BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts

Our children are being taught that blackness equals victimhood, that black history can be

reduced to the story of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow that Britain should be ashamed

of how it treats people of colour, yet Britain is as good as it gets when it comes to race

relations. Those are the views, the words not of an angry newspaper editorial or a political

outsider, but of Britain's equality minister, Kemi Badenock, Britain's only black woman

minister. She was born here but brought up in Nigeria. She says she wants to reset the

narrative on race. Kemi Badenock, welcome to political thinking.

Hi Nick, thank you. I introduced you as the only black woman

minister. Are you proud of that description? Or is it one of those infuriating labels

that you get when you're a non-white politician? It is one of those labels that you get when

you're a non-white politician. I don't get infuriated by it. I think it's good that

people know that there are black people in government, but I have always, and I think

this goes for most of the colleagues on my side of the house that always wanted to be seen

as someone who is a politician who happens to be black rather than a black person who

happens to be a politician. Is that why you talked of resetting the narrative on race?

What did you mean by that? Well, I think having now lived in this country

for 25 years, that the way we are talking about race is no longer the story of progress

and it's also no longer the story of aspiration, but just the story purely of discrimination.

I don't think that you can look at those elements separately. You have to look at them together.

And for many people who perhaps won't even alive in 1996 when I came here, there's

so much that has happened that they don't hear about. And I think we should try and have

...