The countryside is racist, says presenter of Countryfile
MORE effort is needed to stamp out prejudice in rural areas, Countryfile host Ellie Harrison has warned.
She says the British countryside is racist, with white people needing to acknowledge past behaviour they have benefited from.
But Miss Harrison added that rural areas may be no more bigoted than other parts of the country.
The 42-year-old presenter spoke out as she defended the BBC’s decision to show a report exploring racism in the countryside, saying a ‘time of reckoning’ was approaching following the death of George Floyd at the hands of US police and the ‘crescendo’ of the
‘Recognise the pain of the past’
Black Lives Matter movement. She said the huge reaction on social media to the June programme – fronted by Dwayne Fields – had taken the show’s producers a week to pick through.
Miss Harrison wrote in BBC Countryfile magazine that the comments broadly came in three flavours: ‘“I’m not racist so there is no racism in the countryside”, “I’m black and I’ve never experienced racism in the countryside” and, importantly, “I have experienced racism in the countryside”.’
She said: ‘So there’s work to do. Even a single racist event means there is work to do. In asking whether the countryside is racist, then yes it is; but asking if it’s more racist than anywhere else – maybe, maybe not.’
She said she grew up in rural Gloucestershire with one black pupil at her school who was worshipped for being ‘handsome, sporty and brainy’.
Now she wonders if that may not have been his experience and, since the worldwide BLM protests, realises she needs to do more to challenge and confront prejudice.
‘Until this point, I believed ignorantly, that me being not racist was enough,’ she said. ‘There is a big and crucial difference between being not racist and being anti-racist. At times in the past I have given measured and polite replies to people – sometimes close to me – who have said racist things.
‘But being anti-racist means being much clearer that it isn’t acceptable.’ White people need to do more to understand what black people have gone through, she said.
‘It’s our individual work to wrap our heads around history... recognising the pain of the past.
‘It means noticing that for white people, skin colour is not the cause of hardship and suffering, even if our lives haven’t been easy.’