The Revolution Begins at Home

The Revolution Begins at Home was a podcast all about activism. It was hosted by Chantelle Lewis (from Surviving Society) and features loads of great interviews exploring activism, different activist movements and how our understanding of gender affects our perception of both.

You can listen to it on your fave podcasting app or right here, right now.

The Halo Collective

In our first episode Chantelle talks to Kaisha from the Halo Collective, their work to end hair discrimination in the UK and the barriers that young, Black women face in activism. Their conversation takes us through the origins of the Halo Collective, how hair discrimination developed under colonialism and the power of education in activism.

TO LEARN MORE, YOU MIGHT WANT TO CHECK OUT OUR READING LIST:

Kaisha recommends:

Stokely Speaks by Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)

Don't Touch My Hair by Emma Dabiri

to my sisters, the podcast

You might also want to check out...

Coiled

Hot Comb by Ebony Flowers

Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America by Ayan D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharps

From the Kitchen to the Parlor: Language and Becoming in African American Women's Hair Care by Lanita Jacobs-Huey

Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry by Tiffany M. Gill

Plucked: A History of Hair Removal by Rebecca M. Herzig

THE FOLLOWING SOUND EFFECTS WERE USED IN THIS PODCAST:

Hair Dryer – Different speeds by Leonelmail

Shaving hair by MancoMeio

Brushing Hair.wav by Tumiwiththesounds

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Chantelle 0:03  Hello and welcome to the revolution begins at home, a podcast about activism, what it looks like and who gets to do it. 

Chantelle 0:12  My name is Chantelle Lewis. I'm a Public Sociologist and the co-founder and co-host of the Surviving Society Podcast. 

Chantelle 0:21  Throughout this series, I'm going to be speaking to activists and advocates about their work. We'll be talking about what it means to be an activist, what it involves, and how structures of power determine what we consider to be activism or worthy of an activist movement. 

Chantelle 0:46  In today's episode, I spoke to Kaisha-Wade Speid.

Kaisha 0:50  I just ordered, so many books. I've been doing, like, book swaps with other Black people and my mum when she saw the parcels coming, she was like "Kaisha, you're becoming a revolutionary" and I was like, "Yeah!" I love it...

Chantelle 1:00  Kaisha is a student, and whilst on the fellowship at the Advocacy Academy, she co-founded the Halo Collective. I talked to her about their ethos, how they got started, and everything they've already achieved, but before we hear the full interview. Here are Kaisha's activist influences...

Kaisha 1:19  Oh my god, I could literally just- I could sit here and list all day. First of all, like from the UK, Olive Morris. Olive Morris who was like really crucial in the Black Panther Party in the UK and like the Squatters Rights Movement. 'Cause my my gran lives in Brixton, and she's like, part of that whole Windrush Movement and so that was really prevalent for her during that time and even like intellectuals Franz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, anti-imperialist, like, anti-capitalists, Far Left like even Marxist revolutionaries, who, throughout the lockdown I've really been like reading into like, involving myself in all of the literature, all of the like Black Revolutionary Literature surrounding it, you can really see how the things that they talk about, it seems so extreme, like, "oh, let's burn down like the capitalist state". But you can see these manifestations of like capitalism in everyday society, and like capitalism, imperialism, racism, homophobia, all kind of ties within, it all ties together. You know? When we talk about like, intersectionality, and all the different types of oppression that people face. It's so much to take in, but it's very necessary. I love-I love them. Big up to them.

[theme music]

Chantelle 2:36  Hello, Kaisha-Wade speed. 

Kaisha 2:39  Hello.

Chantelle 2:41  Kashia, thank you so much for joining me this afternoon. I am literally so inspired by you having only just been talking to you for the past half an hour of everything you've just achieved, we get to the end of our conversation, and I find out you're in Sixth Form. 

Kaisha 2:56  Yeah. 

Chantelle 2:57  Oh my days, you are incredible! So Kaisha, listeners, is a Sixth Former, but is the co-founder of the Halo Collective. Kaisha tell the listeners about the Halo Collective.

Kaisha 3:09  So the Halo Collective is basically an activism group that is composed of Black young people, and we're kind of based in London, who all in some way have some experience with hair discrimination or being told by different authoritative members, maybe in their school or workplace, that they can't have their hair a specific way. And we were like, "well, this is something that we need to change, because it's not right and it's far too much of a common occurrence for us to just let it slide or say it was a one time thing", because it's definitely not and it makes Black people... well, Black people all over the country that we've spoken to all have some sort of experience with being policed because of their hairstyle. And we noticed that it was really a racialized thing, because if we were to ask white people have you had this experience, it was completely foreign to them. So as a part of kind of breaking down institutional racism and racist microaggressions, we decided to form the Halo Collective, which just kind of aims to end hair discrimination in all professional environments and in general.

Chantelle 4:13  Listening to you talk straight away, I'm thinking about, right, so this praxis that you guys are doing, this praxis of collectivity in terms of fighting, a type of racist microaggression and institutional racism - I'm thinking about scholarship and books that have contributed to this stuff, and then how it then later connects to what you are doing in practice. What I mean by that I'm thinking about like Black Media Platforms like Black Ballad, Emma Dabiri's book, I'm thinking about Shirley Anne Tate, Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Laura Connelly, people that have been writing about this stuff. So I'm familiar with the literature, and then reading and going on your website and hearing about all the things you've done. It's like a prime example of connecting theory to practice.

Kaisha 5:01  Yeah, exactly. 

Chantelle 5:02  And it is so, so inspiring. And it would be really good for the listeners on that basis of connecting theory and practice to find out a bit about the journey in coming to set up the Halo Collective because anyone that's been involved in organizing, any kind of organizer knows how hard work it is. So how did this happen?

Kaisha 5:19  Well, this is actually one of most interesting parts when I tell people like, oh, how did this come about? So basically, in February of 2020

Chantelle 5:27  Oh, pre-pre COVID. 

Kaisha 5:28  Yeah, pre COVID times, when COVID was kind of lingering, but we weren't, we didn't really care about her, then. Well, I signed up to an organization called the Advocacy Academy, which is literally like the mother of young youth social justice work in London, particularly. And I got in, and we basically, from the summer of 2020, because of COVID, obviously, we had to do an online fellowship. And usually it's a real life residential, where we go out and stay somewhere in the middle of nowhere, I don't know. And they basically train us up all things activism. So every day, we just tackle different things like gender and race and we did a lot of like introspective work, and basically all to be like good activists and like we completely dissected, like everything when it comes to social justice. And by the end of it, even though we had only met each other in real life twice, like me, and the rest of the people involved in Advocacy, we literally felt like brand new people. It was honestly the most transformative thing. It was like I was being born again, like intellectually, even though it was all through Zoom. So, um, from Advocacy, in one of the last weeks, Advocacy always is known for like their flagship kind of campaigns, so all of the young people, they go into groups, and they create campaigns, on literally whatever you want to do, as long as it's feasible, then you can do it. So we completely organically kind of grouped together, me and four other Black girls who were in Advocacy. And we said, right, so what is our common experience? Well, we're all Black and we're all women, and what have we experienced? We're all the same age... And hair discrimination is just something that came up like straight off the bat, and we grouped with some Advocacy Academy alumni. So people who had already done the Social Justice Fellowship and are like older people, so they have all the practice and campaigning knowledge. And then from then we just kind of, it was the Code, first of all, which was me and four other girls, and then it became the Collective when we banded with those other people. So we kind of had more arms and more capacity to do things because I didn't think it would not have nearly been as successful as it has been if we didn't have those, like, alumni who joined with us.

Chantelle 7:44  And in terms of it becoming a Collective, when we talk about this in terms of organizing and activism, in practice, what does that mean on a week by week basis?

Kaisha 7:56  Erm, in the everyday world, it basically means that in the beginning, we had a lot of different arms. So we had a lot of different people with different expertise to work in all the different areas that we needed. So we took schools, me and the other four girls took schools, because obviously we were all students at the time, we had connections to other students, it was just like, convenient. And then we had a team that was also about like marketing. And basically when we had our launch, they already had people who were in media. Obviously, this was me and the four girls's first time doing anything to do with campaigning. So we had no idea where we were told to write press release. We were like, what?

Chantelle 8:33  So are you guys like 16 at this point? 16 or 17? At this point,

Kaisha 8:36  I was 17, though we have one one girl Katie and she's in the year below us.

Chantelle 8:40  Yeah.

Kaisha 8:40  So she's just about to enter year 13, the academic year, but we're all like 17. So we had media and comms, we had like a legal team, who are working more with like parliamentary personnel, because we want to change the law, essentially, as part of our campaign. We did social media as well, just because we were the youngest, and we were like, we'll just do social media, this is what we good at. So the Collective essentially just gives us so much capacity, it just allows us to do so many different things at once instead of us five, who are fresh kind of out of campaigning and strategy training, without the real life experience. We had the people that had the real life experience. And we also have an amazing like family advocacy. So we had Liz Ward, who was Director of Programs at Advocacy, who literally just like led the way for us when we didn't really know what we were doing, which was really good. And also Amelia Viney, who's the founder of Advocacy Academy. She worked in like Congress and the Houses of Parliament. So she knows her stuff when it comes to campaigning. So they kind of led the way for us. And we just did all of like the other heavy lifting and we learned so much throughout the way I think that was really scary at first because we literally had no idea what we were doing when it came to... We gained so much traction, it was almost scary. Like I remember, we sat down in one of our meetings and we were like, right, so this blew up now what do we do? And we had to obviously do strategy like formulation. And this was all brand new to us. All I knew was like what I'm doing for my levels. And that's it. So it was all just been a huge learning experience. And we have such a huge family and support network, which has allowed us to be as successful as we have been.

Chantelle 10:22  One of the things that I like about your retelling of this journey, Kaisha is that you're emphasizing the behind the scenes work. And often, people only see like the website or the like, the speeches or the podcasts and whatever. But there's so much that goes on behind the scenes that isn't necessarily seen as quote unquote glamorous. In terms of thinking about it as a collective, do you think you guys making that behind the scenes work acknowledged within how you present what you're, what you're doing?

Kaisha 10:53  Yeah, I hopefully, hopefully, I think so. 

Chantelle 10:55  Yeah.

Kaisha 10:55  I mean, in terms of when we did press releases, at the beginning, we were kind of like the face of Halo, just because we were the ones in Advocacy, who kind of ignited the idea. But by no means we were the one who's done, we were the ones who've done all the hard work. And I think in naming it a "collective", it kind of implies that it's multiple people and like even people who are not tied to Advocacy in any way, or have had a like, push in what what we've been doing people like Helen Hayes, the MP, she is literally been like, by our side the whole time. And she's a trustee for Advocacy. But I mean, she's a she's like a middle class white woman. She's never had anything to do with hair discrimination. She didn't even know really what it was about before meeting us. But it just kind of shows that no matter what background you're from, or what race you are, you can be involved in Halo, it's kind of symbolic in a way because like you can be involved in the change. And that's kind of the message that we want to put out to people because you're not going to really get rid of hair discrimination if you don't have help from a lot of different people.

[electric hair clippers sound]

Chantelle 12:02  So Kaisha, what would you say to people that would say to the Collective, "you're barking up the wrong tree!" "This isn't going to happen?", "Why would we end hair discrimination?" What types of things do you guys say to resist those kinds of critiques? Especially when they're critiques that are racialized and racist? 

Kaisha 12:22  Yeah

Chantelle 12:22  That say things that describe our hair in ways that is derogatory? Like how are you as a collective resistanting and combatting those kinds of critiques?

Kaisha 12:32  Funnily enough, when we received our first like, hate email we were all celebrating! You know, if you don't have haters, then you're obviously not doing something right. So we were celebrating, and a big part of our campaign is about education. And oftentimes, the most ignorant comments are from people who have no experience with hair discrimination. And at the end, the day is understandable. Like, if the problem is not within your realm, you're not going to understand it. So Halo Code is all about, like, educating people first and foremost on what is Hair Discrimination. Because in these comments that people make it shows that it's a really, it's an overt problem for black people. But if you're not black, then it's like "hair discrimination? I never even knew that was a thing". So those people who are haters, we just kind of tried to educate them really and truly to try and show that it is a problem, and it has a huge history, even into like the Colonial Era, and that's the birthplace of hair discrimination, like segregation based on hair type. So education, like in any campaign is obviously really important, and trying to show people that it actually does have a real life impact because people you know, people will say, like, "Oh, so what? You're discriminated on because of your hair - so what? No one's dying, like you're completely fine." But we literally have done the studies, we've done the research to show that those Black children, especially in schools, who are discriminated upon, because of their hair type have less chances of succeeding even in their like final exams, because they're being taken out of they're classes, they're being condemned for literally no reason, it obviously affects your self esteem... I think there's a huge stigma in the Black Community around hair. And just because you're not in the Black Community doesn't mean that you can't empathize with our position - you can't accept people when they're telling their testimonies of how they've been discriminated upon. In all types of activism, compassion is really like a key element. And that comes through education.

Chantelle 14:34  Love that Kaisha. I know so many Black kids that got, and myself I got sent home before for having weave! Like that have experienced exclusion because of hair, 

Kaisha 14:49  People having to like relocate because they feel uncomfortable because of a comment that a teacher made like it's a real... when people try to deny that it's a problem. It's like, well, I have a million and one case studies I can give you. So which one do you want to recast? 

Chantelle 15:02  Yeah

Kaisha 15:02  And I have a man when people you can talk to who are literallyy within our reach. It's not even like, oh, I have to search on the internet for somewhere in America to come with their testimony. It's like, no, this is a problem that if you speak to even within, like my family community, when we spoke about the campaign, my mom had experiences of hair discrimination, my auntie, like, my great uncle, they could all testimony to the fact that this is a problem. We like to put our stories like in the limelight, to firstly show people that obviously, this is a real issue. And this is something that we have experience and also to really like give power to those people and instead of kind of treating them like victims, and feeling sorry for them, we're kind of giving them the power to speak up about something. And we like to kind of believe that if you kind of put your story out there, then it makes your problem more tangible. And it kind of puts it in the faces of people. And with that comes a sense of like urgency, because if you can see a problem, that means that you know that it needs to be fixed.

Chantelle 16:03  So one of the things that I think comes through on the messaging within Halo, is that interconnection between texture, colourism and hair. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, and how that forms the way we're trying to create educate - well with the way you guys are trying to create, but collectively, lots of people are trying to create education around what these things mean, and the real time impact of these things.

Kaisha 16:26  So I think a lot of the education needs to acknowledge that this is a historical... it's not a historical problem, but it has historical roots. I mean, like most things, colourism, texturism, featurism all stems from, like the Colonial Era, and like the Slave Trade. So obviously, during the Slave Trade, when there was like mixed race children from the slave master and the slave, they would be treated a bit better (I'm not say that they were treated well!) but they would get preferential treatment due to the fact that they were white and Black. And most time if you are biracial, you have like lighter skin or you have more Eurocentric features, like you have looser curls in your hair. And I think even though it's a problem that is from... it's, it's existed hundreds of hundreds of years ago, it has really strong resonance today. I mean, when we look at things like the media, there are often really positive connotations, looking at like lighter skinned people. And even like in music, it's so rife, where you hear like, oh, light skinned girls, this light skinned girls this. And on the opposite side of that is like all of the negative things that come with being dark skinned and come with having like 4C or more kinkier hair, bigger lips and a bigger nose. It's just not, you're just not as appealing as your lighter skinned counterparts. And I think it's a problem that has been trivialized almost in the Black Community. And we need to kind of recognize that is it's a really big issue because it all comes from like white supremacist ideals of beauty. And if we're trying to build an anti racist society, you need to recognize that perhaps you may be perpetuating it in a way that you know, everyone has like internal biases, you may have like colourism internally or texturism internally, but you need to learn to firstly recognize where that came from educate yourself on where that came from, why it's a problem, and then how to like break it down. Because, obviously everyone is beautiful in their own way. And you don't deserve to feel bad about yourself just because someone told you like, "Oh, well, you're dark skinned, that means that you're not beautiful." It has no actual logic behind it.

Chantelle 18:37  100% 

Kaisha 18:38  There are people who claim to be anti racist, but then we perpetuate these kind of colonial ideas of like...

Chantelle 18:46  Colourism. 

Kaisha 18:46  Yeah, it makes... it literally makes... it's really embarrassing, to be honest.

Chantelle 18:51  Definitely. Definitely. And I think one of the reasons why I wanted to sort of draw on that as well, is because one of the things that I think has at times been slightly disappointing about the Hair Movement, and bear in mind, I'm saying this sat next to you as a Black mixed race woman interviewing you. So I'm very much aware of my positionality within this stuff. But sometimes within the Hair Movement, I think there has been quite a lot of space being taken up by women with lighter skin, women with looser curls. I think that has been that has been slight- it's been disappointing. But I think that there are organizations like yourselves, amazing women like yourselves, Black women like yourselves that are actually like saying, no, the starting point should not be about reifying lightness and looser curls. That shouldn't be the starting point. 

Kaisha 19:39  Yeah. 

Chantelle 19:40  And it is - it's almost like predictable that at times it has been mixed race women that have been at the forefront of this. And I think that again... that is disappointing, but organisations like Halo Collective I think are really really important for sort of taking up that space.

Kaisha 19:55  In a lot of activism movements that are surrounding like racialized problem. You often see the people with the most privilege on that basis taking space at the front just because they appeal to like the white gaze in a way, like, if you're -

Chantelle 20:10  Look at this! Look at my girl dropping Fanon. 

Kaisha 20:14  We love a bit of Fanon!

Chantelle 20:15  Look at my Sixth Former dropping Fanon! Come on, let me carry on. 

Kaisha 20:20  Because you you appeal to like the Eurocentric gaze, you're not as like "untamed", and you're not as kind of "wild" and "exotic" as like darker skinned Black people. So you kind of... you leverage that. And whilst I think a lot of people go into it with good intention, 

Chantelle 20:37  Yes. 

Kaisha 20:37  But it's like you don't mean to take up this space but you have to really... this is when privilege comes in, you just have to be aware of your privilege. And I think a lot of people get defensive when privilege comes up, because it's like, well, it's not my fault. But that's exactly what privilege is! And you need to use your privilege to make space for people who's voices are kind of trodden on and people who their opinions are always like pushed to the side on the basis that they don't fit, like, the Eurocentric kind of ideals, like, of who should be heard.

[sound of hairdryer]

Chantelle 21:14  Back to Halo Collective in the practical sense, you were talking about in our pre chat you guys meet once a week, have you found at any point that you have been tired and found some of this work a bit exhausted and kind of wanted to retract from it? Or are you guys making enough space for yourself in terms of your well being and doing this kind of work?

Kaisha 21:37  I think it's really difficult when running a campaign and doing other things, because people who contact us think that Halo Collective is our full time job and that we get paid for it. I have not received one penny from doing any of this work. This is all free work from the... it literally just runs on our passion. And yeah, definitely we have reached a point of fatigue, even like right now we're in the process of re-strategizing and completely just like reviving the campaign, because after Christmas, everyone was just tired. And obviously I've literally had my A Level exams, people have their jobs, people had their dissertations to write. 

Chantelle 22:17  We had BLM! The exhaustion of BLM!

Kaisha 22:16  Yeah, yeah, we had like people going hospital for COVID. So like, yeah, it was really difficult. And I think we had to just kind of say to everyone like, right, we get everyone's tired now. So let's just take a bit of a break. And we took like a two week break, where we didn't do anything, we didn't check our emails. And then we came back in like, right, we'd sort this out now. And now we are in the process of just kind of like trying to put the fire back in the campaign because it definitely was there in the beginning. And there was a point where Halo took up like my entire... all my free time. And I literally was neglecting my schoolwork like I would leave school early so I could go to different Halo things or I could go to like an Advocacy meeting. But this has all just been a learning curve, like I said in the beginning, like learning how to balance your school and your like activism and your social life...

Kaisha 22:22  So in terms of the practicalities of building a campaign and the next campaign, we spoke about press releases, we spoke about collaborating with members of parliament. 

Kaisha 23:15  Yeah.

Chantelle 23:15  What other things will you be doing over the coming months and hopefully years?

Kaisha 23:18  So there is actually a lot of like, internal kind of miss-missteps within the campaign that you obviously wouldn't realize from the outside. But there are so many things that we actually need to get sorted. And we recognize like we kind of were stressing at the beginning, because we were like, "oh my gosh, this is gonna fall apart because we haven't set out this email, we haven't spoken to this person!" But that's completely normal. Like within all movements, you're not going to have everything going like perfectly all the way, especially when you have people are our age group who are just kind of fresh to this scene. So when we talk about re-strategizing, we honestly need to just do things internal, we have some issues with like, well, who's going to actually answer the emails, because there is like 15 people in the collective and not everyone can do emails at once. So even just like, all of these things are really mundane, but they're all very necessary. So even we have like emails and we have things like, okay, well, we need to have a look at our roles within the campaign because some things aren't as necessary right now as they were before. So obviously, because we've already released we don't really need to do that many press releases anymore. So the people that are doing press releases, we need your help elsewhere. So it's just kind of re-delegating roles. We had a whole like strategy meeting where we basically just looked at like, okay, what is Halo? And what are we trying to do now? Because we needed that kind of clear vision to carry on or we're just running on nothing, basically, we need everyone to remember like, why are we here and what are we trying to do?

Kaisha 23:52  So ending hair discrimination by law, is the route to doing that via each individual school? Or is it by going to minister in Parliament? Or is it both?

Kaisha 25:07  It's a really difficult question. Because there's I say there's like two routes. So you have in the law currently, obviously, it's illegal to discriminate against people based on their racial, like, characteristics. But hair is something that is implied within that, but it's not explicitly said. And like I said before, a lot of people don't know that hair discrimination is a thing, or they don't know that the comments they're making about Black people's hair can actually be harmful, 

Chantelle 25:33  Or they do know and they don't care. 

Kaisha 25:35  Yeah, exactly. And there's only so much The Law can do. Like, we're not going to go to Boris Johnson and say, "you need to look up everyone who makes a comment about my hair", because that's obviously not feasible. And that's why I say is really important, obviously, educate people within schools. I mean, my part of the campaigns kind of dealing with schools, and it would be great to get every school in the country to sign up to the halo code, but how is it going to be enforced? And that's something that we're also dealing with, within our strategy sessions, because it's all well and good - we have like 80 schools now we have like, I think it's kind of up to 200 work places

Chantelle 26:09  That have signed up. 

Kaisha 26:10  Yeah

Chantelle 26:10  To the Code. And the Code basically says, "we will not discriminate."

Kaisha 26:14  It's more of like a celebratory thing it's like we celebrate everyone, all of our students, all of our employees, regardless of like, their racial characteristics, basically, yeah, like what you said, we will not engage in hair discrimination, but like, in a positive way.

[hair brushing sound]

Kaisha 26:37  You know, a lot of people have a problem with my generation, because it's like "oh you're snowflakes", like "it doesn't actually matter". But this is an intergenerational issue. And like we said, it comes from a time like far, far, far deep in history.

Chantelle 26:51  I mean, not that long ago though, is it? Like if you think about, like, we're still living with the manifestations of colonialism?

Kaisha 26:57  Yeah, yeah of course.

Chantelle 26:58  It's actually very much present.

Kaisha 27:00  Yeah, the slave trade happened. But we are still living with the ramifications of it, like in so many different ways, like economic and social aspects. And these are all things that obviously need to be dealt with, because they can't carry on forever, because it's literally... it is debilitating the well being of Black people. And I feel like, far too many people are scared to speak up on these things, especially people of my generation, they're scared that they're just gonna be labeled like snowflakes, and people are just gonna, like, undermine their kind of issues and say, they don't really matter.

Chantelle 27:34  I would say as well, amongst progressive, sometimes these kind of racist microaggressions are not necessarily downplayed, but they asked at times presented either as a red herring, or something that should be on the back burner, because there's more pressing inequities that we need to deal with. I do have sympathy for that view. But I've also seen, whether it's through my own experience, or through others experiences or case studies, or books, or reading, or just the news, how much these like hair discrimination impacts, Black people's sense of self and our sense of self is integral to our life, so it is to our 

Kaisha 28:14  functioning

Chantelle 28:14  Yes!

Kaisha 28:15  Even like I said, it carries on for generations, because if you harbor that type of self hate due to the comments that you've been victim of, then you have children, for example, and then you teach the children like, "oh, your hair isn't nice texture" like "if your hair looked like this, then it would be better." It just carries on!

Chantelle 28:33  As in people that perpetuate some of these issues.

Kaisha 28:36  Yeah, it's really like really preminent no. Preminent?

Chantelle 28:40  prominent 

Kaisha 28:41  Prominent notions within the black community regarding like, parents, all those things that really need to be kind of combated.

Chantelle 28:48  Definitely.

Kaisha 28:49  It's not even just like, white people kind of perpetuating these notions. It's been indoctrinated so deeply within the Black community that we now believe it ourselves that if you have a looser curl pattern, then you are your hair is better. You don't like "good hair", and there's so many little tight microaggression.

Chantelle 29:06  Labels.

Kaisha 29:07  Yeah

Chantelle 29:07  That we want to resist basically, that we should be resisting. 

Chantelle 29:11  That's amazing, Kaisha. Kaisha, the Sixth Former soon to be... oh actually, by the time this comes out, you'll probably would have started at Warwick?

Kaisha 29:19  Yeah

Chantelle 29:20  She's gonna be an undergraduate studying..?

Kaisha 29:23  Politics and Sociology

Chantelle 29:25  Come on! Revolutionary. Join the Sociology Crew! Love this! Kaisha, you have inspired us so much, this afternoon. And I'm sure you've inspired a lot of listeners and probably make made people feel hopeful. I think your generation is my favorite generation. 

Kaisha 29:41  Wow, that means a lot.

Chantelle 29:42  Gen Z - absolute legends! They do that (Sorry, I just shouted.) Amazing people - love Gen Z because Gen Z is full of amazing people. 

Kaisha 29:53  Thank you [laughs]

Chantelle 30:00

Thanks for listening to The Revolution Begins at Home. If you enjoyed it, you should check out other podcasts supported my Content is Queen.

 This podcast was presented by myself Chantelle Lewis and produced by Cerys Bradley. If you want to hear more of our work, there are links in the description.

Many thanks to Kaisha for talking to us. You can find out more about the Halo Collective on their website.

If you want to learn more about hair discrimination, then the Halo Collective website is a great place to start. You might also want to check out the reading list we have included in the description of this podcast.

The music for this podcast is from Blue Dot Sessions with additional sounds from freesound.org.

See you next time.

The Halo Collective (Bonus Reflections Podcast)

We had some thoughts (and feelings) about last week's episode and didn't have anywhere to put them so now they're here (in your ears). What did you think about the episode? What did you think about the Halo Collective and hair discrimination and hair as a site of activism? Let us know on Instagram @therevolutionbeginsathome. If you're not on the gram, drop us a review or tweet @hashtagcerys with the hashtag #TheRevolutionBeginsAtHome

Transcript

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to The Revolution Begins at Home (bonus reflections podcast). My name is Cerys, I’m the producer here at The Revolution Begins at Home and, after each episode, I’m going to be sharing a couple of things the episode made me think about whilst I was helping to make it.

I realise that, as the producer, it’s generally not my job to say things but, the truth is, I have a lot of thoughts! And there’s not a whole lot of space in a half hour podcast so I thought I could have my own bit where I share them and I asked the producer if that would be ok and they said yes because they are me.

This episode

In the episode that this bonus episode is about, Chantelle, our wonderful host, talked to Kaisha-Wade Speed, a 17 year old activist working to end hair discrimination through the Halo Collective. They talked about hair discrimination, its impact, and the power of intergenerational communication and compassion and I learned a lot from getting to sit in on that conversation.

Personally, I have never experienced hair discrimination, because, if you haven’t already guessed from that statement, I am white. I would actually say that my experience with my hair is the literal opposite of the kinds that Kaisha and Chantelle shared in their interview. I dye my hair a lot of different colours. I spent several years cutting it myself (as well as this year just gone, of course, because of lockdown) I’ve had some rough home-made haircuts in my time and none of this has ever really been an issue. I’ve certainly never been told that my hair is inappropriate at my school or workplace, even when my school had an explicit policy against dyed hair because, as we heard in the episode, these policies aren’t really about hair.

My hair is still something I think about a lot though. Being queer and, I think, especially being non-binary, I try to use my hair to signify certain things about me. I keep it short, for example, I try very hard to get haircuts that are coded as masculine. This isn’t exactly effective – I feel like whatever haircut I ask for, or attempt myself, I almost always end up looking like a forty-year old divorcee who’s getting over her husband through a fun haircut and, to be honest, I’ve made my peace with that. If my soul’s inspiration board is a middle aged woman with an asymmetric fringe and an armful of stories about why her ex is a bastard then I am here for it.

Anyway, my point is, I have a lot of thoughts about hair and hairstyles and so I was really grateful that Kaisha spoke to us about the Halo Collective and the work that they do because it gave me an opportunity to learn about hair and the value of hair from a different perspective to my own.

Hair as a site of protest

So, what is the value of hair and what is its role in activism? Well, one of the things that this episode really made me think about was our bodies, and our hair especially, as sites of protest.

For a lot of people, in one form or another, the body is a site of oppression. We, by which I mean society, project onto our bodies, by which I mean our bodies, yours and mine, an idealised image of what we (again society) expect everyone to look like and then we (all of us, you, me and society) enforce this through things like beauty standards or social conventions or uniform policies and, you know, actual laws.

In the episode Kaisha and Chantelle explored how hair perpetuates and enforces racism, texturism and colourism.

Kaisha: I mean, when we look at things like the media, there are often really positive connotations, looking at like lighter skinned people… And on the opposite side of that is like all of the negative things that come with being dark skinned and come with having like 4C or more kinkier hair, or having like bigger lips and a bigger nose, it's just not as appealing as like, like your lighter... you're just not as appealing as your lighter skin counterparts.

Kaisha explained how we have a hierarchy of hairstyles which was developed under colonialism and still today perpetuates the false ideology that white people are superior, in the way that we look and behave and participate in society. Sort of over time we went from this idea that certain hairstyles were dirty and messy and bad because they were Black people’s hairstyles to Black people who have these hairstyles are dirty and messy and bad. Through this process, hair becomes an expression of prejudice.

And we, again as a society, use hair to enforce a lot of different values, the ones that Kaisha talked about as well as things like patriotism or modesty or maternalism. Because afros look unprofessional and boys shouldn’t have long hair or painted nails whereas women should have hair that their husbands like, right? It needs to be feminine and demonstrate the effort she is making to look pretty for the world and take up so much of her time that she can’t do anything else like gain financial independence, for example. Also, we do get to make fun of her for being so obsessed with something as trivial as her hairstyle because that’s a silly, girly thing to do. In some places covering your hair and your face is against the law and in others the opposite is true because some people think it makes you untrustworthy and others immodest and, crucially, everyone else’s comfort is more important in that space than your own.

We all have to follow a certain set of rules that dictate what our hair has to look like and those rules are different for different people because, again, it’s not really about the hair and some people have to follow more rules than others and are punished more severely when they break those rules because people do break the rules and when everyone is telling you that your hair needs to look like a certain way, you can use your hair to tell them you are not participating in their systems of oppression.

For example… In 1922, in Egypt, the feminist leader and suffragette, Huda Sha’arawi removed her veil in public and trampled it beneath her feet [1]. She revealed her hair to the world around the same time that, in the US, women were making the scandalous decision to cut their hair short and, in doing so, reject the cultural code that long hair equals femininity. Fast forward forty years and long hair became associated with hippies and the anti-war movement and was used to push-back against military haircuts and, this time, representations of masculinity [2]. This was all happening at a time when Kathleen Cleaver famously explained how she wore her hair in an afro because it was natural and because it was beautiful [3].

And, today, the hair and the head remain a powerful site of protest. In 2019, Monireh Arabshahi, Yasaman Aryani and Mojgan Keshavarz were arrested for removing their veils and handing out flowers on a train in a fight for the freedom to choose what to wear [4]. Just earlier this year and a few miles from me in London, students at Pimlico Academy gathered to protest new uniform policies that punished students with afro-hairstyles [5] and limited the self-expression of students who wear hijabs. The school claimed that afros might block the view of pupils seated behind them, placing a hypothetical discomfort above the right of Black students to grow their hair naturally. The idea that some people’s hair is a kind of collective property, partially owned by a society that gets to weigh in on how it should be styled and what it should look like persists to this day.

Perhaps this is why hair is a site of protest.

But maybe it’s also because we all have hair? Or heads at least. As far as sites of protest go, our scalp is pretty close. It’s something that people even with limited power can exercise control over. That’s something that Britney Spears potentially most famously demonstrated way back in 2007? Cutting your hair or growing it from your armpits or whatever you want to do with it can be a bold and simple and empowering act because embedding a protest into your hairstyle is a reclamation of bodily autonomy that goes way beyond what you end up looking like.

The work is hard

Listening to the history of the Halo Collective, the way that it’s evolved and developed as an organisation, the approach it has chosen and the response it has received has made me think a lot about how using your body to protest is hard work.

If you think about it, it’s a place that you can’t really leave. If you go to a march or a demonstration and it wears you down, you can take a break, go lie in a dark room somewhere, sleep in your own bed and get up in the morning and decide whether or not you want to go back but if your protest is your hair it can be harder to leave that protest. You’re literally carrying it around with you on your head all the time.

And, if your school tells you that the way your hair grows naturally is wrong then there’s not really much you can do about that. Sure, you can choose to change your hairstyle, by cutting it or paying someone to chemically relax it but you can’t change the way that it grows and so you can’t really escape from the fact that your school is telling you that the way you grow, naturally, is wrong. So I think having this protest in the space of your own body also brings about a different kind of toll. It must take a lot to come back up against that criticism again and again.

This is why it was disheartening to hear Chantelle and Kaisha talk about the way that the work of the Halo Collective has been dismissed by some, as if focusing a movement on hair is trivial.

Kaisha: people will say, like, Oh, so what you're discriminated on because of your hair. So what, like, no one's dying, like you're completely fine.

I mean, it was disheartening in general to hear Kaisha’s experience of being a young organiser and being kind of dismissed outright purely because of her age but, on top of that, hearing that people don’t really buy this as a cause because it’s just hair was doubly saddening.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not surprised – I’m not surprised that people have looked at a group of young girls working to end hair discrimination and maybe thought “of course all that teenage girls care about is their hair” but I think that the Halo Collective has done a lot of work to show why this is not just about hair.

Kaisha: the research has shown that those Black children, especially in schools, who are discriminated upon, because of their hair type have less chances of succeeding even in their like final exams, because they're being taken out of their classes. They're, they're being condemned for literally no reason. It obviously affects your self-esteem.

And also to show that, actually, this is about hair and that’s ok because hair is important. Because, as we heard in the episode, hair is not just hair it is a tool of self-expression, it is a tool of oppression. It’s really important that people feel comfortable and empowered in their bodies and that’s why this kind of work is so vital. It’s not that it’s not just about hair but that it is about hair and hair is an important battleground where things like racism and texturism and colourism can be unpicked and disempowered and so it is important not to trivialise this work or devalue it because maybe the reason we are devaluing it and trivialising it is because we devalue and trivialise girls and the amount of work and thought and care that goes into hairstyling.

Call to arms

I think the Halo Collective have demonstrated that this is a fight worth having, and a difficult fight to have. It is something that we all have to participate in – by adopting the Halo Code, by talking to people, through education and compassion.

What I have learned from helping to make this episode, and what I hope that you have learned also, is that dressing in the way that best expresses you, wearing your hair in the way you most feel comfortable, showing who you are through your body, this can be a form of activism. It’s one that you can do from home, in public, by yourself, as part of a collective, every day or just on the particular occasions when it is safe.

If you want to get involved and help end hair discrimination there are lots of great resources at halocollective.co.uk

References

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huda_Sha%27arawi#Feminism

[2] https://www.vogue.com.au/hair-insider/how-protest-hair-became-a-form-of-political-expression/image-gallery/7749adee0c448549461b22289b0f0353

[3] https://search.alexanderstreet.com/preview/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cvideo_work%7C2787219

[4] https://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions/iran-30-years-prison-protesting-against-forced-veiling-laws-LG?utm_source=google&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=MAIN717T_2104-1w-tru-Lead_gen_PPC_Iran-3&utm_content=monireh%20arabshahi

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/31/pimlico-academy-pupils-stage-protest-over-discriminatory-policies

The Craftivist Collective

In this episode, Chantelle spoke to Sarah Corbett from the Craftivist Collective about growing up an activist and the power of gentle protest. Their conversation explores activism burnout and how the Crativist Collective came to be as well as the origins of craftivism and the incredible campaigns that Sarah has run with it.

Reading List

Sarah recommends:

The Gift of Anger by Arun Gandhi and translated by Suzan Cenani Alioğlu

A Gift of Love by Martin Luther King Jr.

and has also written several books on craftivism:

A Little Book of Crativism by Sarah Corbett

How to Be a Craftivist by Sarah Corbett

Craftivist Collective Handbook by Sarah Corbett

You might also want to check out:

craftivism: the art of craft and activism by Betsy Greer

Knitting for good! by Betsy Greer

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House by Audre Lorde

The following sound effects were used in this podcast:

knitting and dropping metal knitting needle by HanulSkyGirl

Seamstress’ Large Scissors by Jakobthiesen

Seamstress’ sewing machine setup and run by Jakobthiesen

Paper Crumple Craft Sound by EminYILDIRIM

Transcript:

Chantelle  00:03 Hello and welcome to the Revolution Begins at Home, a podcast about activism, what it looks like and who gets to do it.

Chantelle  00:12 My name is Chantelle Lewis, I'm a public sociologist and the co-founder and co-host of the Surviving Society Podcast. 

Chantelle  00:21 Throughout this series, I'm going to be speaking to activists and advocates about their work. We'll be talking about what it means to be an activist, what it involves, and how structures of power determine what we consider to be activism or worthy of an activist movement.

Chantelle  00:46 In today's episode, I spoke to Sarah Corbett.

Sarah  00:50 So I always say Craftivism is a little bit like punk music, you know, you've got all these different bands and musicians who sounds completely different, but they're all under that umbrella.

Chantelle  00:59 Sarah is an award winning campaigner and the founder of the Craftivist Collective, a social enterprise making big changes through gentle and intimate protest. Before we hear the full interview, and all about the incredible work of the Craftivist Collective, here are Sarah's activist influences....

Sarah  01:19 Oh, so many. Yeah, there's so many. I love Gandhi. I just read his grandson's book about the Gift of Anger, which is really good. I'm an introvert, so Eleanor Roosevelt was a big inspiration for me. But I always come back to Martin Luther King Jr. which sounds a bit cheesy, but my book - Strength to Love is his book of sermons and speeches. And I have a tattoo on my shoulder saying "tough mind, tender heart", which is what he said every activist needs. You need a tough mind to be super strategic, but you need a tender heart to do everything with love and through love, not for love. So Martin Luther King all the way.

Chantelle  01:55 Martin Luther King all day, every day.

Sarah  01:58 Amen.

[music]

Chantelle  02:06 Hello, everyone. [laughs] I'm so excited today to be joined by Sarah Corbett who is the founder of the Craftivist Collective. So Sarah, you are a social enterprise founder, an award winning activist, and author and an Ashoka fellow

Sarah  02:27 All the A's, yeah.

Chantelle  02:28 All the A's. And for those that don't know what Ashoka fellow is, these are people who work in social change all over the world. So you're like a living legend sat in the room with me.

Sarah  02:38 Far from it, I'm figuring stuff out as I go along.

Chantelle  02:42 Sarah, I'm going to tell you You are a living legend sat in front of me and I told you when the men come on, they don't shut up telling me about themselves but when women like you come on, I'm always just so inspired and so excited and want to uplift you because we're so - we're so bad at like uplifting ourselves.

Sarah  02:58 I'm really good at doing it for other people. I love bigging up other people, but when it's yourself it's like, oh, you just cringe and the little scouser on my shoulder is like, "who do you think you are, talking the good about yourself?" [laughs]

Chantelle  03:10 No, I totally understand that. But equally, like I've gotta gash up definitely. Amazing, amazing stuff. So what is Craftivism?

Sarah  03:19 Good question. So craftivism, in its simplest form is the word craft and activism mushed up together. So it was coined in 2003 by a woman called Betsy Greer, who is American and she's a knitter and she joined, she actually was in London, she was living above an amazing shop that's now closed called Prick Your Finger and joined some like feminist craft groups and realized that the knitting groups especially we're talking about politics, and personal, as well as you know, personal political as well as systemic change stuff while they were knitting and making and make do and mend stuff and basically merged, you know, created this word. And I googled craft activism in 2008, when I thought, oh, I think these could work well together. And there wasn't any groups that I could join or projects I could do. So I emailed her and said, I'd love to use this word and try things out. Is that okay? And she lets anyone use the word. So I call my approach gentle protest. But there's lots of different approaches out there, you can crochet voodoo dolls of particular world leaders, and that could be seen as craftivism. Or you could do like some of the stuff I do, where we make gifts for power holders that are small and humble, to encourage them to use their power for good and hold them accountable more as critical friends than aggressive enemies. But if you google Craftivism, you'll find lots of different things and you can go down a rabbit hole for years probably.

Chantelle  04:46 That's amazing! So we you... prior to emailing Betsy, and prior to looking up this stuff, were you into craft and creativty anyway?

Sarah  04:51 No! I was always creative. So I loved drawing and painting and doodling. I'm an introvert so I was always in my own little world, always making and playing around. But in school we didn't really have great craft teachers, never got into craft. My Nan as well was a really good crochet knitter and tapestry woman and she'd sell some of her stuff to make a bit of extra cash. So if anything, I was put off craft because I thought she's so good. But I picked up a cross stitch kit on a train to Glasgow when I was working for the Department for International Development on a big national project. And I was so burnt out and I couldn't read my reports and write my emails on a Pendolino train up to Glasgow from London because I get sick.

Chantelle  05:36 Oh my god they make me feel so sick!

Sarah  05:37 I was so sick!

Chantelle  05:38 I can never remember what they're called

Sarah  05:40 Pendalinos

Chantelle  05:40 Yes, every time I go up to Scotland and I get off them and I feel, oh my god I feel so ill.

Sarah  05:43 Yes, it was five hours to Glasgow and I thought I'm so exhausted and I'd just moved to London, I think a year before and I'd joined up to activist groups because my background's activism. I really wanted to paint or draw and I missed using my hands, but I couldn't do that on Pendalino. So I weirdly picked up a tiny cross stitch kit of a teddy, it was like a fiver, quite ugly, didn't know what to do with it. But it felt accessible because it's just crosses. So I thought, well, this is something I could try. I can YouTube it. And then I immediately noticed that it slowed me down. It calmed me down. It made me aware how shaky my hands were, how shallow my breath was, how actually exhausted I was as an activist in my job as well as in my personal life. And the process. I thought oh my word, it's helping me think more critically, I'm less anxious, the people opposite me were asking what I was doing. And I'm an activist. I'm not a crafts person. So as soon as people asked me what I was doing, I was like, if only I didn't say it to them, it was in my head, I was like, if only this wasn't a teddy, if it was a quote from Ghandi, we could talk about inequality! So I started thinking the process could help with activism, and then the object what could the object be to engage people in a quieter, more intriguing than aggressive way? And it just in my head, it made sense. But then when I googled stuff, there wasn't anything. So yeah, I asked permission to use the word and then it just that was 12 years ago or longer. It was crazy.

Chantelle  06:05 It's such an amazing story. And it really does help like listeners understand like how things come to be and how it's a very... it's a it's a long but kind of detailed process and it's very personal.

Sarah  07:21 It hasn't been like, I'm going to do this perfect package thing. It's been, where's there a need? Am I the right person to fulfill it? Or should someone else do it? And really, always starting small rather than big, because if you start big thinking, I'm going to fix the world and save it, you're sort of fueled by ego and you might... you're setting yourself up to fail. So I think yeah, it is about being organic. And the world changes so much, like, when I started doing the Craftivist Collective Instagram didn't exist, Pinterest didn't exist. Twitter was quite new, it was more... Online was much more about blogs, vlogs were not really there. It's a different world. So you've always got to be thinking about what fits in the context we're in.

[sound of knitting needles]

Chantelle  08:10 So I guess that would be it'd be really helpful, now, to tell listeners a little bit about the Craftivist Collective.

Sarah  08:15 Yeah.

Chantelle  08:16 What is it?

Sarah  08:17 What is it? So it's a social enterprise. It's a... it's not like an Arts Collective where you you know, get interviewed and you're in it, it's whoever gets involved in our projects and community, you are part of the Collective if you want to be, [laughs] we're not forcing you into it. And I create different projects people can do. Some are issue specific and time bound, and some are more you can use this for your own issue, whether it's local, national, international, and I have kits that people buy, I've books and tools and manifestos and different resources and then lots of free resources on the website. And then I deliver lots of workshops, consultancy and collaborations with charities, lots of events for art institutions, whether it's like the V&A and the Tate or different festivals, so a real mix. But my hope is that the Craftivist Collective is a really useful place for people to learn how to do gentle protest craftivism. So when I say gentle, I think a lot of people might be like, oh, it's such a loaded word. So I don't mean passive or weak. And especially as a woman, we need to make sure that that's not the presumption. I mean, as in, it's about being compassionate to yourself and to others, so you don't burn out as an activist, but also, you're not demonizing other people, which is not good for your own health, but not good for your campaign. So it's about being compassionate, but it's also gently being super strategic, really careful, being gentle on the planet. So all of our resources are mostly upcycled and donated and small, not big and it's a catalyst for change, it's not something that is about transaction, but transformation, and it's protest. So we're really focused on protests. So it is about there's a problem and what is the solution and how can we be part of turning that problem into a solution. So it's not fundraising. It's not just awareness raising, it's always protesting against something that you want to change, but always offering solutions and always in a positive way.

Chantelle  10:10 So in terms of thinking about everything you've just said there, Sarah, and thinking about the notion of gentle protests and thinking about you and your organization as changemakers.

Sarah 10:20 Yeah.

Chantelle  10:21 How... if there's a listener now, who is an organizer or an activist, that does stuff that isn't gentle protest? How do we make them understand that this in itself is still a valid way of doing things? So do you know what I mean like, I'm sure you get like, critique?

Sarah  10:37 Yeah, and I love it like, because I wouldn't be doing what I do if it didn't work. And that's the main thing like I do it because it works. I don't see myself as a crafter, I love craft. But I always say we need to see craftivism as one tool in the activism toolkit. It's not there to replace other forms of activism. And a lot of the time I spend is actually telling, whether it's a charity, or a local activist group, or individuals on social media, is telling them not to do craftivism, because sometimes it's not the right tool to pick out of the toolkit. So I worked with Share Action, who do incredible activism, shareholder activism, where we made gifts for the board members of Marks and Spencers to ask them to pay the living wage, which within 10 months of our protests they did pay the living wage, and they said that they wouldn't have done it without our gentle protest, because it was so unusual and humble and quiet and thoughtful and was about their customers and them and not about just anyone joining in. So it's really, it can be really useful for lots of different people in different ways. But I think we should be as new critical and strategic with every activism tool. Sometimes I'll go on a march, even as an introvert who doesn't like shouting lots. And sometimes I do boring petitions, sometimes I have meetings with power holders that I will never be able to tell anyone about because it's important that it's you know, confidential. I think we need... we all need to know how there's so many different tools in the activism toolkit and how to use it to be most effective for the campaign

Chantelle  12:03 God, that's so powerful and I'm just, do you know, as you were talking you gave like that example of like the Marks and Spencers board members, I'm just sat there thinking of them in like their like massive tower like opening... you bought in some amazing examples of some of the craft that you do at the Craftivist Collective, and them opening it and like reading messages on there about -

Sarah  12:21 Yeah, I mean, we handle it with them at the AGM. So we bought a share, which is one pound, the admin fees cost us 40 pound and I had - there's 14 board members. So I picked 14 craftivists from across the UK, not global because it was a UK AGM, and I specifically picked people who either were or looked like their core customer base. Because again, if you're working back from 1) what's the solution? Is we don't want people on the minimum wage. It's not ethical, it's not sustainable. It's not respectful. And so if we want a living wage, is that realistic? Yes, it was that they could pay the living wage. What's stopping them? So we figured out is it reputation? Is it them saving money, making money? What's the motive to get and then I picked craftivists that were part of their core customer base, because they're gonna listen to them much more than someone who isn't. And actually, a lot of activists go for let's have the people directly affected to be the voice, which I think is really important sometimes, but sometimes it can be objectifying, and it can be othering. And people are busy. And I'm from a very low income area in Everton, where we would sometimes feel like we were brought out as an object. So I didn't pick people who were their staff members because it could harm their job as well. So we only had, and again, it's quite counterintuitive. I said to Share Action, I said to the CEO who read my Little Book before my Big Book and said, "can you do something weird? Because we've tried everything" and I said, well, I'm only going to target 14 people, I'm not wanting hundreds of petitions signed or lots of handkerchiefs being given them because it needs to be intimate activism. And for three years they tried so much different types of traditional activism that didn't work with the board. They asked for a meeting with the CEO and were getting nowhere. So I thought well, who's above the CEO? The board he (he's still a he) is on the board. There's 14 of them. Let's buy a share. Let's wear our M&S clothes. Let's buy handkerchiefs from M&S to show that we're customers, and then we googled everything about the board member that we all were given, really figured out what we thought they would be encouraged and inspired by and then we wrote a timeless quote from someone that they would admire stitched it on the handkerchief and then we said "Please don't blow it. Use your power for good." So a bit of a pun, bit of humor, but not in bad taste, and then we wrote handwritten letters to go alongside it, but we wrapped it up in this handkerchief and this, you know, spent hours making it to say we believe in you as individuals that you can do something brilliant and you can change the history of M&S and then we hand delivered it very quietly at the side of the stage. We didn't ask for any photos. We didn't do a big presentation. And it was all boxed up in ribbon so they didn't know what each other's handkerchief looked like or said. So very intimate, one to one. And that form of intimate activism was what made it memorable, you know, it wasn't just the craft, it was the humility, it was the empathy. It was kind trying to figure out what might stop them, you know, always thinking about them, and not us, which is quite disarming for people and unusual and memorable.

Chantelle  12:43 God, that's amazing, that's so impressive.

[sound of scissors cutting]

Chantelle  15:31 So, can you tell us a little bit more about your experiences of campaigning in general, like you've given us a case study example, which is such a great example but I guess within the Craftivist Collective, but maybe beyond as well, your experience of campaigning.

Sarah  15:47 My experience of campaigning, well, there's photographic evidence of me age three with a mullet because my mom used to cut our hair, we were on a budget, standing outside of row of social housing that my community was squatting in to save from demolition, which is still standing, we won.

Chantelle  16:03 Woop woop!

Sarah  16:03 Woop woop! And we got on the cover of the local newspaper, the Liverpool Echo, where we had both bishops there and our big banner with a Martin Luther King quote on it. And so I, I am an activist and I'm passionate about activism. So I grew up in a low, very low income area in Everton, in Liverpool in the 80s. So under a Thatcher government, a very corrupt militant Council. My mom was a nurse, and then is now a politician - she's now deputy mayor of Liverpool City Council.

Chantelle  16:32 No way!

Sarah  16:32 And we have the first Black woman.

Chantelle  16:35 Yeah!

Sarah  16:36 in the country who's currently in Vogue magazine, who came to our last campaign, which we filmed for Sky Arts last month, (which comes out in October). So she's now, yeah, Deputy Mayor, my dad has been and still is the local Vicar in Everton,

Chantelle  16:49 Wow!

Sarah  16:49 and he runs the local youth club as the warden with the community. So I grew up in very high unemployment, bad nutrition, like quite a tough area and saw inequality firsthand, and my mum and dad majorly part of community action. Most meetings were in our back kitchen. And I was always a geek, I would listen to every conversation. So I very much grew up seeing when camp when campaigning could win when we lost hearing stories of campaigning for a health center, and them targeting the wrong power holder and having to be like, oh, bleep we need to get - we targeted the wrong person, it needs to be this person! So quite early on, I knew how to campaign and the strategies involved. And we went to South Africa for my dad's sabbatical just after Mandela got out in '91. So I was eight. Saw lots of the peace and reconciliation work they were doing there and Liberation Theology to bring back to Everton. So it was always very much a global perspective. I remember we boycotted oranges, and I didn't know what boycott and meant and why it was oranges, or, yeah, it was just part of our life have to be a good global citizen. You think about who are the most vulnerable in the world and how can we help? And if not help, how can we just not harm? So it was always a big part of my life.

Chantelle  18:03 That is honestly, I'm just sat here in awe, like, I did not think that we would that we would be talking about the Craftivist Collective and Mandela would come up!

Sarah  18:11 I think that's a good point, though. Because a lot of people go, you know, people go, oh, that sounds nice, what you do? And I'm like, Yeah, you're probably imagining me, you know, sitting away doing a bit of cross stitch saying, "make tea, not war" and I'm like, you can do that, but do you actually, you know, like I said, I wouldn't be doing it if it didn't work. Like I am really proud to say we have helped change policies and laws and behaviors and hearts and minds where people have told us it has helped them, which is what keeps me going. But there is a lot of presumption and baggage around craft and around women, and activism. And even the word "gentle", I'm like gentle is such a powerful word. It's really hard to be gentle, it's much easier to not have self control, and to just go "rawr" and have a tantrum. But when you have a tantrum, even, you know, rightly so we need righteous anger, but we need to channel it and control it and do it in the most way to help the cause. Because it's so easy for people to say, "I can't listen to you, you're shouting at me". Or people say "I can't talk to them - they've just thrown a milkshake at me" or "how do they know how to do my difficult job? It's easy for them to say stop "global warming now", but they're not giving me realistic solutions to do or tangible things, they haven't put themselves in my shoes." I'm always starting from the power holder's position, trying to think the best of them not the worst, but being realistic and pragmatic. And then I work backwards of where could craft help and where might it not help? And I think with all activism, we need to start from what's the problem? What are the realistic solutions? Who are the people in positions of power? Who do they listen to? And then where do we fit in? Sometimes it is right that we are the ones to say don't do this. Sometimes we need to shut up and recruit people who they'll listen to more or sometimes we need to just whisper in their ear and make them feel like they've come up with a decision and then say "well done you" when really what you want to say is I told you to do that. [laughs]

Chantelle  20:03 I think one of the things that I'm thinking about as you're talking, Sarah, particularly when you spoke about, like breaking down the word gentle, is something that is often very much missing within our movement. And that's the centering of love.

Sarah  20:15 Yeah!

Chantelle  20:15 And, like I do, I'm a strong believer in like, love being very, very powerful.

Sarah  20:21 Amen.

Chantelle  20:22 And I know that's, that can sometimes sound a bit cliche, but it's really hard to be loving.

Chantelle  20:27 Cheesey but it's so important. Yeah!

Chantelle  20:27 because we live in a very like... to quote bell hooks, we live in a very loveless world.

Sarah  20:31 Yes.

Chantelle  20:31 So to actually bring love and center love in how we approach our problems, I do think can be powerful. And yeah, like, there's gonna be people listening to this now being like, doesn't sound that maybe doesn't sound as powerful. But I think you have broken down exactly what it is to, to think about activism and its multiplicity. Think about activism as part of the toolkit is what you're saying, like, there are various things that work at various times, and being strategic as well.

Sarah  20:58 And selfishly, you know, it's not good for our physical, mental, it's not good for any of our health to be hateful, and to presume the worst of people, we can be realistic and pragmatic, and say, okay, we've done these awful things in the past, they might have done that some people very rarely, I think we go, we're not going to get anywhere with them, let's aim for, you know, some people a lot more on the fence that we can engage with. So doing a power analysis. But actually, it's really not good for our health to label people as "evil". I love  Brené Brown, so, you know, her whole thing of presume the best and you know, plan for the worst, but do always presume the best in people. Polarization is up, inequality is getting bigger, like, the more we're in our silos, and we're not encouraging each other, it's like, there's so much parts of activism that I just think we've really got to keep in check with ourselves.

Chantelle  21:52 No, I think you're right, Sarah, and I guess, where I sometimes don't always - aren't always able to see the best in people is thinking about power, and those that have the most power, and what they like, how can I change their hearts and minds? What can I do to them, to get them to stop being to stop widening inequality and being abusive.

Sarah  22:12 And you can't - they can change their hearts and minds and you can be there as a seed. But the majority of people, if not everyone thinks they're on the right side of history.

Chantelle  22:22 Yeah, it's scary isn't it?

Sarah  22:24 And nothing is that binary, there's always there is nuance involved. And there's so much more common ground than we think there is, so I think we need to meet in the middle. There's always going to be some stuff where it really is like horrific, but I think we we need to find common ground and work through stuff because it's just it's not working us screaming at each other.

Chantelle  22:44 Yeah, no, I think you're I think you're right. I think you're exactly right there, Sarah.

Sarah  22:48 I mean, even the funding sector, I have patrons who give me 10 pounds a month because I think the funding sector is pretty messed up and it's in the drama triangle, where they say, who were the baddies? (The perpetrators.) You're the rescuer. And who were the victims, you're going to rescue? And that's how you get funding in activism. I'm like, nope, I'm not part of that. I'm no one's savior. I'm not going... people are not victims, they figure out what power they have and can you know, create change, and I'm not writing people off as baddies. Sometimes you can work with someone who's a politician who's doing awful stuff, you can help shift them a little bit whilst you're still campaigning to get them out and replace them, like you can still do both! But I think, yeah, a lot of the activism is in the drama triangle that we need to change.

[sound of a sewing machine]

Chantelle  23:40 So Sarah, going forwards and just thinking again, like tangibly for the listeners, like what other types of campaigns have the Craftivist Collective worked on and successfully changed policy or changed hearts and minds or changed people's lives?

Sarah  23:54 So all of my projects are online, and we've got kits for an all have very different objectives. So all of them have crafter thought questions that you think through on your own or with a group while you're crafting them, and have, yeah, very clear strategies behind them. So I love after talking about the hankie project, I love sharing one that's completely opposite to that like that was like 10 or more hours and really bespoke for power holders. And we have lots of different projects. But the opposite one of that is Mini Fashion Statements that I created for Fashion Revolution. So that came out of when it was launched after the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh. And I know the founders Carry and Orsola who were doing incredible stuff and linking to gentle protest. I loved their approaches, saying to people who love fashion, how you can use your influence to change the fashion industry. You don't have to be anti fashion and I love fashion.

Chantelle  24:46 Can I just say Sarah's sat here look in shaaaaaarp!

Sarah  24:52 Thanks! I know we can enjoy fashion and be activists. It's not one or the other. I get my Vogue subscription every month and I love it, it's allowed. And all of their actions, were you tagging the brand that you're wearing. And then you do a hashtag "who made my clothes?" So it's curious activism. It's not judgmental, it's saying to fashion brands, like, I've bought your clothes, I want to know who made them. So very clever. But it was all online. So I was trying to think like, how do we reach people who don't find it online? So I came up with this project that we've got little kits for now, which are Mini Fashion Statements. So they're little paper scrolls, take about five minutes to do each one. There's three messages and you pick the one that resonates with you. All of the languages nonviolent communication from Marshall Rosenberg's incredible work and you write in your neatest handwriting, ideally in a fountain pen in cursive writings so not capitals, not spiky letters, very gentle fonts, a message about you know, "What's the story behind this item of clothes? Is it one of joy or pain? Find out more @FashRev" for people to Google for more information and different actions they could take. And you roll it up. And I have embossed logo with my scissors and thread, all on textured watercolor paper because if you engage in two or more textures, you remember it more and it's more luxury paper than cheap. And then you put on the outside, "please open me" all lowercase with a smiley face and a kiss. So it's not aggressive or scary. And then you have ribbon in your kits which are turquoise, mauve, or purple, which is seen as luxury colors. So again, it's exciting to make them with your little bow, bit posh. And then you shop drop them. This is the opposite of shoplifting, so you just put one in a pocket of clothes in a shop that you think could be more ethical. So you don't spam people. And then you hope - and it's anonymous, so it's not about you, and you hope that people will find it. And because it says please open me the, again, the psychology is that person decides whether to open it or not. So they're much more likely to open it with an open heart and an open mind rather than being screamed at without giving permission. And they can find out more with the @FashRev. So very different to changing a law to have people have a pay increase, but just as important of its reaching people in a gentle way who then start thinking about how they might buy differently. It's reaching different media outlets that Fashion Revolution and others were struggling to get in to and I still get people email me now saying, "oh, I did your workshop," or "I got your kits and me and my daughter did it together," or "I gave it to my grandmother and now she's talking about Fashion Revolution." And sometimes it is planting those seeds and see where they go. So all of our projects are so different but have to be strategic of who are we trying to target? Who are we trying to reach? How are we trying to reach them? Is it changing a behavior? Is it changing a law? It was an easy quick answer. But I just encourage people to have a go and then see where it takes them really,

Chantelle  27:46 Sarah, that is incredible. Like honestly, I'm just sat here in awe like, no, but I love meeting people that really kind of change, yeah, change my heart and mind. As in like I knew that you were a very impressive campaigner and activist but like getting the detail of it

Sarah  28:02 My rambles.

Chantelle  28:03 No! The detail is so powerful.

Sarah  28:06 Well, I'm doing a handbook at the moment because we've got Little Book, Yellow Book of the methodology, and then the Handbook is going to be a gorgeous coffee table book with loads of projects. And we've got a gentle protest colorwheel in there by an amazing color therapist called Mumtaz Benum, she's amazing. And we've got some gentle protest fonts done by Sarah Hyneman, who's a typographer. So all of this stuff will be there. So you have to get involved.

Chantelle  28:32 Thank you so much, Sarah, what an inspiring conversation.

Sarah  28:35 Oh, it's hope it's useful and people can find out more online and there's lots of videos to watch...

Chantelle  28:45 Thank you so much Sarah.

Sarah  28:46 Thank you!

The Craftivist Collective (Bonus Reflections Podcast)

We're back again with more thoughts (and feelings) about last week's episode. What did you think? Are you ready to get crafty? Let us know on Instagram @therevolutionbeginsathome. If you're not on the gram, drop us a review or tweet @hashtagcerys with the hashtag #TheRevolutionBeginsAtHome

Transcript:

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to The Revolution Begins at Home (bonus reflections podcast). My name is Cerys, I’m the producer here at The Revolution Begins at Home and, after each episode, I’m going to be sharing a couple of things the episode made me think about whilst I was helping to make it.

That’s right, I’m back with more thoughts and feelings about activism and its all thanks to last week’s wonderful guest.

The Episode

If you tuned in last week, you will know that our host Chantelle spoke to Sarah Corbett. Sarah is an activist; she has been all throughout her life, ever since she was a kid growing up in Everton. She sat down with us to talk about her experiences working on local community projects and for large organisations, winning and losing, receiving awards and getting burnt out, and all the things she’s learned along the way.

She told us about her strategies as an activist and that really made me realise that I don’t have a strategy when it comes to activism and so maybe I should have one but how do you pick one? I don’t know – no approach is perfect, even sitting down with friends and knitting can have big implications when it comes to fairness and philosophy and how you think the world should work because our actions are not apolitical and even successes can have negative consequences.

Which is quite a lot to take away from the episode given that, mostly, we just talked about craftivism and the kind of gentle, thoughtful, effective protests that Sarah organises through her social enterprise The Craftivist Collective.

Sarah   craftivism, in its simplest form is the word craft and activism mushed up together

And, as we learned in the episode, craftivism in its not so simplest form might be working out what someone on the board of M&S’s favourite colour is so that you can achieve a living wage for its workers. Craftivism can be many things but Sarah uses it specifically and deliberately to make change. She thinks about how the textures of the materials she’s using, or their quality and appearance might make the recipient feel and asks questions like “if it looks like this, is that going to make someone feel curious or will they feel attacked?”, “what about if it looks like this, instead?” and she’s always weighing up the answers to these questions against the cost to the earth. Her activism is carefully planned and environmentally responsible and, boy does it get results.

Canary Craftivists

I participated in one of Sarah’s campaigns this summer.  A climate change campaign called the Canary Craftivists. The conceit behind it is to meet with friends, dressed in yellow, and make small canaries (hand stitched or knitted and filled with recycled materials, if possible) and then send these beautifully handcrafted (or, in my case lopsided but still kinda cute) little warning signs to MPs as part of a mass, gentle protest demonstrating how many of us are concerned about climate change.

I thought that the point of the protest was to get people talking, sort of like a crafternoon, you know? We’d meet up and discuss why we thought it was important to do something over needles and biscuits and then, as an added bonus, send our birds and some letters to our local representatives. And, if this was happening up and down the country, with people who craft or who can’t and with people who are passionate about climate change and those that aren’t, we’d all come away with something – a new skill or perspective or, in my case, a large ball of crochet suitable wool.

I was incorrect. This was not the point of the protest, at all. In fact, as Sarah explained…

Sarah   my summer climate project is a bit counterintuitive for a lot of people because I'm really focused on people who've never done activism before on already part of climate action. And I'm doing a project specifically for them, and particularly people who see themselves as a political or not left leaning, because we've got a conservative government. And so a lot of activist groups. I've been saying please don't do this project because we need higher Conservative government to see that this is a new group who they didn't expect to care about climate so publicly

So, er, that’s not me actually. The point of the protest was not to encourage people like me to have a bit of a catch up and give them something productive to do with their hands in the meantime. I should probably have listened to our interview with Sarah before I got involved because, what I learned during the recording is that I definitely had a couple of misconceptions about Sarah’s work akin to the kind she’s come across before.

Sarah Yeah, you're probably imagining me, you know, sitting away doing a bit of cross stitch saying, make tea, not war.

Essentially, yes. Though, not in a bad way – I imagined the work Sarah was doing as being similar to the kinds of meetings that inspired the creation of the word craftivism in the first place. Sarah told us how craftivism, as a term, was created by craftivist Betsy Greer. When Betsy was studying for her MA in Sociology at Goldsmiths (and writing her dissertation on knitting, no less)[1] back in the early 2000’s she observed the political conversations and organising that was taking place in feminist craft circles and saw the potential in using crafts to engage people in activism. People who couldn’t or didn’t want to go to marches and lock ins and picket lines or, at least, not all the time and needed a way to engage with their feet up and their hands warm.

When, I looked into it, I found lots of groups who fit this kind of mould. Groups like the Knitting Nannas[2] in Australia who turn up at rallies and fracking sites and politicians’ offices and… knit. They have tea parties and craft or play cards or give out ice lollies to protestors and police officers and workers alike and are generally nice and pleasant but also stubborn and disapprove strongly of how we are treating the Earth.

Or the Yarn Mission, a collective knitting for Black Liberation through community building, connection and guidance[3]. They organise knitting meet-ups and teach people how to knit and crochet, all the while building safe spaces to talk about the advancement of justice, rebellion, and the end of oppressive systems often with those not normally involved in activism.

When I thought of craftivism, this is the kind of thing I was imagining – crafts as a facilitator for important conversations and accessible spaces. And Sarah does run workshops and engage in this style of craftivism but she also uses crafts in a different way.

Sarah’s Activism

In many of Sarah’s campaigns, the crafts are a tool for change, not conversation and this is because Sarah’s style of craftivism is not about the craftivist. In fact, Sarah almost exclusively centres the person she is protesting against in her approach. She is a laser-focused, practical activist who starts each project by determining her quantifiable, tangible, achievable objective and then works backwards to her role, which may actually involve taking a step back and letting someone more appropriate do the work that needs to be done.

This means she uses the favourite colours of the person she is protesting, not her own. She works out what quotes inspire them, not her. She gets into their head and tries to figure out why they are doing the thing they are doing and what needs to be done to make them change. And then she does it. Even if that means making a beautiful and bespoke gift for someone denying their workers the living wage or writing a heart-warming and encouraging note to someone buying a piece of fast fashion made in a sweatshop.

Listening to Sarah explain how she needs to see the people she protests against as critical friends, not aggressive enemies or “baddies” and thinks that shouting at people harms more than it helps, I simultaneously strongly agreed with her argument and vehemently disagreed at the same time.

I want to see the best in people and have empathy for their position. I want to pull people into the movements that I feel passionately about and make change together, rather than disempowering them to the point that they no longer matter. I agreed with Sarah when she explained that we are becoming more polarised, that the world feels angrier and more divisive and I have resolved, a thousand times, to approach conversations calmly and kindly and humbly and understand that I might also be wrong.

But then every time I get into the situation itself, I’m like “no, actually, fuck off that’s a disgusting thing to say, how could you even think that? Where is your morality?” but, you know, less articulately and even less helpfully.

And, also, it doesn’t always sit right with me that the person who is doing the bad thing, not to say that they are the “baddy”, but the person who is objectively doing the thing that I think they need to stop doing because they are trying to, I don’t know, make it illegal for me and my friends to use the toilet or because they are poisoning a community’s drinking water for profit, or whatever, that person, I think, why do they deserve kindness and a beautiful gift that took ten hours to make and for someone to tell them that they’ve always known they can do the right thing? Because they haven’t been doing the right thing up until now!

But, then again, if it works… I’m not really in a position to compare the outcome of getting a living wage for M&S employees on the one hand and the fairness of making the people who should and could have done it ages ago feel good about doing it now on the other. Who am I to say to an M&S employee, “sure you can’t afford your rent this month, but at least we have the moral high ground”?

I understand that the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house and that they can only temporarily beat him at his own game[4] but also think that temporarily beating him at his own game can put a lot of food on the table and help a lot of people in desperate need of that temporary win.

So, I think two things simultaneously. That I like this approach and I don’t. That I want to use it and I don’t. That I think it is good and bad.

I also think that Sarah doesn’t think that it’s perfect either. Well, I actually I know this because she said in the interview that it’s not always fair. But it is effective because she picks the battles that she can win. And I don’t mean to imply that these battles are easy, I mean that Sarah picks the battles that she, as the humungous activist nerd that she is, can break down and strategize on and design a campaign to achieve. And then she does, with a laser-focus and decades of experience.

I was surprised when, quite early in the interview, Sarah talked about how she spends quite a lot of time explaining to potential collaborators that she isn’t the activist for them, or that craftivism isn’t the way to go with their campaign. And that’s because Sarah’s philosophy involves having a clear goal and a clear strategy and enough knowledge and research to believe the latter is going to help you achieve the former. She knows there are a lot of different approaches to activism in general and craftivism in particular and it’s important to choose the right one.

So, sometimes, what you need is a knitting circle to vent into. To talk and rage about the injustices of the world and be soothed by your friends and your needles and regain your strength for the next fight. And sometimes what you need is a crochet workshop that will help someone make their first stitch and hear their first Audre Lorde quote. And sometimes what you need is a small craft to make the boss of a company feel special enough that they connect with the thousands of people they are oppressing and you have to be nice to them otherwise nothing will change. And, sometimes, you need a little cross-stitch kit that says “make tea not war” to help spark a conversation with a stranger on a train.

Call to arms

Sarah’s work with the Craftivist Collective has demonstrated that crafts are a powerful tool of gentle protest and that we can make a huge difference with small, deliberate actions.

What I have learned from making this episode, and what I hope that you have learned also, is that, as an activist, you have a tool kit and different types of goals require different tools so we all need to think carefully about what tools we want to use and why.

If you want to get involved in craftivism, there are lots of great resources as craftivist-collective.com.

References

[1] https://craftivism.com/about/

[2] https://knitting-nannas.com/about-us/what-we-do/

[3] http://theyarnmission.com/

[4] https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Lorde_The_Masters_Tools.pdf

In this episode, Chantelle talks to comedian and former stripper Siân Docksey about sex work and the integral role that sex workers have played in activist movements. Their conversation covers everything from the 2008 economic crisis to how we can (and should) be engaging with feminism critically.

Reading List

We're doing our reading list a little differently this week. To find out more about activism around sex work and decriminalisation in the UK, Siân recommends engaging with the following organisations:

National Ugly Mugs

English Collective of Prostitutes

SWARM

Decrim Now

You might also want to check out:

The Life and Death of Marsha P Johnson

Revolting Prostitutes by Juno Mac and Molly Smith

Pole the Other One, a brand new podcast all about Pole Dancing presented by... Siân Docksey!

Transcript

Chantelle  00:03 Hello and welcome to the Revolution Begins at Home, a podcast about activism, what it looks like and who gets to do it.

My name is Chantelle Lewis. I'm a Public Sociologist and the co-founder and co-host of the Surviving Society Podcast.

Throughout this series, I'm going to be speaking to activists and advocates about their work. We'll be talking about what it means to be an activist, what it involves, and how structures of power determine what we consider to be activism or worthy of an activist movement. In today's episode, I spoke to Siân Docksey.

Siân Docksey  00:49 I do - I feel like a bit of imposter syndrome using the word "activist" because I'm not particularly organized (laughs) in how I do stuff.

Chantelle  00:57 Siân is a stand up comedian and writer. She's an advocate for decriminalizing sex work and I spoke to her about her own experiences of sex work, the kinds of changes that sex workers are fighting for, and how conversations on this subject can be difficult.

Just a quick content morning on this one - we do discuss sexual harassment from the point of personal experience, and do share non-graphic examples. Before we hear the full interview, here are Siân's activists influences.

Siân Docksey  01:29 Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who I think most people will associate with the Stonewall uprising, which is very mythologized and chaotic in its own way. So Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were two trans women who were sex workers, they set up something called STAR which is the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. And these two incredibly marginalized women, who were living in the most like precarious circumstances constantly getting beaten up, irregular income, struggling with drug addiction, homelessness themselves, from their own survival sex work income, they rented a flat, which became a homeless shelter for other trans youth, marginalized youth, sex workers. And they, like, they did that completely out of their own pocket because they wanted to create a community space for queers who had nowhere else to go. And from that, they started doing more organizing for like gender nonconforming people in the states as well as being tied up with the Gay Rights Movement more generally. But I just thought that was amazing. Because these are two people who were working in precarity, it's not like they had just a convenient pot of money that they were like, "okay, well, we've taken care of ourselves like now we can look after other people..." literally from income that they were living on, from one day to another, they were like, it's more important that we create community resources that can pull other marginalized people out of homelessness, and they can come live with us and find community.

Theme music 

Chantelle 03:02 Hello, everyone. We are really excited today to be joined by Siân Docksey, who is a comedian, writer, former stripper and advocate for decriminalizing sex work. Siân, thank you so much for joining us today!

Siân Docksey  03:19 Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be on the show.

Chantelle 03:22 Siân, please tell the listeners where we are, where you are right now. where you're-where we're recording from.

Siân Docksey  03:28 I'm in a very glamorous basement in Belgium where I've been for too long.

Chantelle 03:34 Aww bless you! Can I just say the basement looks very chic. I'm really likin' it, like I always think of Belgian being very cool, like so you're really, yeah, really, emphasising that right now.

Siân Docksey  03:45 Thank you, just doing what I can for the brand.

Chantelle 03:49 So, Siân, could you tell us a bit about your connection and why you are so passionate about sex workers rights?

Siân Docksey 03:55 Sure. So it starts off a bit grim, but don't worry, it does get better. It was a dark and stormy night in November of 2015. [laughs] I've had I think what is quite a typical millennial experience of the immediately post crash UK job market of a few years out of uni, I was still just running into a lot of dead ends with day jobs. I was doing comedy, but as my day job, I was working in communications and PR and I was just like going through this loop all the time of okay, right, I just kind of grit my teeth and did this internship because I was told it would lead to that and then it didn't or doing a six month contract somewhere which didn't translate into then another job, but it was all very piecemeal. And I was working in a bar at the time to make-make money while I was trying to lock in something more perminent. And I got to the final stages of four different job interviews for PR and comms related things and then didn't get hired. And in the bar I was working in, sexual harassment was part of the job. Basically, it was something that as a female staff member, you were told, like, this is just how it works, wear less makeup, wear baggy clothes, the management wouldn't help you. And it was just it was just really, really gross because all the like the main client base was these, you know, incredibly well paid people from all the big shot like finance institutions like KPMG, Ernst and Young, Deloitte, and it was just horrible. And one night I was working and the sexual harassment got so bad that I just thought, fuck this, if this is going to happen anyway, I'm going to make some money out of it. So I auditioned for a strip club with (that's definitely the worst reason to audition for a strip club or get into sex work. I would not like in any way [laughs], like, recommend anyone go through that thought process...) But, I auditioned for a club in Bethnal Green, which was my first club. It was still honestly my favorite if the money was better. I'm seeing it a bit through rose tinted glasses now, but um, yeah, I loved that place. My stage audition was to Britney Spears' Gimme More. I was awful.

Chantelle  06:09 Anthem! Absolute anthem, can I just say. [laughter]

Siân Docksey 06:14 It was kind of the only option that I recognized. They needed girls. So I was hired. And so from then over the next three years, I worked on and off in three different clubs. Auditioned for fourth one, didn't get in because they told me that my dancing wasn't sexy, my outfit choice was poor, but my spoken English was very good. So it was useful personal growth on multiple levels. So yeah, so I was working on and off as a stripper. While in the day, I had a bit of a better run of luck, then with day job stuff. And I was still taking shows up to the Edinburgh Fringe and doing comedy. But stripping was my kind of backup side hustle. And it was part of my life.

Chantelle  06:58 I really like, Siân, I really like your introduction to the subjects because of obviously how personal it is, but also kind of creating that normalized narrative around that time period, particularly for women who were and continue to be in precarious situations and relating that to sexual harassment in hospitality, like I've been on var- I mean, it's not, I've been on various podcasts, I talked about this very openly about how much sexual harassment has been very much a part of my - a part of my everyday life. And I like you talking about that, in the connection to that between... the connection to hospitality, like I kind of had like a physical bodily reaction to that, because I just remember it all so well, and then you then linking that to the decision to go to start stripping and engage in sex work. Like for me, that is such a rational choice, and something that I looked to do as well, myself. I mean, I'm very much pro Sex Workers Rights and the choice to be a sex worker 100%, hence, why during this podcast, but I was fortunate enough to not have eventually not have to go into it. But I did I signed up to be an escort. Like, because I didn't have any money! And I was then, everything day after day after day was harassment. So it's exactly. As you said, why would I not just make some money out of this? It's so overwhelming. It's so overbearing, and so thank you so much for saying that. And I think that there will be a lot of women, particularly that are our age that sort of, were either graduates or non graduates at that kind of like, post or like, the beginnings of austerity times, like so few jobs that were just so desperate. I think it's such a powerful way of introducing your your relationship to the subject matter.

Siân Docksey 08:46 I'm sorry that it relates to you because of that, as you say that completely normalized-

Chantelle 08:51 No, don't be sorry! [laughter] Like I said, I think it's, I think the - please don't apologize, because I think it's really powerful for us to be able to have these kinds of retrospective discussions that are also present, present as well about how our relationship or our proximity to sex works, but also our relationship with sexual harassment. And it it I think, having distance and years away from that time, even though, sexual harassment still is part of my life now, I think helps us to create like a kind of more linear understanding of what was happening to us and how we ended up where we do. So I think that Yeah, absolutely incredible stuff that you're saying.

Siân Docksey 09:26 And yeah, so much of what you described from your experience maps on to so many of the experiences of my friends, and there's also this conflict, especially with just the prevalence of sexual harassment when you present as a femme or a gender nonconforming person, mainly - cis men get sexual harassment as well, but it is a very gendered experience. Yeah, I should just, I guess, maybe mentioned that one of the things that really surprised me about Metropolis is the first club I worked in. So that was a club where if anyone touched you as a customer, like even if a customer casually touched your leg, they would get booted out. And if you did a private dance, you were always standing a meter away from the customer.

Chantelle  10:09 Wow.

Siân Docksey 10:10 And you've had a lot of agency in that environment. And it really, really surprised me how I would experience more sexual harassment on the walk to and from my like city job in the daytime, than I would at work. I'm absolutely not claiming that a strip club is a feminist utopia, where there's no patriarchal, exploitative power relations, you're definitely not departing from those really gendered interactions. But yeah, it really struck me how embedded it was into the nature of the job that you were acknowledging that these were transactions that it was shifted to make money from it. Again, I want to repeat that, like, I really, even though it was sort of what created the entry point for me monetizing your experience of sexual harassment is really not the best [laughter].

Chantelle 11:01 No, but I to me like it, it was a rational choice. I see it as something that, yeah, for me, like, it's like hearing you say it, I'm like, yep!

Siân Docksey 11:11 It's important to state from the offset as well, that the majority of people, certainly in the UK, but I'm sure, globally as well, people enter sex work, because they have exhausted all other options. And Sex Worker Activism has always been poverty relief is its number one priority. The English Collective of Prostitutes in the UK, they very demarcate their priorities as, number one, put money into the hands of vulnerable people so they don't have to start selling sex out of desperation. Secondly, to create exit routes from sex work for the people who want to, and then they are advocating for rights that are working conditions, decrim. All of the things that create safety for current sex workers. But yeah, that like desperation that you talked about is you're resorting to it because you're broke, you know, like brokeness is the driving force of people into these industries. It's kind of a weird one, because it's still a very awkward area with my family to talk about the time I was stripping, because they were really shocked and disappointed. They were like, how is this girl who has a first class degree from Cambridge... Like, you know, I had all of the markers of what would typically be like not the sort of profile who ends up stripping. But yeah, and you know, and I'm still very aware that like, I kind of entered that industry as someone with relative socio-economic privilege compared to a lot of the women and gender variant people who I was working with, but there was that crunch time in the immediate kind of combination of austerity Britain, and also the financial crash where

Chantelle 12:56 We have no cash! I say it to people all the time. We had no money, like, we didn't have any money, like, well people still don't have money now, obviously. But that, that stripping of resources…

Siân Docksey  13:07 Ayyyy, good fun!

Chantelle 13:09 Oh, oh yeah! [Laughter] Like 2010, like 2008, you get the crash and like, if you're from a family that felt it, you're from family that felt it and you remember it well. And then you get 2010s onwards, like we didn't have any money. And there's still and I don't want to just reiterate, there are still people that don't have any money, that are still struggling, has died, have like just the state has just brutalized, working class communities like so much over the past few years. But like, I do really like having these conversations with people like you Siân because we go back to those times and really remember viscerally how little cash we had, whilst still working. And also I'm sorry, I'm sorry to hear that must have been really dif- that must be really hard and awkward within your family like having the relationship you do have to sex work. But one thing that sort of sprung to my mind is that how, even within families, amongst kin, amongst our friends, the sort of city, male-dominated, sexual harassment that we know, that we have to experience, what was that not? Is that not? Is that not shameful that that goes on? Like, why is that - why is that positioned as so common sense? The types of - the types of sexual harassment upskirting, hands up my dress, like, so much of that, and it's so common? Yeah, absolutely. So I always find it really interesting as to what becomes the respectable basically, in that sense.

Siân Docksey 14:46 Oh, my God. 100%. And like, yeah, all the things you described. Exactly. It just word for word is what was going on in that bar, where we were just told as employees like this is this is normalized, and to be honest, it's kind of what keeps them coming in. Just these like absolute pieces of shit on like six or seven figure salaries, who would like bark at you like a dog and just be like, you know, just like incredibly gross in ways I won't like dignify but I try to be honest with people increasingly about stripping and that I 70% hated it. Like there are so many grim things about those working environments. 30% loved it. And I could wax lyrical about those, but I don't want to romanticize the profession. It's under a lot of strain at the moment, as well. But part of what made the experience, yeah, mentally very demanding about doing this. And I was like, also, side note, I really think my parents or at least my mom knew, before I came out to them, because I mean, it was like, Siân is fine for money and mysteriously good at pole dancing. You really don't need to be a genius to link those. Yet, to me, the paranoia constantly that one of my sisters would grass me up, or it would become clear that this is what I was doing on evenings and weekends. Living with that paranoia was exhausting. So I think that it's that stigma that you internalize that harms you as much as the working conditions as much as negative experiences on the job. And we know from other kinds of activism, HIV activism is a good example that sometimes it's the stigma itself that i-i-it kills people. It means that people don't access resources they need they don't ask for help, because outing themselves as being part of a stigmatized occupation or social profile actively gets in the way of you agitating for your rights or getting the help that you need. So yeah, sex worker stigma is a wild time. 

Chantelle 16:46 It's hard to put into words like trying to say to you Siân, like I have so much empathy and compassion for sex workers and strippers that do do this work, but don't enjoy it. But equally, the fact that we have the choice to do that is also good. Do you see what I mean? It's kind of like this... that juxtaposition is really hard to reconcile with.

Siân Docksey 17:15 Yeah, yeah. I think that it's, I think that well, so Sex Work is such a broad church and the needs of, for example, the kind of sex worker that people might recognize from cultural depictions of Sex Work like Secret Diary of a Call Girl, for example, which is a blonde, white, cis, able-bodied woman -

Chantelle  17:39 Big up Billie Piper though, I'm just saying...

Siân Docksey 17:40 Yeah, yeah, yeah I think she's brilliant but, you know, the needs of a white, educated, privileged woman, for example, working as a dominatrix in London are not the same needs as an undocumented migrant sex worker in a less metropolitan community where you can't maybe network with other sex workers and share resources. Someone who doesn't speak English, people who aren't able bodied. And for me, I found a really useful way of thinking about this is there is an amazing activist called Nim Ralph.

Chantelle  18:11 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah!

Siân Docksey 18:13 They're really cool.

Chantelle  18:14 Very cool.

Siân Docksey 18:14 Yeah. They're mostly organizing for Trans Rights. Now, I think. But they've been across so many things, Climate Activism, they've been looking at yeah racism within the Climate Activist Movement as well. They've done so much stuff. And I was watching an interview with them, where they said that if you want to organize your activism and prioritize, because you can't do one single thing that meets the needs of everyone, (just a side note, the important thing we need to do is decrim). But anyway, what they said is identify the person in a stigmatized and marginalized community who is most vulnerable, identify their needs, look at those, and then work outwards from there, because the changes that you bring about that benefit, the most vulnerable person you're trying to help will have a ripple effect. So for example, yeah, the imbalance that I just described of, if you were fighting for the rights of a street working migrant, not able bodied sex worker and you prioritize their needs, that will have a positive ripple effect on your white privileged, highly educated dom in London, who will have different sets of needs as well. Especially within sex work where, you know, poverty and sex work do go hand in hand, like talking about sex work without talking about poverty is like talking about lung cancer without mentioning smoking. I don't think you can decouple these things. Not everyone's gonna like me for saying that because there's a separate movement that's almost trying to like gentrify the sex industry and make it a kind of aspirational profession and honestly, cracking for those people. I'm genuinely delighted that people are finding income security and pleasure in their jobs. Like that's really great. I would love it if that was the main conversation that we can be having about Sex Work, but in the UK the reality is that, as I said before, people overwhelmingly resort to selling sex when they've exhausted all other options, and it's an income solution. That, yeah, is often also like precarious in and of itself. It's definitely not a silver bullet that fixes all of people's problems at once.

Chantelle  20:25 Following on from that Siân, it would be really good if you could just give us a little outline of what decriminalization looks like and what it means and then perhaps after that, we could talk just do a little bit of myth busting around the Nordic model as well, would that be OK?

Siân Docksey  20:40 Yeah, absolutely. So criminalization means you're doing a crime [laughs] being punished for any activities. And with regards to sex work. In the UK, we have partial decriminalization of sex work. So it is legal to trade sexual services as an adult, but there are some things about it that mean you can be arrested, you could have your earnings confiscated. For example, working with other sex workers is called "brothel keeping" and you can be arrested for doing that. So it's like kind of half legal. Decriminalization and legalization are not the same thing. So in a model called legalization, which up until recently, they had it in Victoria, I think, sex work is legalized but it is then subject to lots of other parameters that the state controls. So it's not like whatever you're doing, it's not criminalized, you can organize, you can do what you want, it's fine. You will have a situation with legalization where external bodies impose measures on what you can be doing. For some people, this works better. I know a sex worker who was working in Victoria, where the model is legalization, so like a more controlled form of sex work and she loved the fact that if she was working in a brothel, which is legal, which was legal in that context, if a client was being funny about using a condom, for example, she could point at a sign on the wall that says, it is illegal for you not to use a condom, and then they go, "oh, okay, blah, blah, blah". But the law was kind of on the sex worker's side. Decriminalization, full decriminalization means that any activity associated with sex work would not be criminalized. So it would be an expansion of the model that we have in the UK today. So sex workers would not only be allowed to trade sexual services, they'd be allowed to work together, which is honestly, like, from anecdotal evidence, that's the thing that people

Chantelle  22:42 Keeps people safe.

Siân Docksey  22:44 Yeah, exactly - it's a safety thing. Clients also know about this  - in Juno Mac's TED talk on why decrim is essential, she describes a situation where she was working with another sex worker, they were sharing a flat, a client got violent with her friend. So she came in and tried to interject, and this client knew that if they called the police, they would be arrested because they were working together. So this partial decriminalization model that we have doesn't keep sex workers safe. The Nordic Model, or it's called the Swedish Model, sometimes, it exists currently in France, as well as several Scandinavian countries. There's this weird system where it is legal to sell sex, but it is not legal to buy it. So one side of the transaction is legal, the other side is illegal. And this has been conceptualized as this sort of like "feminist" (I'm putting it in quote marks) idea because overwhelmingly, the majority of people who sell sex are women. In the UK, actually, the majority are single mums, so people with dependents. The idea behind the Swedish model is like, well, we're protecting the people who have to sell sex, so we're not going to punish women for meaning to sell sex. But we don't like male entitlement, we don't like objectification, so we're going to criminalize anyone who buys sex. But the evidence shows that where the Nordic Model has been put in, you don't get fewer people engaging with sex work, what you do get is people having to do it much less safely, because clients are aware that they will get criminalized. So you don't get the same kinds of clients who are likely to do things consensually, because they don't want to put themselves at risk. So sex workers who need to continue selling sex are pushed further and further underground. And they then have to take the nasty clients, they have to go with the people who if there was more choice, and if they had more rights within it, they could avoid and it's mainly self organizing sex workers who were like we need full decriminalization because it's the safe option. But in case that's not enough because it is generally not treated as enough which is really gross, Amnesty International, The World Health Organization, UNAIDS, all of these bodies from the point of view of human rights, health, they all advocate for decriminalization as the way that best protects people's safety. And also, you know, if-if people's engagement with Sex Work is like, well, we prefer if people weren't doing this, you know, or maybe it's like a stopgap until they get another job. Having a criminal record for doing sex work does not help you get another job and where criminalization is brought in, overwhelmingly, what you're doing is you're criminalizing people for the conditions that drove them to selling sex in the first place, and just making people even more precarious and unsafe, so it's not straightforward, but yeah, decriminalization, decriminalization, decriminalization is what people need [laughs].

Chantelle  25:52 Like, just on a basic level, why isn't it being decriminalized? What are the powers that be say, what are the people that are resistant to decriminalization, what do they say? What's their argument?

Siân Docksey  26:04 What underpins it, to be completely honest with you is a generalized distaste for the idea of Sex Work. So the Nordic Model has come back into the news because Priti Patel's horrible little baby, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill,

Chantelle  26:20 Oh, God, yeah..

Siân Docksey  26:22 Yeah, there are a couple of politicians who want to bring the Nordic Model in as part of this, which would mean we'd have the Nordic model in the UK, many of these people fighting for the Nordic Model are women and it's women who tend to treat sex workers as like women who've like defected somehow, that it's women who have like, yeah, just joined the patriarchy, "our value is our sexuality" you know, there's there's lots of like toxic attitudes. If I'm being completely honest, like one of the reasons that I'm constantly re-engaging with like, this is why decrim works is that I think that the propaganda around the Nordic Model probably would have drawn me in if I'd been less knowledgeable about sex worker rights, because it's always, always put under the pretext of protecting women from gendered violence, like don't let these sex workers tell you what's good for them, because how could they possibly be the experts on their own lives. And what we've seen over and over again, is despite decades of self organizing in sex worker communities, where the message has been pretty consistent, that decriminalization is what sex workers need, and like, don't target sex workers who are already stigmatized and vulnerable target the economic conditions that are driving people to sex work. This is where these kind of weird like, you know, things like the Nordic Model, come about. It's something also that is, is quite tricky, because there's a bit of a lack of joined up thinking in this. So, for example, you might have a lefty woman who is a Nordic Model supporter, but who's also an activist for Universal Free Childcare, Universal Free Childcare would probably prevent a lot of people from having to resort to Sex Work, like my kind of sad fact is that around November is when a lot of people start going into sex work so they can get Christmas presents for their kids like these are real people.

Chantelle  28:19 Yeah

Siân Docksey  28:20 You know, there is a - there's often a bit of a disconnect of, especially within feminist activism, that sex worker rights is absolutely enmeshed in other rights that feminist activists have been campaigning for for so long, but yeah, it's it's whorephobia, there is just this kind of distaste for people who have done this like disgraceful and degrading thing of selling sex, of selling sex!

Chantelle  28:44 I think one of the key points that you've made that I think it's really important that listeners kind of sit with is that although like we aspire to be feminists, I should think like both of us on this call, now. We just have to understand the ugly side of feminism, like this is part of feminism, like part of feminism contains whorephobia. That's why our feminism is so... it's so - it's so broad, but it doesn't necessarily - feminism hasn't always protected the most marginalized.

Siân Docksey  29:15 Yeah.

Chantelle  29:16 Feminism has got a long history of upholding patriarchy, but also sorting out women that I've got the best class position. I think it's really important (and just to make sure that's not my argument - Professor Allison Phipps talks about this) like in order to understand why we get women at the forefront, why we get women at the forefront of saying we need the Nordic Model and blah, blah, blah is consistent with history. And we're just in a renewed era of that, and I think we have the same, we have the same I feel like there's definitely a crossover with the Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists as well.

Siân Docksey  29:54 Absolutely. Yes.

Chantelle  29:56 The again is this consistency like, not protecting the most marginalized women and gender non-conforming people, like because it is suited, it's suited the status quo, it's suited their class position, it's suited what they what they want. And it's deeply... it is deeply troubling, but I think one thing sort of hope that we can take from this, that there has always been people like yourself, that are contesting and arguing against and doing what they can within their everyday life to say that these feminists are not the ones that we want. This is not the type of people that we want representing us.

Siân Docksey  30:35 But the truth of that, as well is that people have been very patient with me, because I think I'm

Chantelle  30:40 Very modest, Siân, very modest!

Siân Docksey  30:43 But, I think there is, you know, like, in any sense of, I guess, like political learning or political engagement, you're constantly having to like, learn and unlearn things. And so I have been trying to think a little bit more strategically about how to engage with people who are pro Nordic model, because and it goes a little bit back to sexual harassment, I think that sometimes my impression of not necessarily politicians, but people who hear about the Nordic model, who would say, "oh, no, that sounds smart." Pretty much every woman. I know, by the time you reach adulthood, you will have had experiences of catcalling, sexual harassment, objectification, assault in the worst case, it's really grim stuff. So when Sex Work is brought up, which is a very, I mean, for sex workers, you know, like sex workers are humans who have their own complicated relationship with sex and power and, you know, trauma. But I think that sometimes when people and I'm gonna say, especially women and gender variant people, at the risk of excluding men who've experienced sexual violence and harassment, but just to kind of keep it like it is a gendered experience, what you get when you start talking about Sex Work is all of this trauma suddenly surfaces. And so it's a really knee jerk reaction to become like, yeah, but "Sex Work bad!" because some of my experiences of sex and abuse of power within that bad and so you're like, what's the Nordic Model, we'll, we'll make it go away. It's really, it just takes a lot of time and patience to have these conversations, because sometimes what you're having is not a conversation, it's just people's different sets of trauma, knocking against each other. And then you're not even looking at what I described within decriminalization, which is the evidence based argument for decrim. In terms of like, just like, don't even think about the sex work part -it's a workplace rights issue. Like it isn't really even really about sex anymore. It's about labor rights. And it's about, it's about poverty. It's about Disability Rights. So, it's about all these other things, but I'm trying to get a bit wiser on the emotional side about why people are so pro Nordic Model. Kind of always wondering, what are the negative experiences that someone's had that means they're so pro Nordic model, and you're just kind of wondering, what aspect of people's own trauma is locking a kind of -

Chantelle  33:09 Siân I love that. I love that. I love that so much. I feel like we so need that more within our movements. It's hard to do, though, that don't get me wrong, like, and I don't think everyone can do it within our movements. So we're thinking about, like, where do people start from when they come to these conversations? Like where what are they bringing to the table? What is their lived experience of this? How can I get them to see beyond that? And I think that having more people, I try my best to do this in my everyday life, and you just saying that off the cuff shows me that you you're trying to do this. I think we do need more of us doing this. But equally, I think that those that are most marginalized in our movements shouldn't shouldn't necessarily have to do it. Because it's, it's hard. It's really hard to do that. Like, where is that person starting from? And where are they coming from without trying to do respectability and without trying to do stability around conversations that are damaging to other groups?

Chantelle  34:07 Yeah, yeah.

Chantelle  34:08 It's a very, very fine line, but it is one unfortunately, I think we're gonna have to keep trying them.

Siân Docksey  34:12 And it takes time is the thing.

Chantelle  34:19 Siân, that was such a great conversation. You are so inspiring and you're so clear

Siân Docksey  34:24 Thank you so much for having me!

Chantelle  34:25 You are an absolute credit to the movement. And you are yeah, very, very brilliant. Thank you. 

Chantelle  34:38

Thanks for listening to the Revolution Begins at Home. If you enjoyed it, you should check out other podcasts supported by Content is Queen.

This podcast was presented by myself Chantelle Lewis and produced by Cerys Bradley. If you want to hear more of our work, there are links in the description.

Many thanks to Siân for talking to us. You can find out more about Siân's work via her website Siândocksey.com. Siân's just started a new podcast all about pole dancing, so, if you enjoyed this episode, you should have a listen to Pole The Other One available to download from all good podcasting apps.

The music for the podcast is from Blue Dot sessions with additional sound from freesound.org.

See you next time.

Last week's episode left us with a lot of thoughts. Here's a little bonus episode about getting involved and doing your research and the things that we learned from Siân and Chantelle's conversation. We'd love to know what you think so why not drop us a line on Twitter or Instagram?

Transcript:

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to The Revolution Begins at Home (bonus reflections podcast). My name is Cerys, I’m the producer here at The Revolution Begins at Home and, after each episode, I’m going to be sharing a couple of things the episode made me think about whilst I was helping to make it.

It’s me, back again, thinking about things and then saying them to you now.

Episode

In last week’s episode Chantelle interviewed Siân Docksey. Siân’s a comedian – you may have seen her on the BBC, in a sketch about witches, or on Instagram, pole dancing her way through the pandemic. She told us about her experience of stripping whilst searching for a City job in post-financial crash London.

I think that Siân and I left uni around the same time. I got quite lucky as I moved straight onto a postgraduate course whilst my friends applied for hundreds of grad schemes. It’s a demoralising process and time-consuming and, often, fruitless. Siân described this culture where…

Siân 19:16 you can be working and exhausted all the time and just not touching any money… And the time from where you're hired to when the money actually hits your bank account is so nuts… like I was in the final interview stages of four different jobs and was needing to like create all this stuff to get hired and things and it was like, this doesn't work. I need to get paid now.

Which was, in part, why she sought work at a strip club called Metropolis in Bethnal Green. And Siân’s experience is not unique – Chantelle also talked about her own experience signing up to an Escort Service, again out of financial necessity.

But money is only one part of the story. The conversation also focused heavily on street harassment and the kind of sexual and sexist verbal assault that is commonplace in other fields of work, like the serving industry. Siân talked about how moving from serving in a bar to dancing in a strip club took her out of an environment where her superiors refused to do anything about catcalling and unwanted touching and put her in one where the rules were clear and strictly enforced.

Siân’s experience of sex work, which she describes as 70% bad, 30% good is, obviously, not universal. She made it clear that her experience benefited from certain privileges, like being able to find work in clubs that had things like no touching rules and knowing, and being friends with, other sex workers.

But, it was still useful to hear about the world of Sex Workers’ rights through Siân’s story because, as Siân explained in the podcast, we often abstract the issue and forget that there are real people involved. This process allows for those in the debate, whether they are arguing for the Nordic model, regulation, or full or partial decriminalisation, to transform Sex Workers into many things – fallen women, bad feminists, victims, instead of listening to Sex Workers as their own advocates. Siân made her point very clear – when you are talking about Sex Workers’ Rights, you are talking about Sex Workers who have their own stories, their own arguments and, crucially, a long, long history of organising.

History of Sex Worker Activism

The history of Sex Worker Activism is the history of workers’ rights, it is the fight for unions and acceptable working conditions. But, also, it is the history of police protests, to the end of stop and search and of prison abolition. It is the fight for trans rights, disabled rights and migrant rights. It is anti-capitalist and anti-racist, as well as feminist[1] because Sex Worker activism intersects with many other forms of activism because Sex Workers are affected by so many of the structures of power that create discrimination and poverty and violence.

When we asked Siân about the history of Sex Worker activism she quoted from Juno Mac and Molly Smith’s book Revolting Prostitutes:

Siân 45:34 So Juno Mac writes: sex workers are the original feminists, often seen as merely subject to other's whims. In fact, sex workers have shaped and contributed to social movements across the world. In medieval Europe, brothel workers formed guilds and occasionally engaged in strikes or street protests in response to crackdowns, workplace closures or unacceptable working conditions. 15th century prostitutes arraigned before City Council's in Bavaria asserted their activities constituted work rather than a sin. In 1907 200, prostitutes marched in San Francisco in what's been called the original women's march to demand an end to rustle closures. A speaker at the march declared, nearly every one of these women is a mother or has someone depending on her, they're driven into this life by economic conditions. You don't do any good by attacking us. Why don't you attack these conditions?

The Point

I find this history fascinating. I was about to say “we owe so many of our rights to sex workers”, but, I mean, you’re only included in that “we” if you yourself are not a sex worker engaged in campaigning for, for instance, sexual health education[2] or immigration reforms[3] or community support for rough sleepers[4] amongst many other things.

And that seems like a pretty sweeping generalisation given what we heard in last week’s episode. I would like to be able to quote to you statistics on how many people in the UK have, at some point or another, engaged in Sex Work, but they’re quite tricky to find. Even though Sex Work is legal in the UK, many aspects of the way that people practically engage with Sex Work are illegal and it’s still heavily stigmatised so not something that many people would feel comfortable, say, checking a box about on a national survey, not that they could even do that – no UK based national surveys actually ask this question so realistically quantifying the proportion of people who have been or are Sex Workers is kind of impossible[5].

But just because we’re not counting them doesn’t mean they’re not there. (There I go again, with the “they”s and the “we”s.) I think a really important thing that came out of Siân and Chantelle’s conversation is how so much of the conversation around Sex Work seeks to side-line Sex Workers. To separate Sex Workers out as something different. It’s an uncomfortable truth but an important one, that activism isn’t perfect and that just because a movement calls for equality doesn’t mean it includes everyone. Or, as Chantelle put it, when talking about feminism specifically:

Chantelle: … we have to have to understand the ugly side of feminism, like this is part of feminism, like part of feminism contains whorephobia… it hasn't always protected the most marginalized by feminists, feminism has got a long history of upholding patriarchy, but also serving women that have got the best class position, I think it's really important just to make clear that that's not my argument - Professor Allison Phipps talks about this like… I feel like there's definitely a crossover with the trans exclusionary radical feminists as well. And like, exactly like the again, is this consistent consistency, like not protecting the most marginalized women, gender non conforming people like because the status quo suited their class position, it suited what they what they want. And it's deeply it's deeply troubling…

It is important to be critical of the movements we are a part of and to ask ourselves who are they serving, how and why. Not just that, we have to look at who gets to speak and who doesn’t. So, if you’re listening to a politician advocating for the Nordic model, when the leading Sex Worker organisations in the UK are demanding decriminalisation, you need to ask yourself who’s voice is more important.

Call to Action

Siân explained how the current conversation around Sex Workers rights in the UK is fraught with tension and, I imagine, it can feel like a difficult thing to get involved in, especially if you don’t want to support people or organisations that don’t have Sex Worker’s rights at heart (or, you know, think they do but are badly misinformed). Siân had this to say about what you can do to start supporting the cause.

Siân: in terms of everyday things that people can do to be more in solidarity with sex workers and fight for sex worker rights, fighting for decrim is the main concern like that is, again, it's not the silver bullet that will solve all the problems by any means. But it would definitely make a huge, tangible difference. But what I mentioned earlier about the stigma is something that everyone can change a little bit. So for example, if people are like, telling an anecdote or a joke, where the punchline is someone ending up having to like prostitute themselves is a phrase that people use, and that being really degrading, just kind of question that, you know, and be like, why is this the example you can think of, or when someone would be at their rock bottom, and also just things like, I don't wanna be like a language bore, but like, yeah, just being mindful of using language in and around sex work that kind of perpetuates harm towards people. And, you know, as I mentioned earlier, there is the bigger thing of like, sex worker activism and poverty relief are tied up. So I think just kind of seeing those connections a little bit more. And if people are talking about a sex worker, and like, oh, guy fell on hard times, whatever. Like, just getting people to think a little bit more about that. That's a human that's a human with probably lots of different plates that they're trying to spin. What are their conditions that mean that they resorted to this? Is it because they exhausted all other options? Maybe this is work that they like, maybe this gives freedom, independence, maybe it's a line of work they enjoy and, and, you know, I know sex workers who are very happy in their jobs. I know sex workers who are absolutely fucking miserable in their jobs. But yeah, I think that I'm more mindfulness about the kind of bigger picture of why people are sex working…

She also suggested some organisations that you can follow and support for trusted information on Sex Workers rights here in the UK. Organisations like UK Decrim Now, SWARM, The English Collective of Prostitutes and National Ugly Mugs. There are links to all these groups in the show notes.

What I have learned from this episode, and what I hope you have learned also, is that it’s not enough really for your heart to in the right place, especially if you’re privileged to be able to support from the outside. You have to do your research and, to push the metaphor, have your ears in the right place also (geographically speaking, they can be anywhere you want them to be on your body) to make sure you are staying informed and helping in a way that people actually want to be helped.

If you want to see what Siân’s up to, you can visit her website siandocksey.com and you might want to check out her new podcast Pole the Other One! Which is all about pole dancing.

[1] https://prostitutescollective.net/verso-are-sex-workers-the-original-feministsa-brief-history-of-uk-sex-worker-activism/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/aug/12/sex-workers-fighting-for-human-rights-among-worlds-most-at-risk-activists

[3] https://www.bl.uk/womens-rights/articles/english-collective-of-prostitutes-occupation-of-holy-cross-church

[4] https://www.homeless.org.uk/sites/default/files/site-attachments/EWHF%20Case%20Study%20Report%20Aug%202020.pdf

[5] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/842920/Prostitution_and_Sex_Work_Report.pdf pg. 37

In our final episode of this season, Chantelle spoke to Jemima Hartshorn from Mums for Lungs about air pollution and how to organise on an issue that feels so big and so unsolvable.

Reading list

Jemima recommends:

Following the Ella Roberta Family Foundation

Suffragette

You might also want to check out:

The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes

What Goes Around by Emily Chappelle

Back in the Frame by Jools Walker

Streets Ahead

Wheels for wellbeing

The Ranty Highwayman

The following sound effects were used in this episode:

Walking Across London Bridge JoeDinesSounds

Buses.wave dggrunzweig

"Ambience, Children Playing, Distant, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org

If you enjoyed this podcast, you should listen to the Surviving Society Podcast which is also hosted by Chantelle and check out other shows supported by Content is Queen. You can follow Cerys on Twitter or sign up to their mailing list to find out what else they're up to.

Transcript

Chantelle  00:03 Hello and welcome to the Revolution Begins at Home, a podcast about activism, what it looks like and who gets to do it.

Chantelle  00:12 My name is Chantelle Lewis. I'm a Public Sociologist and the co-founder and co-host of the Surviving Society Podcast.

Chantelle  00:21 Throughout this series, I'm going to be speaking to activists and advocates about their work. We'll be talking about what it means to be an activist, what it involves, and how structures of power determine what we consider to be activism or worthy of an activist movement.

00:45 Theme music

Chantelle  00:46 In today's episode, I spoke to Jemima Hartshorn.

Jemima Hartshorn  00:50 Sometimes it's really about coming up with small, feasible solutions to make a difference.

Chantelle  00:56 Jemima is a strategist, community leader, and an environmental campaigner. She co-founded the group Mums for Lungs, and in 2019, was named by the Evening Standard as one of the year's most influential Londoners for her work in reducing air pollution. I spoke to her about the creation of Mums for Lungs, why groups like it unnecessary, and the challenges they face when trying to make a difference. Before we hear the conversation, here are Jemima's activist influences.

Jemima Hartshorn  01:30 Well, I feel the standard one is the Suffragettes obviously. And I almost feel a bit boring by saying that at all, but I just find them so interesting, because they just fought against adversity. And some of them still living in very traditional lives. Many of them were basically married and had children and had very traditional lives and yet, they said, this is an injustice, we really want to fight for our women's rights, and we really want to vote as well. And then there were obviously Suffragettes, who took almost, you know, almost had to decide to go for a different lifestyle that was very uncommon for women who were divorced and decided not to have children and had jobs and things like that. I find it very empowering because, in a way, they were fighting in a double way, you know what I mean? Their lives themselves were so traditional to get out from that life to get into real, serious campaigning, including getting arrested and things like that. It's just really inspiring.

02:35 [theme music]

Chantelle  02:37 Hello everyone. Today, I'm excited to be joined by - remotely - joined by Jemima Hartshorn from Mums for Lungs. Jemima, thank you so much for joining me today.

Jemima Hartshorn  02:49 Well, thank you for having me. I'm super excited!

Chantelle  02:51 So Jemima, could you tell our listeners, what is Mums for Lungs?

Jemima Hartshorn  02:56 Okay, Mums for Lungs is a network of parents across London and further afield, especially because of the pandemic now, who are campaigning against air pollution. And most of us have children, most of us are sort of driven by the huge health impacts that air pollution, especially from diesel cars, and wood burning has on children's health. So that is why we campaign and that's why we get together.

Chantelle  03:26 So how did you start this work? How did Mums for Lungs get started?

Jemima Hartshorn  03:31 Well, I was on maternity leave for the first time and I have a background of being Human Rights Lawyer and I worked-

Chantelle  03:37 Wait! Jemima, roll back, roll back that is like that is big business right? Jemima, legend in the room, legend on the show. The human rights lawyer, let's not let's not let's not just sweep over that. Please, please tell us more.

Jemima Hartshorn  03:53 Okay, this is really awkward. I'm literally blushing here and no one can see it because it's a podcast.

Chantelle  03:57 It's important! I've said before on this show - whenever I interview men, I have to listen to them go on and on and on about all that shit and then the women just kind of skirt over all their amazing achievements. So please, you're allowed to blush, but equally, this is a space for bigging you up.

Jemima Hartshorn  04:15 [laughing] Thank you Chantelle. So, yeah, so I, you know, I I was working as a Human Rights Lawyer in a charity on Defense Rights in Brussels and in London. So that's what I was doing. I qualified as a lawyer in Germany many years ago. Anyway, I sort of went on maternity leave in 2016 for the first time and I was living in a very polluted and very busy area of London. I was living in Brixton. We were living on Coldharbour Lane, and I was you know, pushing the pram and so on. And I started thinking at this one stage that many mums and dads perhaps too will know when you're sort of ready to leave the baby bubble, you're sort of done with talking only about like poo and naps and solid food and I was you know, looking around, there was cars everywhere and cars are smelly and dangerous. I was like, "this is not great." And I started reading about air pollution of it. And it's one of these topics that when you start reading about it, you suddenly see articles and issues around everywhere. So you know, I did that I started talking about air pollution to other people. And it turned out there was a bunch of us who were really concerned about air pollution and the health impacts it has, because air pollution at the levels that we experienced in London can stunt children's lung growth, strong links to exacerbating and causing cancer and asthma and wheezing, and even mental health issues. All these things are very closely linked. And we started getting really worried. And it's like, ok we want to do something! And because I had this background of the, you know, Human Rights Lawyer-y stuff of wanting to change things, when I, when I see problems, I was like, okay, "the law needs to be different, the policies need to be different..." And we started Mums for Lungs, and it was really cool. On Wednesday afternoons we would meet, and there was as many parents, most of us mums, to be fair, and babies in the room. So there'd be paddling pools, or whatever we needed to make it possible and fun for the children at the same time, but it was brilliant. And it's sort of going from there.

Chantelle  06:15 That's amazing Jemima. So to what extent is Mums for Lungs about educating people about the dangers of air pollution, whilst also being about lobbying the Government and lawmakers about air pollution? Like how would you say the time is divided in the organization?

Jemima Hartshorn  06:40 I would say it's probably about perhaps half-half or so? But it really depends, because we're an organization - we're primarily grassroots,

Chantelle  06:49 Yes!

Jemima Hartshorn  06:50 ...and volunteers. So we have a little bit of funding now. You know, me and another, mother are sort of funded part time to do a bit of work sometimes for Mums for Lungs, but most of us are volunteers, and we volunteer as well. So you know, everyone, as a volunteer always brings what they bring, and they want to bring. So you know, as a volunteer, if you decide that your big thing is to educate people, then you do that. And if your big thing is to write letters to policymakers to change the law, then you do that. So it sort of really depends on what we're doing. But also, I feel that raising awareness and getting policy to change and getting government to finally address the issue of air pollution are very closely linked, because government, at least that's my opinion, will only do things if a lot of people show that they care. So people can only care if they know about the issue. So it starts with raising awareness, and giving really easy ways that people can join our campaigns and show that air pollution is an issue that they want to address. And then I hope that will translate into government change.

Chantelle  07:58 And why is it that government changes so slow on the matter of air pollution?

Jemima Hartshorn  08:04 To be completely honest, I don't know and I don't understand because apart from COVID, the biggest public health issue we have in the UK, it you know, it's a huge issue across the world, but even in the UK, about 40,000 people die every year earlier than they would have if it weren't for the high levels of air pollution and people die of issues like a cardiac arrest, or they die of a stroke or they die of the cancer and they won't know, their family won't know that it was air pollution that made this illness so bad, that that is the reason they actually died. So we're talking 40,000 preventable deaths across the UK every year, but it is rarely known and death certificates don't really say that apart from this one case where very tragically a little girl died a few years ago in South London.

Chantelle  08:59 That's Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah who died. Ella who lived near the South circular road in Lewisham, Southeast London died in 2013. An inquest found air pollution had made had made a material contribution to her death.

Jemima Hartshorn  09:13 Yes, and her mother Rosamund fought so strong for this recognition and continues to be the most inspiring campaigner and mum around to be honest, yet, there has not been the change in law that we need to see and the change in policy because if you really wanted to address air pollution, the first two changes that would be absolutely necessary basically would be to probably ban diesel cars in cities and ban wood burning for comfort across the country. Those are the two biggest sources of air pollution and where it is not necessary to either drive a diesel vehicle or have a woodburner for warmth. It just needs to be stopped both of it.

10:02 [sound of traffic]

Chantelle  10:05 I'm always interested in how we can find multi class alliances and solidarities. Not in a sort of apathetic way just in like a sort of practical way. And actually like this this issue, just like with a global pandemic, this is an issue that is - that affects everyone doesn't affect everyone equally, as we know, like, particularly we think about housing and where people live. But in terms of who... we're all breathing that same air, some of us might be more exposed to it than others because of, yeah, reasons such as what access to materials we have, what housing we have, but surely, as you said, like, I don't understand why this doesn't, this isn't being picked up. Surely the solidarities can be made across class status generations on this issue?

Jemima Hartshorn  10:57 Yes, I totally agree in the way I'm just standing there shocked all the time by how little action is being taken, especially by central government, that is, you know, really resisting all efforts. And it's really doing only very, very tiny steps to clean up the air. But currently, our government has drafted a new environment bill, and it has not committed to legal limits on air pollution in this law that would be in line with WHO guideline limits. So we're standing here and people are dying - 40,000 people a year, many more 1000s are ill, really ill and can't do certain things, can't work because of bad asthma or, you know, I know an amazing mom who's involved with Mums for Lungs a lot and her son has got wheezing. She was told a few years ago to no longer walk by "traffic-y roads". I mean, how is that meant to work in a city like London?

Chantelle  12:01 It's just- it's just mad, cuz it's putting... it's always putting things back onto the individual rather than taking responsibility. And it's so disappointing.

Jemima Hartshorn  12:11 I know. And it's like, you know, drive a little less well, you know, what, like, people would drive less if public transport were cheaper. If it were better. In the outer boroughs of London, even, not even to think of cities like Birmingham or Manchester that have much less public transport, there's a real problem with public transport to getting from one area to the other. And I was listening to an amazing presentation by Tiffany Lamb, a while back who's sort of, you know, highlighted how the public transport is all really in a way basically designed for men. Because it is the public transport... even if you look at London, most of the tube lines basically go in, right? Into the centre of London, but statistically actually more of the school ones, that will be across boroughs, sort of further out East-West, those trips, they are done by mothers in the majority, you know, taking a kid to a hobby in the afternoon, or this kind of stuff, going to birthday parties, all of this is much more done on an East-West access, than going into the centre of London, and there you're then relying on buses that are slow, not often coming, you don't know if you can take the pram on it, this kind of stuff. It's really, it's really quite staggering, if you sort of look at the bigger picture, you know, how public transport is designed and how difficult it is in some cases to not drive but there's obviously other issues as well. So diesel vehicles still in 2021, their emissions don't actually meet what they are legally allowed to emit. So that's an absolute shocker. There was a huge diesel scandal in 2015, where it turned out that most of the companies producing cars that are diesel cars, and that are, you know, the very often sold cars across Europe, were all basically emitting much more toxic nitrogen dioxide, which is the one that exacerbates wheezing, gives you asthma, that kind of - lung inflammation, then they were legally allowed. You know what happened in the US? Some of the people who had designed these cheating cars, went to prison. In Germany, these companies were fined billions. And in the UK, they got a slap on the hand and we're told that this was not good. That's it, nothing else happened. There is so many related issues that I just find really shocking.

Chantelle  14:48 I think Jemima everything you've just said is just so true. And I'm just sat here like, like want to pull my hair out like because the thing that - the thing that's sort of in the back of my head or the word that's in the back of my head is capitalism. Because actually, like what I was taught, I was trying to say to you like, where are the solidarities? Like what, like surely this is something that people can be united on what they think about it. But actually, there's, there's money to be made, isn't there? There's money to be made in air pollution. And actually, it-it does come down to a moral question. Are we happy for some people to die of air pollution for the sake of big business? Like when you're talking about, so I'm just become like, wow, okay "so that's the question, really!"

Jemima Hartshorn  15:34 Yes, I think you're right. And that seems to be the question. And currently, the Government is answering it in a certain way. And it's making no amendments in its policies and laws that would stop that. And it's just very, very depressing. It's just horrible. Today is a medium high pollution day.

Chantelle  15:57 Yeah, because it's warm today, isn't it? It's warm today, yeah.

Jemima Hartshorn  16:00 I got a warning on my phone today. I'm like, I mean, what am I supposed to do? As a result? I can't do anything. It's just really depressing. The whole issue. However, I feel like I'm getting in a very, very, very depressed mindset here. The whole thing I tried to do with my campaigning with the amazing volunteers that do all this campaigning with me is to find positive ways to engage on this issue, to raise awareness of it in a more positive way and get people to adopt changes that then signal to government that people as a whole are ready for a change. So, for example, we ran a campaign about a year ago for the start of school again, after all the lockdowns and stuff in September, where I think about 150 volunteers across the country put up 10 or more colorful posters near schools in particular, that said things like "connect and walk together to school", this kind of messaging, we like people to think about why it is actually fun to travel in a way to school and elsewhere of course, that is non polluting, ie not in a car. Sorry, I was just trying to change the topic, we were going down a very gloomy...

Chantelle  17:14 No, no, no. Yes. And yes, that's I would like to No, no, [laughing] what I actually wanted to ask you is a combination of what are some of the things that Mum for Lungs have achieved over the past few years? And then secondly, what have you got planned for the foreseeable future?

Jemima Hartshorn  17:32 The problem is with achievement in air pollution is there's not a single thing I could point to and say, this has only happened because of Mums for Lungs. I like to think that we are

Chantelle  17:42 Contributing to change?

Jemima Hartshorn  17:44 A noisy voice

Chantelle  17:45 Yes!

Jemima Hartshorn  17:46 I hope that we are successful in raising awareness on social media and in other ways by putting up posters and flyers and things like that. And we have been really banging the drum for School Streets, which is a scheme whereby the road by a school is closed at drop off and pickup times for about an hour, which means that where the children are most clustered, and their parents and carers and siblings at the school gate, the pollution levels will be down. And it also really encourages people to walk or cycle to school because if you have to get out of the car the last 300 meters anyway, for many people, the school run is actually so short, it's not really worth driving at all. So we've, you know, been really supporting parents on campaigning for School Streets and doing a lot drumming around it. And that is, I think about 350 School Streets in London now. And a year ago, I think it was about 60.

Chantelle  18:42 That's amazing! It's so amazing.

18:45 [sound of a bus]

Chantelle  18:53 I didn't grow up in the city. I grew up in the suburbs. But I grew up in the 90s, and the 00s. And we used to be able to take our bikes to school, and then it stopped like quite abruptly. And I don't know what-I mean... and I also was thinking about how like air pollution has become like, air pollution should now be considered the most important thing in terms of protecting children around school areas, and also all of us in general. But the other thing that I was thinking about is how this compares to there was like really big campaigns, I think during the sort of New Labour years for sort of "safe streets" in terms of the speed limit, and that - like the combination of the smoking ban, and the speed limit really kind of dominates my understanding of how the government and other sort of lobbyists which were, not lobbyists, sorry, campaigners, were looking to protect children. And it's really interesting, but it doesn't seem like with air pollution, it doesn't seem to have got the same kind of media attention. Like when it came to, when I was growing up, like, obviously getting not that long ago, I'm only 28, young people getting run over like that was like the big that was a big things. Cars speeding and also smoking. And it's like, how, how would these connections not been made? And perhaps it comes back to the point that you said earlier in terms of central government not taking enough leadership on these matters? Maybe central government did do a good job on those matters? I don't I don't know. Does that kind of make - does it make sense the connections I'm trying to make there?

Jemima Hartshorn  20:30 Yeah, yeah. You know, I didn't grow up in the UK. I grew up in Germany. So you know, I don't know what the feeling was. But you're not the first one to raise it. It's weird. I don't know. Because there are strong similarities between smoking and air pollution, both from diesel cars, as well as from wood burning. It is just so weird, because UK has been violating a commitment to have certain air pollution levels for 11 years now. And it's just been getting away with it. There is like laws that say by 2010, air pollution has to be below 40 milligrams of nitrogen dioxide annually per year. And the UK exceeds it in many, many areas. And it just seems to be, or I should say England, perhaps, but it just seems to be acceptable. And I'm like where does this come from? And I also see that you were talking about speeding, I do get a bit surprised by these issues, because like in Germany, it is completely acceptable that there is lots of speed cameras. Lots! And there are moving speed cameras, and if you get fined, you pay the fine and you're embarrassed because it's not okay. Right? You shouldn't be speeding because you're danger on the road. In the UK, if someone speeds, it's like, oh my god, they they're being, like I'm being used as a cash cow! I'm like NO.

Chantelle  21:54 Yeah.

Jemima Hartshorn  21:55 What-why are you a cash cow? This is not acceptable!

Chantelle  21:58 British exceptionalism, it's a hell of a drug. Like the other thing I did didn't mention as well was drink drive it and that was another massive, massive. I mean, people obviously still do it now. But that was a massive government backed campaign to stop, yeah, speeding, drink driving. It's just like, why has the same thing happened?

Jemima Hartshorn  22:17 Why has that stopped? And what is this idea about a cash cow? And you know, you will see people driving into areas that say you're not allowed to drive here will say and people will say "well, I drove there but I didn't know the road sign..." And they'll share that happily on like Next Door Neighbours and Facebook. You shouldn't be a driver. You wouldn't like as a driver admit to not knowing a road sign like! You know, I'm just really baffled. And the problem is that all of this has a real knock on effect on cycling. So I know of many people, by the way, including myself, who are very uncomfortable cycling, or I only got into cycling during the pandemic, because people say it's too dangerous. And I think it is very dangerous to be cycling on London's roads, and we don't have a car and accordingly, I'm always on the bus or on the tube with my young children. But all my friends in Germany with young children are all cycling all the time. And I feel like if I look at the buses, they are often very full. And someone like me, who is like healthy and has two strong legs should really be cycling everywhere. And leaving the bus free for those people who really need the bus. But it's dangerous and I find it dangerous. And cars are not considerate of cyclists. So I've been like on a road cycling with my small daughter, my daughter's two, and she was on the bike seat in front of me and the car would hoot at me! And I'm like, excuse me? I actually have a right to being here.

Chantelle  23:45 So now we're going, now we're going from British Exceptionalism to London madness [laughter]

Jemima Hartshorn  23:50 That has a knock on effect. So I always think, everyone who's driving in London if they don't need to, or if they're driving badly, they are polluting twice perhaps, because once they're polluting because they're driving and secondly, they are potentially, they're a driver who discourages and scares another cyclist from driving. So this you know, I know people who get into cars because they say cycling is too dangerous. So if all drivers were more considerate more people would feel comfortable to cycle and yeah, you know, air pollution would would be reduced.

Chantelle  24:30 Also like I think without trying to hone in on the individual too much, like the people in power set the parameters for how you behave as citizens don't they? Like they set the example, if they're behaving in ways that are inconsiderate of your fellow citizens, then it normalizes it.

Jemima Hartshorn  24:50 Totally. And that should be just you know, there should be an overhaul of the speed limit system, for example, and government should be really clear and say look, we're going for Vision Zero, as it was called the Vision Zero of zero road deaths and say, look, we've had enough of it, we're not accepting this, so, you know, we're gonna put in more public transport a lot more speed cameras, and if you get fined, you get fined seriously and if you get caught several times you lose your driving licence for six months. And I reckon that would really make people reconsider how they drive. And it frankly will take the worst drivers off the road.

25:27 [children playing]

Chantelle  25:34 So obviously, we've been in the last sort of 18 months, a global pandemic - COVID-19. How is the impact of the pandemic impacted your campaign at Mums for Lungs?

Jemima Hartshorn  25:47 It's been really interesting for us because obviously, firstly, there was a feeling that we couldn't really campaign because there was this pandemic, and it was throwing everyone into a really weird and scary world. And all of us were very, very worried. But then it feels like it has equally really raised the awareness of the need to protect our lungs. Right just today, the Mayor of London has published a report, which highlights the links of getting more sick from COVID-19 if you've been exposed to higher air pollution. So I think that awareness is there and for us from a volunteer campaigning group, that also every listener here is very, very welcome to join, please, if you have children or not, we have also seen that the move to zoom has been actually for us quite beneficial. So we have people joining from across the country, and across London on a much more regular basis than we previously did when we met in the three different boroughs of London, you know, directly in the pub. But I think other things is that, yeah, the awareness of air pollution has increased but equally a sort of car dependency has perhaps become more than norm. People were really worried about getting on public transport during a pandemic, understandably, so I think it will take much work to get away from this habit again and remind people of getting back onto public transport in order to reduce air pollution.

Chantelle  25:50 Because you think about that time like in like, think about the lockdowns, like what the cities were like, like it was just so quiet. And it was just there was no traffic on the road. And like the air like you could breathe- like it was so noticeable. Like you can fit you can see it and you can feel it, the air just cleaner. And now actually like as we're recording now we're in September 2021, I'm looking out the window, and I'm walking like down the street, I'm walking across Waterloo Bridge, and the pollution is just back with a vengeance and so are the cars!

Jemima Hartshorn  27:49 Yes, in many areas, pollution is likely to be higher than it was pre pandemic, because

Jemima Hartshorn  27:54 people have gotten into habits of driving a lot. And the other thing is that in the pandemic, obviously people really got into deliveries, you know, food deliveries. So a lot of the different delivery companies, including, for example, Sainsbury's, and Tesco and so on, they hired loads, loads and loads of drivers. People really got into Amazon, much more than they were before. And that is a really worrying, change. And I'm not quite sure how we are going to make that shift again, that people will actually remember to go to their local High Street and not order from Amazon. That will people will actually return to going shopping by themselves on foot or with a bike to do their food shopping as well. So, you know, the pandemic has sort of increased awareness of lung health, but has also made us get into habits that are really, really bad from an air pollution perspective. So it's a really big risk to to to, you know, to combine again, and to get back into it. And I don't know how we're gonna to manage that as campaigners. We actually recently did a campaign where we looked at the monitors with an amazing organization called the Environmental Defense Fund. And they realized that in 2020, even when traffic was much reduced 15 of the air pollution monitors in London recorded illegal levels across the whole year. So that included the very low pollution months of April, May and June. And we put out stencils in these areas saying this monitor is you know, recorded illegal levels of air pollution because we want people to know, you know, and we've got a bit of media around it and in quite a lot of boroughs. So that was great. But it was very, very shocking to see how am I even doing the pandemic air pollution was and I think everyone is really - all campaigners are worried and anxious to see how air pollution will go in the next few months. Now that you know, London and the world have reopened quite a lot, but people have perhaps gotten into into bad habit. So, you know, we are really campaigning for the Mayor of London to take much bolder action and protect young and old lungs across London by implementing much stronger legislation and policies to really reduce driving because we know so much about lung health now. We need to be healthy - if every breath you take is polluted, you're never going to be a happy and healthy being in London.

Chantelle  27:54 No!

Chantelle  30:23 Definitely. Oh Jemima, thank you so much that was absolutely brilliant!

Jemima Hartshorn  30:28 Well, thank you, this has been really fun.

[theme music]

Chantelle  30:40 Thanks for listening to the Revolution Begins at Home.

Chantelle  30:43 If you enjoyed it, you should check out other podcasts supported by Content is Queen.  

Chantelle  30:48 This podcast was presented by myself Chantelle Lewis and produced by Cerys Bradley. If you want to hear more of our work, there are links in the description.

Chantelle  30:58 Many thanks to Jemima for talking to us. You can find out more about Mums for Lungs on their website. If you want to help reduce air pollution in London or wherever you are, Mums for Lungs is a great place to start. You might also want to check out the reading list we've included in the description of this podcast. The music for the podcast is from Blue Dot sessions with additional sound from freesound.org.

Chantelle  31:24 See you next time.

 It's time again for a bonus podcast. A little extra audio for your ears. We thought that last week's episode was enraging and encouraging and devastating and hopeful and we had many thoughts and feelings and so we wrote them down and then said them out loud. This is the final episode in our first series and we'd love to know what you thought of it so why not leave us a review on iTunes or drop us a message on Instagram. We want to hear what you liked and what we could improve on as well as the kinds of activists that you want to hear from next time.

Transcript

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to The Revolution Begins at Home (bonus reflections podcast). My name is Cerys, I’m the producer here at The Revolution Begins at Home and, after each episode, I’m going to be sharing a couple of things the episode made me think about whilst I was helping to make it.

I have so many thoughts about this episode and, luckily for you, I am not going to just list all the things that I hate about cars or all of the terrible experiences I have had on my bike…

Episode

If you tuned into last week’s episode, and I really should say at this point, if you haven’t, you really need to go back and listen to it. Like, you’re missing the best bits of this podcast, i.e., the bits where Chantelle talks to some amazing activists and advocates about the incredible work they do, not this bit where I just sort of prattle on about my feelings and whatnot. Seriously, we’ve got some really good interviews in this podcast, go listen to them.

Anyway, if you tuned into last week’s episode, you’ll know that Chantelle spoke to Jemima Hartshorn, a human rights lawyer, environmental campaigner and cofounder of the organization Mums for Lungs.

Mums for Lungs fights to reduce air pollution in London through lots of different initiatives including school streets (streets that are closed to traffic during school opening and closing times). They have a wide variety of climate change goals, such as…

Jemima one of the things we want to see in London, for example, is that the whole bus fleet is electrified by 2030 at the very latest, with a priority of starting reducing those other polluting buses, on those main roads along schools.

and

Jemima we really want to see the ultra low emission zone that's being extended, expanded…. There's one problem with school streets, which is that they have never been delivered anywhere, where there is a really big road. So a main road or High Street are all TfL red routes, which are, obviously, the most polluting roads, because they have the most cars on them are those that don't get closed. So we've been complaining a lot about those issues as well.

The Ultra-Low Emission Zone charges drivers whose cars don’t meet a set of emission standards to drive within the zone and so, hopefully, will disincentivize drivers who have highly polluting cars. This means that schools in the zone that aren’t on school streets should also benefit from reduced amounts of traffic. 

Mums for Lungs isn’t just looking at traffic and at drivers though.

Jemima it's also really about coming up with small feasible solutions.. so you know, providing support for schools and ideas around walking buses, or really encouraging schools to work more with organizations, allowing the neighbourhood to travel for the school run and that kind of stuff…

They have a lot of different projects, a lot of different solutions all coming at this one, massive problem of air pollution.

The problem

I like to cycle, to be honest, the state of London’s roads really stresses me out. I’ve had a lot of terrible experiences, a lot of close calls and a lot of lungful’s of toxins that have come straight out the back of a bus. But, I’ve already committed to not telling you about all of that in detail. I just want you to know that I found it really quite cathartic to hear Jemima speak so passionately about the work that she does and why however, when she talked us through the actual ins and outs of the organisation’s activism, I also found it quite overwhelming.

Air pollution, Climate Change, well, they’re just massive issues, aren’t they? We need people to stop driving diesel cars but how else are they going to get around? I think I’m doing a good thing by cycling but I always order online instead of going to the shops. Sure, you can make sure you switch the light off when you leave but that’s not going to put out the literal fire in the Gulf of Mexico. We’ve basically destroyed the world beyond repair but that doesn’t mean it’s futile to make small changes now except we need big changes and I can’t make them by myself but if I’m not demanding those changes then the people who can make the changes probably won’t bother and none of this changes the fact that I can’t cycle two miles up the road to the park without a driver skipping a red light and nearly hitting and killing me.

Honestly, I don’t know where to start.

I’m kind of in awe of Jemima and the volunteers she works with who get up every day and try to make the world a better place and then try to take their kids to school or to the doctors or a friend’s house and are repeatedly confronted with the thousands of things that need to be changed before they can even think about, you know, making a real difference, especially when…

Jemima The problem is with achievement in air pollution is there's not a single thing I could point to and say, this has only happened because of Mums for Lungs

Kind of, adds to the futility of the process, doesn’t it?

Even though Jemima was very humble in the way she described the work of Mums for Lungs, they are making a big difference by getting people involved in Climate Change activism which is accessible. Their approach, which provides paddling pools for children at meetings and helps you play to your strength, I think, is such an amazing way of conducting collective activism that it calms the deer in the headlights panic that contemplating the fate of the environment often gives me.

The solution

In the interview, Chantelle and Jemima kept returning to this push and pull between individual and collective responsibility. So, my choices and my actions are having a direct environmental impact on the world. As are yours. We can both decide to make lifestyle changes, like switching to a vegetarian diet or unplugging the kettle when we’re not using it or not dropping our kids off at school in a fuck off massive tank of a car and they will be but a drop in the ocean of the global impact on the planet this year especially when compared to say one of the 20 companies responsible for 35% of all greenhouse gas emissions[1].

And when we put the responsibility on individuals that detracts from the system which allows, encourages and requires people to pollute more than they would if they could easily get the bus or shop local or walk their kids to school.

But, if we fall into the trap of saying that everything is the fault of Shell and MacDonald’s and mega corporations then we absolve ourselves of the responsibility of making more environmentally friendly choices. It’s that kind of thinking that allows people like my brother to feel good about the fact that he recycles even though he has two cars one of which is big enough to eat an average sized hatchback (and also for me to feel some sort of moral high ground as if I didn’t get Maccy D’s on the way home last night and still feel kinda ok about that because, hey, at least I took public transport there).

These two approaches are in tension with each other, but we have to keep both ideas in our head and be mindful of both at the same time. And that’s partly because things like air pollution, they don’t affect us all equally. So, sure, I don’t pollute as much as an oil company but my impact on my environment is orders of magnitude bigger than many people across the world. I use more electronic devices, I travel more, I eat more imported food, I buy more stuff than a lot of the world’s population and by virtue of my comparative wealth and the place where I live, I am less affected by things like rising sea levels and extreme weather caused by Climate Change.

Even thinking more locally, I live in an area of comparatively higher air quality than many places in London. There is a correlation between the most polluted and the poorest areas in this city[2]. In the episode, Chantelle talked about class solidarity, about how this is an issue that we should all be fighting on. To me, that means not passing the responsibility onto the next polluter up the chain, but it also means making systemic changes, changing the law for everyone, not just working with your local community to make your corner of the city greener and nicer and pushing the pollutants a little further out.

Call to arms

I think that Mums for Lungs have found this amazing balance between thinking about the bigger picture and targeting the biggest polluters and not getting overwhelmed by the problem but breaking it into smaller chunks that can be chipped away at until they don’t feel so impossible.

What I have learned from this episode and hope that you have learned to, is that there are little things you can do that make big differences. We all have a responsibility to think about the way we engage with the world and the impact we are having on it. And, whilst this is not a problem that can be solved by individuals and individual actions, we do need to work together to demand change and hold companies and governments accountable. It’s not hopeless and if we don’t do anything nothing will change.

If you want to get involved and help fight air pollution, Mums for Lungs are always looking for more people to join and support them so head over to their website mumsforlungs.org.

Outro

Thanks for listening to The Revolution Begins at Home Bonus Reflections podcast. If you enjoyed it, you should check out other podcasts supported my Content is Queen.

This podcast was presented by myself Cerys Bradley.

Many thanks to Chantelle and Jemima for their great conversation, which you can listen to in last week’s episode. Thanks also to Amanda Moorghen for her help and advice.

The music for this podcast is from Blue Dot Sessions.

Thanks for listening!

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/revealed-20-firms-third-carbon-emissions

[2] https://www.trustforlondon.org.uk/news/london-inequalities-infect-the-air-we-breathe/