Emotional toil.

Since a race renaissance unfurling in the summer of 2020, where Black Lives Natter was coined, in the hotbed of sun, corona virus, lock down, and George Floyd; the now martyr of the Black Lives Matter movement. Since that personal and political race renaissance, the great un-silencing, posting on social media almost every day, but wading through Black British news stories, every day can be traumatising and triggering, as Head of Content, (laughs) trying to metre the stark horrifying truths of racial inequality, with art, culture, history, health, sport (sometimes) ocasional celebrity birthdays. Is toil.
But in so many ways at least for the Black Briton, racism is unable to be disconnected with the culture, it is Black and Brown experience splashed onto a white canvas after the wash of England’s pastoral imagined landscape, of green and pleasant lands. History (a dominant culture’s history) has wanted to whitewash the more gruesome and sordid bits of colonialism from the historical records, but with technology comes global community.

We are a global majority not BAME this rests uneasy for patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy. Since 2019 I have ran for Parliament, vented by spleen, waxed lyrical, read article after article, posted 500 status’ don’t know how many stories? Got a live show under my belt, read books, engaged in twiiter, then not during a toxic month or two (on twitter, like storms) etc etc.

But it’s starting to make my head explode, not Black Experience, this I LOVE, this I want more of, (like meeting people I really admire on the spot and asking them for an interview best BLN thing EVER!) but how do I navigate mental health while still reporting the really important, harrowing, earth shattering things that are STILL happening, like snap shots of Slavery past, how do I navigate that while not losing my mind?

This week has been hard, harder still for Child Q. What do we do when the system seems so skewed to perpetuate state sanctioned sexual assault on a minor? It’s South Africa apartheid, it’s deep south Mississippi lynching era antebellum. It’s racial violence and its so old, so embedded I’m not sure how to begin to unpick it? Unpack it? And that takes its toll, it is a toil, it is. It is inherited DNA memory, It is diaspora, it is the weight of knowing a better way of being, but how to deconstruct a paradigm of white male monied corporate power? You Don’t? You Do? Do You?

I don’t know what to do except try to build this platform for Black and Brown people to be heard for the global majority - in the UK to feel seen, and heard on this platform, and on BLN-LIVE stages, and in pod-casts, and community outreach. To facilitate creativity, conversation and community.

Eljai Morais