Twenty years since she became the first Black Leader of the House of Lords, Baroness Valerie Amos is proud of how Britain has changed.
Speaking during Black History Month, the 69-year-old Labour peer dismisses Home Secretary Suella Braverman ’s recent assertion that “multiculturalism has failed” and insists diversity is one of our greatest assets. And while she warns that racism “hasn’t gone away” and more needs to be done, she believes the UK should cheer the progress that has been made. Baroness Amos – made a life peer by Tony Blair in 1997 – says: “I don’t agree with Suella Braverman’s comments.
Baroness Amos was the First Black leader of the House of Lords (Ian Vogler / Daily Mirror)“One of the strengths of the UK is our diversity and the ways in which cultures have fused to create Britishness. It doesn’t mean that challenges don’t remain. But I feel very strongly we should be celebrating how we came to be who we are.” She adds: “Britain now is not the Britain of 1963 and I’m really proud of that.”
The former United Nations undersecretary general, who has joined with leading Black figures including Beyonce and actor Forest Whitaker in her humanitarian work, is clear that racism has not ended but it has “taken a different form” – “indefinable” discrimination continues in employment, housing and the criminal justice system, affecting people’s confidence and limiting opportunities.
She reveals: “I’ve spoken to so many women of colour, so many people of colour, who constantly get knocked back – and then it knocks their confidence because they think, ‘I haven’t done enough, I’m not qualified or experienced enough’.” Born on the small island of Wakenaam in Guyana, racism was prevalent when Valerie Amos moved to South East London with her family in 1963.
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At a hospital in Haiti with BeyonceShe and her siblings were put in the bottom sets on their first day at school – they were moved up after mum Dolly, a teacher, demanded they be tested. Once when they moved house, a neighbour started a petition to try to stop the family buying a home in the street. “My mother was always fighting for us,” Baroness Amos recalls.
In 2004, National Front members attacked her nephew’s friends as he celebrated his 18th birthday. She says: “It ruined the whole thing. It was scary.” Baroness Amos has lived a life of firsts: she was the first Black deputy head girl at her school in Bexleyheath, first Black woman in the Cabinet, and first Black Leader of the House of Lords.
Visiting South Sudan with Forest Whitaker in 2015After becoming the first Black woman to lead a UK university, London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, now she is Master of University College, Oxford – the first Black head of a college there. Her career has taken her from local government in the 1980s to war zones across the world with the UN. Last year, she received the Order of the Garter from the late Queen. Yet Baroness Amos says she always has to “work a bit harder” as a Black woman, as countless people assume if she gets a job it’s because she’s “[a Black woman in the] right place at the right time”.
She says: “It makes me really angry. It is so demeaning. It becomes a central thing and you don’t want that – you want the central thing to be the fact that, actually, you are capable, you’re qualified and you can do this.” Recently, a letter from a grandma asking if she could advise her 14-year-old grandson because he had no one close to turn to moved her to tears.
She says: “It is still important for us to give confidence to our young people and make sure that they understand it is possible for them to achieve their goals, their visions and their dreams.” Next year, she admits she’d love to celebrate turning 70 with Beyonce. The pair visited Haiti in 2015 to see the recovery since the 2010 earthquake. The Baroness laughs: “Then I really would have a birthday party. But I wouldn’t dream of asking!”
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