On race in 2020, we took a step forward – from minus 10 to zero. We can't afford to go back

This was the year that made achieving nothing look like progress. I mean that in the nicest way.

A wise old man I spoke to recently put it better. He has spent a lifetime doing anti-racism work, and was reflecting on how, since the traumatic murder of George Floyd in May, it feels like real gains have been made in 2020. “The good thing about this year,” he said, “is that for a long time we have been stuck at -10. In 2020, it looks like we have finally progressed to zero.”

Getting to nothing has been a lot of work. Until this year, even attempting a conversation about anti-blackness, structural racism – or, God forbid – whiteness, was often liable to provoke the most extreme hostile and defensive reactions. I should know: I often experienced the consequences of attempting to do so on live television.

Whereas now, simply acknowledging the state of our problems has become a socially acceptable thing to do. It does feel like a step forward, but at the same time describing it as an accomplishment feels like a bit of a stretch. If I sound ungrateful, then good. It cost so many people’s lives to get this far.

There are those giant tragedies and then there are the little things. All our worlds shrank this year – because our movement was so dramatically restricted – but sometimes the devil is in the detail. A conversation I had recently with a black woman who wields enormous power in the TV industry sums it up for me. She and I were meeting from our respective bedrooms in the now familiar, strange intimacy of a one-on-one Zoom meeting. She has developed a massive rash all over her boobs.

“It’s years of bullshit – racism, micro-aggressions,” she told me in a matter-of-fact tone. “I have never had any eczema before. My doctor said it’s erupted now because I’ve finally given myself permission to acknowledge the toxic stuff I’ve been putting up with during all these decades of my career.”

It’s one of numerous similar conversations I have had this year. Being exhausted became a state-of-the-black-nation fact. It was exhausting when institutions, white friends and co-workers refused to acknowledge the murder of George Floyd. It was exhausting when they did. “What has racism been like for you?” – six words you hope to never hear in any language you speak well enough to be required to respond.

Coretta Scott King said that the struggle against racism is a never-ending process. “Freedom is never really won,” she said. “You earn it and win it in every generation.”

It’s true, and also tiring as hell. As I write, my year is ending with a rightwing commentator demanding that I educate him about white privilege via Twitter. You couldn’t make it up. He suggested that his life story of failing upwards – he experienced disadvantage, did not excel in education, and yet now has a large platform anyway – shows white privilege does not exist.

Sometimes I engage in these wearying conversations because, having written a book about the need for a national conversation about race, I feel obliged to take part in one when it happens. But I do think people could read mine, or the number of other excellent and informative books on the subject, before requiring us to speak to them about it.

This demand that black people explain racism, from those who have not previously made the effort to think about it, is precisely the reason why “Your Black Friends Are Still Exhausted” was a headline in British Vogue in October, with the added suggestion to “Check On Their Mental Wellbeing”.

I don’t want to be overly negative. And the fact that British Vogue should run such a piece is symptomatic of the positive change that is starting to come through. Its editor, Edward Enninful, has not only turned the nation’s most prestigious fashion magazine into a celebration of all beauty – not excluding blackness but championing it – he has also now been appointed Vogue’s editorial director for the whole of Europe.

Culture, fiction and drama are powerful tools in this struggle, and we are finally tasting what happens when black creatives come through. Michaela Coel set a new bar for authenticity and creativity with her mesmerising series I May Destroy You. Steve McQueen’s Small Axe made the telling of Britain’s own recent history a cultural moment. I didn’t know how much I had missed seeing black love and joy celebrated, allowed to breathe and flow on British TV, until I watched Lovers Rock.

At the same time Covid, which took so much away in 2020, also hit black culture hard. We mourned Ty, the rapper who pioneered the unapologetically British hip-hop that has now, thanks in part to his pioneering, taken the world by storm. And we mourned the legendary community activist Paul Lawrence – who spent his life working for and with the black community in the UK, keeping strong ties to his native Jamaica.

That the spotlight shone on black excellence, for all these reasons, only served to make our government more conspicuous in its complete mediocrity. This was the year Boris Johnson’s government actively campaigned against anti-racism, appointing a race equality inquiry run by people who don’t believe in institutional racism. To this we can add having a minister of gender equality who doesn’t believe in feminism, and a children’s commissioner unable to condemn smacking children. In fact, reflecting on all this, if our government wants to really challenge itself with new year goal-setting, mediocrity would be a bold aspiration.

The “Goodbye 2020” sentiment has become a small industry at this point, for understandable reasons. But you don’t have to be a prophet to see that the only real crime of this year would be to not learn its lessons. Hopefully we won’t have to go through it all again.

• Afua Hirsch is a Guardian columnist