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The old saying that ‘words can never hurt me’ isn’t true.
They can hurt, especially when used to spew racist abuse. But words can also inform, educate, heal, inspire and transform.
This month a new book is being launched that will include poems about racism in the workplace and in childhood. It’s a collection of poems that’s been compiled by Charlotte Shyllon, the Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Black in White, a company she set up two years ago when she published her first book of poems also called Black in White.
Charlotte is a communications consultant who also provides a range of equality, diversity and inclusion services. Raised as a diplomat’s daughter, she lived in a ‘privilege bubble’, not knowingly impacted by racism until she entered the world of work. She worked in the corporate world for more than 25 years, rising to the rank of Partner in a top 10 global communications consultancy. She was often the only, or the most senior, UK-based black person in the companies where she worked. Over the years, she encountered occasional incidents of racism and unconscious bias, and just accepted these as something that came with the territory.
Speaking up about racism
Then after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, feeling compelled to speak up about her previously ignored incidents of workplace racism, she wrote and published her first book with poems to relate some of her own experiences and those of others she had been told about or observed. “I use poems to narrate some of my experiences of racism in the workplace, in the hope that they provide insight and illumination to some of these issues,” said Charlotte. “Poetry can be an engaging means of sharing powerful content; it can pack a punch. It has been used to great effect by many brilliant poets over the centuries to deliver some difficult but important messages.”