Too often, we’ve been invited to ‘sit at the table’ and ‘have our voices heard’ - but what is the truth we speak when we’re talking with each other, and the table is ours? We hear a lot about creatives and audiences from our community, how we are hard to reach, how we face barriers, how we should be engaged. But better insights and a closer mutual understanding comes with familiarity. Before we are to be ‘engaged’ and ‘reached’, we first want to be seen and understood as individuals, as people with diverse backgrounds and life experiences.
There’s a lot of umbrella terms used to describe our community; ‘BAME’, ‘Black Asian Minority Ethnic’, ‘Urban’, ‘Diverse’, ‘Ethnic Minority’, the list continues. What these terms don’t tell you is the different cultures and identities we have. Some of us go by Somali-Welsh, others are British-Asian. We’re third generation Cardiff Cypriots, we’re Bajan, we’re Nigerian, we’re mixed, we’re Black. And we come with our own cultural differences. Umbrella terms don’t capture the richness of our community, of our diverse cultures and the richness of our roots. But there is something we all have in common. We’ve all experienced racism and discrimination. Terms like ‘Communities who experience racism’ or ‘Minoritised Communities’ drive that point home - we’re not monolithic, and we’re not born as minorities - we’re made to feel minoritised through the prejudices we encounter. It is the same racism and prejudices, cultural and institutional, which single us out that leads to our under-representation in the cultural sector and creative arts. This report brings us together as a community, but we speak with our individual voices against the minoritization and racism we experience.
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