Our Assistant Director of Strategy and Policy, Sam Rodger, shares insights from a recent delegation to the USA, where he engaged with a range of communities, officials, and academics on the challenges of tackling race inequity.
My interest in equality first started in the 1980s. It was a wish of my parents for me to receive a ‘good education’. I was one of only four Black pupils in middle and high school, one that had changed from a boys’ grammar to a comprehensive. I could clearly see staff and teachers struggling with the new intake of Black faces that looked very different from other children; it was around then that I started, indirectly, forming questions about equality whilst facing the stark realisation about what difference meant.
For most of us, agency is something that, until recently, was easy to take for granted. In normal life, we make hundreds of choices every day and feel, for the most part, that decisions regarding our life and our health are ours to make. In other words, we feel free.
