Martha Awojobi wants you to live laugh love
What we're getting wrong about anti-racism, inclusive language and DEI
Hi friends,
If you don’t already know Martha Awojobi then wow have I got a treat for you today.
Martha’s the curator of Uncharitable (formerly BAME Online), the founder, director and fearless leader of JMB Consulting, and an all-round anti-racist powerhouse.
Ettie: There’s a lot of big talk from organisations who say they’re committed to anti-racism, dismantling white supremacy, or on a journey towards decolonisation. But it’s just words. They’re not doing anything to become more equitable. What’s going on there?
Martha: The charity sector is a PR machine. It's also… full of deluded people. People who are so attached to their identity of being a good person, someone who is part of the solution not part of the problem, that they co-opt radical language, and then completely water down what these things mean.
So for example, intersectionality. When I’m training organisations, I ask people what intersectionality means. And every single time people say something like “I’m a woman who is cisgender” or “I’m a man who is also working class.” That's actually not what intersectionality is, at all.
(A quick definition for anyone who doesn’t know intersectionality. It describes the way systems of oppression intersect, to create particular kinds of oppression. A Black woman doesn’t just experience racism or sexism. She experiences the unique intersection of racism + sexism (misogynoir). Intersectionality teaches us that the racism she experiences isn’t the same as a Black man would experience. And the sexism she experiences isn’t the same as a white woman would. Interruption over.)
Martha: I see this happen all the time, even like with terms like anti-racism.
We’re talking about this a lot at BAME Online. We’ve got a session on reclaiming anti-racism. It’s about how the battle of anti-racism, that is meant to be fought on the material and economic realm, is being fought in the realm of language.
People are fine-tuning their comms in order to appear to be doing something. A lot of people think that is actually doing something.
That’s why our work is so important. People don't have that political education to match these theoretical concepts with the material economic realities of their workers, their organisations or the people that they're there to support.
It's funny because even by doing this work to debunk language we're playing into it. Then racism gets fought in the terrain of language, all over again. We're spending a lot of time having to talk to people about language about order to bring them towards economics. Which is not what I actually want to be doing with my life.
The language thing is something that really terrifies me actually. It makes it really hard to know who to trust. It makes it really hard to know who to partner with. It makes it really, really hard to know who to align yourself with.
That further atomises us and makes us view each other with suspicion. Even people who claim to be working or leading an anti-racist organisation. Now they're having to, like prove their credentials to anti-racism groups. We're not even at the place where we're doing anti racism. We are still talking about what it means. It's such a waste of time.
I would rather people didn't have the correct language to describe people of colour, BAME, minoritised people. I don't care.
I would rather people weren’t using words like decolonisation and intersectionality and they were just moving money to where it needs to go.
That's why I think BAME online is so important because it gets into [tangible changes like] where money moves and how it moves.
Ettie: Tell us more about BAME Online. What is it?
Martha: BAME Online started out as a conference that I curated in partnership with Fundraising Everywhere in 2020, in response to a report from Ubele Initiative that said without urgent funding investment that nine out of 10 small and micro charities led by people of colour would have to close.
Fundraising Everywhere wanted to create a conference that was for people of colour, by people of colour. That’s where I came in, because they were all white people. And since then, it's grown.
BAME Online has become kind of a hub of political education, particularly looking at anti racism, imperialism, understanding the colonial context of the charity sector, and forging a path for liberation. Our role is as educators and conveners who bring the sector together and mainstream some really challenging conversations, particularly about how money moves in the charity sector. For example, thinking about how fundraisers are actors.
A lot of fundraisers see themselves as quite passive. Actually fundraisers have power.
Funders need to understand their relationship to white supremacy. They’re part of a legacy of imperialism and their work still maintains the logics of colonialism and capitalist extraction.
We also have our scholar series with Khadijah Diskin. Khadijah breaks down the misused terms found in anti-racist activism. Actually I would challenge the term anti-racist activism when we're talking about people who don't actually understand what racism is.
You get people who are talking about intersectionality without really understanding what that means. So we've started to commission writers to write about how those big topics play out in their day-to-day work.
Ettie: I loved what you said about fundraisers seeing themselves as passive, when they actually have the power to challenge things. Or the ability to do a lot of harm if they don’t challenge their role in perpetuating racism. Tell us more about that.
Martha: So I was a fundraiser since leaving school at 18, until now. I’m 30 now. And what I think is really interesting about fundraising is it's kind of given licence to ignore the mission of the organisation.
Fundraisers are kind of like this little capitalist arm that are really target-driven. Often these targets are completely arbitrary. They're not set by the programmes team who might have a specific set of ambitions in order to achieve mission. They're often set by fundraising teams and trustees, who generally see growth, bigger targets and more money as success.
If the goal is growth, then the fundraiser automatically has to compromise on mission. That means they’ll prioritise the needs of the funder over the needs of their organisation, in order to get funds.
It means that they shy away from having really difficult conversations about the structural issues that underpin their work. For example, when I worked in a homeless charity, we were told we couldn’t criticise the Government, when we were talking to our prospective donors. So I wouldn't really be able to talk about austerity. (LOL)
Fundraisers have this really interesting role where they are kind of a bridge between the funder and their organisation. They have a duty, I think, to represent the organisation to the best of their ability. That includes the difficulties that the organisation is facing and the structural issues that underpin their work.
So I think fundraisers need to understand the power they have to be able to talk – both to the people they’re working on behalf of, and to the people they’re trying to get money from.
Even the act of moving money around can be liberatory, if done in the right way. But it can also continue colonialism and capitalist expansion.
We’ve got a few sessions on fundraising at the conference. I'm going to talk to my colleague Khadijah for one session, about my journey from being trained as a little capitalist into having my many a-ha moments. Like when I realised that what I was actually doing was allowing organisations to tell a story about themselves where they were the heroes and part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. That session is called fundraising with integrity.
We also have a session called navigating powerful funders. That brings me on to funders. Okay, funders are terrible. Shall I'll leave it there? No? Okay.
When you look at how money is spent in a foundation, you go on their website, and they'll be talking about how their mission is to end poverty or their mission is to see social justice in the UK etc, etc.
And these funders are spending 4% of their endowment, something like that, on achieving this mission, which is all over their websites. And the other 96% is invested in the very industries that create the problems that they're trying to solve. Fossil fuels. Banking. There is this amazingly horrific PR activity that that's happening within the funding and philanthropy.
Where even the people working in foundations aren't really aware of where this money is being invested, or how the whole system of philanthropy works. And I think actually, all you have to do is look at the way that decisions are made within foundations.
They’re made by majority white people who are incredibly wealthy. Or if they're not white people, it usually is people who are incredibly wealthy, who have very little understanding of the problems that their organisation claims to be trying to put money into. There’s very little - I hate the term co production. Let me find a different one. Very little partnership working. Even that’s annoying, isn't it?
Ettie: Maybe… respecting who actually knows about the problem because they live it? And not calling people experts by experience, because that's patronising. It's just like: who is actually affected and who therefore knows about this.
Martha: Exactly. And I think because of living in capitalism, we mistake having money for having expertise. Often having lots of money means that there's been a history of violence or history of exploitation that's happened within an organisation rather than having any kind of inherent moral or intellectual superiority.
Yet funders still kind of position themselves as though they are the ones who are going to solve this problem as though they have the best ideas. Ideas which usually they've stolen… from us.
So yeah, I'd say funders have a really important role to play in bringing about change. Some funders, but not all funders. A lot of funders just need to stop. Give away their money. I think all foundations just need to find a way to get themselves out of existence. And to actually live their mission, because their mission shouldn't be to invest forever.
If that’s what you want to do, just say you're an investor. What is heartbreaking is that there is a lot of kind of words being used and a lot of narratives that are being touted around, where which really obscure the realities of the relationships of subjugation and exploitation that are happening in the charity sector.
Ettie: I love how you’ve explained that. If much of this sector is engaged in reputation washing, often for the violent origins of its money, and is giving tiny little 4% payouts every year. Then you've got foundations that are just in the business of keeping going. It's like this nonprofit industrial complex to keep basically white women like me in jobs.
Then you’ve got people using the “right” words but not knowing what they mean and giving off this appearance of being invested in radical politics and justice. Well, it’s like children repeating words that they've heard adults say. But it's an immature version of something very, very real and important.
Martha: Everyone knows this person at school. Everyone knows this person who says a bunch of big words, and there's no substance behind it. When we think about the fact that our missions are the difference between life and death for a lot of people, we don't have time to be messing about with language, with PR, or with whitewashing our reputations. I've been saying this since day dot.
Since we started BAME Online. I've been having the same conversation except now I'm a little bit meaner.
Ettie: I would say… you’re a bit less palatable.
Martha: I'm a tiny bit less palatable. But I've also I've been schooled myself.
I think I was really heavily invested in a lot of that language conversation. And I was kind of being dragged into the mud when what I should have been focusing on was: how do we change the material conditions of people of colour in the UK, and people of colour outside of the UK, people living in the in the Global South?
Ettie: Why is BAME Online needed?
Martha: So many different reasons. I won’t focus on like the white people in the charity sector who really need political education. I'll focus on the people of colour who have been isolated within their organisations, who have been trying to push for this this work.
What's been beautiful for me is just the amount of people of colour who tell me: I’ve been to BAME Online and this was the first time I heard people talking about the things that really mattered to me, and it wasn't being said by white people about us.
BAME Online an amazing place for people of colour in the charity sector to just, not even feel heard, I feel like being heard is not enough, right? That doesn't really describe it. To find love, to find joy, to find community. To just be able to be themselves without having to like code switch every second. Without having to make people in the room comfortable. This is a space for us to come together and talk to each other about the things that matter. It’s great that white people are in the audience, but they are not our audience.
Ettie: I love how you started to say it was about being heard and then immediately rejected that. Being heard isn’t enough. And DEI wants minoritised people to be heard, or maybe seen. There's this drive to “include” people in a very, very shallow way. But then the wants and needs of all the minoritised people in that group are absolutely still subsumed to the wants and needs of the majoritised people. What is so much more radical - and I love that you're using the language of love for this - is decentering whiteness. A space that doesn't exist to be palatable, nice and polite. Or to make white people feel good about themselves because they're part of this “nice” movement.
Martha: And I don't think the DEI movement is nice, to be honest. I think it's peak white feminism.
Ettie: Well, it's very nice for some people, right? It's nice for people like me. It’s not nice for people of colour. It prioritises white people’s comfort, which is violent.
Martha: The first time I went to anything DEI related I was like I'm never doing any of this again, ever again. Even in the words diversity, equity and inclusion or diversity, equality and inclusion, whiteness is still centred. Like diverse from what? Included into what? Equal to what?
I don't want to be included into whiteness and white supremacy. I'm not interested in the slightest, because what it demands of me is for me to die, basically. Whether it is for me to like slowly kill off the parts of myself that makes me who I am, or whether it’s for me to have a heart attack at the age of 50 from battling with white women over terminology.
BAME Online has been amazing for shifting people a little bit further and I won't even say that BAME Online is radical. I know radical people. I'm schooled all the time by radical people who are talking about things that are a lot more critical, a lot more revolutionary than the concepts that we have available. We're just trying to shift people a little bit beyond equality, diversity and inclusion and show them that liberation is something that is possible if we all come together and if we all know what the hell it is.
Ettie: Yes! We have to know what the hell liberation is. And actually, because I'm a white woman, I'm now going to make it all about me. I’m the sort of person who really does think that language matters. We know it affects how people perceive the world, their actions, attitudes and behaviours. A part of me is still clinging on to the debate about the words.
And how that relates to my personal journey is that thanks to BAME Scholar, for example Khadijah’s lecture on what race actually is, I learned that so many words did not mean what I thought they meant. And the organisations that I thought were being radical. Well, they looked like they were taking pretty bold action on anti-racism. The more I learned about the meaning of the words, the more I realised. They’re not.
Martha: They’re doing diversity & inclusion. But they're doing it in a way that is tricking people. Basically, a bunch of uninformed people are talking to a bunch of uninformed people about how great they are. And so yeah, of course, we think it’s great because we don't understand what greatness is.
I do think words matter. I'm coming from a fundraising background. So I think about words and money at the same time. We've got people who are Marxist, so we're really thinking about the material conditions. We've got people who work in Comms who are thinking a little bit more about how language can be used to liberate us. And to me, it comes down to honesty.
Language is an incredible tool for setting us up for liberation, for challenging our ideas, and giving us inspiration for a different way of being. But language, I think should come after having a real interrogation of your and your organisation’s relationship to white supremacy.
What has happened is that the language comes first. People say a bunch of stuff, fool a bunch of people of colour, who may not have the time to be discerning. who may not have the contacts to be discerning and find out things about organisations. So they join quite problematic and quite dangerous organisations.
I think you have to do everything. You can't just do the language. In the same way as you can't just move money. There has to be a narrative change as well. What is the most honest and what's the most authentic?
And I will say that there are people in this country who are doing incredible organising work around like immigration around immigration.
They don't f***ing talk about intersectionality. At all. Because they're living it.
If you want to talk about how different oppressions are interlinked, say that. Explain it. Don’t just say intersectionality. It’s lazy. Intellectually lazy.
And I think you know, language could be simplified in a way that shows us the truth. But instead, the charity sector obfuscates reality. I feel like at one point it was intentional, but now it's just become the DNA of how we kind of all operate.
I was born and raised in Tottenham. We didn't have people talking about intersectionality there. We didn't have people talking about all of these big buzzwords. People were just trying to survive. People were trying to deal with like the constant kind of police state that we were living on. So, I think it's been really interesting straddling those two worlds, those two parts of myself.
I had quite an elitist education. I came from a place where that wasn't an opportunity that was available to so many people, people that went to my primary school, lived in my local area(who no longer live in my local area because we've all been gentrified out).
I think when it comes to words and communication it’s about honesty and integrity. Not “how can I avoid scrutiny?” But how can we bring scrutiny to ourselves? How can we tell an honest story that allows us to be challenged? How can we tell an honest account of where we're at and where we've failed? Charities are like: “we're doing amazingly and we've never failed at anything ever.” Are you f***ing for real?
Ettie: I definitely know that shallow kind of scrutiny you’re talking about. People who want to trade terminology debates. “I think you’ll find… technically…” Versus the deep scrutiny of people that have a shared goal of liberation, and are interested in how we get there. There can still be as you've said, loads of challenge along the way. It's not about winning points for who can cite bell hooks the most while actually failing to put any of her radical politics into action.
Martha: Don’t even get me started with bell hooks. Firstly, she died on my birthday so I feel very, very, very connected to her. But the way she's been co-opted. You know what I hate? I see people weaponise the work of important liberation's figures of the past, against the people who are trying to carry on their legacy today.
We have a session in the conference about revolutionary love. I read all about law in 2016 when I was on a family holiday to Nigeria, and it absolutely changed the way I think about love and about relationships. There’s a chapter on love and work and we're going to talk about how to cultivate a loving practice at work.
I think because of the “niceness” of white women, they take all of these terms and then turn it into #BeKind. So when we're talking about love, love for me is justice. Love for Me is reparations. And love for white women in the charity sector is: “be kind, don't upset me.”
Ettie: Yeah. Love is “don't make me (a white woman) cry.” But it's total comfort with some people’s tears. The tears of the people who are actively marginalised.
Martha: Totally. I see that happen so often. I'll be doing like terms of engagement for working with a client, and they'll say: Oh, we just want everything to be psychologically safe. And I'm like, so who? Psychologcally safe for who?
I’m so tired of the weaponising of terms that had been around in Black queer communities, that meant something really, really important and meant something really nuanced and also opened the door for conversation. And seeing that turned into absolutes like: “you cannot make white women uncomfortable.”
Ettie: Thinking about how bell hooks has been co-opted by people who don't actually endorse any kind of a radical politic makes me think of two people: Martin Luther King, and the historical Jesus.
People love to quote Martin Luther King who think that he was polite, who think that he was a moderate. Little knowing that his whole work is based on criticism of the white moderate, the person who loves an unjust peace over justice.
Same with Jesus. A lot of rich white people - particularly in the USA - are quoting a Marxist, someone who supported radical wealth redistribution, who was totally on the side of and identified with the most minoritized people in his time.
Martha: He was literally crucified by the state for being too radical. He was a refugee.
Ettie: He was a refugee, he was a friend to sex workers, to outcasts. People will co-opt the most radical voices and they will put them on a Live Laugh Love tea towel, and then they will sell it to you on a T-shirt.
Martha: Do you know what is so funny? We were doing a team quiz at my work and they said, What would the title of your book be? Mine would be Live, Laugh, Love: the Revolutionary Version.
Because I do feel like Live Laugh Love is what life should be. But unfortunately for white women, Live Laugh Love is just for them to live, laugh and laugh. Live Laugh Love is one of the most radical chants that you can have, if you understood what those words meant for everybody. I'm gonna co-opt it. I'm taking that from white women. I might even write an essay on why live laugh love is radical praxis.
(Break here while I howled with laughter).
Ettie: So who is BAME Online for?
Martha: BAME Online is everybody. It’s for anybody who is interested in how to understand racism and how to build anti racist practice into their work. Anyone who’s interested in the charity sector, philanthropy, social movements, social justice. Anybody who enjoys live living, laughing and loving. I think it's for anybody.
The people it’s not for? People who don't believe that racism is real. Because we're not gonna spend loads of time explaining to people that racism is real. That’s a given. The name itself tells you something.
I think the name BAME Online is really interesting because white people think that is not for them. Which is so interesting, because, you know, they create conferences, fundraising conferences, they don't even need to say white fundraising conference, but we know it's not for us, right.
We actually do have a new name. And I'm not gonna say it until the conference. But it really is for anybody who is ready to understand how anti racism works in practice, because I think people think it’s very theoretical, but we have people from Black Feminist Fund who are coming to talk about reparations, from Decolonizing Wealth who are doing incredible things with reparations and funding indigenous work in the US.
If you want to learn about resistance and how liberation is happening right now within communities who have taken it upon themselves because they cannot wait for you to finish the battle of the f***ing terminology… then it's for you.
It started as an event for fundraisers. It still has a lot of that. One track is focused heavily on how money moves. But we talk about Compassionate Leadership, Revolutionary Love, Oppression Olympics, Radical Imagination, Joy.
And what is missing from conversations in the mainstream is that focus on values. Not values in really f***ing wishy washy ways like “we respect everybody.” But what does it mean to be unwaveringly staunch in your values. What is the reality of navigating these oppressive systems? Sometimes you end up doing things that contradict your values, and actually, how do you live with yourself? How do you come back from maybe straying away from your community, receiving a lot of hate for it from either side?
These are very, very real conversations. I think for a lot of white people, it feels theoretical. But this is the difference between life and death for people of colour, working class people, queer, trans disabled people.
If you are multiply marginalised, you have to be better than everyone else. I don't fully believe in the “you have to work twice as hard” thing, but you're going to be smarter, more experienced and a lot more savvy. Without access to resources and capital, your communities are still finding a way to thrive.
There's so much that we can learn from those people, rather than exceeding arbitrary fundraising targets year on year for no reason other than to feel good about ourselves and to compete with other charities. To be the best at capitalism, why? That's what the charity sector is. The capitalist sector.
Ettie: I always thought of the charity sector as separate. Definitely a vehicle for reputation washing, but I thought of it as a separate sector from the one where that wealth was created through violence and exploitation.
Martha: We've got people striking from St. Mungo's right now. Can St. Mungo's really confidently say that they’re achieving mission, if their own staff are going on Universal Credit, at risk of eviction? I'm sure many of them are getting evicted.
What kind of bull***t is that?
People who work in charities would be striking much more, if they understood their organisations as part of an industry, rather than some inherent force for good.
I think people end up with an unfortunate loyalty to organisations that don’t serve them, simply by virtue of them being a charity. Well, it’s operating exactly as a business would. So, strike!
Ettie: So many minoritised people, and people who have lived experience of injustice get drawn into the machinery [of charities]. And end up alienating and marginalising the people they thought they were there in solidarity with, that they thought they were working in service with or in service to. The way most nonprofits (apart from like grassroots collectives) are set up means that it's not only possible but inevitable that you will actually move further from justice and equity.
Martha: 100% And that's something I've had to come to terms with. Sometimes when I ask questions to people at BAME Online like “how do you live with yourself?” I really mean: “Please help me live with myself.”
I'm very excited for the conference this year because I’m going to share my own personal story. I think a lot of people see me as this person who gets anti racist practice, knows all the answers, came out of the womb some morally superior person. No man, I participated in some shady unethical practices. And I didn't know any better, but I should have.
And here's my journey to learning. Because I'm smart. I should have known better. Obviously, the way that you're trained is very specific. But we have the internet. Come on. There's no excuses. That's why I'm going to bear my soul with someone who is very challenging.
Khadijah is a brilliant thinker. She does not mince her words at all and actually talking to her will draw this out of me. I strategically wanted to have a conversation with her because I know that she will push me to actually think harder and probably in a sadder, dark way than the Live Love Laugh way.
Ettie: I think that comes right back to love being justice. That scrutiny, that tough questioning that she's going to subject you to. That sounds like love.
Martha: It does. Love is honesty, you know, and it's also reconciliation. I think I need to reconcile with my own demons but also with the people that I love.
Maybe they're not going to be there watching it. But I think a lot of the work that I do, it’s not motivated by guilt, but there is a definite feeling of atonement.
I raised millions of pounds for organisations, that don't give a f*** about people like me. If I put the same amount of effort into dismantling these systems as I put into raising money, then I feel like I'm on the right track. Living life in the way that I should be living. A Live Laugh Love kinda way. White women, you're onto something. Oh, never mind. I bet they stole it. I bet they stole it from us.
Ettie: Do not doubt that a Black queer woman came up with it first.
(Shockingly, I’ve checked and it looks like a white woman called Bessie Anderson Stanley came up with it.)
Martha: You have to call this interview Live Laugh Love. You have to.
(Joke’s on you Martha. I did.)
Ettie: How can people find or get involved with LiveLaughLove I mean BAME online?
Buy your tickets for BAME Online.
It’s online. All you need is access to the internet and a device in order to join.
Tickets are pay what you can.
Ticket holders can access the content for at least 30 days afterwards.
Last year, we gave it to people for 90 days, because we were feeling very generous and also because the content was so f***ing good.
You don't have to be available on the day. You don't have to make an agonising choice between two sessions that are happening at the same time. You can watch them back. You can watch them on the toilet you can watch them on the bus.
We have BSL interpreters for the whole conference for the whole day. We'll have captions as well and isn't accessible programme as well for people who use screen readers which is on our website.
As my final words, I'm gonna really savour throughout the whole conference. I'm just like, oh my gosh, how can we live laugh love better?
Thank you Martha.
Please Live Laugh Love your way to BAME Online right now. I’ll see you there. 😊