None of us is immune to unconscious bias
Edward Enninful with supermodel Naomi Campbell. Reuters/ File
Edward Enninful was recently told by a security guard at his workplace, the central London office of British Vogue, to “use the loading bay” as he tried to enter the building. He wasn’t delivering a van full of cucumber water and champagne, which is what I imagine they all drink on the editorial floor. He was, in fact, the editor in chief of the iconic fashion magazine simply trying to get into work.
Enninful wasn’t wearing overalls or driving a white van. But he is black, and the security guard assumed he was delivering something. And there we have unconscious racial profiling in action.
What a world when a black guy is not only never assumed to be the boss, but not even assumed to be the one serving the boss coffee, sacrificing his relationships to impress the boss, or getting his hands on an as-yet-unpublished manuscript by the world’s most popular children’s author so the kids of the boss can read it before anybody else (The Devil Wears Prada is, I’m afraid, the only insight I have into the world of fashion magazines).
The security guard “was dismissed”, according to Enninful’s Twitter post. This action taken by the global publishing house Conde Nast, which owns the Vogue titles, demonstrates a will to change the status quo, but if the profiling was unconscious then it doesn’t solve the problem. To not question why you automatically think a black man is delivering something means that you simply have not seen enough black or non-white people in positions of power.
Here’s a bit of honesty: none of us are immune to unconscious bias. In Los Angeles once, many years ago when I was about 25, I went into a fancy restaurant. I walked straight up to a good looking, smartly dressed black guy and politely asked him for “a table for two please”. He was not a waiter; he was a fellow diner.
It was obvious to both to us what had happened. Mortified, I apologised. “Don’t worry,” he said, “it happens all the time” – which didn’t help to not make me feel like a big fat racist.
Of course, it’s happened a good few times the other way around too. At a hotel I was staying at on tour, a couple asked me if I wouldn’t mind cleaning their room while they were at breakfast. They were so polite about it that I almost fetched a duster.
Another time, at a different hotel, a guest complained to me that they had no toilet rolls in their room. I wanted to say, “Would you mind letting me know if you have a number one or number two? Then I can bring the appropriate amount to your room”, but I was afraid of getting the real cleaner into trouble.
Meaningful representation simply isn’t happening because excruciating assumptions like these are still routinely made, especially in the creative industries. Just this week the comedian Dane Baptiste, a black man who has spoken out relentlessly about the unconscious bias of comedy and the entertainment industry as a whole, was sent a publicity shot to approve by a television production company which wanted to book him for a show. The photo they sent was of Richard Blackwood – who is, by all accounts, an entirely different black comedian.
If TV producers can’t differentiate the one black guy they have booked from another – if they can’t be trusted to be absolutely belt and braces about this kind of thing, at any time let alone in the era of Black Lives Matter – then what prayer did a clock-watching security guard have at the offices of an industry equally lacking in diversity?
If that security guard had been raised with more non-white people on TV, in the world of publishing, in journalism, as the head of his school, or if a black person had interviewed him and given him the job as a security guard, this ghastly situation would not have occurred. And he’d still have a job.
People like me call for diversity not just because we want to be represented, but to stop everyone – from the police to security guards to toilet-paperless-tourists – judging people by the colour of their skin.
I’ve said it again and again: we want to be part of the gang. Not just to ‘”tell our stories”, not just to tick boxes, but to be ourselves. Let us be normal. Let us in.
