[Music] at the age of eight my dad brought mean history encyclopedia I loved it I read it all the time and I still have it now that in it there's no front cover anymore there's no back cover there's not even really a spine it's just a dusty book on my bookshelf but when I was reading it I realized there were a couple things missing so this is me reading it realizing there are a couple things missing and then I'd go to my history classes and realize that there are a couple more things missing and I started to think surely history can't just be castles and white men in tights like there has to be more to history than that I can't just be that lone man says has must have come from somewhere why aren't they in my encyclopedia and so one of the stories that was missed was of a Brummie boy called Francis called Samuel Gorton we'll get to Francis a little bit later but Samuel Goldwyn was a gun maker he made guns in Birmingham's gun quarter and he sold them all across the world he sold them in exchange for black women's bodies on the west coast of Africa he sold broken and faulty guns for black women who would be sold into slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas and it started to get me thinking that through colonization through the white men in tights that were in my book traveling all across the world thinking they knew what was best the parts of a black woman's body was equivalent to a faulty gun to a broken gun that was the value of a black woman's life and so we skip forward a little bit to the 19th century to a guy called dr. James Marion Sims and see dr. James Marion Sims was a physician and we lured him today in history books for finding gynecology and for developing a lot of the practices that we use in modern medicine today when looking into gynecology and gynecology is the study of women's reproductive systems so any diseases or things that may be attributed to their womb to their ovaries to their downstairs parts um but what a lot of history won't tell you is that dr. Sims perfected his ideas on gynecology on three enslaved black women their names are Anaka Lucy and Betsy and he used their bodies whilst they were alive and awake and in pain and screaming to rummage around because he felt entitled to their bodies because he didn't think they were human because again the price of a black woman's body is a faulty gun when he had perfected those practices he then used them on white women and he gave them pain killers of anesthetic the same was not extended to the black women he had experimented on and so where does this come from well dr. Sims believes that black people and black women in particular had a higher pain threshold that because they were closer to animals that they could endure more pain and that's an idea that still lives on today this is a picture of them of an arker Lucy and Betsy and Simms just staring at them that wagwan but this lives on today the Emory study in the u.s. found that black patients are 66 percent more likely to receive no pain treatment compared to their white counterparts even when they describe similar levels of pain so those ideas are still in our medical practices today because of one man's belief and the idea that pain isn't valued the same when it comes from a black person or a brown person or a person who was deemed as being undesirable and lesser we see history's ideas spouting into today but who is producing these ideas so that's in the UK also show that black women are more likely to live in silence with chronic pain then go to the doctors out of fear of not being believed or experiences of not being believed or being told to their face that they have a higher pain threshold or being told to their face that it's not that bad I am one of those women and so it kind of got me ask him how do the things we believe in practice today live on how do they come from the histories and the lies that we've been told to believe and that we've been told are truths and why do they live on and where are they from remember our friend Samuel gotten done with the dodgy guns he wasn't really good at his job he had a grandson also from Birmingham little Brahmi lad called francis galton and francis that founded an idea called eugenics and eugenics the dictionary definition is the science of improving the population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable hereditable characteristics in in english that means there are some people with desirable characteristics that we want to keep in our society and there are some people with undesirable characteristics that we want to exclude from our society and Goldson was obsessed with how do we breed out the bad ones how do we make a society where there are only good stock when his idea of what good stock was was white was blond was blue-eyed was we might have had it in our history books the Aryan race or an idea that disabled people black people queer people people from all over the world that when European we're not as desirable we're not as important this idea is also called scientific racism which is a bit funny because it's got nothing to do a science it's just racism there's nothing scientific about it so why would we have to call it a science and we'll get to that a little bit later but where do we see eugenics play out today and it does still play out today those ideas still exist in the way that we interact and treat people today first off Hitler was a big fan he loved Francisco in his ideas of sterilizing mass disabled people of exterminating millions of Jewish people of destroying the lives and sterilizing black and brown people in Nazi Germany came from a little book that Frances got in our Brummie boi developed and that's not where it stops the massacres in the Congo by the Belgium government and King Leopold are also true of this same theory of dehumanizing we also see it in the gynecology story I spoke about a little bit earlier with black women being tested on I'm a closer to home we see it in the beauty standards we did we hold dear so the idea that white is right or white is default the idea that it you're prettier if you're closer to whiteness the idea that we can do human eyes so if you're closer to whiteness your pain is valued more we also see it in our schools and in our institutions and the fact that black boys can't go to school with afros in some schools in Birmingham they can't have fades they can't have their hair dreaded or plaited or growing how it grows from this from desk out because it's seen as being undesirable I could name those schools by right and where does that come from this idea that this is normal or this is professional and this isn't it all links back to our friend Francis Galton and a little bit closer to home we see an actual eugenics conference happening at UCL the University in London last year where they spoke about how do we solve the Mexican problem how do we actually make sure that refugees die see how do we stop black and brown people being drains on our resources and how do we stop Jewish people taking over all of these very dangerous ideas that are not based on truth and it's still taught today in our schools and our opinions in our attitudes so an idea from burms where we currently are can permeate all across the world today you know alia why are you telling me this why go on I'm gonna ask you to wait a bit we'll get there I want you to ask yourself where did the ideas our current society is built on come from how our bolton's ideas so ingrained in today's society my guess is colonialism is colonization is the project of the white men in tights that were in my history encyclopedia on the ships navigating everywhere knowing best or thinking that they knew best in context they didn't quite understand they transplanted Eurocentric or European ideals on places everywhere and said that this is the right way to be but how can it be right if you don't understand the context of that place why would I wear suits if it's hot outside why am i in a three-piece suit I mean the Caribbean should be wearing a flannel t-shirt and so I also end up asking myself the question what do we have to do to a people to justify colonizing them you have to destroy their knowledge their ways of producing knowledge you have to destroy the way that they love the way that they be the way that they produce culture tradition what they value you have to destroy all of it and you have to dehumanize another so then you can justify doing this and you can justify doing that you can justify sending black women for guns and that's what was missing from my history encyclopedia and so the first time I heard the word D coloniality the first thing I fought was Ross the big word I don't know what it means but I can feel it all over my body I can feel that it's true I can feel that it's right and what I've come to know since finding out about D coloniality is that it is valuing multiple ideas multiple perspectives multiple people and humanizing everyone instead of having absolute truths or Sciences that are based on people's opinions of other people it's also about questioning how do we question where we currently are today how do we ask what's missing how do we put those things that we're thinking into action and how do we start reimagining because for so long we haven't been able to reimagine we haven't been able our imagination has been limited because people have told us that this is right and this is wrong rule if everything isn't that binary just think about what more we could have if one little boy from Birmingham came up with an idea of eugenics that still permeates society today why do we think that our ideas can't live on for the next 500 years or that they won't be able to change the world and permeate in a good way in a way that we can value people in a way that their experiences are important and not dehumanized in a way that we don't still see black women as collateral damage whose permission are we waiting for and so if we want to develop real systemic change like really deep change like actually do the stuff we're talking about create that change and we need to start interrogating whose lives matter who's our fro away and who does it serve for these lives to be throw away or these lives to be valued we need to think about the inequalities we see and point them out all the time we need to question why and where did they come from and we need to start reimagining because that's a beautiful place that our imagination anything can happen and we need to action that as a side note we also need to Google D coloniality colonisation and eugenics and see what comes up and so I'd like to throw it to my G James Baldwin he said this not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced and I believe that with every ounce of my being but yeah it's gonna be a bit uncomfortable sore what we're writing in our history books but it needs to be done nonetheless because nothing ever changed from people ignoring ideas and then at the end of the day it will be uncomfy for a little bit but there's a home for all of us in decolonizing thank you [Applause] [Music]