As reported by Mariella Brown on the Society of Editors website:
Coinciding with Black History Month, the Metro has said it will be dedicating its lifestyle email The Fix to exploring race related issues once a month from its State of Racism series.
Compiled by the Metro’s lifestyle writers – Natalie Morris and Faima Bakar – as well as the paper’s assistant editor Sophie Murray-Morris, Alex Wilkins (Social Media Producer) and Ellen Scott (Lifestyle Editor), the inaugural edition looked at matters including the psychological burden of fighting racism at work, why Britain’s countryside is unwelcoming for people of colour and how to call out racism.
The paper’s State of Racism series began in early 2020 and aimed to explore and investigate the insidiousness of systematic oppression in the UK, Morris and Bakar told the SoE.
While the series was prematurely stopped due to the pandemic, in the months following the Black Lives Matter movement the pair decided to bring back the series to dedicate more time and energy into dismantling racism.
Acting Editor of Metro-co.uk, Richard Hartley-Parkinson told the SoE, “What has happened over the last six months with the BLM movement proves why this series is so important and I hope that it will do some good in the world.”
In the newsletter’s launch edition, Morris and Bakar told readers: “A lot has happened since we first launched our ongoing series The State of Racism back in February. The world feels like a completely different place.
“As the pandemic loomed and then hit – and we witnessed the world transform in ways we could never have imagined – we cut our eight-week series short and switched our attention to the unprecedented events that were unfolding around us.
“But, what has become abundantly clear over the last six months, is that systemic racism and social inequalities aren’t put on hold just because we are living through a pandemic. In fact, Covid-19 has laid bare those inequalities in starker terms than ever before.
“From healthcare and mortality rates, to the education system, police brutality and civil violence, the pandemic is only exacerbating racial inequalities – and with everything else that’s going on, too many instances of injustice are slipping under the radar.
“The swell of momentum behind the Black Lives Matter movement has shone a light on racism across the globe, and has been a huge unifying force demanding awareness, change and justice. But it’s vital that this momentum isn’t allowed to fade or be diminished to a ‘moment’.
“We are bringing back our regular State Of Racism content – along with this monthly newsletter – to shine a light on the realities of racism in the UK today. From microaggressions to overt hostility to systemic barriers to success, we aim to uncover the unspoken experiences of people of colour in modern Britain.”
