To be honest, when I arranged to speak to a group of politicians, I wasn’t expecting them to declare their determination to “dismantle power structures that were created 400 years ago”. Or for them to speak approvingly of Black feminist organisers and theorists such as Audre Lorde.
My conversation with Tamsin Omond and Amelia Womack, who are jointly running for co-leadership of the Green Party of England and Wales, came as a surprise. For a long time, I had thought of UK politics as inaccessible, particularly for people from ethnic minority backgrounds. It’s hard to get excited when you rarely see yourself reflected among the MPs elected to represent us, and when the few Black, female MPs who do get elected are discriminated against and receive a disproportionate amount of online abuse. When I thought of politics, I would think of rich, old, white men – and I am none of these things.
But Omond and Womack are speaking a language I understand. “Those power structures and the model of extraction and exploitation that was baked into our white, Western, dominant culture, have to be dismantled,” Omond says. “Not just for social justice to be achieved, not just for healing and reparation to be achieved, but also because we’re in the midst of a climate and ecological emergency.”
