EVERY YEAR as chancellor of a university, I remind our students at graduation that their academic gains tells them and us what they now know: attested, affirmed, accredited.

But the most important journey ahead is to find out what we don’t know and to seek continuous, lifelong, excitable learning and, in that mix of honest pursuit, to face our ignorance, fears and prejudices and learn to eradicate our pre-disposition to despise those we see as “less than” – the least.

As I look back across 2020, where for so many who are in their founding adult years – their 20s and 30s – their rage at the violent assault that racism represents, in protests, in marches, in screeching speeches, in promises and in statements and demands, I am thankful for the power of that rage, but I am also sanguine that we’ve been there before.

I’ve seen it before. I’ve witnessed these moments that are laden with demands but dissipate as the months turn to years and the years to decades.

Being old enough to remember Mangrove and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, to have met Mandela and Obama, to have been frequently in Harlem and Manenberg, the crushing violent drug-disordered African township in Cape Town’s hidden heartlands, and Notting Hill and Moss Side and St Paul’s and Handsworth and Deptford, to have stood on the waste tip home of Kibera and to have lived in non-gentrified Peckham. I’ve been there – I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it and smelt it.

I’ve witnessed these moments that are laden with demands but dissipate as the months turn to years and the years to decades.

Lord Hastings

I was embroiled in the aftermath of the 1981 and 1985 22 city riots working with the then-government — Margaret Thatcher’s team — to bring healing and building alliances between angry black communities and funders eager to build back better and prevent more destructive turbulence through employment and innovation and cohesion schemes. It worked — for then. It was right — for then.

Perseverance

It didn’t heal the wound — although it helped. But it didn’t set a course of perpetual equity and racial justice. The unaccountable litany of ongoing cases of police harassment, judicial discrimination, disproportionate imprisonment, and — this past year more than ever — health inequalities and distinctly unequal access to housing and recovery resources has laid bare the need to resist the exhaustion that a moment for Black Lives Matter delivers in an other-wise turbulent and frothing sea of fearful COVID and frustrating Brexit, and set our sights on something much more essential – the pain of perseverance and the power of persistence.

If the darkest moment for many of us in 2020 was the violent slaughter of George Floyd in plain public sight, and the easy slippage of his killers to bail, paid freed whilst a family are manacled in trauma, and so are all of us in differing degrees, then one of the bright luminous moments was to study the long life of a man we just lost – civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis,

His death in July allowed the release of a letter he had written to all of us just for the day of his burial. He wrote, having been in the struggle with the greats as one of the greats: “You must also study and learn the lessons of history, because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time.

“People in every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you.

“The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.

“In my life, I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and non-violence is the most excellent way.

“Now it is your turn to let freedom ring. When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st Century, let them say it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war.

“So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting
love be your guide.”

So for me, the answers lies in that determination. To create a covenant with
yourself that you will conjoin with others in meaningful, purposeful, unrelenting acts of justice, irrespective of your job or position or all you don’t have.

To find moments that build a movement. To give time to lift the “less
than” and to exemplify the real heroes in our communities. Great people like Patrick Hutchinson, who stunned the world by picking up a white man manifesting racist aggression, yet fallen and wounded.

Patrick lifting him across his shoulder to take him to safety stunned the world.

Stunning

Our communities need to be full of stunning people. We need to shock the world by being the most engaged, the most relentless, the most professional, the most loving, the most persistent, the most generous.

For me, I joined the then Commission for Racial Equality serving nine years as a commissioner in the era after the death of Stephen Lawrence, when we
fought for Macpherson whose report laid bare what we know from Mangrove — institutional racism is as regular as the air we breathe, but unlike oxygen, this was carbon monoxide and we had to expunge the ugly truth and change the law.

And that took work. Not protests. Work. For nothing lastingly significant changes by a moment’s outpouring. But that’s not enough.

We must build alliances that will empower freedom to have genuine equity of opportunity and solid governance and investable resources.

That’s why I lead the London Chamber of Commerce and Industries Black Business Association and the newly formed Black Business Institute — so that we can contend together for opportunity within the frameworks that have power and want to share it.

That’s why I go eagerly with my fellow seekers to visit those in prison and fight for their case reviews and to stand up for those targeted by rotten non-aspiration and to get their truth heard, and that’s why I will continue to hear the sounds of my childhood from the great speeches to today’s great screeches to make sure every black woman and man can breathe and has the breath of life.

We make moments into movements when we build alliances and common bonds and when we see the significance of investing in long-term assets, and not glamour and showcase trivia.

Then we build a legacy, and if all of who hold the identity of being black in one degree or another paid heed to MLK’s dream that character must be the benchmark, then we will listen to John Lewis and we keep history’s fires burning, until all of what we hate the most is truly history, because we have persisted to dedicate and demonstrate that the best of us is in our conviction that justice for us is also about justice for all.