January 2022 saw the end of lockdown in the UK. Despite rising rates of Covid-19 infection Britain has opted to live with the virus. While it is too early to say the pandemic is over, we can suggest we are at least in a hiatus. This period of pause is one which allows a moment of reflection on the pandemic and what it revealed about the levels of trust and mistrust towards science and authority in British society. I am particularly concerned by the prevalence of such attitudes among People of Colour (PoC) in Britain. A December 2020 survey of 12,035 participants showed the highest vaccine hesitancy in Black (71.8%), followed by Pakistani/Bangladeshi (42.4%) and Mixed (32.4%) ethnicity people. With 15.6% of White British or Irish groups showing vaccine hesitancy.i
Such studies confirmed my experience of talking to, debating, and arguing with my peers online and in person during lockdown. I am a second-generation Black Briton of Caribbean heritage living and working in the port city of Bristol, England. Black and Ethnic Minority groups make up 16 % of Bristol’s population.
Post war settlement from the Caribbean and Asian sub-continent has been joined by new communities from East Africa in particular Somalia. These communities are disproportionately concentrated in a handful of districts that appear on various indices of deprivation. Living conditions and forms of front-line employment are among the reasons why PoC are most at risk from Covid-19. Yet they were disproportionately represented among the unvaccinated and vaccine hesitant. In this brief article I want to posit some reasons why those that are most at risk are among the most vaccine hesitant.
Seen in the context of Black experience mistrust of White authority this is not only understandable but arguably logical.
From slavery through to Empire there has been a sharp dissonance between European values and the treatment of PoC. Britain’s imperial expansion was built upon the enslavement of millions of Africans, the genocide of indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas, and the exploitation of the natural resources. Europe justified Empire on the basis of a just and equitable Christianity. By the 19th century religious justifications for Empire were buttressed by new fields of scientific racism that claimed to evidence the innate inferiority of Black and Brown peoples.
Post-slavery white supremacy was maintained by a mixture of de facto segregation sharply observed in social norms, economic domination, violence propaganda and education. The latter was crucial to inculcating the idea that Britain was the shining pure heart of a vast Empire. Britain was the Mother Country. For most of Empire’s duration, the myth of the Mother Country survived unsullied. Most colonial subjects were unaware that they were regarded as savages in the metropolis.ii
The arrival of the passenger ship, the Empire Windrush in 1948 marked the beginning of mass migration from the Caribbean and South Asia. Not only this but it marked the end of the myth of Mother Country. The migrants were confronted by widespread hostility from all classes of British society. British Governments were loath to interfere in civic society, so migrants were confronted with signs saying ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’ in the windows of private renters. Employers were free to discriminate against on Black labour. Discrimination took the form of a refusal to employment, operating a quota system or confining Black workers to the most menial tasks.
The experiences of migration precipitated an interest in Black history within and outside academia. Black and Brown communities and their allies were keen to recover the histories they had not been taught and, in the process, to tell a different story of Empire.
Key to understanding Black and Brown perspectives on past and present is to consider that we often see the world through a transnational lens. People of African descent in particular feel a powerful affinity with Black experiences on the continent, in Europe and the Americas. How Black people are treated in the US matters locally, how they are treated in France, Germany, Spain matters. Each national experience is part of a wider story of racial struggle.
Added to the general rediscovery, is the recovery of key flash points in Black and Brown histories that suggest the White state is a hostile force. There are numerous examples in the US, such as the 1921 Tulsa Massacre in which White mobs raised to the ground the affluent African American district of Greenwood Oklahoma; the assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in 1969 and the Tuskegee experiment of 1932-1972. The latter is particularly vital in embedding levels of distrust in White medical science. Conducted by the United States Public Health Service and the Centre for Disease Control, the experiment involved the documentation of the effect of untreated syphilis on 400 African Americans. The men were unaware that they were involved in a medical trial. Nor were they given treatment towards the end of the trial when such treatment had become available.
There are also the British flashpoints: the 1981 New Cross fire which claimed the lives of thirteen Black teenagers at a party in London’s Lewisham district. Judicial reviews recorded an open verdict but members of the local community insisted the party was firebombed by Far-Right extremists; a string of miscarriages of justice including the case of Winston Silcott who was wrongly imprisoned for the murder of PC Keith Blakelock during the 1985 Broad-water Farm riot and the shooting of Mark Duggan that led to a series of riots in 2011.
However, most analogous to Covid-19 is the response to the AIDS epidemic. Covid-19 has reminded me of the conspiracies that circulated among my peers that HIV is an artificial virus invented by Whites to kill people of African descent. The Whites in question range from Euro-American governments to a secret cabal. Others were offended by the stigmatised discussions on how HIV spread from animal to human which seemed to hark back to notions of African primitivism. These discussions were sometimes distorted versions of scientific analysis. Consistent with these approaches is the sense that science could be powerfully employed against PoC.
History near and close, seemed to suggest White authority as manifested in science, religion, law and philosophy could not be relied upon to serve Black interests.
However, discrepancies between White narratives and Black experience do not stop at history. It is part of our daily reality. Fairness, tolerance, and liberal attitudes are touted as British values enshrined in our institutions. But if we take the agents of law-and-order, reports show Black and Brown Britons are disproportionately arrested, imprisoned and more likely to receive longer sentences for the same crimes than their White counterparts. Commentators cite institutional racism as key reason for such discrepancies.iii
More generally, in housing, health, education, and employment Black Britons are over represented in indices of disadvantage. This structural disadvantage is at odds with the aspirational society ‘everyone can make it’ ideals. Nor has a raft of anti-discrimination legislation, and ethnic monitoring managed to end the persistence of structural racism. iv
Returning to my main contention, it is then possible to see why PoC communities mistrust White authority and science. As regards the latter, mistrust has been a driver towards alternative medicine. By and large, certainly among my peers, alternative medicine is used alongside ‘Western’ medicine. It also connects PoC to healing practices that are variously described as non-Western, ‘ancestral’ or holistic healing practices. But mistrust can have far more dangerous consequences in a pandemic particularly when it is fuelled by anti-vaccine influencers such as self-styled nutritionist guru Pan-Africanist Chaka Bars or the President of Madagascar who during the crisis claimed to have discovered a cure for the virus. Such influencers have legitimized conspiracy theories – Covid-19 is a ruse to microchip the world, the virus does not exist – that might have otherwise remained in alt-right communities. They are the relatable sources of information in communities marked by disillusionment and mistrust.
If we are to truly reflect on the pandemic then we must address the levels of mistrust it revealed among PoC in Britain. However, it will take an anti-racist approach towards our past and present to begin to restore levels of trust. By that I do not mean trust in the official government narratives but in the value of evidence, in critical thinking, in the importance of scrutiny.
The current political climate does not give one cause for optimism. The outgoing Prime minister Boris Johnson has pushed against a reassessment of British history. His likely successors are promising to do the same.
Dr Edson Burton is a writer, historian, programme-curator and performer based in Bristol. His academic specialisms include: Bristol and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Black History in the USA, Cultural continuities between Africa and the New World. He has been a consultant and coordinator for a range of history projects in Bristol. Edson has maintained a parallel career as a poet and writer for theatre, radio and screen.
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i
Office For National Statistics: Updating ethnic contrasts in deaths involving the coronavirus (COVID-19), England: 24 January 2020 to 31 March
The Lancet Regional Health Europe: Ethnic differences in SARS-CoV-2 vaccine hesitancy in United Kingdom healthcare workers: Results from the UK-REACH prospective nationwide cohort study
ii
The realities of racial attitudes in the metropolis were known to activists, Caribbean service men and women who served in WW1 and the sailors who settled in Britain from the late 19 century but their experiences were not sufficient to dispel the myth of the Mother Country in the Empire.
iii
Gov.uk: Ethnicity Facts and Figures. Stop and Search, 27 May 2022
Julian V. Roberts & Jonathan Bild: Ethnicity and Custodial Sentencing, A review of the trends, 2009-2019. Sentencing Academy.
iv
Omar Khan: State of the Nation: New comprehensive analysis on race in Britain, Runnymede Trust, 4/9/2020