The actor Shaniqua Okwok has criticised the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, claiming she was told to embrace her “inherited trauma” and act like a slave in chains during an acting exercise.
Okwok, who appeared in Steve McQueen’s series Small Axe and the award-winning drama It’s a Sin, accused the prestigious drama school of paying lip service to its anti-discrimination pledges by failing to say whether it had disciplined the teacher involved in the incident in 2015.
Okwok said: “I don’t think I was able to really understand what was happening at the time because I was being gaslit. No one was calling it racism.”
The actor reported the alleged incident after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, when she and other graduates met school leaders, Deadline reported.
The meetings culminated in an action plan and pledges from the school, including staff anti-racism training, a commitment to “decolonise” the curriculum and plans to diversify its workforce.
Royal Central also encouraged graduates to make formal complaints to Intersol, an external agency engaged to examine historical allegations of racism. It was to these investigators that Okwok made a formal complaint about the incident that she said took place weeks into her first year at the drama school, which boasts alumni including Dame Judi Dench and Kit Harington.
Okwok described how during a movement exercise she focused on walking neutrally with her hands by her side. Classmates were invited to comment on the walk in the form of a movie title, and one student shouted “chain gang” at Okwok, which was interpreted as a reference to her race.
She said her classmates were shocked and she expected the teacher to intervene and encourage a conversation about unconscious prejudice. Instead, she alleged, the teacher told her to embrace the interpretation of her being a “slave in chains” because she was dragging her feet and her hands were close to her body.
She said she was horrified and the incident “diminished” her for the rest of her training. She claimed she raised concerns with teachers at the time but the school was more interested in criticising her for sharing details of her experience with friends on Snapchat.
Deadline reported that her classmates penned written statements supporting her story and Royal Central upheld her complaint in February last year, nearly 12 months after she formally lodged her concerns with the external investigators.
She received a letter from an HR officer that said: “We can confirm that your complaint has been upheld and we wish to apologise for any distress.”
For confidentiality reasons, she was not told if the teacher faced any consequences. According to Deadline, the individual remains in post and did not respond to a request for comment.
Okwok believes not sharing the conclusion of her complaint “leaves a world where the school is still keeping an unsafe environment” for its students. She claimed the Royal Central upheld her complaint to “shut her up” and said her experience showed the school’s efforts to rid itself of systemic racial prejudice were “performative”.
She said she would regularly return to the school to talk to students, but since speaking out about her experience in 2020 she had not been invited back. In contrast, she has made regular appearances at the Brit school, another alma mater, over the past three years.
“There is no ulterior motive other than making it a safer place for those after us,” she said of her reasons for speaking out. “[In 2020] there was nothing to gain in coming forward. There was no money, no real celebrity; there was nothing other than shifting the school forward.”
Deadline said the school had upheld two racism complaints in the past three years. The Olivier award-nominated actor Josette Bushell-Mingo was appointed as the school’s principal in 2021, while its vice-president is Anne Mensah, Netflix’s UK content chief.
In a statement, Royal Central said: “In June 2020 some of Central’s students and graduates shared their accounts of racism and discrimination experienced during their time at the school. Central issued an unreserved apology and committed to undertake an extensive programme of work across all levels of the organisation to ensure accountability and create meaningful, lasting change.
“Central, which has been under the leadership of a new senior team since 2021, has worked to acknowledge and own its history in an accountable manner, and to foster a culture of equity and inclusion. There is more work to be done, but this work is ongoing and it is a priority. Central remains fully committed to ensuring a safe, equitable, inclusive and supportive environment for its students.”
