Racism doesn’t start with beating up black people on the street – it’s much more insidious than that

In 2017 my novel, Nina Is Not OK, was longlisted for a prize. I did a little dance when my agent told me. Being nominated for an award is very exciting and flattering because the opportunity to say, “Look mum! I got a sticker!” is as appealing now as it was when I was five.

“Which award?” I asked and was told, “The Jhalak award. It’s a new award for Bame writers.” I didn’t know what Bame meant in 2017. I looked it up. Black and Asian Minority Ethnic.

I gracelessly withdrew my book from the long list. I didn’t speak directly to Nikesh Shukla and Sunny Singh, who had set up the award to champion non-white authors, to try and explain how I felt. I wish I had asked them to have coffee and explained but I was too shy and awkward.

The thing I didn’t want to admit was that I was hopping mad. Not at those who set up this prize, but by the need for it. I’d already spent 20 years as a comedian where many producers and critics could never quite get past the colour of my skin or my unusual name – now, here I was, box-fresh in the publishing world to find that it was the same. I had naively assumed it wouldn’t be. I was sent to the headmaster’s office to explain myself. In other words I had to go on the Today programme to talk to John Humphrys about why I had snubbed this honour.

An elephant in a china shop on the bull’s day off would have expressed their reasons for removing my book from the list more eloquently than I did that morning. The other guest was Gary Younge who was also on the long list and quite a hero of mine and it hurt me to have an opposing view to him. I was in a right old tizzy in the interview and I wish I’d had the courage to be honest and scream, “How many years do we have to live in this country to be considered part of the gang?”

I was so angry that black and brown and other minorities were so overlooked that we had to get together and give each other prizes. As with the television and radio industry, diversity exists amongst the performers and the writers, but the commissioners, producers, reviewers are still overwhelmingly white.

It’s taken the murder of a black man in America and the Black Lives Matter protests this week to make people in the entertainment industry in our own country properly sit up and take notice. Many white performers have announced on Twitter that they are shelving their podcasts this week as it’s a time to listen and not talk. Leigh Francis has apologised for the way he sent up black stars in his hit show Bo’Selecta! It’s taken the horror in America to make our industry do more than defensively say, “Well, we have commissioned several comedians doing shows about their brownness, and we read articles about diversity in the newspapers, what more do you want?”

Last year I was a judge on a panel at the National Television Awards. The category I was judging was best comedy, and I made a passionate case to my fellow judges for The Big Narstie Show – already a favourite with some of the judges. It’s a chaotic chat show hosted by comedian Mo Gilligan, rapper Big Narstie (I have yet to meet a quantity surveyor named Big Narstie but I hope one day that I do). Both are black guys and I fought for them because they were doing something no one else was doing: capturing a young, black and Asian working class audience so often ignored by commissioners, who absolutely loved them. The spirit of the show was not unlike The Word, the anarchic comedy show of my own youth. My fellow judges let me give my passionate speech in favour of it winning then we all voted anonymously.

Mo Gilligan made his name on the internet where his audience found him and such was his success that television could not ignore him. When black comedian Gina Yashere was a bright young thing in the 1990s, taking the roof off notoriously hard to play comedy clubs, I was a newbie on the circuit, watching her create the energy of a rock concert at her gigs. Social media didn’t exist back then to give Yashere the platform that TV commissioners refused her because “we already have Richard Blackwood”. (This is a fact, by the way, not a speculation. It was said in a meeting with a TV channel to Yashere, to her face).

This country lost Gina Yashere. That’s our shame. Sick and tired of a scene where she would only have been “the token black face on Mock the Week” and of reviewers for whom her abundant comedy talent was not enough, she moved the US. I read the review in The Guardian which read, “She doesn’t delve deep enough into the African experience”. That reviewer has a lot to answer for. Where is his apology on Twitter? Yashere grew up in London. What “African experience?” We all saw that review, us black, brown and more tuned-in white comedians, but who to complain to? Where could we go with our outrage?

Racism doesn’t start and stop with beating up black people on the street. A long way before that comes the inability to see black people as the same as you, as normal. It comes from the audacity to allow yourself to dictate what they should and shouldn’t be talking about.

In America, Yashere told me, “It’s racist as s**t but at least it’s in your face”. She added, “But there is an opportunity to try and dismantle and educate from the inside and that’s what I’m doing with my show, hiring black writers and providing opportunities that weren’t necessarily available before.”

I hosted the Royal Television Society Programme Awards last year. I opened the envelope of the category I had judged to announce the winner. It was The Big Narstie Show. The predominately white panel of judges had really heard me. That was huge. An emotional moment after years of trying to bring this stuff up but being fobbed of or ignored. So much talent is lost unless we let people in.

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