Professor Charlotte Williams OBE

Professor Williams is a Welsh-Guyanese social justice activist, esteemed academic, cultural critic, and award-winning writer, who has been shining a critical and disrupting lens on Welsh public policy and notions of Welshness for decades. Here, she shares her insights with Professor Roiyah Saltus on belonging, Welsh devolution, and the links to be made between academic decolonising and anti-racist practices.

What has it been like returning and resettling in Wales after spending nearly a decade as a Professor of Social Work and Deputy Dean at RMIT University in Australia?

I was always coming home. Australia was a wonderful experience in so many ways but, as they say, home is where the heart is, and my heart is always in Wales. I didn’t disconnect from all things Welsh. When I retired from RMIT University in 2020 I was clear that I wanted to make further contributions to my country. But let me tell you I learned so much in Australia, particularly about the challenges of coming to terms with a historical legacy that has caused so much intergenerational inequality. This year Australians will vote on a constitutional voice for Indigenous peoples which if successful will be a historic shift towards reconciliation. These lost histories – black histories – matter so much to contemporary rights and well-being. I brought home with me a refreshed sense of interrogating the colonial past.

So, it hasn’t been so much of a resettling because in so many ways I never left. My family are in Wales and my home.

I am mindful of the seminal article you wrote nearly twenty years ago entitled Devolution, multicultural citizenship and race equality: From Laissez-faire to nationally responsible policies (2006). I am also mindful that we wrote a chapter together for the latest version of your edited book A Tolerant Nation?: Revisiting Ethnic Diversity in a Devolved Wales (2015). I recall reading your comment that people often forget the question mark in the title of that book. Can you share some examples of if, how, and to what extent things changed over the two decades in terms of how racialised inequalities and injustices are acknowledged and addressed by our political leads and systems? Is there cause to be hopeful?

The devolution moment was highly significant for people of colour in Wales. The constitutional settlement embedded race equality and imposed specific duties on all public bodies. The approach was called mainstreaming. We had a voice and a place at the governance table and the organisations of civil society began to be deliberately drawn into the process of policy making. I don’t think we should underestimate how important that moment was in establishing a sense of collective identity for Black Welsh people. But we were generally a weak partner in the new arrangements. We were mobilised but our response was disparate and difficult to sustain. We relied on top-down initiatives to respond to inequalities which we had barely the sound evidence to demonstrate. Research and evidence to make the policy case was emerging but slowly. Neither were the civil servants geared up to working in a different way with these new publics.

Today is a totally different scenario. The Welsh Government has acknowledged that their early approach to tackling race equality has failed in terms of implementation and outcomes. The development and roll out of the Welsh Government’s Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan foregrounds an astounding aspiration to create an anti-racist Wales by 2030. This plan has been built in partnership with those with lived experience and drawing on the expertise and research of those of us who have been involved in producing and reviewing the evidence base. This form of co-production is groundbreaking because it shares responsibility for outcomes, it builds into the methodology monitoring and advocacy, and it makes for a two way channel of education and learning between the policy makers and the lay policy actors.

You Chair the Black Asian and Minority Ethnic Communities, Contributions and Cynefin in the New Curriculum Working Group. USW is on its own journey of re-working how it relates and intervenes in its everyday practices and processes. What can the work to develop a new curriculum for schools in Wales offer those in Higher Education settings who are seeking to transform (decolonise, if you will) the established curriculum as part of a larger agenda to acknowledge and address race inequities within USW policies, practices, and culture?

There is considerable movement at all tiers of the education sector in Wales to transform not simply the content of the curriculum but to think about how we work (pedagogy) and about the representation or rather lack of representation of those from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds in the education workforce. I think the overall message is that a whole system approach is needed – we called it a whole school approach in our working group report. There is no point in teaching more content on black perspectives in the curriculum without thinking about the total experience of learning for all involved. Academic decolonising should be coupled with anti-racist practices. I guess a big message for USW is to look carefully at all aspects of the learning environment. I think assessment in particular needs a lot of work as it is a major driver in unequal outcomes.

I am also the Editor (with Neil Evans) of the new University of Wales Press Series: Race, Ethnicity Wales and the World which will ultimately consolidate and prompt much more significant attention to race within Welsh studies – a valuable resource for the education sector in Wales and beyond.

There are a very small number of staff at USW who are women of colour (and men for that matter). As we gear up a new cycle of Black History Cymru 365 where we find ways to commemorate, valorise, and spotlight the achievements of people of Africa and the African diaspora, what words of advice can you offer to our staff of colour be they be at the start of their careers or in senior positions. What has kept you steady and courageous and helped make you the inspirational leader you are today?

In some writing I have done I referred to us as ‘Blacademics’. They loved that term when I spoke at a conference in Cape Town, South Africa where, as you know they are grappling with the aftermath of decades of apartheid. Quite a lot has been written about the experience of being black in the Ivory Tower, including a great book Inside the Ivory Tower (2017).

This syndrome is well recognised. I have found building and keeping a strong personal network important. And allyship is very valuable. I tend to keep hold of Black colleagues I have worked with over the years wherever they are and I have drawn on their support and advice. There is no need any longer to be isolated – take opportunities to look after yourself and connect with the broader sisterhood.

I found one of your beautiful quotes in your section of Writers Mosaic: “I want every piece I write to be an inscription on my nation. I am seeking by turns to place me within Wales and the beauty of Wales within you.”

This quote speaks to your literary work, but it seems to speak in a bigger way to your legacy and what you have given to Wales over your life. May I ask you to share the rationale and feeling behind the quote, and give us some insight into your literary life and current work, please?

Well thank you for listening! I have found an expression through literary work very valuable and another way of getting important messages across about identity and belonging. My passion and focus has always been my home country, Wales. I think there is a lot of disregard of Wales and Welshness within the wider UK and beyond. We know we have a rich and positive culture, some of the most spectacular landscapes in the world and an enduring spirit of resistance. I love to communicate this to the wider world. At the same time, I want to keep up a dialogue with our nation about who belongs, who is included, who gets a voice, and how Wales has benefited from its historic colonial entanglements and what that means for current inequalities. As the First Minister has clearly said: "Welsh history is black history and black history is Welsh history".