Black woman shares ‘heartbreaking’ response after setting up ‘safe space’ for minority mums

A black woman from Cheshire has spoken out about the ‘frustrating and heartbreaking’ response she has received in the county after providing a ‘safe space’ for ethnic minority mums. Sheila Wright, who is speaking using a pseudonym, says she spent nights in tears during the start of the Black Lives Matter movement thinking ‘what kind of world have I brought my son into?’

It was during that time, in 2020, that the mum-of-two decided to set up the Black Mums of Cheshire group as a support network for ethnic minority mums in the county. But Sheila, who has a 10-month-old baby and a four-year-old, was ‘heartbroken’ by what followed.

Since setting up the group she has been threatened and racially abused, with regular messages on social media from strangers telling Sheila she ‘better watch her back’. “It can get quite bad,” she explained to CheshireLive.

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“You can get a lot of people that say it’s racism towards white people, which is just ridiculous, but I can handle that stuff. But when I’m getting messages in my inbox with ‘c***’ and ‘better watch your back’ and ‘hope I don’t bump into you’, these kinds of comments, I’m like: ‘Right, okay, this is serious, this is not good.’

“That’s why I had a conversation with my husband and said, ‘I’m not willing to not do this group, but let’s change my name on Facebook just to keep us a little bit safer.’ It’s a shame that I had to do that.”

The Nantwich woman says that in Cheshire, ‘inclusivity is never a priority for people’, as in a county lacking in diversity people take for granted that they are the majority.

“I’m not sure if it’s the same everywhere else, but in Cheshire, inclusivity is never a priority for people,” she said. “We’re surrounded by people who say that they don’t see colour, because they take for granted that they are the majority and they never have to see colour.

“The flip side of that is a child who grows up thinking, ‘Why am I different? Why do I look like this and everyone else looks different?’ And they never see themselves represented in books, or in schooling, or on the TV.

“As a new mum, I started looking for support groups and mummy groups to arrange playdates and that kind of stuff.

“It’s not that these groups aren’t friendly, the people in the groups are lovely, but as a black woman and as a black mother we face certain things that you can’t express or gain support for in that kind of group because there’s just that generic lack of knowledge on the subject. Also, people get very uncomfortable when you start talking about race or anything like that.

“I’m mixed-race; my mum is white and my dad is Jamaican. When I had my son – this is the magic of melanin, as I like to call it – although my son is three-quarters black, my son was born with absolutely no pigment, he was completely white.

“He’s come into his blackness now, he had grey eyes and light skin, no colour. I had these situations where people would question whether he was my son. If I tried to gain some sort of understanding or support for that in these mainstream groups, people just don’t get it.”

Sheila says that it was around the time of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 that she decided to found the group: “I spent many a night crying over my son, thinking: ‘What kind of a world have I brought you into?’ I needed support with that; I needed to be able to talk to people about that, and I could not do that in the mums’ spaces.

“You get gaslighted by people saying: ‘Not everything’s about race,’ but actually, a lot is about race, a lot is about colour. Every person on this planet deserves a safe space and deserve to find their tribe. So, one night, I said: ‘There are black women in Cheshire who feel like me, so I’m going to start a Facebook group.’ That group quickly grew within a couple of weeks, and we’ve now got over 170 members, and it’s growing.

“The aim of the group is twofold: To be a safe space for black and brown mothers in the area of Cheshire to engage with each other, to draw on each others’ experience, to talk children and to seek advice; and the other side is to challenge that non-inclusive nature of Cheshire for our children.

“Because it’s not just us; when we, as mothers, go into a mainstream mummy group with our children, it’s not just us that are the only non-white person in that room, it’s also the children who are the only non-white children in that room the majority of the time. As that child growing up in Cheshire, I can tell you that that has a detrimental impact on you as a child, on your confidence and self-worth and the way you see yourself, the way that you feel not normal and other-than.

“We say now that ‘representation matters,’ and it really does, because we go to school and we don’t see anyone that looks like us, the teachers don’t look like us, the guest speakers don’t look like us, and most of the other children and their parents don’t look like us – it can be quite damaging, and I’ve told myself that it’s going to be different for my children, and that I’m going to strive and go out of my way to put them in situations where they don’t feel like that and see themselves like that.

“The environment has to be inclusive. I know geographically it’s difficult, and if we just opened it up to everyone and said ‘everyone can come,’ then you are going to get 98, 99 or 100 per cent white, but it’s not impossible to be more inclusive. You just have to go out of your way and make it a priority.”

Sadly, Sheila says she has had to limit the frequency in which she advertises the group to just once every one or two months, as the negative response every time she does becomes ‘exhausting’.

She explains: “I’ll get maybe 10 to 20 mothers who come into the group, but I’ll get 30 or 40 nasty messages. We’ve not had the best response.

“I post in other [Facebook] groups… a little bit about what the group is, who it’s open to and what we do. People get very bogged down in: ‘That’s racism’, because it’s exclusive to BMoC members, but you just have to look at the definition of a ‘safe space’, and that is: An environment or a place where a category of people can feel confident that they won’t be exposed to criticism, discrimination, harassment or any time of emotional harm.

“Everyone is deserving of a safe space. If we want our coffee mornings to be safe for black, brown and ethnic minority mothers, then it has to be exclusive to them, otherwise it’s not going to be a safe space anymore.

“One of the arguments is that it’s segregation and we’re segregating ourselves. I’d argue that in a town or a county where it’s 98 per cent white, where none of the shops stock our food or hair products, where none of the mainstream groups want to go out of their way to put inclusivity at the heart of what they’re doing, who is segregating who?

“It’s bad that we feel we need our own group. If we didn’t feel this way then we wouldn’t need to have it.

“We are not the only Facebook group that has exclusion criteria, but we are the only Facebook group that gets flak for it. It’s a representation of that anti-blackness. It’s frustrating and it’s heartbreaking, but it’s also not surprising.”

But despite the threats and negative response, Sheila says the response from members who have joined the group makes it all worthwhile.

“So many of the women in the group talk about how it [BMoC] has changed their lives,” she said. “It’s brought about a community and a sisterhood that they’ve never had before, or women who’ve moved here from Birmingham, Wolverhampton or London, who have that community, and they’ve come to Cheshire and it’s been taken away, and finally they’ve found it again.

“One of the ladies in the group, her son is the only non-white child in the whole school, and he said to his mum: ‘I wish I had white skin like my friends,’ and she was heartbroken. He’s now in an environment where he has friends who look like him, and it’s not an issue for him anymore.”

Sheila added: “Our intentions and our aims are pure, and it’s only to benefit marginalised women and children, and I don’t understand how that could be criticised and attacked. For me, there is only one reason that it could be criticised and attacked and that’s racism.”

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