Open Wounds, that still bleed - Kings Fund and Tottenham Rights: exhibit 2023

This week I rushed to the Kings Fund to see "Open wounds” Created and developed by Tottenham Rights, the exhibition explores the connections between health, racism and inequalities, and how this has affected generations of Black people. It does so through the eyes of the Black community themselves. 

I'm currently looking into digital health inequalities, and I've heard from AgeUK, ABILITY and some ground roots agencies from a House of Lords inquiry, so it seemed appropriate to hear the experience of the Black community, in a specifically curated exhibition by Tottenham Rights.

OPEN WOUNDS exhibit

I was impressed by the boards and it's very plain speaking from slavery and the dismissal that Black people were even human, and the cheap labour their lives represented, which informed from a very early time, that Black people could be mistreated, weren't as smart, or not as valuable a human as their white counterparts.

Dehumanising Black people saved £3 a week.

 Interesting then to see how in the 1940's the British government called on the Black communities to come fill the gaps in the health service and so then Windrush was born, where many came to what they thought of as the 'motherland' only to be ostracised, told their qualifications did not count, and they would have to re-qualify and “work twice as hard to ‘regain’ the professional levels they arrived with’ very sadly, it states somewhat pointedly at the very last line of a board, "many didn't".

The need for our NHS to recruit from overseas

 

Thereby being the basis of the very structural racism, we see today in so many of our public services and sectors, no change there, even in 2020, when the exhibit discusses the pandemic, and how COVID hit the black community the hardest, though much played down by the then Prime Minister, who contracted the disease himself after boasting about shaking hands with people and was determined to keep doing so.

The exhibit includes an absorbing account in 1986, not so long ago, when in the UK a black man died in police custody after being accosted in the most quintessential of British places; a fish and chip shop. The police, nor the courts, did not take Stephen Bogel seriously unable to stand from tiredness, and illness, called a ‘malingerer’ and uncooperative, he died after being at the court for only 2hours “his physical illness was interpreted as resistance… and he died as a result.”

It’s a well-considered, well written exhibition by Tottenham Rights, and deserves much more of an audience, as alongside the stark realities of what it means to be black in the UK, even as a working professional in the NHS, it offers a concise breakdown of the situation, and also solutions and ways forward to start to heal these very open wounds.

If you can get to see it, it's running to the 24th March 2023.
Despite what it says, no need to book, it's in a corridor, where the staff shuffle past you as they take their cups to the cafeteria.
The pinnacle of irony; an exhibit about racial inequality in healthcare assigned to a corridor, toilets on the side, though they praise it as a accessible area it is not a proper exhibit space for such a important and emotive issue. Black and Asian people died at dispoportioate rates in the pandemic, but it's only spoken plainly on a board most wont see.