Edward Enninful Talks About The Importance Of Cultivating An Anti-Racist Agenda

Last week, Edward Enniful, the editor of British Vogue watched a video of George Floyd, the 46-year-old African-American man who died in custody after an officer from the Minneapolis Police Department knelt on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds. He talks about how it made him feel, he said, “First of all, I was wracked by a feeling of intense sadness at the senseless loss of life. Then I saw the video footage of Amy Cooper, the white woman who called the police on Christian Cooper, a black man walking in New York’s Central Park, when he asked her to put her dog on a leash. That made me feel enraged. In the days since, I have been unable to shake a very specific feeling that will be familiar to black people around the world: that my life is somehow disposable.”

He talks about how lucky to have a privilege in his world, he said, “But as a man of colour, and as a gay man, I could not escape the sense that it doesn’t matter what you’ve achieved, or what you’ve contributed to society, your life can still feel worthless. When I step out of my door in the morning, to take a walk or to wander alone, I am always aware of increased personal danger because of the colour of my skin. These past few days I’ve gone between rage and sadness and fear. What these racist acts reveal, among many other things, is that we have a lot more work to do. Anybody who thinks we’re there, that we have created a society where everyone is equal – well, they’re wrong. Racism is a global issue. Racism is a British issue. It is not one that is merely confined to the United States – it is everywhere, and it is systemic.”

His mother always told me to watch himself when he left the house, he said, “As a black person, you learn from a very young age that you need to have your wits about you. Children are born without prejudice, but when I started school in London, I realised that I was different. Name-calling is only the very first thing you have to deal with, and there have been worse moments. Growing up in Ladbroke Grove, I saw black people persecuted, arrested, abused – this happened all the time. My mother told me to watch myself whenever I left the house. I still feel that same sense of anxiety today when I step out of my front door. Forty years on, nothing has changed.”

Report: Amanda Lou