The story goes something like this: Anansi is a spider and the smallest of creatures, almost invisible to the naked eye. But he has the audacity to ask the Sky God, Nyan-Konpon, if he can buy all his stories. The Sky God is surprised to say the least. Even if Anansi could afford to buy his stories, what was a lowly spider going to do with these stories – the most valuable items in the animal kingdom?

I suppose Anansi took the view that if you don’t ask you don’t get, and what’s the worst the Sky God could do? Say no? At the bottom of the animal kingdom, ‘no’ is a word Anansi is very much accustomed to.

Still confused, the Sky God asks Anansi: ‘What makes you think you can buy them? Officials from great and powerful towns have come and they were unable to purchase them, and yet you, who are but a masterless man, you say you will be able to?’ Anansi tells the Sky God that he knows other high-ranking officials have tried to get these stories and failed, but he believes that he can. He stands firm and challenges the Sky God to name his price. Now the Sky God is intrigued, but also slightly on the back foot. When you’re a God you don’t expect to be challenged by a spider, after all. So the Sky God sets Anansi the same ‘impossible’ challenge he set the others: to bring him a python, a leopard, a fairy and a hornet. (Yes, we do have fairies in Ghana, just like everywhere else.)

Anansi is not the strongest creature on earth, but he is the most resourceful – he has to be to survive, right? Otherwise he ends up down a plughole or flattened by a newspaper. By using his wit and cunning, Anansi manages to catch all of these creatures. This involves some elaborate hoaxes and traps, but true to his word Anansi delivers to the Sky God the animals, and in return the Sky God gives Anansi the stories. Stories that Anansi goes on to share with the whole of humanity, spreading wisdom throughout the world. From that day on, Anansi grows in stature above all other creatures.

This story is dear to me because it tells us that when you have equal opportunity coupled with purpose and self-belief, anything is indeed possible. Even though the Sky God did not believe Anansi could complete the task, he gave him the opportunity anyway – the same opportunity he had given the previous, seemingly worthier, candidates, who had each failed. Fortunately, Anansi believed in himself, and with a little help from the Universe, he achieved the impossible. It’s this theory that I want to explore in more detail in this book – as well as how limiting beliefs about ourselves and each other prevent us all from achieving our full potential, and how society is robbed as a result. It’s the equivalent of mining for treasure: we are standing in a vast, mineral-rich landscape, but deciding only to dig a small section of the Earth, and so we’re missing out on all the gems the rest of the ignored land has to offer.

We have no template for a truly fair and equal society from any major civilization in recent history. In fact, we have to travel as far back as 7500BC to Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement in southern Anatolia, Turkey, to see an example. Çatalhöyük is extraordinary for many reasons, not least its vast population (over 10,000 inhabitants), which makes it our first known ‘town’. However, perhaps its most notable characteristic was its inhabitants’ egalitarian ways and their lack of societal hierarchy. The town comprised an enclave of mud structures, all equal in size – there were no mansions or shacks. There was no concept of ‘rich’ or ‘poor’, no nobility or slaves, and no separate or lower castes of people. Men and women were considered equal with a balanced distribution of roles and participation in civic life.

Our so-called ‘civilized’ way of living would have us believe that a fair and inclusive society is wishful thinking – a naive or utopian idea. We are naturally programmed to follow the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest – a system that has only worked for a privileged few, caused social polarization and proved unsustainable. But as Çatalhöyük shows, this doesn’t have to be the conclusion. Its exact model is perhaps unrealistic in a modern capitalist society, yet we can incorporate some of the philosophies of our ancient ancestors and make our communities much more inclusive. We have the chance to change gear and move towards a more meritocratic model – a thrilling and exciting destination.

The old way isn’t working; the first country that gets this right will be a beacon to the world. The first economy that is efficient enough to capture the talents of all those available to contribute and utilize its greatest minds will produce a model that the rest of the world will be desperate to emulate.

My sincere hope is that the arguments, evidence, stories and tools in this book will help us to get there – to that Promised Land that Martin Luther King dreamed of. If we remember the story of Anansi, give each other equal opportunities, and believe in ourselves, we can achieve this seemingly impossible utopian ideal. Put simply, to make progress, we must diversify, transcend the six degrees of separation and move towards lives connected by six degrees of integration.

Because the world is separate enough.

PART ONE

THE OTHER MAN

‘It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.’

Frederick Douglass

The Old Way

Making up slightly more than half of the world’s population, women are probably the largest ‘other’ group – but it’s the ‘other’ man that I want to discuss first.

If you genuinely want to identify and understand the ‘other’ man (and the fact that you have chosen to read this book gives me confidence that you do), he is not hard to find. The ‘other’ man is a diverse group found across the Western world in working-class communities, blue-collar jobs, and weekend football matches. These are the men I was raised by and raised with. They have been taught from a young age not to cry, not to be a sissy, and to stand up for themselves. They are more likely to have been celebrated by their peers and perhaps even their teachers for their physical prowess than their mental agility. This other man is black, Muslim, or white working class, and each group is the victim of their ‘otherness’ in a different way. But each will have been taught early on to understand the importance of a man being able to provide for himself and his family – and each will have encountered barriers in trying to achieve this.

Discrimination against men is important to address because of the impact it has on the rest of society. The exclusion of the ‘other’ man can often have violent and devastating consequences. This isn’t always the case, obviously, but men have a different way of dealing with fear and frustration to women, as does each person to the next. Some of this is due to socialization, but some of it is pure biology. Leading neuroscientist Dr James Fallon explained to me that our genetics can result in striking differences in our response to stress, abuse, and rejection: ‘People with “vulnerability” forms of genes are extremely impacted … while those with highly “protective” [genes] are remarkably resistant.’ This suggests that some people are genetically more likely than others to develop damaging responses to environmental stressors, such as depression, PTSD, substance abuse, and personality disorders. And, says Dr Fallon, ‘males often [have] poorer mood and personality outcomes than females’. So men are in fact more vulnerable to exclusion than women, and no man – no matter how much he may have been taught to suppress his emotions – is immune to its effect.

We’ve seen this in action throughout the UK and US in recent years. The failure of these societies to prevent the economic and social exclusion of their ‘other’ men has weakened and divided communities, and created a ticking time bomb that we must deactivate. It has caused feelings of inferiority and led to a fractured society. It has compromised social mobility and created artificial bubbles whereby the situation you are born into dictates your job and educational prospects. It has opened the doors to radical groups, and nurtured breeding grounds of extremism. In short, it has led to a lack of diversity, which then leads to a lack of empathy on both sides: cue demagogues fanning the flames of division for political ends.

For it has been the exclusion of the ‘other’ man with muscle where it still counts – at the ballot box – that has had the most profound implications. In the UK, the white working-class male vote delivered the shattering of Britain’s 40-year union with Europe; in America, it brought the election of Donald Trump, a President with zero experience in public office and some unsavoury views and conduct. Whatever your opinion on either Brexit or Trump, 2016 provided the two most extreme examples in recent history of how a marginalized group can dictate the social and economic future of society.

And of course, politics aside, the exclusion of any ‘other’ man impacts more than just him. His family will share the impact of his pain – sometimes literally, if alcohol and low self-esteem are part of the toxic mix. This scenario played out within a family has a multi-generational impact, and can cost the state millions of pounds in welfare and social services professionals, called in to address family breakdown and deprivation. Failing to diversify and include all ‘other’ men is not something we can afford economically or socially. Quite simply, it will cost a lot less – financially, but also in pain and suffering – to expand opportunities to the ‘other’ man rather than continue to exclude him.

While preparing to write this book, I wrote to three such ‘others’: prisoners in the UK with strikingly similar stories; young men – one black, one Muslim, one white working class – who all once had dreams that turned into nightmares. You will find their letters in response to mine at www.Diversify.org. I read their personal accounts of how life had taken them on a path that led to prison, a powerful line from philosopher Susan Griffin’s A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War kept running through my mind: ‘“There is a circle of humanity,” he told me, “and I can feel its warmth. But I am forever outside.”’ And this ‘circle of humanity’ excluded for them behind bars, too: The Young Report of 2014 found that: ‘Most of the prisoners, said that they experienced differential treatment as a result of their race, ethnicity or faith. Black prisoners felt that they were stereotyped as drug dealers and Muslim prisoners as terrorists.’

These three young men may not possess the tools to express themselves as eloquently as Griffin’s subject, but their words of despair and hopelessness are no less powerful. They are men who, thanks to mass social media and globalization, knew what bounties the modern world had to offer, yet felt that they and their kind were not wanted, valued, or needed. Is it any wonder they ended up where they did?

CHAPTER ONE

Colour Is Only Skin Deep

‘I refuse to allow any man-made differences to separate me from any other human beings.’

Maya Angelou

A black male child growing up in America or Europe will, by the time he reaches school, already have an understanding that he is different from the majority. Whether it’s the images he sees in the media, or family members attempting to prepare him for the exclusion he’s likely to experience outside the home, he will know that the rules are not the same for him and boys that look like him. In many cases, he will be told that anything is possible, but that he has to be twice as good and work twice as hard as his white counterparts in order to succeed and be worthy of acceptance. Many will take this message on board and strive for academic excellence in a pressured education system. Others, seeing black role models in sport, music, or some other art form, will pursue a career in that field, hoping that their talent (as has been the case with stars such as Jay-Z, Usain Bolt, Floyd Mayweather, Stormzy and Tinie Tempah) will enable them to overcome discrimination and other obstacles to success.

The men in my family experienced this first-hand. My father was gifted and well educated as a child and rose to become somebody of stature in his native Ghana, but when he arrived in Britain as an immigrant in the 1980s he had to start afresh. A political coup in Ghana meant that he had lost his position and his finances. He still had his education and experience, though, which surely would be enough for him to make a new life for himself and his family? Unfortunately not. In 1980s Britain, his thick foreign accent and skin colour meant he was visibly and audibly different from what employers assumed was right for a job in banking. There was an unwritten understanding that non-white migrants from commonwealth countries could settle in the UK to do menial or low-paid jobs that indigenous people didn’t want to do. Immigrants like my father, regardless of education and career experience, were not going to be allowed to just parachute into middle-class occupations like banking.

It soon became clear to my father that Britain was not going to be the land of opportunity he had first hoped, so he decided to take his talents and my brother to America. America did provide more opportunities, and Dad was able to secure a job in banking and then eventually launch his own successful real-estate and construction company. Perhaps America, despite its poorer record on race relations, was more amenable than the UK to the idea of social mobility for an African man.

Starting again for the second time in America was not easy, but Sam Sarpong Sr thrived against insurmountable odds and built a very comfortable upper-middle-class life, and I can’t help but beam with pride when I look at the journey he has made. A few years ago I made a pilgrimage to the rural village he was raised in, and I couldn’t fully comprehend the vast leap from where my father started in life to where he now resides. I doubt I would have had the same level of grit and strength to overcome such odds.

Life wasn’t all smooth sailing for my brother, Sam Sarpong Jr, either. African in parentage, British by birth, and raised in America – as you can imagine, he didn’t fit neatly into any particular category. As an actor/entertainer, my brother shared the desire for the visible signs of affluence – luxury cars, designer clothes, and beautiful women. However, as flamboyant as he was, during one of my visits to America I saw my brother become humble pretty fast. Driving through LA in one such luxury car, Sam was pulled over by the police. This being a regular occurrence for black men in America, Sam had his contrite responses memorized: ‘Yes sir, no sir, sorry officer,’ etc.

Witnessing this exchange and knowing the type of person Sam was, I felt upset and indignant – especially as he had done nothing wrong and there appeared to be no valid reason for the stop. My friend and mentor Baroness Margaret McDonagh – white and well spoken – was also with us in the car. As Sam delivered his usual routine, Margaret and I weren’t so agreeable, as this is not something either of us are accustomed to. We demanded the officer’s badge number and a detailed explanation as to why we were stopped. The police officer seemed taken aback, as he hadn’t expected to be met by two British women, and his tone changed immediately to become less threatening and more like a public servant. We received the badge number but no valid reason for why we were pulled over.

With US police officers being fully armed, black men in the US have to humble themselves to an almost humiliating degree to ensure their survival each time they encounter law enforcement. Regardless of the outcome of these exchanges, they serve as an overt reminder to all young black men that, whatever your achievements, aspirations, or character, you can be brought down to the level of a criminal at any time. Male pride makes this a difficult reality to live with and can generate anger in the most excluded and vulnerable black men. However, anger and resentment at authority are costly emotions that black men can ill afford in Western society. In both the UK and the US, it’s an uncomfortable truth that in spite of claims of equality and calls for fair treatment, young black men continue to be targeted for no other reason than the colour of their skin.

These stories show just how difficult it is for black men – even those of education and affluence – to negotiate life in the UK and US as an ‘other’. Their colour is always the first thing people see. But where did this obsession with race and skin colour come from? And why have we allowed it to become such a divisive and alienating factor in our society? These are fundamental questions that scientists may now be able to answer for us. And perhaps, by answering them, we can tear them down.

The false social construct of race

Anthropologist Nina Jablonski has conducted extensive studies into this issue from her research lab at Pennsylvania State University. I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with Jablonski and listen to her speak about the origins of the social construct of race, and her findings are fascinating. In her book, Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color,^* Jablonski investigates ‘the social history of skin color from prehistory to the present’ and finds that, biologically, ‘race’ simply does not exist. In a separate article she states, ‘Despite ever more genetic evidence confirming the nonexistence of races, beliefs in the inherent superiority and inferiority of people remain part of the modern world,’^† and she goes on to explain that the most influential ideas on the formation of historic racism came from just one man:

The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was the first person to classify people into fixed races according to skin color. To him and his followers, skin color was equated with character. People of darker-colored races were inferior and destined to serve those of lighter-colored races. Kant’s ideas about color, race, and character achieved wide and lasting acceptance because his writings were widely circulated, his reputation good, and his audience naïve. The ‘color meme’ was born. The linking of blackness with otherness and inferiority was one of the most powerful and destructive intellectual constructs of all time. Views on the inherent superiority and inferiority of races were readily embraced by the intelligentsia of Western Europe and eventually by the general populace because they supported existing stereotypes.^*

It’s hard to overstate the damage this kind of thinking has done over the centuries.

Geneticist Spencer Wells, founder of The Genographic Project and author of The Journey of Man,^† goes even deeper, using the science of DNA to tell a similar story to Jablonski – that ‘we are all one people’.^‡ By analysing DNA from people in all corners of the world, Wells and his team discovered that all humans alive today are descended from a single man (Y-chromosomal Adam), who lived in Africa around 60,000–90,000 years ago, and from a single woman (mitochondrial Eve), who lived in Africa approximately 150,000 years ago.^§ (It’s a quirk of our genetic evolution that our two most common recent ancestors did not have to live at the same time.)

Due to this common ancestry, the human genetic code, or genome, is 99.9 per cent identical, which suggests that the 0.1 per cent remainder that is responsible for our individual physical differences – skin colour, eye colour, hair colour and texture, etc – has primarily been caused by environmental factors. Like Jablonski, Wells believes our early ancestors embarked on their first epic journey out of Africa in search of food, which led them to gradually scatter across the Earth. Wells explains that the physical appearance of these early travellers changed depending on which part of the world they migrated to. Those who ended up in Europe – in the northern hemisphere – received less sunlight, so their bodies did not need to produce as much melanin (a natural-forming skin pigment that protects from the sun’s ultraviolet rays), and so they developed lighter skin and straighter hair to match their new cold conditions. The same is true for other communities around the world whose appearance adapted to match their new environment. And so our physical differences – once just mutations of survival – became embedded in our DNA, to be passed down through the generations for millennia.

Wells’s deep understanding of human DNA has also influenced his views on humanity and the false social construct of race. In an interview with the UK’s Independent newspaper, he commented: ‘It’s worth getting the message out, that we are related to one another, that we are much more closely related genetically than people may suspect from glancing around and looking at these surface features that distinguish us … Race, in terms of deep-seated biological differences, doesn’t exist scientifically.’

Many of us have instinctively felt and argued for a long time that the concept of ‘race’ is a misleading human construct used to divide us, but it’s reassuring to now have the science to back this up. If more of us understood the epic voyage that our early ancestors embarked upon, which led to the rich diversity we see around us today, perhaps we wouldn’t be so fixated on race. Indeed, we really are all one, and that oneness began in Africa.

The daily reality

Sadly, this understanding hasn’t yet reached everyone. Even when young black men play by the ‘rules’ today, some find that many of the people they come across are still unable to see their academic and career achievements, but have less difficulty seeing their skin colour. Regardless of their personal journey, young black men learn to take the stop-and-searches in their stride (after all, it’s nothing new), as long as it results in their walking away without being too delayed (or physically wounded, as we’ve seen in the US with the rise of police brutality). At work, he is frustrated with his lack of progress in relation to his contribution, although he is careful in office environments to mask his feelings for fear of being viewed as ‘angry’, ‘threatening’, or potentially violent. And he may have qualifications but is unable to get a foothold in the sector he has trained for, or has been given an opportunity and is expected to feel grateful while he remains at entry level and is surpassed by other colleagues, some of whom may be less qualified.

This is the reality for young black men, although it’s fair to say that being prepared for the possibility of rejection on account of your colour from an early age does foster determination and can lead to success, as it forces one to develop astounding levels of resilience. Like diamonds, this pressurized environment can produce spectacular gems, such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Colin Powell, Barack Obama, Kofi Annan, Sir David Adjaye, Ozwald Boateng OBE and many of the great men of colour who have helped shape our world for the better. However, it can also cause deep-rooted feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. The sense of never fully being accepted doesn’t go away, especially as it is reinforced daily, which continuously erodes a sense of belonging and self-worth.

For some black men, this can result in the rejection of education and the world of work, and the pursuit of validation from a subculture where material possessions are valued above those things deemed further out of reach, such as employment and schooling. This route can indeed bring more immediate rewards than academia and employment, where rejection will already have been experienced, but it stands in the way of true social mobility.

Young males in poorer black communities can also fall prey to the trappings of a prescribed form of masculinity that thrives in these subcultures: one in which using violence to defend your reputation is seen as acceptable and sometimes necessary. Men in these environments – gangs, particularly – are often considered weak by their peers if they fail to defend their honour or respond to a slight, the consequences of which can be disastrous. Ironically, the ability to reason oneself out of conflict or to avoid it altogether would be applauded outside of the subculture, but is often seen within the community as cowardice. And the rewards within the subculture – respect, and attractiveness to women – are hard to refuse, especially if escaping the subculture is not seen as a possibility, which makes it pretty difficult to bring about a change in behaviour.

The revolving door

For many black men, this route leads to only one destination: in America especially there is a revolving door from the classroom to the prison cell. Mass incarceration has reached epic proportions, with one in three black men imprisoned at some point during their lives.^* This has big implications for their futures; the ramifications of a criminal record can be catastrophic for employment prospects and, once the step along the criminal justice path has been taken, it’s near impossible to turn back.

When it comes to the American criminal justice system, the odds are stacked against you if you are black. A 2016 report by The National Registry of Exonerations found that 47% of all wrongful convictions involved black defendants. The figures for serious crimes such as murder show that black defendants account for 40% of those convicted, but 50% of those wrongfully convicted (in comparison to whites, who account for 36 percent of those wrongfully convicted for murder). It’s a similar picture with sexual assault: 59% of all exonerees were black defendants, compared with 34% for white defendants^†.

As well as falling victim to police brutality disproportionately, US blacks are also more likely to be victims of police misconduct, such as ‘hiding evidence, tampering with witnesses or perjury’. This may also have contributed to the aforementioned racial disparity; the report concluded that black defendants accounted for 76% of wrongful murder convictions where police misconduct was involved, in comparison to 63% of white exonerees^*.

50%: the percentage by which US prison populations would decline if African Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated in the same proportion as white people.^†

Ava DuVernay’s powerful BAFTA-winning Netflix documentary 13th chronicles how the abolition of slavery and the subsequent exploitation of the 13th Amendment, which deemed it unconstitutional to hold a person as a slave, have led to more black men being locked up now than there ever were during slavery. On the surface, the 13th Amendment seemed honourable and straightforward enough. But there was a loophole that excluded ‘criminals’, and so began the hyper-criminalization of the black male as a means of maintaining the free labour that had been so easily available during the years of slavery. Fast forward to today, and this loophole has morphed to fit the times: from the Jim Crow laws of segregation, to mandatory sentencing and Nixon’s ‘war on drugs’, Reagan’s ‘war on crime’, and, more recently, Clinton’s ‘Three-Strikes Law’; 150 years of systematic discriminatory policy-making has led us to the black male mass-incarceration epidemic in the US today.

American lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative Bryan Stevenson has spent the best part of three decades fighting to highlight the plight of those caught in the crosshairs of the US criminal justice system, and he argues that at the crux of the problem is how we treat the marginalized and dispossessed:

Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. Finally, I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavoured, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.^*

Stevenson also states that the criminal justice system unfairly favours those who are ‘rich and guilty’ over those who are ‘poor and innocent’ – after all, the poor can’t afford a good defence lawyer. It seems prison-for-profit is a very lucrative business, and is now a booming industry – it pays to send people to prison. One of the final acts of the Obama administration was to issue a memo to bring an end to the Justice Department’s reliance on private prisons (which now account for approximately 18 per cent of US federal prisons – a figure that is steadily increasing). The memo, issued by former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, cited more ‘safety and security incidents’ in private prisons than public ones as the reason for this change in policy. Unfortunately, a month after Trump took the Oval Office his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, rescinded this and announced a reinstatement of private prisons.

This, coupled with the fact that a whopping 90–95 per cent of prisoners accept a plea bargain and never go to trial,^† has created a system where poor people of colour are disproportionately incarcerated. This is not only ethically wrong, but also in the long term it is economically insane. To discard one-third of all black males when they are in their prime and most able to contribute to society is a cataclysmic dent in the moral, social, and economic fabric of America.

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