When did you realise you are white?: Episode 5 of the Quiet Revolution
- brap
- Apr 11
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 19
Here's a version of a video we sometimes show in our development courses.
The setup is simple. Children are presented with two dolls - one black and one white - and asked a series of questions: Which doll is the pretty doll? Which doll is the nice doll? Which doll is the ugly one? Why?
Have a watch and see how you feel.
When we showed a version of this to Ian Garlington from South West London and St George's he felt sick.
It's just devastating to watch, devastating. It's been about a year since I last watched it and I watched it today and I can feel my heart accelerate. I feel distressed, I feel overwhelmed by it. It's just a bile-inducing, awful moment.
Hearing Ian talk about the doll experiment, you can sense the shift when racism stops being an abstract idea and becomes something he feels in his gut. It's not just about taking responsibility, it's about what happens when you are confronted with a human cost of prejudice. In that film, the children are no longer just children.
This is the topic for episode 5 of our podcast series, The Quiet Revolution.
In the season finale, we travel to South West London and St George's Mental Health NHS Trust. With 40,000 people in care and a staff of 3,000, the Trust is both a lifeline and a mirror of the inequalities it cannot ignore.
We speak exclusively with senior and clinical leaders to explore a critical piece of the puzzle: what happens when leaders stop treating anti-racism as a theoretical project for marginalised groups, and start reckoning with what it demands of them personally?
From the visceral shock of the "doll experiment" to the PR nightmare of admitting "our organisation is racist," this episode tracks the journey from personal awakening to structural accountability. We explore why the fear of saying the wrong thing paralyses leadership, the radical act of simply believing staff, and how anti-racism is fundamentally linked to life-or-death clinical metrics, like detention and restraint.
In this episode, we cover:
Unseeing the Norm: Why Ian Garlington described confronting racism as having "the skin peeled from your eyes."
The PR Taboo: Why a Director of Comms and a CEO decided to start telling inductees that the organisation has systemic racism.
Believing the Experience: Why organisations demand "proof" of racism, and the power of changing the default response to belief.
Clinical Outcomes: Why anti-racism isn't just an HR issue, it's about shifting the data on patient restraint, seclusion, and detention under the Mental Health Act.
Comments