Frazer A Quick Ting On: Black British Businesses

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-913090-64-7
Verlag: Jacaranda Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 172 Seiten

Reihe: AQTO

Day-to-day struggles, triumphant success stories, and unique circumstances. A Quick Ting On: Black British Businesses takes you on an informative journey through the history (and future) of Black British entrepreneurship. With the powerful rise of Black British culture, Black British entrepreneurship has rapidly become a point of great conversation. This book looks back on significant moments in Black British entrepreneurship, exploring the struggles, success and unique circumstances that face Black British businesses. Featuring brilliant interviews and first-hand accounts from some of your favourite Black British entrepreneurs - from Sharmadean Reid MBE and Ozwald Boateng OBE, to the late great Jamal Edwards MBE, and so many more - Black British Businesses offers an important insight into how one of Britain's most influential communities continues to create space in the world of business.

Tskenya-Sarah is an award-winning culture, inclusion and sustainability specialist. Over the past nine years, Tskenya has implemented equitable and profitable strategic roadmaps that ensure diversity and inclusion underpins all functional areas of businesses across global public, private and third sectors spanning the global regions of APAC, EMEA and NA. She has acted as an advisor to His Majesty King Charles III and the government through her work with the Prince's Trust International Youth Entrepreneurship Board. Tskenya is also an award winning business owner and has been featured in Forbes, Vogue and more. Tskenya continues to advocate for the further representation of neurodiverse, disabled and minoritised groups within businesses, entrepreneurship and venture capital. Personcentric, dynamic and charismatic, Tskenya brings a consistent intersectional lens to everything she does.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Frazer, Tskenya-Sarah

Leseproben

1

BRIT- BUSINESS

‘I want to be a neurosurgeon!’ That is what I told my doting mother when I was just a tender six years old. Only the ancestors could know how I had any understanding of what a neurosurgeon was at that age. I suppose it could have been attributed to the fact that my older sisters Laverne and Lorna were obsessed with watching Casualty on BBC One. Then, at eight, I wanted to become a vet because ‘animals were much more interesting than people.’ At the age of ten, I changed my mind about that and decided to simply become a ‘regular human doctor’ after I learned that I would have to treat animals, not just cute puppies. I was constantly changing my mind in true neurodivergent style, but luckily by the age of 14, I realised I had an aversion to blood. So, I settled on becoming a lawyer.

At 14, I was told by family members and teachers that everything had to be in perfect alignment. My GCSE choices would inform the A Levels I took, which would lead me to university, and into the career that I had chosen seven years prior. With hindsight and lived experience, I know that rite of passage that I was sold on, and that we still sell many young people on is skewed—but that is for another book.

At one point or another, I think all Black British girls, well my friends at least, all dreamed of becoming lawyers. We dreamed of moving to New York without any frontiers. We dreamt of ferociously fighting and winning every case put before us whilst dressed in Burberry and Gucci. We would fantasise about being part of the corporate elite we knew nothing about and drinking cocktails after work together. Then after having a trailblazing career, settling down to live extraordinarily heteronormative lives at 28 in California and have three children with a 50 Cent, Chip, Omarion or Devlin look-a-like. We all had very different tastes in boys.

Our parents, carers and teachers were avid cheerleaders of these plans. We were first-generation working-class girls who were the first to have a ‘formal’ teenage education and were set to be the first in our families to go to university. We were daughters of immigrant parents who worked hard as hospital porters, hairdressers, cleaners, shop attendants and civil servants.

We ate free school meals, and some days would not eat, but sneak our sandwiches out of the lunch hall in our Nike Just Do It bags to give to our other friends who we knew had empty fridges to go home to. Despite sociological praxis demonstrating consistently that the Black experience is not monolithic when I was coming up, success in traditional Black British households meant attaining good grades, getting into university, becoming a doctor, lawyer, accountant and more recently an engineer! For our immigrant parents and carers, who often came from low-income, colonially ravaged countries, success was rightfully framed in terms of one’s position in society and how much social and economic security one could garner through education and work.

In his 1943 book , Psychologist Abraham Maslow argued that all people have specific needs that can be categorised into a hierarchy of importance, which explains our caregivers’ specificity in terms of the careers they wanted us to forge.

Maslow argued that humans have various needs, which can be classified into specific groups and then ordered in a hierarchy of importance. At the bottom of the hierarchy are physiological needs, essentially the things we need to survive on a basal level, such as food, water, and sufficient warmth. So, that would mean finding a job with a good wage that could provide shelter, food and clothing.

Next on the scale is security needs, which reflect the desire to have a safe physical and emotional environment. So, that would mean finding a job that had grievance procedures for discrimination, that maybe offers health insurance and a pension. Closer to the top of the hierarchy is a person’s social needs, feelings of belonging, equity and self-esteem. So, that would mean being able to find affinity with your colleagues at work, win awards, garner respect from others and maintain a positive personal image.

Essentially, our caregivers drove us towards specific careers, as they could provide for those basic needs and necessities productively and securely. Becoming a doctor, lawyer, accountant and engineer in their eyes, was success in its finality. However, at the top of the hierarchy is the concept of self-actualisation, which can only be attained if all of the basic security, esteem, social and physiological needs are fulfilled. In short, self-actualisation is the complete realisation of one’s potential and purpose, where you can focus on personal growth and development without compromising the other needs. Self-actualisation is a privilege that our parents and caregivers did not have, but one that they hoped to live vicariously through us, their children, when we became those doctors, lawyers, accountants and engineers.

The book suggests that those who start businesses or break away from jobs in large corporations may be looking for ways to satisfy their self-actualisation needs.1 But getting to the privilege of self-actualisation where you can start a business or leave a ‘secure’ job to do so was and still remains a barrier for many people, so it made sense why our parents and carers, coupled with the understanding of the challenges our Blackness would present did not encourage ‘jollyfoder’ or ‘whiteman gwarnings’ despite some being ‘entrepreneurs’ themselves.

Until this day, many of the older Black business folk I know do not consider themselves to be entrepreneurs. They say things like:

‘I AM A HAIRDRESSER THAT HAS A SHOP IN DALSTON MARKET.’
‘I BAKE AND SELL RUM CAKES.’
‘I CLEAN PEOPLE’S HOUSES ON THE WEEKEND FOR EXTRA CASH.’

But, these are examples of entrepreneurship. However, they do not deem themselves as ‘worthy’ business folk either because they were marginalised into having to work for themselves or understand that in our capitalist society doing braids, cleaning houses or cooking are deemed to have ‘no value.’

When I was at college I deceived myself into taking biology A-level, for what reason I do not know! But it became a ritual of mine to sit staring blankly at the pages of the textbook in the Science block hoping my knowledge would fall into place. One evening, and very on brand may I add, I started to cry quietly thinking about my impending exam failure when one of the cleaners offered to help me out. This cleaner shared that he had qualified as a top heart specialist in Rwanda and fled to the UK in 1994 with his family to escape the genocide. Upon his arrival, he discovered he could not get any work in medicine because, in his words, his ‘papers are nothing to these English people.’ Instead, he started a small cleaning business with his wife, which was a full-time success until the recession in 2011. He decided to take up work in my school to supplement their weekend earnings. He did not see himself or his wife as entrepreneurs.

My grandmother, who immigrated as part of the Windrush Generation with my mother in 1958, was a knowledgeable scholar, researcher, and teacher who faced the same challenges. Her skills were deemed untransferable, meaning that she had to re-pivot and became a hybrid cross between wellness guru, healer and herbalist to provide for herself and my mother at the time.

Stories like these are not uncommon, if you are the child of an immigrant or are close in lineage to those who are immigrants. You will be familiar with the harsh sacrificial exchange that they are often forced into when migrating to new Western countries to be told their degrees, their credentials, and their experiences did not count here. Many of our ancestors had to start again, their hard work and expertise became invisible, and entrepreneurship became not something you chose to do but had to do to survive.

My journey into entrepreneurship is similar but different. I was born and raised in the United Kingdom, but there were constant reminders that my state of nationhood and racialethnic identity will forever be at odds with one another. I would never truly belong. The nature of Black Britishness is oxymoronic. We can place the two words together, and of course, there are Black British folk that exist and experience those two states of being together—I am one of them—but it does not mean that those two words we thrust together do not mingle without friction, nuance and seclusion.

Black British folk and I alike are consistently asked what Afua Hirsch calls, ‘The Question’:

If I were to single out the most persistent reminder of that sense of not belonging, it would be The Question. The Question is: where are you from? Although I have lived in five different countries as an adult, nowhere have I been asked The Question more than right here where I started, where I am from, in Britain… I can’t be British, can I, if British people keep asking me where I’m from?2

Like, I understand why the glow of my skin would suggest a clime where the sun is constant all year round and where mangoes grow on trees. By looking at me, I get it. But I have been asked the question by people who have heard me speak, people surprised at how ‘eloquent’ I am. I have come to accept that even though Black and British are sometimes placed together, they are opposing identities. It is...