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White supremacy, the decline of community, and implications for social justice activism.

For the past half a millennia, many people racialised as white benefited from a system that, whilst preferencing them, may also have caused a decline in their sense of community.  Community is defined here as a group of people who live in a particular area who are considered as a unit of togetherness because of their shared interests or background. Sense of community is defined here as a caring, shared commitment to meet group members' needs; a friendly feeling that members belong in and matter to the group. Leaving aside the probability of a more direct reason for a decline in reported sense of community specifically amongst those white people who are overtly racist and xenophobic i.e. discomfort and fear from their observation, perception, or assumptions about growth in diverse ethnic demographics and increasing multiculturalism, and the rhetoric about white minoritisation and the demonisation of the non-white / 'un-citizens' they consume from Right-wing, racist media, a...
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Moving our bodies - Moving for mental health

  Moving our bodies - Moving for mental health Michael Cole, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, and The Society of Sports Therapists (Orcid ID: 0000-0002-4131-9566)   In celebration of Mental Health Awareness Week (13 th to 19 th May), and the Mental Health Foundation’s theme of ‘Moving my body - Moving for my mental health’, here’s a short blog post that’s part personal and part political. Movement is my primary love language. For me, simply changing my body position whilst sitting in my office chair is self-care. Engaging in exercise is one of the best presents I gift to my body and to my mental health almost every day. But there are tensions within exercise. In this blog piece I take a brief look at two of these. Tension 1: Exercise is great, but it’s personal – why aren’t you moving more? On the one hand, we know that the health benefits of exercise benefit everybody; on the other hand, an individual’s relationship with the act of exercis...
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How does whiteness view the 'other'?

  For educators reflecting on their identity, position(ality) and responsibility in society, it is useful to actively critique the ways in which we may inadvertently reproduce patterns of inequitable power in our social relations. For almost half a century, white supremacy has taught us to view marginalised, indigenous and racially-minoritised peoples and practices through a lens that judges them as either one or more of: - misplaced (or out of place, see non-gender binary public toilets, accessibility for disabled communities, or surveillance of Black and brown customers and students) - lesser (e.g. hip-hop vs classical music, or living as a traveller vs in a house) - invisible (or hyper-visible depending on context, see 'Stop and Search' vs recruitment) - threatening (e.g. whiteness wants to maintain the colour line, protect its power and privileges, its 'genes', its 'virtuous' psyche of 'goodness') - deviant (whiteness is often a mirror that reflects ...
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‘Structural humility’ and ‘socio-professional activism’ – adding to the equity lexicon for practitioners

[Estimated reading time: 6mins] During my research and praxis over the years I have sometimes struggled to articulate with brevity some of the fundamental characteristics that practitioners should strive to embody if they aim to contribute to positive social change in healthcare and education. This led me to proposing, in late 2021 on twitter , ‘ structural humility ’ and ‘ socio-professional activism ’ as two new terms that may contribute to thinking and action towards social justice. In this blog I explain things in a little more detail… Firstly, let’s look at this quote from a recent research paper entitled ‘ Physical pain, gender, and the state of the economy in 146 nations ’: “ Economic worry can create physical pain.. .[its level] in a nation depends on the state of the economy. Pain is high when the unemployment rate is high. That is not because of greater pain among people who lose their jobs - it extends far beyond that into wider society …[and the] increase in phys...
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