was at uni and i was like oh my god this makes so much sense this is how we should be organizing each other and working it out on like a you get five points for this minus five points for this and we can work out these like privilege checklists and then we can all sort of like and as you say it's just so much more complicated than that and it's so redundant

to just be like okay well you can speak on this because they're not that fast be it for me i'm not saying i want to get involved in criticizing anyone for anything but um just just starting again it's it's just that critical eye it's not even being critiquing it's not necessarily saying someone's wrong it's just having that ability to to zoom out and think actually like am i literally just listening to this person because they have you know this many followers and identify as xyz and do this like you know there has to be sort of like an amalgamation of of lots of things I think it's is it Shardeen Taylor Stone is someone I follow on Twitter and she did a really good tweet quite a while ago about um like why we've got to stop looking at identity politics and think about more like coalition building and

kind of forget all of this idea of what separates us because it's it's kind of just finding more ways to tear each other like put it separate each other um it's kind of i think we've i think we've done it i think we've done identity politics like to the death yeah and i think that those ideas are really well explored in emma debiris and what white people can do next which is a really fantastic book that i've like raved about and she also talked about that need for coalition building and the fact that we just i think sometimes i i'm really i think when i was like 18 and i like discovered the concept of privilege i was like oh my god yeah this really understands that this is a good organizing principle for understanding the world and now

i'm just i'm sorry i i'm really sick of this idea that we all need to kind of like this kind of confessional politics where everyone needs to like stack their different um intersections and kind of like weigh up and see who's more marginalized than the other before deciding who can speak like people need to actually i think what was a good distinction that was made in the book was when emma kind of said that you know people are getting information but they're not getting knowledge. And knowledge is made by like engaging and, you know, generating and criticising and thinking through things properly rather than just like taking some things as authority.

Like I kind of got to the position where I'm like, no, I'm not going to take your authority on this purely because of who you are. I'm going to think about these things independently and read a wide range of things and come to my own conclusions. And that matters because i think that you know there were points where i probably believed or followed certain things because i

thought oh this person's of this identity group so i should follow what they're saying but it's like we don't all have the same opinions we all have our own conflicts so everyone has to do their own work and that's what matters the most and i often think the kind of like privilege beating i think you know in in some cases like it still matters and it's still significant and in certain environments it matters but i kind of think that the whole white privilege stuff sometimes it becomes a very corporate idea like sometimes it's about you know who gets a promotion above you based on privilege and that's you know those are the discussions but it's not the same as you know articulating the language of like class conflict um interests in coalitions and the kind of violences that people face

which aren't reducible to privilege, they're about power. And I think that it was Sean Fay, a friend of mine, who put that on her story where she was basically like, you know, this idea of privilege, say, like, cis privilege she was talking about is really outdated because it's about power. And she was saying how, like, as a transgender woman, it was a cisgender doctor who you know operates her on her um it's like um a cisgender civil servant or something who like processes her like gender

recognition significant or i don't really know the technicalities of it um but it's understanding where different actors have power and how you know these things occur um yeah i think that a lot of people are also starting to kind of like move past this like kind of like high prudency politics like privilege discussion i mean i remember back when i think the time when i started to realize this is a bit ridiculous is when there were discussions basically being like how to explain white privilege to a homeless person i just thought this is ridiculous i don't care about explaining white privilege to a homeless person i would care about you know

getting them off the streets yeah I'm looking at what kind of like health things that they have so I sometimes think that it would get bogged down in these discussions and all it is is it's just a discussion that's it it's just us talking and white people or straight people or cisgender people just self-flagellating and apologizing for their privilege and what is actually gained for anyone yeah that's the thing this is I mean this is where this podcast kind of ended up it wasn't meant about this and then it ended up being like oh my god let's find out about the world and all stuff and then it ended up being sort of just um not awareness raise i've had so many incredible conversations but i got to point where i was like i don't need to like we don't need to raise awareness i think it's a whole

generation of people of loads of different ages who had this same sort of like awakening at the same time and all kind of and then now are all as you said like fucking fatigued like we don't but the irony being that like mainstream publication whatever are just catching on I really need to read Emma's book I have it written down anyway but um it just sounds like it's a great next step in that conversation because I think we have all done it to death and it sort of makes you feel a bit like oh my god I'm gonna vom if I have to read one more thing even though I was definitely like such a big player in those conversations but it felt like relevant at the time and now I look back to podcasts a few years ago and I'm like oh my god shut up this is just like what is what good does it do I'm literally like listing my privilege I did a TED talk and the beginning of the TED talk

I'm like I'm white cis hat able-bodied neuried, neurotypical like as if that was somehow then it was like once I'd said all of that it's like okay now I can speak and it's like actually yeah that's not really relevant you know it is but it's not in that sense. It's just like it's the politics of confession and it just becomes really unnecessary yeah it's it's writing yourself into it's like setting yourself up to discuss something by first acknowledging the different ways in which you are privileged but that doesn't necessarily it also doesn't necessarily make any difference on what you're even saying so i think my friend rachel wrote a really good article about this i just can't quite remember the details of it but i think it was for the

guardian where she basically just wrote about like how sometimes like authors kind of set up by talking about their different privileges but it doesn't actually like bear on any kind of reflection of their actual positionality beyond talking about that privilege um so yeah i'm kind of like glad to see the end of that reductionism i think it's good for people to kind of come full circle and realize that like this kind of like economy we have of you know privilege raising awareness and privilege and all of that i mean i talk i constantly go on about how much i hate infographics on instagram because i'm always just like you know who is this for um and where it's kind of like here's what you can do about this and here are seven ways in which you are privileged above me and i just think who's this for because

like first of all like most people in your timeline unless your education about a humanitarian crisis or something like that most people in your timeline know what white privilege or whatever it is and they decide by now they've decided if they care or if they don't yeah um sometimes it's not about awareness raising it's not the case that you know someone will become educated and now suddenly that they will you know start behaving or have a different worldview. People know these things. They've read the arguments and they've chosen their alignment. You know, giving Boris Johnson a book on white privilege is not going to change anything. So I think basically understanding that actually what we are facing is class struggle and class conflict.

And that's what matters. And actually being clear that this is a battle which is based in aggression, based on you know certain interests actually clashing with each other and that's always how history has been right rather than acting as if it's a process in which you know we can hold people's hands and we can win these things by you know being really loving and kind of like guiding people through it that's not how these things are won and it's never how these things have been won and i think that it distracts from the necessary work that actually needs to happen and actually going up against and i think that one of the most instructive educational things that's been going on at the moment has been the kill the bill protest

it's been educating people on the extent of state power and the extent of state authoritarianism and what the actual threats to speech are and it's politicized and mobilized people who have not previously been politicized and mobilized and thought about their rights in terms of protest and thought about the ways in which government tries to suppress dissent and that is so much more powerful and impactful than just flogging people about their privilege because it shows that you do have a stake in anything that the state

does, all of us have a stake in how the state operates and all of us going out and building people power and protesting and shutting these things down is what's going to help break these things and people you know the massive backlash in response to the poll tax which was what ended up um undoing thatcher in the early 90s and it's like we do need to be ready for these big conflicts and the fact that this isn't gonna the revolution isn't gonna happen by describing for graphic um and yeah understanding that and understanding that your

position is not about confessing your different privileges and your intersections and then talking it's about attending these protests if you can it's about sharing the resources which are actually important in which matter and also educating yourself and critically thinking I always emphasize people need to critically think when you're reading something you need to read it to critically think with it pick up a pencil engage what you agree with what you disagree with why do you think that as a result of reading that it's important but as you said i definitely think that there's been it's literally as you said like coming full circle and there's going to be this huge space of everyone's something oh fuck what are we doing like why are we sharing

this infographic that like we've literally seen the last million people that we follow i do that now where i'm like i'm not fucking sharing it you can send it to me but like i know that you've already seen it on 80 people's stories. So why do you want me to put it up? Because all that does is says, yeah, I've seen it. Don't worry, tick. And I might not read it. You don't even know if I've looked at it.

I could have just shared it. And that's where I think it's now people starting to go, okay, I do think there was a point, like maybe in the height of this summer, last summer, when actually it was amazing. People were literally learning about you know white supremacy for the first time whatever and but then that kind of thing got diluted and turned into like this thing that is now there's an infographic for literally anything and um yeah but i remember not loving those infographics at the time i get why it was useful and some people was useful that's fine but i remember like recently on instagram sometimes people and they don't sometimes

they don't even follow me they will send me yeah an infographic that they made and ask me to share it and i think fuck off why have you have you asked me to share this because you're trying to raise awareness or i think one people one thing people realize is that if they create something that's really shareable like an infographic everyone shares on their stories and it drives up their engagement rate and they gain followers and it means that their selfie gets more likes yeah it's kind of like a calculation like that um and that's why people share infographics and it's quite obvious and one really cynical thing that's happened recently and i was really appalled by this um recently someone had posted um something of like a missing a young missing black person

and this account didn't even follow me and it just sent it in my dms to share it and i noticed that it was like watermarked with their podcast it was this image of a missing black child and it was watermarked with their podcast and not only was the child already found and they kept the poster but it was like you send this to me randomly so i could share it so what you could get what 30 000 likes because it's gone viral and then you hope that what 100 people will follow you and start running your podcast i just thought that is sick i thought that this kind of like information sharing economy it's so easily exploited it's so easily exploited because also you feel guilty if you don't share that missing person or if you

don't share that infographic talking about a certain crisis but and it's not and i think that a lot of the time you know we feel disempowered and we feel like there are ways that we cannot help i mean today is a day where people feel particularly helpless and people just like you know what it's gonna be fucking for the next 20 years just fuck it what can we do and sometimes social media gives us a way to make us feel like we're doing something because it feels like it's an action because you know people talk about words not action so sharing something feels like an action or donating to something feels like an action. But a lot of time it isn't. And sometimes I do think we need to also understand that, you know, sometimes these biggest issues are bigger than us as individuals.

And that does not mean you have to be apathetic or start disengaging or anything like that. But it does mean that you need to think about things critically. You need to think about why you're sharing something and what the benefit of sharing it is. You need to educate yourself on the issues if you're going to read an infographic and you care enough to share it i hope that you're also reading further you know i hope you didn't just read the infographic and put it there and not read it further because you know that's what people are doing so yeah i was really appalled by that person who sent me that picture of the missing child i thought i didn't say i just deleted the dm because otherwise i would have been really rude to them I just couldn't believe that their watermark was there

and obviously it would have been shared however many times and I was just really appalled no that is that is disgusting and but it's so exploitative and I think that we're gonna see I mean I'm so ready to read Moya's think piece about this because I'm sure she'll have to do one soon but just about how like even if you don't don't want to be an activist like the what Instagram kind of makes you feel like you have to be in order to have some worthiness and that's kind of another thing we need to get away from it's like actually not everyone has to be an activist most people aren't really designed to be activists you can be caring and give back to a community and try to be like as aware as you can be but you really don't like we can't keep it's become a new

commodity in a way that i can't quite explain but at one point where it would be like posting your brunch was like the thing to do on instagram it's like now the thing to do is make sure that you're up to date with the latest government coup that's happened wherever in the world and it's making everyone not only imagine like 15 year olds are probably anxious as fuck trying to make sure that they know like what whatever's happened in myanmar whatever's happened wherever and then everyone else has sort of got this like you said that false sense of security like oh good i'm doing the right thing i've shared that thing um i've signed that petition and obviously all of

these things are good but they're not when they they've just lost all meaning now i think yeah yeah yeah like i'm i'm very i'm someone who's very fed up with it so i'm not even i'm sure some people can you know launch a defense of like instagram activism but i'm particularly fed up with it i also don't like being i'm often referred to as an activist and i'm always like i'm a writer and obviously that always happens to minority writers if you are a black writer who writes about black issues or a gay writer who writes about gay issues or a trans writer who writes about trans issues then it means you're an activist it's like no i'm not an activist i'm a writer and i do not want the responsibilities that come with activism you know activism comes

with great personal sacrifices i'm honest that i'm not ready or willing to make those sacrifices in my life and i can accept that and a lot of people need to accept that they're not and that's fine you know there are people who will do that work and do do that work. And, you know, I always support them and I back them. But it's okay to say that this is not my range or I don't have the bravery to do this. I think too much about my own security, my own safety to do that. And is it selfish?

I guess we're all selfish. That's how things are. Yeah, I think it also ends up devaluing some of the other work that you do do. Like some people are like, you know, I'm a writer, I'm a content creator, I'm a i'm this and that and i think that it means that you know as black people particularly we're kind of just constrained to just this like realm of activism and i also think that some people also really readily take up the label of activists as well

because it kind of it benefits them and it's kind of like i don't know if you can call yourself an activist and also do spunk on. I just don't think so. Like, I think that naturally, if you're an activist, you should be, you know, going against a lot of these different organisations. And this isn't me saying I'm better than you because you do SponCon. I've done SponCon before, but I'm also not calling myself an activist. I'm just a writer who writes about certain issues. So I just, yeah, I think that whole label, I think more people need to drop it from themselves, to be honest, and also people need to stop

so readily attaching it to anyone who has just spoken on such issues because it's like, these are our lives, you know? Yeah, and I think also like activism is always meant to be about the collective. I just, I don't think that activists are meant to be named individuals. And I think that it's also part of the problem again in how history is taught right we're always taught

about you know the individuals who did big things so we're taught about you know mlk mlk as an individual rosa parks as an individual we just don't learn enough about the kind of organizations of collective solidarity which goes into that even thinking to the united kingdom we don't have enough understanding and education about the trade union movement and for example and the ways in which people organize throughout it and you know striking power and things like that and how key gains were made collectively i mean if we talk about say like the poll tax and you know who led the poll people can't name individuals who were leading the poll tax riots or one activist individual who you know stood up to thatcher that was seen as a collective that was seen as a story

of a nation who fought back and said no more right and i think that's missing the fact that you know these activist stories are about communities they're about collective work they're about solidarity and radical change they're not about this individual going and standing up and doing their own individual thing and i just i get very tired of that i agree i wonder if it's also just a limitation of language where there's certain people who especially someone who's really educated really passionate maybe like you understand like what what like historical grassroots activism really meant and then obviously young teenagers coming up now who really want to be activists and i wonder if there's just a level of miscommunication we need like a different word for what it is when you're

online and sharing things, which also might take so much emotional labor and be really tiresome. And obviously, like this whole question of accessibility of the online world. But there definitely is some sort of disjunct between, or there's just like a dearth of knowledge between what, you know, what activism is and what it's being presented as in like current standing. The minute you, someone puts that label of activist on you if you like try and what i don't know buy a pair of shoes they're like well you can't enjoy nice shoes because you're supposed to be being activist all the time and it's like no one even

said that they were that um so yeah joy and fun needs to be like injected back into the story yeah yeah and i think you know people need to be able to like live you know like holistic and balanced lives like sometimes people follow me on social media for like you know political tweets and when i'm like really riled up and then they'll see me tweeting about something really trivial and they'll follow me and it's like well i'm a 24 year old boy what do you want yeah i've got a life outside of being angry at the government so yeah i totally understand that and i sympathize the fact that you know you're kind of expected to always be on and even people that i know who are like um i know some people who, you know, you're kind of expected to always be on. And even people that I know who are like,

I know some people who actually, you know, organise in like actual, like radical activist collectives. They've still got lives. They've still got on holiday. They still, you know, watch trash TV. They were watching the Meghan Harry opening to Live In For The Drama. Because, you know, we can't just stay angry all the time. We can't just, you know, constantly be doing that fight.

So, yeah, I totally agree with that. Totally. Now, your last thing that you wish you'd been taught in school was public speaking. we can't just you know constantly be doing that fight so yeah I totally agree with that. Totally now your last thing that you wish you'd been taught in school was public speaking but judging by the last one hour and 26 minutes and eight seconds I think you're a fantastic public speaker when did you get that? I appreciate that I think that I was kind of thinking about the ways in which you know I was taught to speak in school and we only ever had the only real practice we had for public speaking was debating society and I really just I always thought I should be good at debating because you know I'm argumentative and I have ideas and I just I was really bad at it because you had to like structure your argument in a certain way and it was really just decorative

and you had to take on a certain cause and it would be like a b a b I just I really couldn't understand the structure of it and I think that it made me confused about how to speak publicly and how to like really articulate what i say verbally and i remember just like being i remember being really bad at speaking for a long time and i honestly as much as you just like complimented me i still think i'm a really bad speaker and i really like panic a lot of time with speaking because i'm always like i might slur my words or i might be speaking too fast or I might not be saying things in like a certain coherent order and I kind of just wish that there was more practice just for speaking freelance because you know that's something that you know everyone has to do at some point I mean at most at school you

would have a presentation but you would have everything written down and you pretend that you're not literally eyeing the whole thing the entire time so yeah i kind of wish that there was more like workshops and opportunities to actually like practice speech and think about what makes good speech as well rather than just the kind of like public school contortions of like a debating club because that's not how people speak in real life and that's not how people speak on public platforms either like what they're doing at the cambridge union is not a model for how conversations happen in society so yeah i i wish i was better educated on public speaking i i completely agree when i first did i got asked that tedx talk and i was absolutely terrified and so i made i like learned a script and i did this powerpoint it's the one of the worst things ever

done because i didn't really understand that like what makes a really good speech is actually just speaking from knowledge trying to like draw from things that you know speaking really freely I guess like we have done on the podcast such kind of the best the best way to listen to someone is listen to that natural flow of conversation but it is such a hard skill and I definitely find it even now that I've done so many episodes this podcast now I'm thinking about what I'm saying it does make you really self-conscious and suddenly all the words jumble up and your brain can't think of what you're going to say next um and it is something as you say that everyone's going to have to do even if it's like it's your brother's wedding you have to do a speech everyone at some point in their life is going to have to do a speech and yeah we are really ill-equipped i guess

yeah it's a really necessary skill i think it's something that i think it's something that lots of people feel anxious about you know the the need to you know be able to speak publicly and i remember i remember i think the time that i i think the time i really challenged it was that you know i was it was my dad's funeral and i had written out a speech to write and i was really struggling with it and i just threw it away and i just spoke and i just spoke about my father free just freely and what i remembered about him and i think that from now on like with my speeches i will always i might write down like a few prompts to say you know i need to talk about this but i just think i will ever write out a whole speech again unless i really had to

um because it will always feel unnatural it always feel really artificial and it will always feel like you're confusing and jumbling yourself and i think that part of good public speaking is also trusting yourself and trusting your brain as well like even now throughout this entire podcast conversation i mean being honest i was in bed before being like shit what am i going to say but i've now just come here and i thought you know i have you know some thoughts and why taking this spiral into other things you know um the host will prompt me or ask those questions and that will inspire certain things and so remembering that you know our brains hold so much more than some a4 sheets of paper ever can and they our brains are the best resource um for what we can say because you know we're always thinking to ourselves

we're always speaking to ourselves and in dialogue and in conversations ourselves all the time and speaking in public isn't all that different it's just thinking about it at a certain vibrancy and at a certain consistency yeah i i was listening to a podcast the other day actually with a comedian who's talking about how she does improv classes and she she was saying, like you just said, it's really sweet. We walk around all day improvising to ourselves. We're just having a little chat in our head all day long. And we completely forget that, as you say, our brain's able to jump from idea to idea. And it makes perfect sense.

Whereas, weirdly, writing and speaking are such different skills. And if you wrote something down that you were going to say out loud it sometimes actually comes out really clunky because our brains make these really amazing segues that you couldn't necessarily get to in writing they're kind of a twindly and tiny but when you're listening it flows very nicely um yeah and it is really free i love to having these conversations i think it's actually really fun to see where your brain goes but it's exhausting like we'll be really tired after this because your brain has just been like yeah going all over the shop I mean I didn't imagine that we would be talking about influencers in this conversation but I actually quite enjoyed I quite enjoyed that discussion I thought it was good and yeah it does show the kind of like when your discussions are organic it can take you to really exciting places

and when they're not really fixed down so I like the format of this where you said you know just three things that you wish you learned in school because it allows lots of different prompts and it allowed me to even that memory of you know my my teacher who I was knew was a lesbian who I you know I haven't actually thought about that memory in a really long time but it just I was reminded of it and so yeah I I like the creativity of the brain the way it can take you rather than just being really like super prepared and being like I'm going to say this this this this yeah exactly because sometimes you listen to journalist interviews and and not to say that I'm better than other journalists because I definitely am not but you know when you would like oh my god they're about to say something really interesting and then the

journalist goes okay so anyway and then has like a really specific question to ask and you're like oh my god if you just said like what did you mean by that you could have had like an amazing conversation about the muffin they have for lunch or whatever it might be yeah well that's an interesting thing that happened um so last week i was interviewing some of the mayoral candidates for the black culture archive so i interviewed the labour green and liberal democrat candidate and so sean berry was my best interview the green candidate because it was just like a free-flowing conversation. So what it was was that they, all of the candidates get like a set list of questions. But for Sean Berry's and Louisa Porritt's conversations,

the green liberal Democrat candidate, I was allowed to kind of follow up more. And so we ended up having more interesting conversation back and forth and I was able to like challenge and I asked questions that I wasn't expecting to ask them. And also that they weren't expecting to be answered as well. So, you know, they were having to speak more organically so at some points they had to kind of break out of their script but the interview with Sadiq Khan oh my god so it was shorter because

he only had like a certain amount of time but also his team like sent us like a very fixed set list of questions and said you can only ask seven questions and I was allowed to follow up and so there was a point where he said something like his answer to like police brutality was more black police officers and I wanted to follow up on that I wanted to interrogate that and have a discussion you know is representation really what you're offering to young black Londoners and you know are more black police officers actually going to solve the issue or are they going to be a kind of like cosmetic diversity cover-up and that would have been a very interesting conversation for me to have with the mayor but because we were restricted to just having to you know keep into the seven questions i had to move on and i was really really frustrated actually

um because i wanted to be able to have that dialogue and i think it would have been better for the both of us and i also actually think he would have come across better as well if he had allowed that space to engage in that dialogue and actually present himself as someone open to challenge because you know what sean berry i challenged her on some things i was like you know i didn't like you know when this has been said by the green party so i challenged her on some things that green party have said about me and she was able to actually respond to it give me an honest answer as well um and i i like that i think that's so cool and also you're right he would i would be fascinated to see what he said about that because obviously like if you people and also people who perhaps haven't gone into this idea of, like, abolishing the police or what that could really look like or why there's no such thing as, like, a rotten system, et cetera.

It would have been interesting to see him take that on. And it's a shame how the PR machine then sort of takes over. Because you don't know how much it's him going, oh, I don't want to answer anything. Or people going, look, we're going to completely, like, put up barriers so that people can't people can't like catch you out and then it's just a shame because you're right what are we voting for then if we can't really get inside your brain and understand what you really think about things it kind of changes it just becomes a PR stunt again doesn't it it's like if I want the PR answer I will just read your manifesto but I just don't think that's what we I just don't think that's what interviews should be like anything that you know you've got prepared should already be out to the public and interviews should be able

to they should be able to catch you off guard they should be able to ask you the difficult questions i don't think that i don't think a politician should be able to prepare for an interview beyond remembering their numbers or something like that yeah they should be able to have pre-prepared lines for everything that's said you know they should be open and i think that we would have much better conversations with politicians because also sometimes a politician comes off worse when they're trying to just repeat a line that they had set and it doesn't answer the question that they're being asked and they think it's fine because they're taking control but they just look stupid to most people and they look incompetent so yeah no i agree that's very

interesting and i i'm gonna where can we get these interviews? Are they out yet? Your interviews? Yes, yes. They're on the Black Cultural Archives YouTube. So you can watch them there with the Labour, Green and Liberal Democrat candidate. Unfortunately, I was meant to interview

the Conservative candidate, Sean Bailey, but I was taken off it and it was given to another journalist. I reckon that they searched me up and they were scared. So that's what I'm thinking. But I don know what why um i would have loved to see your interview because i'd be interested to see what accent he did if you interviewed him yeah oh god yeah yeah his interview with zizi mills was like painful because it was like where did you rent this

accent from i'm sorry this is not how you speak i had to pause it and get a youtube video up to remind myself i was like am i going mad like i'm like does he normally I swear he doesn't normally speak like this so I got like another interview up and watch it and then I played it back and I was like oh my god oh my god what is going on it was shocking well we'll see how the results play out today thank you so much for joining me it's been such a pleasure sorry to keep you so long do you have anything that you wish to find do you want to point anyone in the direction of anything you've got your book coming out in 2024 is it should i get that right yeah so my book revolutionary acts which is a social history black gay men will be out 2024 um you can follow me on instagram and twitter i'm at jace by jason

which is a play on mark by mark jacobs that's the joke um got you and i yeah and also our digital archive black and gay back in the day which i run with mark thompson who you should also check out because he does some really excellent work um with hiv prevention and he was recently on a bcpc2 program called saved by a stranger um where he reunites with the therapist who helped him when he was a young man recently diagnosed with HIV so yeah wow that's all I have to plug amazing I'm trying to think if I saw an article about that the other day maybe anyway irrelevant um it's been such a pleasure to chat to you as I said you only got on like we're recording this like for piano on Friday which is probably like the worst time to be doing an interview but I've actually really

perked up now because I feel like it's such a nice chat so thank you I really enjoyed it thank you for having me thank you so much thank you and thank you everyone for listening I will see you next week bye We'll be right back. A chance to win with every spin and a guaranteed winner by 11 p.m. every day.