Introduction: race, racism and intersectionality

Quite soon after the COVID-19 pandemic reached the UK, its disproportionate impact on Black and other people of colour in our communities and among NHS staff became apparent. We watched the viscerally arresting pictures of the first NHS deaths displaying Black and Brown faces on our news screens. We waited desperately for answers and solutions in the subsequent official reports (PHE, 2020) with the banal ministerial claims that the ‘virus does not discriminate’ ringing in our ears. However, we knew, as Omar Khan, the former Director of the UK's leading race think tank, the Runnymede Trust, was quick to remind those of us that needed reminding: ‘racism is a matter of life and death’ which the pandemic has merely served cruelly to expose and exacerbate. ‘Racism is the real pandemic’ – as the banners of Black Lives Matters (BLM) protesters (shown in Figure 5.1) proclaimed – because COVID-19 does discriminate through inequalities in health, education, housing and employment, impacting and determining ‘the lives of BAME groups from cradle to grave’. In November 2020, the American Medical Association, recognized racism – systemic, cultural and interpersonal – as a ‘public health threat’.

That the severity of the suffering from the pandemic was experienced most acutely by Black and other lives prompted all of us to reconsider injustice. In this chapter, we extend this reflection to the profession of the authors of this book: legal education. As a starting point, it is clear that justice is not available for everyone: from police brutality and deaths in custody against Black lives and those of indigenous and other people of colour across the globe including in (former) colonial centres like the UK; to the sheer negligent disregard which led to the burning of Grenfell Tower; to standing by as people fleeing persecution drown in the waters that surround us.