How to Persuade Black People to Take Covid-19 Vaccines - Three Lessons

Last week Sir Lenny Henry wrote an open letter to Black British communities asking them to take the Covid-19 vaccination. The letter was co-signed  by a raft of famous and influential Black Britons and made into a short film by the fantastic Amma Asante. 

I was involved in writing the letter, and even though it was relatively short, I think there are three important lessons for media diversity and trying to connect with a Black audience.

THREE LESSONS

1. It is a love letter.

We deliberately framed the letter as a love letter to the black community. Irrespective of the credibility of the people who signed the final letter within the Black community (and across the UK and beyond) we realised that it is necessary to always make our position clear, especially when we are issuing that message on mainstream media. Our love for our Black families and communities can never be taken for granted and needs to be explicit. 

2. Do not blame the victim

Proceeding the letter there was a lot of media coverage and discussion around misinformation that was stopping Black people being vaccinated. If this narrative is taken to its logical conclusion it means media, policymakers or other opinion leaders are either blaming the Black community for producing more misinformation, or blaming the Black community for being more susceptible to misinformation. When writing the letter we  discussed whether we needed to talk about this issue as well. We came to the decision that we shouldn’t. We took the view that Black people are reluctant to trust official information for very good reasons. The fact is, Black people are no more or no less rational than any other group of people. If Black people do not trust British authorities it is with good reason. As an example, the same week the open letter was published a branch of the British establishment whom Black people are meant to trust when it comes to vaccines brought out a report insisting that institutional racism does not exist. As authors, we realised that we could not gain Black people’s trust by simply writing off their rational concerns and blaming it on misinformation videos. People’s rational concerns need to be acknowledged and addressed, and at least not written off. 

3. Avoiding the White saviour complex

We did not want to produce a letter which in any way could play into the idea that the majority white establishment was here to save Black people. We realised that if we as authors were trying to convince Black people to do anything we needed to ensure they have agency and power over their own lives and we do not fall into tropes of a “white saviour complex” even if it is black people urging them to do something. For this reason we stressed how the vaccine is not simply British but has been developed with the help of Black doctors in the Caribbean and Africa. 

Over the years we have seen far too many public information campaigns aimed at Black people that do not come from a place of love but instead implicitly chastise them for not taking the right course of action.

Over the years we have seen Black people blamed for their own victimhood - either characterised as being too stupid to to know what is good for them or even having cultural beliefs that stop them from doing the right thing. We believe black people act rationally (or at least as rationally as any other group of people).

And from images of starving Africans to encourage us to donate to charities, to Europeans having the answers to “our problems”, themes of the white savior complex pervade our public information campaigns. This is not helpful and must be avoided.

I usually do not go into detail about the thinking behind the letters and speeches I help to write, but the lessons coming out of this one were too important not to highlight them.

I hope other people can learn from our example and I, most importantly, sincerely hope that through the approach we used, the letter will encourage more people to decide to get vaccines against Covid-19.