This week I was mistaken for another black MP – again
You couldn’t make it up. If you did nobody would believe you.
On Monday, just a week after the BBC ran a story about Kobe Bryant’s death using pictures of LeBron James, they showed a picture of my comrade, Marsha de Cordova, the MP for Battersea, addressing the House of Commons on the Agriculture Bill.
The trouble is that underneath they used my name and claimed she was the MP for Brent. The Evening Standard followed up on the story the day after but then managed to use a picture of Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the MP for Streatham.
There are all sorts of points I could make here. The clear need for more diversity in the newsroom, not so that they look different but so they act differently. Is it any wonder the media covers the issues of race and racism the way they do?
I could illustrate how this plays out in more problematic ways in the House of Commons itself. Recently a Tory MP approached Abena Oppong-Asare, another black colleague recently elected to the House, and gave her his used bag because he thought she was a cleaner; I once entered the Members’ lift only to be told that ‘this lift really isn’t for cleaners.’
I could talk about how black people are constantly misidentified as criminals, drug dealers, illegal immigrants and gang members. Or how we have to raise our children without the expectation that they will necessarily be seen for who they are, and what they do. Or the fact that we have to work twice as hard just to be recognised.
But for now I want to concentrate on this one very human point. The problem here is not about making a mistake – all people get things wrong from time to time. It is about making an effort.
Mistakes like this say that no matter how well you do, you will still look like just another black woman to people who are paid to know better.
When so many people on so many different levels of an institution keep making the same mistake it’s no longer plausible to treat each one as an isolated incident.
Are you willing to make the effort to identify me for who I am, and to identify Marsha, Abena or Belle for who they are? It’s about making an effort to recognise people for who they are and the qualities they bring to the table.
It’s not for me to say why this keeps happening – it’s for the people who do it to say why they have done it and how they will address their mistake.
We live in an Alice in Wonderland world where nobody denies we have racism but nobody will admit to being racist or having a bias, which makes it worse to actually point out racism than to do something racist.
But for now it falls to me to explain how it feels to have to continually justify my existence in a place where I have every right to be. I have had responsibilities under two Labour prime ministers and serve as a shadow minister.
It’s all very well telling black kids that if they work hard they can succeed. But the experience of so many of my colleagues suggests that no matter how well you do, you will still look like just another black woman to people who are paid to know better.
This is not the first time it’s happened. Marsha and I have been mistaken for each other a couple of times. We don’t always talk about it. Sometimes we will laugh about it. Life’s too short.
But being wrongly identified the day after I had passed the threshold to become a candidate in the race to be deputy leader of my party, highlights the responsibility Labour has to lead the way on this issue. As John McDonnell said, having a black working class woman as deputy leader would show what our party is all about.
Yet some people think they’re above it. Only today I had somebody write that one of my opponents in the race for deputy leader can represent the views of a black woman better than a black woman herself with lived experience.
I wonder how many times he’s been mistaken for a cleaner or a colleague just because of the colour of his skin. You really couldn’t make it up.
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