Last week was probably the best time for me to shadow the Race Alliance Wales (RAW) steering group, as they launched their Manifesto for an Anti-Racist Wales. The manifesto lists 69 interdependent ways that we can work as individuals and collectives to make Wales an anti-racist country with an anti-racist government, just as the last Welsh government pledged to be a feminist one.
RAW was founded to enable individuals and organisations to work collectively to look at race and racism in Wales. One of RAW’s development workers, Leila Usmani, told me she and her colleague Jami Abramson spend much of their time researching. Currently, Leila is working on an evidence paper into the representation of racially minoritized people in public and political life in Wales, while Jami is creating an evidence paper on racism in education; the papers will be published in January and March 2021, respectively. These peer research projects don’t just look into what the problems are or why the problems exist, but they crucially explore how these problems can be solved. These active research projects will make a real difference to racially minoritized people across Wales by helping us all to actively tackle racism, rather than just talk about racism. As their website says, “Race Alliance Wales isn’t just a talking shop. We are all about taking action.”
RAW’s passion for ensuring that anti-racist work is active rather than passive was clear during the manifesto launch; they focused on moving from #Rhetoric2Reality. If you’re looking for an organisation that wants to look anti-racist more than it wants to be anti-racist, then RAW probably isn’t for you. However, if you genuinely care about changing Wales for the better, and you want to put work into making those changes, then RAW is a great place to be.
