The Black and Ethnic Minority Arts Network (BEMA) had to step in and sort out the London Borough of Hackney last week.
Hackney is redesigning the Narrow Way – that bit at the top of Mare Street where the buses get stuck in the rush hour – and put on its website an artist’s impression of what a pedestrianised area could look like. As you might expect, the artists put some happy people in their impression. but they were all white – leaving the artist’s impression looking very unlike multicultural Hackney.
Fortunately, within a couple of hours of the Black and Ethnic Minority Arts Network emailing the picture round their members and encouraging them to protest to Hackney, the Borough took the picture down from its website.
While it often feels that the future of the borough is far beyond the control of local people, BEMA has shown how important and effective it can be to collectively raise the voices of those who imagine a different future full of a diversity of races, classes and ages.