If you listened to last week’s Women’s Outlook show you will have heard from a very articulate young man called David McLeod. David is something of a legend in the Bristol Afro-Caribbean community, having successfully won a racial discrimination case against his then employers, a large local school. The short version is that David, having been doing a job very well for some time, was passed over for promotion in favor of a white person with fewer qualifications, for a job that was all about outreach to ethnic minority communities. The tribunal found evidence of other instances of racial discrimination at the school as well, and in the wake of this the head teacher, Gill Kelly, decided to look for alternative employment.

You will have heard me rant before about how anti-discrimination laws are often toothless. Sure David won his case, but it will be very difficult for him to get a new job. What HR department is going to recommend hiring someone who sued his former employer for discrimination? Ms. Kelly, on the other hand, was spared the indignity of being fired for the lapses that took place on her watch. And now we learn that she has been given a high profile consulting job by the City Council’s education department. That, dear readers, is what privilege is all about.

We talked about this with David after the show last week and Paulette, being Paulette, was immediately organizing a protest and phoning all of her media contacts. I volunteered to contact my colleagues at Bristol 24/7. I wasn’t sure what to expect as they are a relatively new outfit and I’ve not actually met any of them, but I was delighted to see them run a big story about David yesterday.

It gets better. The BBC picked up the story, even crediting us for breaking it. And today we ran a new article featuring legendary Bristol civil rights campaigner, Paul Stevenson.

I am very pleased. I don’t know whether anything concrete will come of all this. Institutional racism is a very hard thing to break down. But at least the city’s new media is taking a stand, and forcing some of the old media to take notice. The Post, of course, seems to have missed the story entirely.