Baroness Lola Young: "you can't be what you can't see, but somebody has to go first"

The Shift with Sam Baker

My guest today is one incredible woman.

Baroness Lola Young of Hornsey is an actress, academic, campaigner for social justice and a cross bench peer in the House of Lords.

By anyone’s standards she has achieved.

She studied at the New College of Speech and Drama and started her career as an actress in the 1970s and 80s, before becoming professor of Cultural Studies at Middlesex University. In 2001 she received an OBE and became an independent peer in the house of lords in 2004, where she has actively campaigned against modern slavery and unethical fashion, amongst other things.

But before all that, from the age of just 8 weeks old, Lola moved between foster care placements and children’s homes. Then, at the age of 18, she was pushed off what she calls “the care cliff”.

Now that childhood is the subject of Eight Weeks, her stunning memoir of a childhood in care and her journey to discovering her own story.

As she says herself, when people say “this is my friend Lola, she grew up in care, now she’s in the house of lords” it misses out rather a lot of steps on the way.

Lola joined me to tell me how it felt to start trying to weave together the scattered parts of herself in her 50s and how growing up in care turned her into an activist. We also discussed everyday racism, what it’s really like being a Black woman in the House of Lords, her conflicted relationship with visibility and why somebody has to go first so it might as well be you.

* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Eight Weeks by Baroness Lola Young and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.

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