Northampton's Infinite Playlist: Whiteness, the Arts, and the Land of Shoe and Boot in Cahoots - by Tré Ventour-Griffiths.

In his autoethnographic long-essay, Tré describes coming to Stroud and meeting some of the core team at SAR. The full work is excellent, we highly recommend it and it can be found HERE.

The section below and image are reproduced here with kind permission from Tré and we hope he will visit us again soon!

Visiting Stroud and the Five Valleys in July 2021, in 2020 I was impressed with how this mainly white community were exploring whiteness and using their privilege to hold their MPs to account in very public ways (Young, 2021). I could not help but think how this put my community to shame where members of the Facebook group ‘Stroud Against Racism’ made me feel protected more than Northampton did.

Stroud Against Racism (SAR) is a social action CIC situated in Stroud and the Five Valleys in Gloucestershire, UK (much respect)

In my vicinity, there are few white people I would feel protected by, and these are people I have known for years. Here, it made me think about the excuses white Northamptonians use to not talk about race. In the summer of 2021 I visited the people of Stroud who had supported me in 2020 including Polly Stratton and Nabeela Akhtar. There I also met Sarah Dixon, and Florence Nyasamo who had been doing important work in Cheltenham with ‘Lives of Colour’. At this time, I was both disappointed and overjoyed that a quintessentially whiter and ‘more English’ part of the country was doing more than Northants, a place that long peddles talk of ‘multiculturalism’ as a way to safeguard against critiques of racism.

Stroud had also started public consultations into public monuments (Wall, 2021). Like consultations have not occurred in Northampton in spite of histories of enslavement and blood money. Simultaneously, many institutions gave lip service to Black Lives Matter, very much including local arts and culture industries. The arts (which should be one of more progressive and nationally representative, especially in theatre) is steaming with the liberal whiteness and nice racism discussed in Good White People (Sullivan, 2014).