Fried chicken and swimming really aren't pressing issues for Black British youth

The BBC is an institution close to many people's hearts. Known for its programmes about working your fingers to the bone baking a Victoria sponge in what must be an extremely stuffy marquee and surprisingly white East End communities, it has rarely ventured deeply into the topic of race, preferring to see itself as a non-partisan organisation.

This is probably what caught most people off guard when during the station's promotion of BBC Newsbeat's online documentary That Black British Feeling, which asked why Black Lives Matter is in the UK, they asked series of inane, reductive questions on their Twitter page. These included "Is it true all black people like chicken" and "The myths around swimming and being black ...".

For an organisation that's usually too steeped in nostalgia to notice any changes in society this sideways jump to openly using racist stereotypes to start a conversation seems a little left-field. What happened to the BBC that never mentioned racism?

The stereotypes used are based on the traumatic and ugly history of prejudice and discrimination. The reason many black people in the US can't swim is due to segregation; they were banned from many pools in their neighbourhoods and never had the chance to swim. That's why it was such a dramatic moment when Simone Manuel won the women's 100m freestyle in Rio 2016. Not only did she accomplish an amazing feat, she also had to break down the barriers racism built just to get there.

The fried chicken stereotype associates black people with laziness, gluttony and ghettoises us. It goes along with the watermelon myth and the idea of the poor, undereducated class of people. It's also a stereotype that just doesn't make sense. There aren't many societies in the world that don't love chicken. It's delicious. End of story.

These stereotypes are outdated, offensive and most importantly they're actually American stereotypes. If you're gonna stereotype us at least use good old-fashioned British stereotypes.

Now that the dust has settled and the Twitter storm has moved on it's become obvious to me that the BBC Newsbeat team and documentary makers thought they were really adding to the conversation around what it means to be Black British with this incident.

Rather than viewing the statements and videos they made as an unnecessary addition to their documentary I truly think Newsbeat believed they were being forward thinking and progressive in their decisions. Of course it's not radical to simply regurgitate the same nonsense that black people face every day. This obvious mistake could have been avoided with one simple change; hire more black people that want to make programmes for other black people. It's really that simple.

The BBC and its programme makers always fall into the same trap whenever they attempt to tackle the issue of race. They always forget to consider who they should make the programme for and who is making the programme. If the answer to both those questions is white people, then you've gone severely wrong before you've even started.

How does it benefit Black British people to talk about fried chicken and swimming? Who decided this was an important topic to discuss on a channel aimed at young people? Considering today young Black British people have to deal with the humiliation of stop and search, the knowledge that they're more likely to live in second class housing, poor environments, go to run down schools and even when they get to university no matter how well they do they're still less likely to succeed than a white person.

Of course, on top of this they have to deal with the niggling, depressing notion that racism plants in your head that tells you everything you do and everything you are is not good enough. With this knowledge it seems obvious that fried chicken and swimming really aren't pressing issues for Black British youth.

The BBC still has a whole season of programmes focusing on Black British life to go. Will it be more of the same? Was this a blip in the BBC's usually stoic approach? We'll have to wait and see, but we do know from the reaction to this is that there is an increased need for black representation - Black British people won't settle for second best when it comes to getting our voices and stories heard.