Rupa Chilvers

So I think the challenge that I had and I… I… you know 20 years later I can say I did it wrong but I did start my career thinking that my… the… my skin colour didn’t matter because I was around people who didn’t… umm… seem to sort of um notice it or I guess I didn’t feel like it was being noticed, but I did overtime realise that it does probably have an impact, but I would find that harder to talk about injustice in case I was labelled umm… and… and so I think when I saw it I did name it. But umm… but it’s… know you it is… it is hard to make those statements in case you look like… you look like you’re making a point because you’re that skin colour or… or whatever it is, but I had to overcome that a little bit and just think well if they think that they think that and I’ve just gotta say what I’ve gotta say. Um… and I have spent some time thinking what is that term? I don’t go with race as a term which is why I call it skin colour because I think that it what we’re noticing physically, I don’t know that we’re noticing people’s backgrounds, culture, ethnicity– I think we are noticing their skin colour and their accent. I’ve been lucky enough to work in international settings, um… so… so… I’ve noticed differences in culture in how for health and social care, we have a lot of things like regulation, governance, all those things, but I look at it now um, it has… it has a tinge of um… I don’t know what the word is but there is a way that we do governance and regulation in the UK because of the UK culture and there is a way its uncomfortable in certain cultures to take that, so if we’re going to slam people, for example, if we’re going to catch people out and um tell them that they are doing something wrong, how we do it is influenced by our cultural background as well as the context we’re in. Yeah so I think that all of that, I have a deeper understanding, I don’t have answers but I have a deeper understanding of why it matters and I think that’s made me realise that activism is important because we shouldn’t make these assumptions that we carry things over and there is one right way of doing it, um I think we should constantly be working hard to understand what the different ways are because actually an answer in a different culture that’s needing to address it differently because they actually don’t want to tell people off and they don’t want to be harsh in… in…. in… not in the negative way of harsh but ya’know they might come up with a way that somebody else might go actually I prefer that way and I don’t want to do it this way, um… so I see it as a positive step… umm in the world.

Recorded: by Jayde Stevenson