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Living inside this brain...

I often see neurotypicals telling

autistics how to be more autistic (for their comfort)

I mean, they hijack discussions that aren't even theirs

they tell us "not that sort of autistic"

and like "that's not autistic enough" ...

they tell me my autistic means broken

that my thoughts should be spoken

as quickly as possible

if I'm to ever be acceptable

like allistic expressions are incontrovertible

neurotypical standards

have been making their way onto my timeline

interrupting my ability to think

neurotypical thoughts that

declared themselves the default

masking is for protection

stims are our pepper spray

and our hyperfixations...

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Living inside this brain... I often see neurotypicals telling autistics how to be more autistic (for their comfort) I mean, they hijack discussions that aren't even theirs they tell us "not that sort of autistic" and like "that's not autistic enough" ...

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I am a Northamptonian writer-poet, speaker and educator, that delivers lectures, workshops, and facilitates discussions on race and Black history.

I have worked with a wide range of organisations including: Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, The Nenequirer, Northamptonshire Rights and Equality Council, University of Buckingham, Now & Then Theatre, Quinton House School, HMP Onley and more.

I am bookable to come into your institution to deliver sessions on the aforementioned. To inquire further, email tre@treventour.com

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I am a Northamptonian writer-poet, speaker and educator, that delivers lectures, workshops, and facilitates discussions on race and Black history. I have worked with a wide range of organisations including: Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, The Nenequirer, Northamptonshire Rights and Equality Council, University of Buckingham, Now & Then Theatre, Quinton House School, HMP Onley and more.

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Tré Ventour Ed | Twitter, Instagram, Facebook | Linktree

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View treventoured's Linktree. Listen to their music on YouTube, Spotify here.

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Black Lives Matter & The Question of Violence | Gary Younge

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Hollywood is perhaps one of the last places to look for inspiration-practical, emotional, or otherwise-in times of crisis. Still, our gilded class's response to the societal shitstorm that has dominated our minds and screens for the last four months has felt notably unfastened. In April, the comedian and talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres made headlines when she joked that life while quarantined in her ten-thousand-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion felt like "being in jail." The same week, the Times reported on the four hundred inmates being held at Rikers Island for minor parole violations, despite a worsening pandemic. The inmates included Raymond Rivera, a fifty-five-year-old man who, after having his case delayed several months, contracted in jail and died the day after state officials lifted the warrant against him. As public sentiment has turned from coronavirus-induced fear to sadness and anger following the tragic killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, the celebrity response has ranged from milquetoast to head-scratching.

In a video shared to Instagram on June 2nd, the movie heartthrob turned Silicon Valley financier Ashton Kutcher choked back tears as he recounted a pre-bedtime conversation that he had with his two young children. He explained how his son wanted to be read to first, but Kutcher told him that his sister would go first because "for some boys, girls don't get to go at all." The story was meant to serve as a poignant and instructive allegory for the scores of Instagram users who had commented "All Lives Matter" under a recent post of his where he had opined "BLM." Around the same time, Virgil Abloh, the artistic director of menswear for Louis Vuitton and the founder and C.E.O. of Off-White, was being memed into a fine dust after posting a screenshot of his paltry fifty-dollar donation to a bail fund started by the Miami art collective (F)empower. And, on Thursday, a two-minute video for an initiative bluntly titled "I Take Responsibility" joined the ever-growing canon of the unsought celebrity P.S.A. The video features a coalition of white actors and entertainers asserting their culpability in perpetuating anti-black racism. Filmed in a sombre black-and-white and scored with saccharine piano, the spot shows Sarah Paulson, Stanley Tucci, Kesha, and others vowing no longer to "turn a blind eye" or "allow racist, hurtful words . . . to be uttered in my presence" and "to stand against hate." The Web site for the initiative allows visitors to decide which vice they feel most guilty of ("Saying racism doesn't exist," "not being inclusive," etc.) and to "make it better today" by pledging to do things like "donate to families affected [by racism]" before directing them to various organizations and petitions. Elsewhere, many celebrities simply invoked proverbial, and often literal, "prayer hands" emoji (🙏)-a de-facto "get well soon" to society and all its ills.

The missed notes have been particularly grating in the pop-music world, where many stars have built careers and amassed huge profits working within black musical traditions and selling their work to black audiences. As black communities are being disproportionately decimated by the coronavirus and black people continue to die at the hands of law enforcement, there are some who feel that figures like Drake should use their gigantic platforms to do more than, say, offer a fan the chance to fly on his private jet. (On June 1st, Drake was challenged by his fellow Toronto artist Mustafah the Poet to match a four-hundred-dollar donation to a black bail-fund network. The rapper reportedly replied, "Say less, brother," and posted a donation receipt for a hundred thousand dollars.)

A similar desire to push industry leaders toward more decisive action in combatting anti-black racism is likely how #TheShowMustBePaused was first conceived. Led by Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang-two black women who have worked in executive roles at major record labels-the initiative was meant to be an industry-wide day of observance for "the long-standing racism and inequality that exists from the boardroom to the boulevard." According to the stated mission on the project's Web site, the women hoped that this day of reflection would be a positive first step in the effort to "hold accountable the industry at large . . . including major corporations and their partners who benefit from the efforts, struggles and successes of Black people." On Tuesday, June 2nd, scores of artists posted black squares on their Instagram feeds, often alongside the hashtag #BlackoutTuesday. Nearly all the major music labels observed the blackout, and explained, with varying levels of specificity, what a continued commitment to this mission would look like at their respective companies. The trend was quickly picked up by many people outside the industry, too. And, somewhat ironically, the flood of black-square posts ended up saturating the #blacklivesmatter tag on Instagram, displacing resources and information that some organizers had been compiling for years. By Wednesday, it was back to business as usual on many artists' feeds-after all, there were deluxe-edition albums to promote.

The current cultural moment is one whose urgency feels particularly ill-suited to the sort of vapid pageantry that typically constitutes the "socially conscious" arm of a celebrity's public-relations repertoire. Given all the vested corporate interests that celebrities have, and the timeworn tradition of rewarding famous people for the appearance of political integrity more than its actual presence, it's wishful to expect every musician with more than a million followers to be schooled in the perils of systemic racial inequality, much less to be equipped to speak publicly about it. In fact, it would probably be in our collective best interest that not all of them did. Still, one hopes that, among the faction of the highly followed and highly influential who were jumping to post black squares and vague sentence fragments, there are some who could use their visibility to do more. The increased pressure on artists to monetize their personal brands and the subsequent professionalization of social media have turned these solipsistic Internet spaces into de-facto storefronts for mini corporations. Sadly, it seems that many of the famous names behind these accounts have also adopted the sort of risk-averse, politically opaque rhetoric favored by Fortune 500 companies-opting for tepid platitudes and lazy hashtag activism in lieu of more resolute (and potentially alienating) public displays.

The tiptoeing of the entertainment industry's biggest names has been made all the more conspicuous by the activity of their less popular peers. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, and now in the wake of the George Floyd murder and other police-related violence, smaller and independent artists have used their reach to compile and disseminate resources like recommended viewing and reading lists ( flawed as they may be), to amplify the work of organizers, and to publicize bail funds to donate to in support of the many protesters who have been arrested in cities across the country, and they have gone to protests themselves. Corpus Family Mutual Aid Fund, the initiative started by the New York creative collective affiliated with the Queens hardcore band Show Me the Body, has amassed more than twenty-two thousand dollars in just over a month, with the bulk of proceeds going to members of the New York City D.I.Y. music scene who have been financially affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

Of course, not all of the ultra-famous have blown hot air. Various high-profile figures have disrupted their seemingly endless promotion cycles and retrofitted their social channels to speak pointedly about the current moment. One such figure is "Star Wars" 's John Boyega. Despite apparent pushback from some of his fans, the British actor, who is of Nigerian descent, has been very outspoken in disparaging racism and brutal policing and has voiced support for protests around the world. On June 3rd, a video of an impassioned Boyega addressing the crowd at a large Black Lives Matter demonstration in London circulated widely online. Elsewhere, figures such as the Chicago rapper Noname, whose popular online book club has highlighted titles by Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Octavia Butler, have continued to use their platforms to galvanize their following and espouse their unequivocal beliefs. Some celebrities who in the past had been perhaps overzealous in exploiting their soapbox (ahem, Kanye) even seem to have stepped back and taken a more measured approach this time around.

What shouldn't be overlooked is the work that plain old non-celebrity people have been doing. Within the past few weeks, funds for, among other causes, pretrial bail for trans people being held in New York City jails, George Floyd's young daughter Gianna, and Ramsey Orta-the man who filmed the murder of his friend Eric Garner in 2014 and was released from prison this year-have been flooded with contributions. Bail-fund organizers in particular have seen an unprecedented spike in support in recent weeks. Many people have been posting receipts of their donations and challenging friends in their network to match them.

What these examples show is not that every single celebrity has to commit to leading the revolution but what can happen if these platforms were treated less like public-relations buildouts and more like the powerful communication channels and resource vectors that they are. Ideological fluffiness on the part of people with huge online followings can be at its best a wasted opportunity and at its worst deleterious to more substantive activism happening on social media. A #blacklivesmatter post on Jennifer Lopez's Instagram page reaches an audience larger than those of most regional television stations. And although reposting an aerial video of a street mural is nice, it lacks the efficacy of a bail-fund link to free those arrested while marching across it.

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"I Take Responsibility" and the Limits of Celebrity Activism

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Hollywood is perhaps one of the last places to look for inspiration-practical, emotional, or otherwise-in times of crisis. Still, our gilded class's response to the societal shitstorm that has dominated our minds and screens for the last four months has felt notably unfastened.

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MP Zarah Sultana Breaks Down Talking About Sarah Everard, Violence Against Women & Police Crime Bill

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'Living While Black' (Guilaine Kinouani)

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'Living While Black' (Guilaine Kinouani)

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'Revelatory, necessary and brilliant' Candice Carty-Williams | 'A must read' Robin DiAngelo | 'A powerful wake-up call' Patrick Vernon | 'An incisive and important book that will change the way you think' Nikesh Shukla | 'An unmissable read for everyone' | 'Honest, razor-sharp, f ascinating and impressive' The Psychologist | 'Groundbreaking' Bad Form

For the past 15 years, radical psychologist and therapist Guilaine Kinouani has helped hundreds of Black people to protect their mental and physical health from the harm of white supremacy. In this timely book, she brings together powerful case studies, eye-opening research and effective coping techniques from her anti-racist academy and award-nominated blog, Race Reflections, helping readers to:

- set psychological boundaries and process trauma
- protect children from racism
- handle difficult race-based conversations
- understand the complexities of 'Black love'
- find connection, beauty and joy in the world

Living While Black empowers you to adopt radical self-care tools that improve day-to-day wellness. It teaches you how to thrive not just survive and find hope - or even joy - in the face of racial adversity. It is also an essential anti-racist resource for allies who want to do better.

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Living While Black: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Racial Trauma

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'Revelatory, necessary and brilliant' Candice Carty-Williams | 'A must read' Robin DiAngelo | 'A powerful wake-up call' Patrick Vernon | 'An incisive and important book that will change the way you think' Nikesh Shukla | 'An unmissable read for everyone' | 'Honest, razor-sharp, f ascinating and impressive' The Psychologist | 'Groundbreaking' Bad Form For the past 15 years, radical psychologist and therapist Guilaine Kinouani has helped hundreds of Black people to protect their mental and physical health from the harm of white supremacy.

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Film-makers Steve McQueen and James Rogan explore three key events in 1981.

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The acquittal by a jury of four people at Bristol Crown Court this week for their role in pulling down the statue of Edward Colston and dumping it in the docks has been greeted with a chorus of outrage by members of parliament. Former cabinet minister Robert Jenrick implied in a tweet that the ruling somehow undermined the rule of law.

We attended all ten days of the trial from the public gallery. While we cannot know the jury's reasoning, it is unlikely that this was a "perverse" verdict - where the jury believes the defendants are guilty in law but still choose to acquit. In this case, the judge gave the jury a range of legal reasons to acquit the defendants.

The trials of protestors are rarely like "ordinary" criminal trials. In most trials, defendants contest the facts of the case: what happened, whether it was them, if they were there, and so on. In protest trials, defendants focus instead on justifying their actions. Invariably, this explicitly brings politics into the court.

The "Colston Four" were charged with criminal damage. Under the Criminal Damage Act 1971, defendants charged with destroying or harming property can argue they had a "lawful excuse" for their actions. This is because safeguarding property - whether it is a house, a car or the statue of a slave trader - is less important than protecting public safety or preventing a more serious crime. To demonstrate "lawful excuse", defendants must show that they acted reasonably and they honestly believed they were acting for these reasons.

All four of the accused accepted leading roles in the events of June 7 2020. As around 3,000 people congregated near Colston's statue during a Black Lives Matter march, two of the defendants produced ropes. Another secured them around Colston's neck. Once the statue had been pulled to the ground, the fourth defendant encouraged others to roll it to the docks, across the cobbles where (as he said in the witness box) so many had been dragged against their will centuries before.

Video of what the defendants did was repeatedly shown to the court. The jury could have little doubt about the "facts" of the case.

But the defendants denied their actions were criminal damage. They and their lawyers put forward three legally available reasons for this.

Public indecency

One of the key arguments was that the group was acting to prevent the more serious crime of public indecency. Though the prosecution insisted at the start of the trial that the only people in the dock were the defendants, this rarely felt the case.

Instead, it was Edward Colston and Bristol City Council that appeared to be on trial. The defendants and multiple witnesses argued that Colston's crimes were so horrific that the continued presence of his statue was offensive, abusive and distressing. The local council's failure to remove it, despite 30 years of petitions and demands from Bristol's African-Caribbean community, in particular, amounted to misconduct in public office.

The judge, HHJ Peter Blair QC, didn't allow jurors to decide on the grounds of misconduct because there was insufficient evidence on the matter. But he did allow them to consider whether the statue was offensive. One defendant said in court that the statue was "offensive to the true character of Bristol... [it is] wrong to celebrate an individual who had such crimes against humanity in such a multicultural city".

The defendants also demonstrated that they genuinely believed the citizens of Bristol were the owners of the statue and would consent, including by highlighting that the plaque on the plinth of the statue stated that it was "erected by citizens of Bristol". And as evidence that the defendants truly believed local citizens would support their actions, they noted the many petitions that had been sent to the council calling for the statue's removal. The prosecution argued that the very fact that these petitions were addressed to the council implied that the council was the owner.

Property, rights and emotion

Finally, the defendants argued that they had a lawful excuse in that a conviction would be a disproportionate interference with their freedom of expression and freedom of assembly rights under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. To convict, a jury would have to have considered the harm caused to the council's property rights so significant that it would effectively override the defendants' protest rights.

Toppled, dumped, and finally recovered, the statue is now on public display in a Bristol museum. As prosecution witness Jon Finch, head of culture and creative industries for Bristol City Council, conceded, Colston's statue has greater cultural value than ever before, in that it now speaks to Bristol's "past, present and future".

This makes the comments of Conservative MP Robert Buckland particularly questionable. Speaking to the BBC, he said that new legislation currently making its way through parliament seeks to impose tougher sentences for damaging memorials because "the emotional and psychological scars that can be caused by the desecration of war memorials needed to be reflected more flexibly in the law" . But the harm caused by an offensive statue could, in his view, only be challenged by requesting action by the authorities, even if this request was continually ignored.

Consequences

Far from being perverse, the jury's decision re-asserts what EP Thompson called the "moral economy" of the community - an act of absolution recognising the collective action of the defendants as being at the service of all of the community. The defence provided a frame for the actions that placed them within an ongoing community dialogue about the slave trade, Bristol's role within it and the veneration of a mass murderer.

The jury, plainly, agreed. And they did so on legal grounds provided for by parliament and directed by the trial judge.

In proposing to increase the maximum penalty for toppling a statue to ten years in prison, the government says it is aiming to recognise the "emotional or wider distress" caused by damage to public property. As the jury at Bristol Crown Court has this week shown, "emotional and wider distress" cuts both ways when it comes to the public commemoration of slave traders.

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We attended the trial of the Colston four: here's why their acquittal should be celebrated

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The acquittal by a jury of four people at Bristol Crown Court this week for their role in pulling down the statue of Edward Colston and dumping it in the docks has been greeted with a chorus of outrage by members of parliament.

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Sir Tony Blair was made a knight of the garter in the Queen's New Years Honours list. Photograph: Tolga Akmen (via The Times)

With the announcement of the Queen's New Years Honours, it's that time of year where I do my (sometimes) twice yearly blog on the Honours system. In this round (like every round), we have seen many recieve accolades simply for being famous! Yet, a gong for former-PM Tony Blair is something that upset many, with over half a million people signing a petition to revoke it. However, is Tony Blair's appointment as a 'Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter' so terrible? When we look at the sorts of people that have recieved this historically, his name sits alongside the likes of Sir Winston Churchill. And whilst he was voted the Greatest Briton by the British public in 2002, his name is tainted against histories of colonial brutality in the Global South. As Shashi Tharoor writes:

"... by the time [The Bengal Famine] ended, nearly 4 million ... starved to death ... Nothing can excuse the odious behaviour of Winston Churchill, who deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere. 'The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious' than that of 'sturdy Greeks', he argued. Grain for the Tommies, bread for home consumption in Britain (27 million tonnes of imported grains, a wildly excessive amount), and generous buffer stocks in Europe (for yet-to be-liberated Greeks and Yugoslavs) were [his] priorities, not the life or death of his Indian subjects. When reminded of the suffering of his victims his response was typically Churchillian: The famine was their own fault, he said, for 'breeding like rabbits' . When officers of conscience pointed out in a telegram to the prime minister the scale of the tragedy caused by his decisions, Churchill's only reaction was to ask peevishly: 'why hasn't Gandhi died yet?'" (p160).
Extracted from: Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor

King Leopold II of Belgium most famous for using Congo as his own private playground (violently so with an estimated 5-15 million dead Congolese), recieved the same knighthood. Rewarding statesmen, diplomats and the like who have violently checkered pasts is completely and unequivocally in character for the British state. However, while I do understand the outrage to Blair's knighthood, I question why there is not as much outrage to the system at large that glorifies the British Empire and colonialism? Sure, be outraged, but the same anger is a little quiet at the Honours system in general.

Concurrently, the arrival of COVID-19 and the allocation of senior COVID jobs is a reminder to me of how power is transferred in the UK. The shredding of the NHS by the government in favour of an American-style system that puts profit ahead of access to healthcare is unshocking when we see the relationship between Honours and big jobs, and who gets projected into them. For example, at the start of the pandemic former-TalkTalk CEO Dido Harding was tasked by PM Boris Johnson to lead the Track-and-Trace system. Harding was a good friend of former-PM David Cameron who made her a life peer in 2014, and her grandfather Sir John Harding was knighted for quashing anti-colonial insurgencies in the 1950s.

2. This is Field Marshall Sir John Harding. In 1949, he was sent to Malaya to suppress the insurgency. British actions were notoriously brutal, using Agent Orange, scorched earth campaigns, hunger as a weapon and concentration camps. It's not clear how much of this he did. pic.twitter.com/WNxuHNh8ue
- George Monbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) October 9, 2020

An acceptance or declination of a state honour will always be politicised, but it warrants saying that numerous legitimate achievements are also interlocked with an alleged corrupt system of merit. For Global Majority people, in my opinion, it still feels that being included into the establishment is an indicator of how our Britishness is temporary - while being included into white proximities of power is viewed as the 'magnum opus' of achievement. And for people like me with immigrant grandparents and great-grandparents that moved from those English colonies (as they were at the time), colonial honourifics allow whiteness to harden. As Guilaine Kinouani writes:

"Although [respectability and assimilation] may provide temporary escape and possibly material gain and conditional access to structures of power, they produce white supremacy and such breed further shame and self-alienation. Self-contempt, disdain and scorn were not merely accidental by-products of colonialism - they were manufactured, deliberate colonial weapons to fortify whiteness and reduce resistance" (p56).
Extracted from: Living White Black by Guilaine Kinouani (2021)

While there is the fact of ordinary people's social investment into the monarchy and empire via Honours, the rewarding of people like Tony Blair revisits how colonial footsoldiers have been rewarded by the British state. Historically, Blair sits alongside not only King Leopold II and Churchill, but also ... Lord Kitchener following his ' services' during the Boer conflict in South Africa. Further to Sir Evelyn Baring who was Governor of Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprisings in the 1950s. Baring is the grandfather-in-law of PM Boris Johnson's former-aid Dominic Cummings. Thus when I think about Honours, Blair's knighthood is very in character for a country that has rewarded those that serve the inhumanity of the state.

During the Mau Mau Uprisings: Kenya, 1952 (Photo: Popperfoto / Getty Images / The Guardian)

In a broadcast for Double Down News, Byline Times editor Peter Jukes said "it is illegal to solicit Honours / peerages in return for donations but ... you are highly likely to get [one] - in fact 55% of those who donated more than £1.5m [to the Conservative Party] get an honour or a peerage." Meanwhile both Tony Blair and David Cameron were previously challenged for tapping their mates for Honours, showing this system is intertwined with political dynamics across parties. And while educators that have taken empire medals pontificate about whiteness, decolonising the curriculum, and the rest (ahem), one must ask if we will ever have lasting change. What was it Audre Lorde said about masters' tools and masters' houses?

So, I think equity would be to go further than curriculum. That means ordinary folks will need to let go of some of those privileges ... including honourifics to those days of pillage and plunder. Are we ready for that?

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Yanking the Lion's tail: Sir-Prized, not

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Sir Tony Blair was made a knight of the garter in the Queen's New Years Honours list. Photograph: Tolga Akmen (via The Times) With the announcement of the Queen's New Years Honours, it's that time of year where I do my (sometimes) twice yearly blog on the Honours system.

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'Why we’re fed up of weak excuses from anti-imperialists accepting MBEs' (Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin)

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'Why we’re fed up of weak excuses from anti-imperialists accepting MBEs' (Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin)

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24 * Northampton * Writer and race equality activist

I remember when Mark Duggan was killed by police. It was my generation's Stephen Lawrence moment

An event that I had a first visceral connection to was the London riots of 2011, when Mark Duggan was killed by police. It was probably my generation's Stephen Lawrence moment. Black people in this country are given the talk. I was eight years old when my parents gave me that talk; that one day, I might be stopped by the police. I might not have done anything wrong, I just happen to be black in this country and that's a mandate for suspicion. I don't know a black person who hasn't been stopped by the police. The London riots had an impact because I sort of linked it to when my parents gave me the talk. Being stopped by the police can result in someone's death. There are many that have lost their lives in police custody. I encountered racism day in and day out, and some of it was from my teachers. People called me savage, asked if my family lived in huts in Africa. Being black at private schools was very difficult, but if I can deal with racism there, I can deal with it anywhere. Middle-class and upper-class people talk in a certain way, where they could be saying the most horrible things about you but because they say it in such a way, with their accent and their pronunciation of words, how they were taught to speak the Queen's English, that when they do stuff like that, it sort of pads it down a little bit. When Boris Johnson goes on about Muslim women being letterboxes or black people with watermelon smiles, because he says it in that vernacular that is tied to the English private school system, it comes across in such a way that is less threatening than Tommy Robinson. Nothing like this has ever happened in my lifetime. When we protest in Northampton, we're lucky to get 10 people to turn up and we had 1,000 people attend the first Black Lives Matter protest. Northampton is a famously white town. The protest was led by young people. If I didn't go, I would feel guilty. I don't think you can be black in this country and not support the protests. People say that British racism is very subtle and covert. But nothing about the Windrush scandal was covert; it was very open, very honest. Grenfell as well.

18 * Birmingham * Singer and student

If I have to fight every day for the rest of my life, I will

The UK is not innocent and never has been innocent. I remember walking in town with my friends when I was 12, and two white girls were fighting and the police started threatening and ragging up all the black kids that happened to be there, while the white girls continued to fight. We ran home because we knew we would get arrested, even though we weren't part of it. I was flabbergasted. I thought, why just us? To be black in the UK is beautiful, especially now with so many black entertainers. I want to become a music mentor, but first I need to become a performer. I don't really fit the look you see on TV. I'm thick-bodied, thick-lipped, I've got big nostrils and my hair is curly. I have friends who are musicians and they're all slimmer, they have straighter hair, they even act a certain way. But I will always just be myself. I'm not sad that I'm black and I won't pretend to be something I'm not. Casting agencies and judges tell me I don't really "fit the criteria" or they don't think I'd be able to do this part because of "the way you look". They would never say anything about my talent and I'd think, why aren't you judging me based on my talent? When I saw the hurt on my brother's face over George Floyd, or, as he put it "the world", I thought, I'm going to London [to protest]. This can't carry on, we can't not go: this is my fight. The next day, I went to one in Birmingham, then London the week after. We cannot stop - if I have to fight every day for the rest of my life, I will. The energy that day was fire; that day my mentality changed to: "No justice, no peace". I realised I was fighting for me, for my brothers, for my parents, for my ancestors. I want to be able to tell my children: "I fought for you, I fought for your children. I went for us".

21 * London * Student

Being black, especially a black woman, is a political statement in this country

School in the UK was really difficult. I've tried to suppress and put in the back of my mind the traumatic experiences that come down to racism. I was experiencing racism at the age of eight. I was aware that I was being treated differently to other people. It was the end of the day and I really needed to go to the toilet. There was about 10 or 15 minutes of me having my hand up and you could tell I was really distressed. I was crying like I really needed to get to the toilet and then I wet myself. It just makes me really upset that I had to go through such a traumatic experience at such a young age because a fully grown adult didn't like the colour of my skin. I would never want anyone to feel one-tenth of what I felt when I was going to school. You have so much self-hate and you just don't really know how to deal with it. Looking at myself now, I couldn't have imagined when I was younger that I would have turned into this person. We went to France when I was in year 9. The teacher didn't know I was in the lift, I was at the back, and she said: "Oh, my God, all these black people are so annoying". Everybody in the lift turned around and looked at me and I just didn't really know what I was supposed to do. No one defended me. No one said anything, and you know from a really early age that you're on your own. My life has changed drastically within the last six weeks, since Aima and I first put that tweet out and organised the protest in London with All Black Lives. I didn't expect it to change me in the way that it has. Now, I wake up every day and I have purpose and I have something to fight for, and something that I know I can put my full self into that's changing people's lives. Being black in this country, especially a black woman, is a political statement. You've seen just within the past six weeks, how much more confident black people have been, how much more outspoken - they realise their opinions are valid.

19 * Shetland Islands * Student

I remember hearing black people with Scottish accents for the first time and thinking I'm not the only one!

The very first political event I can remember was Obama being elected as the first black president. I was seven or eight at the time. We were in Cuba, so me and my Cuban family, who are all black, were sitting on the couch watching it happen. School was hard. I was bullied mercilessly in primary school and it took me years to realise that actually happened. Just young kids not knowing that people have different skin colours and that is an OK and normal thing. There was a lot of being picked on and being grouped together with other brown-skinned girls or boys when we weren't even the same race. I think we have 1% of ethnic minorities here in Shetland. In primary school, I remember being the only black or mixed-race person and there were three Asian kids. Because I didn't realise I was being bullied, I never thought to talk to my teachers about it. I never sought the support I needed. But when issues did come to light, for the most part I was supported by my teachers. The earliest experience I have, and the worst one probably, is being in the playground and me and a Pakistani boy from my class were pushed together. All the other kids were standing in a circle around us, pointing and laughing, and saying that we were boyfriend and girlfriend just because we had the same skin colour. I went to the protest because somebody has to be the voice for black people in Shetland. Because it's so white-populated, it's hard to find somebody who is going to have the strength and courage to stand up and be that voice. So I thought if I don't do it, who is going to do it? It was really incredible seeing the amount of support. It's the biggest turnout for protests that we've ever had. It was really amazing seeing just how many people came out to support the movement. It was heartening to see. Growing up as a black person in Shetland was hard but it's definitely strengthened my character as a young woman today. I don't really identify with the Scottish side of my family; I would consider myself British more than I would Scottish. And I definitely much more identify with the Cuban side of my family. So amalgamating my black and Scottish sides is something I've not quite done yet. But it's definitely interesting. I can remember hearing black people with Scottish accents for the first time and thinking I'm not the only one!

21 * London * Student

In year 6, my teacher told me, 'When you're older, please don't join a gang'

I would say the first event I was actually politically inclined and knowledgeable about would be over the death of Mark Duggan. It was the first one that hit home. The anger and frustration that was happening within the black community, and just how the media painted him out to be this barbaric guy, when really, he was a human being just like me, who looked like me and my friends. School in the UK was probably the worst experience I've had in my life. The school system didn't understand me or cater to my needs. I got sent to boarding school in Uganda for a few years to study there instead because I felt so out of place in Britain. In year 6, my main teacher approached me and my friend, who was black, and said: "When you're older, please don't join a gang". I replied: "We're not going to join a gang", but it wasn't until I started growing up that I began thinking to myself, what did she actually mean by that remark? Why would she select two black males and differentiate them from their peers? The protests are about the injustices that we face here as the black community, especially with deaths in custody. Black people are twice as likely to die in police custody than any other race in this country. When it comes to disparities in the criminal justice system, it is one of the reasons why I felt I also had to take a stand and move with my brothers and sisters to forge a movement here. I remember the first time I got stopped and searched. It was a section 60 in the Stoke Newington area of London and I was 18. I was walking and a police car pulled up. An officer asked where I was going and I said: 'I'm going to eat'. I put out my hand and he handcuffed me. It was very shocking and traumatising. It fragments people like me from society, it makes us feel like we're not British. Being black in the UK is trying to fit in areas that you know aren't really built in your favour. But when it comes to black culture, everyone wants to copy it and not call it black. I love my culture, I love my heritage, I love what my community has to bring to civil society.

25 * Edinburgh * Student

Teachers refused to test me for dyslexia and instead told my parents to stop speaking other languages at home

I'm dyslexic and I've only just found out at the age of 25, while I was at university struggling. When I was in school, I had the same struggles that I'm going through now with my work, but the teachers refused to test me and told my parents to stop speaking other languages at home. My parents told them there was not a language barrier. My school was very problematic. I remember I got into a fight because this girl hacked into my social media. She made everything about slavery, claiming my family were slaves and put all the pictures as slaves in shackles. I didn't even see it until I got to school, and I remember everyone being really weird to me. I got pulled aside by the headteacher and a police officer into this meeting room. They told me something's happened on your social media and we talked about it. Then they took my phone off me. Afterwards, I had a PE lesson with the girl who did it. I'd never been so angry in my life. I remember blacking out and I went for her and we had a fight. We got sent home and a couple of days later we returned with our parents for a big meeting about it. I remember sitting there with my mum and dad, who said to the teachers: "What are you guys going to do? This can't keep happening to our kids." They were trying to exclude me for being violent. And my parents were like, 'That's not fair. She's obviously at a point where she can't take it anymore. Someone was racist to her.' It was a bullshit conversation. They didn't know what they were doing, but they were trying to do their best. And then halfway through the conversation the girl's parents used the comparison of their daughter being bullied for being ginger as the equivalent to racism. My mum and dad got up and left. I was in a team of people that were organising the protest in Edinburgh. It was overwhelming. I've been in Edinburgh for almost 20 years now and I didn't know there were this many black people here. As bad as the experiences black people have had, I feel like we have a uniqueness that we can laugh so much and we can always find happiness and peace within, despite the damage that goes on. There are things to celebrate in being black and being British, because there are not all bad things about British culture. I like a cup of tea and dipping my biscuits in it. Yes, we are more commonly first-generation migrants but be proud of us for adapting.

21 * Bristol * Student

Blackness means innovation. It means resistance. It means persistence

There were a lot of black and brown people at my school, which was great. I was able to find a group of black girls that I felt that I could find comfort in, friendship and solidarity. But that didn't stop us from facing racism in school. I think one of the difficult things was seeing a lot of kids being put in isolation, being taken out of lessons, being harshly graded, and not being given the same patience as the white students. We do have systemic racism here, and the police are violent towards black bodies. We have a history here, especially in Bristol, of a deep involvement with the transatlantic slave trade. When people say the UK is not innocent, this is what we mean. It's about being stopped and searched, it's about how you feel like there's going to be some kind of altercation every time you leave your house. If you see a police van, even if you've done nothing wrong, you risk the violence of being shot with a Taser stun gun and the violence of being hit with batons. I think it's amazing that there's such a strong black British culture. I love that there's so much influence from the Caribbean community - from the music people listen to, to the slang people use. There's such a heavy influence of blackness across the UK, which can be frustrating when we see that we're not being respected. It gives me a sense of pride because I feel that black people, wherever we go, are so innovative. And especially here in Britain, I think blackness means innovation. It means resistance. It means persistence. I'm from South Sudan and everybody there is very dark-skinned. As a black person, being dark-skinned kind of comes with its own issues that's specific to communities of colour, specifically the black community. I think it will be an obstacle moving forward, and that's paired with being a woman as well. I think it sets up a lot of things against me. But at the same time, I really wouldn't want to be anything else. I feel like being a black woman is the best thing that's ever happened to me.

17 * London * Student

I realised it's not because you're annoying, it's not because you're ugly, it's because you don't look like them

I just remember hating myself because I've always been in school with only white people. It gave me body dysmorphia. I remember feeling ugly as a child. I look back at pictures of myself as a child and I wonder why I felt that way. I had teachers who were racist and I was bullied. Teachers used to belittle me. I never found groups of friends, because they were all white, that I felt that I could slot into. I never felt like I could fit in. It was a traumatic experience and it just leaves you feeling quite socially homeless. I used to get left out and I would wonder to myself, why is this happening? When I was in lockdown, more and more the pieces started to fit together. I'm one of the only ones like this. I'm one of the only ones that are around these people. So then I realised, it's not because you're annoying, it's not because you're ugly, it's not because of this or that, it's because you don't look like them. I think that racism in the UK is so dangerous, more dangerous than people realise. I think for America, if someone doesn't like you because you're black, they'll say it to your face or they'll do it in ways that make it easy to identify. But in the UK, it's so subtle. And it's still systemic. It was my first response to go to the protest to be part of the movement here. It was exhilarating. Seeing streets full of people that look like me and were there for the same reason as me, it made me feel so warm inside. When you go on the train and someone sees your sign and they do the fist, that was stuff I had never experienced before. It made me very emotional. Being black in the UK means you have a very close connection to the cultures that you come from. But it also means you have to go through struggles that people pretend not to see or understand and don't want to fix.

20 * Buckinghamshire * Student

Somebody would cross the road because of coronavirus, but that's an everyday thing for black people

I think my school was very micro-aggressive. People would be like, "Oh, can I touch your hair?" I got a detention once because somebody stuck a pencil in my hair. I had an afro and people thought it was interesting and wanted to run their hands through it, but I'm not an animal. I'm just normal, but because you're unfamiliar with the texture of my hair, you think it's interesting enough that you want to pet me. I look back and I think, wow, I actually tolerated that and allowed that to happen, but it's because I didn't understand what it was. People don't know what Britain has done because we don't get taught it. We've been taught about Henry VIII and his six wives. Who cares? I don't want to know how he manipulated the Christian church so that he could get away with divorce. That's got nothing to do with me. I want to know about what Britain's been up to colonising the whole world; imperialism and the effects of it. I think it's important that we protest. I think there are issues in the UK. It's so important that we also take on America as well. It's interesting that you have people like Boris Johnson, who will happily sit up and say, 'What's going on in America only concerns America', but then what have we been doing in the Middle East for all these years? Coronavirus has given an insight into racism in the UK because when you're walking down the street now, somebody will cross the road because they think you've got coronavirus. But if you're black in the UK that's an everyday thing. It's me walking to school and a white lady walking towards me, clutching her bag, and crossing the road because she's scared about what I'm going to do. I'm going to school! That happens two or three times a year. Being black in the UK gives you a sense of belonging. There's a level of respect the black community gives each other. When you're walking down the street, it's like a nod or a smile. It's so encouraging to see that from whatever generation, whether it's old or young. We all kind of have that caring nature towards each other because we need to have it.

20 * London and Oxford * Student

At secondary school, the world is screaming very loudly that you're not wanted

I think going to school in the UK is one of the hardest things. I was recently talking to my friends about it, because the George Floyd protests have made people begin to re-analyse experiences at school. I think every black woman has had an experience that's jarring, of feeling like you're not pretty. I used to get told, 'You're like so blick', which is slang for being very dark. It has a profound impact. As you grow up, you go through a phase of forcefully trying to love yourself. But in secondary school, the world is definitely screaming very loudly that you are being rejected and that you're not wanted. It was really hard. The UK constantly points the finger at America and there's a complete misconception that the UK isn't racist. At one protest I attended in Oxford, one American woman stood up and spoke about what was going on in America, but then she went on to say that her family were really happy that she moved to the UK because this isn't a racist country. Everyone was outraged. I think our lived experience as black people is overlooked in the UK. As a result, it means the government doesn't have to do anything. My mum migrated from Ghana to England and I'm the first generation of my family to be born here. If you ask people who have just migrated, they identify with the country they just moved from. I don't think my mum identifies as being black British as much as I do. I love Ghana and my Ghanian heritage, but I think I feel more of a sense of belonging here. They came here at a time when Britain was still so racist, where pubs had the sign 'No blacks, no Irish, no dogs', and that would make you want to hold on to your culture more. With our generations, being black British is a mix of your heritage and a mix of being British. We've created a whole new identity. Look at Stormzy, Burna Boy, and Kojo Funds. Artists like NSG have these beats that are like Ghana highlife, a type of music in Ghana, and grime energy mixed into one. Music is a perfect example of what being black British is like, regardless if you're first generation or if you're fourth generation. It's a beautiful mix and fusion of different identities.

20 * Monmouth * Student

I could sense this was perhaps the biggest moment I've felt for black people during my 20 years of life

I remember the 2008 US presidential campaign for Barack Obama. It was good to see a man of a similar colour running for one of the biggest jobs in the world. Although I was comfortable going to school with people who were predominantly white, it was still reassuring when another black boy joined in year 6, and we're still really good friends. Hair was a big thing for me. I didn't understand certain people constantly wanting to touch my hair. It's just one of those things I let happen for a while, but when this other black boy joined, he just wouldn't have it. So I thought I should just be saying no. I then wouldn't let people do it. I felt privileged as well as I got to go to a good private school here. I think when looking at the problems to do with race, we should also be looking at class as well, because a lot of the issues come hand in hand. I could sense this was perhaps the biggest moment I've felt for black people during my 20 years of life. I hadn't been to a protest before so I asked my mum, who lived in Zimbabwe when it was Rhodesia, what they could achieve. I thought it was quite important because I knew a lot of people in Monmouth. It's quite a small community. I think it's got a population of 10,000. I felt very privileged in the fact that I was lucky enough to speak and convey my message. I did get quite upset at one point. I thought If I were lucky enough to have grandchildren, I wouldn't want to have to have the same conversations that my mum is having to have with me. So that's one thing that I think would break my heart. My parents have always told me to be proud of who I am and where I come from and never to forget that. There's a sense of togetherness in the community a lot of the time. I love going to Zimbabwean functions because you know you're always guaranteed good food, lots of singing, lots of dancing. I remember when the Dave song Black came out. It just resonated with me. I think the song was for those who weren't in the black community to see what it can be like to be black and British.

18 * Sunderland * Student

Being black is to be strong. But it's not an option, you have to be

The north-east is typically not a very diverse place, so school was difficult for me. I've had racial abuse from peers and stuff like people touching my hair and calling me names. After school I went to college to do music and I just didn't really fit in with anybody. It sounds ridiculous but it's a bit intimidating walking into a room and no one looks like you or has the same history as you, and just automatically being different wherever you go. The history curriculum is kind of ridiculous. They just teach you, 'Oh well there was slavery for a little bit and it was really bad but then the slaves got freed and that was that'. Martin Luther King did a speech and racism was over. A lot of it is very whitewashed. They try to make people like Winston Churchill a hero when he's not. It's only from reading material by black authors that opened my eyes and made me realise how much of my own history I was shielded from. I heard about the protest in Newcastle but it got cancelled and moved online after a backlash because of the pandemic. I was pretty outraged by that, so I started my own. It was kind of my first opportunity to speak about my struggles and the struggles of black people in the UK. It was like a moment of relief for me because I thought people were finally doing something about it. It's hard to succeed when you don't have confidence in who you are. How am I supposed to have confidence in who I am when there are people who literally hate me and want to see me down and think they're more superior than me because of the colour of my skin? Being black in the UK means to be different. It means to be silenced. However, hopefully in future generations to come, being black in the UK will be something to be celebrated by everyone. In the meantime, I'm always going to celebrate where I come from. I think black people should be proud. As a race, they've come so far in life and had so much success, even though they've repeatedly been squashed and dragged down by oppressors. I think being black is to be strong. But it's not an option, you have to be.

18 * London * Student

I just did not feel comfortable speaking about race in my school

I was absolutely disgusted, angry, but not shocked by George Floyd's death. I've seen this happen so much ever since I was a little girl. I've been so desensitised to it that I'm not shocked when it happens anymore. It's just like a normal daily thing. I was talking to my friend Natasha, who helped organise the London protest with me, and said: "We need to do something. We can't just be silent". This doesn't only happen in America, but also happens here. We posted tweets about the London protests and it just skyrocketed everywhere. I was just in shock that so many people came out in support. I remember we were walking out of the US embassy and one of the police officers came up to us and said there were more than 9,000 people still there, and another 10,000 coming to join the march. The amount of systemic racism in the UK is disgusting; and how normalised racism is, in this country, is just terrible. The UK needs to take ownership for what it has done in the past. I never learned about colonisation in the UK. I remember so clearly in year 7, I was in hi

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Young, British & Black: the voices behind the UK's anti-racism protests

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I remember when Mark Duggan was killed by police. It was my generation's Stephen Lawrence moment An event that I had a first visceral connection to was the London riots of 2011, when Mark Duggan was killed by police. It was probably my generation's Stephen Lawrence moment.

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Women and minorities are increasingly entering fields where white male power is firmly entrenched. The spaces they come to occupy are not empty or neutral, but are imbued with history and meaning. This groundbreaking book interrogates the pernicious, subtle but nonetheless widely held view that certain bodies are naturally entitled to certain spaces, while others are not. How are positions of authority racialized and gendered? How do people manage their femininity and/or blackness while in a predominantly white male context? How do spaces become naturalized or normalized, and what does it mean when they are disrupted? Engaging with a range of material from a variety of institutions, Space Invaders is a timely contribution to wide-reaching debates on race, gender and space. It is the first book to articulate the full complexity of diversity in organizations.

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Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place

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Women and minorities are increasingly entering fields where white male power is firmly entrenched. The spaces they come to occupy are not empty or neutral, but are imbued with history and meaning. This groundbreaking book interrogates the pernicious, subtle but nonetheless widely held view that certain bodies are naturally entitled to certain spaces, while others are not.

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The Problem with Diversity and Inclusion

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The Problem with Diversity and Inclusion

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Companies and universities have long relied on seminars to reduce racism, despite lackluster results. Maybe institution leaders can salvage the format.

Starbucks is trying. In 2018 the coffeehouse company became a national punching bag after a café manager called the police on two Black men for sitting and not ordering anything in one of its Philadelphia locations. Ever since, company leaders have been working, fully caffeinated, to make amends for this racist misstep. Right after the incident, they closed some 8,000 shops for a day to hold a mandatory antibias training. Then, they worked with scholars at Arizona State University for a year and a half to develop "To Be Welcoming," an online curriculum featuring videos of leading scholars on topics ranging from policing in America to harmful stereotypes about people with disabilities. The company released To Be Welcoming as a voluntary class for their employees last September. At the same time, they made the class freely available to anybody who'd like to use it.

The team designed the course to encourage discussion among employees about how to improve the workplace, says Bryan Brayboy, a professor of indigenous education and justice at ASU, who led the curriculum design. He calls To Be Welcoming an "invitation" for people to gather, listen, and plan for change. "We really see the curriculum as the commencement of things, not the end," he says.

According to Zulima Espinel, the vice president of global public policy at Starbucks, over 33,000 people within the company and in the general public have signed up to take Starbucks' curriculum. One goal is to provide employees with "common terminology to encourage conversations" about racism in the workplace, says Espinel.

In creating this series, Starbucks has essentially updated a decades-long workplace tradition: the diversity training workshop. The formats vary, with consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, for example, now offering diversity training in virtual reality. But generally, training consists of company employees sitting down to a presentation from a coworker or outside contractor to educate them about their prejudices, with the goal of creating a more diverse workplace. The workshops might involve instruction on racist terminology to avoid, group discussion about how to handle discriminatory situations, or lectures about a company's code of conduct.

For years, these workshops have been one of the private sector's most popular tools to introduce variation into their employee pool. A 2016 Harvard Business Review analysis found that nearly all Fortune 500 companies and nearly half of midsize companies employ diversity training. Many workplaces outsource this training, which has led to the formation of entire companies dedicated to running diversity workshops, forming the basis of a now multibillion-dollar diversity industry, writes journalist Pamela Newkirk in her 2019 book, Diversity, Inc. "I think of it as the equity-diversity-inclusion industrial complex," says physicist Brian Nord of the Department of Energy laboratory Fermilab. As one of the few Black men in his field, Nord has participated in many diversity-centered activities and led some of his own discussions.

The industry exists for this moment. This summer, the weeks of massive protests that followed the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers have prompted a soul-searching national conversation about race and diversity. As both real-world and virtual protesters call for social change, many corporate executives, government officials, and other institutional leaders are again turning to diversity training as a solution to inequity in the workplace.

So now seems like a good time to raise a scientific question: Does the training actually work?

A lot of research suggests not. Sociology studies by researchers at Harvard University, Tel Aviv University, and the University of Minnesota in 2007 and 2016 that examined more than 800 companies over three decades found that firms that used diversity training did not hire significantly more diverse managers, and that the trainings actually correlated with a decrease in Black female managers. Workforce statistics support this conclusion: Between 1985 and 2016, the percentage of Black men in management at US companies with at least 100 employees has increased from 3 percent to a still paltry 3.2 percent, according to Diversity, Inc. Only two Black women-Xerox's Ursula Burns and Bed Bath and Beyond's Mary Winston-have ever been the CEO of a Fortune 500 company since 1955, the year the magazine began compiling that annual list, and they have since stepped down from those roles.

So diversity training doesn't have a great track record of boosting Black employees into the executive suite. "I would advise companies to spend the money on something else," says sociologist Frank Dobbin of Harvard University, who worked on the 2007 and 2016 studies. As an alternative to diversity training, he suggests companies try special recruitment programs, such as soliciting new hires from historically black colleges and universities. "The effects are lasting, because they're actually bringing more kinds of people in," he says.

Diversity training may actually cause a backlash in its participants, particularly if people feel forced to attend. "If I tell you, 'Don't think of an elephant,' you'll be thinking about elephants," says Dobbin. "If you tell people to think about their biases, their biases may be activated."

For example, a 2015 study by psychologists from the University of Washington and UC Santa Barbara found that in simulated job interviews with 77 white men, participants experienced increased cardiovascular stress after reading a pro-diversity message. (The experiment did not include people from other demographics.) In an additional study that included people of other gender and racial backgrounds, the researchers found that white men were also more likely to believe they were being treated unfairly. "Importantly, diversity messages led to these effects regardless of these men's political ideology, attitudes toward minority groups, beliefs about the prevalence of discrimination against whites, or beliefs about the fairness of the world," the authors wrote in a summary of their study for Harvard Business Review. These responses, they continue, "exist even among those who endorse the tenets of diversity and inclusion."

Diversity training may also do more for the company than for the workers. UC Berkeley law professor Lauren Edelman has found that in discrimination lawsuits, judges evaluate a company's compliance with anti-discrimination laws based on the mere presence of diversity policies, rather than their effectiveness. Ultimately, a company may find that spending money on diversity training is cheaper than a lawsuit, and so the purpose of the workshop becomes symbolic, argues Newkirk, a professor of journalism at New York University. Training may be ineffective, too, because people now use the word diversity to refer to an abstract debate about fairness, rather than to undo specific historical inequities. "The term has been broadened to the point where it's become meaningless," says Newkirk.

Nord, for example, has participated in diversity seminars that barely discuss racism, if at all. Some workshop leaders, he says, will cast differences in education backgrounds and job experience as "diversity." "People play a game with [the definition] so that they don't have to actually focus on justice, accountability, or change," says Nord. Often, he finds the workshops focus on the needs of white women, while ignoring other underrepresented groups. "In most of my experience, these seminars have been bad," says Nord.

"Diversity" wasn't always meaningless. When diversity initiatives began with President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs in the 1960s, policymakers specified concrete objectives such as the integration of schools and the reduction of poverty. The definition of diversity began to broaden, some legal experts say, with the 1978 Supreme Court case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.

In that case, a white man named Allan Bakke argued that his rejection from the UC Davis School of Medicine, which capped the number of white students admitted, stemmed from reverse discrimination. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled in favor of Bakke's admission to the school and deemed racial quotas unconstitutional. "The notion of reverse discrimination, that if you try to address this legacy of bigotry that you are hurting whites, has been an ongoing theme since the Bakke decision," says Newkirk. In 2016, in Fisher v. University of Texas, a white woman, Abigail Fisher, argued a similar case before the Supreme Court regarding a college rejection. (The court ruled against her in favor of the university's diversity admission policy in a 4-3 decision.)

Given its toothlessness, why is diversity training still so popular? "It's easy," says Newkirk. "It's one day or one week of training, and you go on as if, 'OK, now we've settled that problem.'" Quoting civil rights lawyer Cyrus Mehri, Newkirk calls these trainings "drive-by diversity." Fostering a supportive workplace for Black people and other minorities requires far more commitment, she says.

Some institutions have made fledgling efforts to tether "diversity" goals once again to concrete outcomes. In June, Nord helped lead a worldwide one-day strike called #ShutDownSTEM and #Strike4BlackLives, as more than 5,000 scientists paused their usual work to develop plans to end anti-Black racism in their overwhelmingly white workplaces. ( 81 percent of full-time professors in the US are non-Hispanic whites, while the demographic makes up only 60 percent of the US population, according to the US Census Bureau.) On their website, organizers of the scientific strike specifically asked participants to avoid more "diversity and inclusion talks and seminars."

Instead, some participants discussed hiring and recruitment. Staff at the scientific journal Nature participated in the strike, and now the journal's leadership, which has no Black editors, is "examining our own hiring practices," editor-in-chief Magdalena Skipper wrote WIRED in an email. At the online preprint repository, arXiv, one of physicists' most popular forums, staff also participated in the strike. They discussed the requirements and recruitment strategies for their scientific advisory board and set a potential goal of "ensuring that arXiv has a presence at minority professional conferences," arXiv spokesperson Alison Fromme wrote to WIRED.

Still, some experts think that diversity training-when done thoughtfully-may offer some benefits. Erin-Kate Escobar, a diversity and inclusion expert at Caltech, and one of the organizers of #ShutDownSTEM, thinks that workshops can be effective if they are tailored to be relevant to a particular group of attendees. They also need to be more than a one-off event, she says. "You want it to be something that is ongoing," says Escobar. "You don't want it to be that if someone misses that day, they miss that information."

In addition, while workshops don't necessarily inspire people to change their behavior, studies show that participants do learn about racism, says psychologist Eden King of Rice University. "They become more aware, more knowledgeable," she says. King thinks that diversity training can be useful in combination with hiring and recruitment programs.

A 2019 University of Pennsylvania study of over 10,000 employees at an unnamed global organization found that while training doesn't make leadership more likely to offer mentorship to employees of underrepresented groups, it does make women in junior positions more likely to seek mentorship from leadership. "Interestingly, one of the strongest behavioral effects we detect is that our training prompted women to connect with more senior women," the authors write. They also find that the "training may have signaled to women that they needed to be more proactive about their advancement in the company." They also found that the training didn't produce a backlash, although they attributed this to attendance being voluntary and the participants already holding fairly progressive views on gender issues. The study's authors also recommend that workshop leaders treat their sessions more like scientific experiments-that they collect data on participant behavior and attitudes, and revise the curriculum accordingly.

Innovations on the format may also prove more effective. Felicia Moore Mensah, a professor of science education at Columbia University, teaches an elective semester-long course designed to help future K-12 teachers better support students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Mensah avoids lecturing and has tried to curate a personal, introspective diversity training. The students read texts, watch videos, and write in journals to reflect on their understanding of race, which they share only with her. "The confrontations become more internal, as people try to figure out what biases they have," she says. On the first day, she asks them to explain the reasons they are taking the course, what she refers to as their "whys." "They have to answer those questions for themselves," says Mensah. "They may not be able to answer in that moment, but as we continue through the course, I'm hoping it becomes more clear to them."

When designing the Starbucks' curriculum, Brayboy's team kept the research about potential backlash in mind. "Tonality is really important to us," he says. "We had a series of internal reviews with a group of faculty members who have ideologies which may run counter to the material itself, and asked, 'Did we get the tone right? Are there words in here that may turn you away? What do we need to do it differently?'" They wanted to make sure the coursework did not feel confrontational to people who might not normally participate in a conversation about race, he says.

By making To Be Welcoming public, the team also opened their diversity initiative to external criticism, which is not common among private companies. "Usually, you can't even see what people get during the trainings, because the trainers don't want you to copy what they're doing," says Dobbin. "It's interesting that Starbucks just put this out there." This way, independent researchers can more easily evaluate whether the program is effective, he says.

Starbucks' team is treating the course as just one piece of their new diversity initiative. "It has to come with a lot of other systemic work," says Espinel. Company leaders, for example, have set a goal that people of color will comprise 30 percent of all corporate positions by 2025. They have also opened themselves up to external audits of their workplace practices, which they've made public. As companies and institutions take a new look at the persistent systemic racism in their ranks, the role of the diversity workshop, too, must evolve.
Update 7-14-2020 10:08 am EST: This story was updated to correct the month when To Be Welcoming became available to the public.

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The Equity-Diversity-Inclusion Industrial Complex Gets a Makeover

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Companies and universities have long relied on seminars to reduce racism, despite lackluster results. Maybe institution leaders can salvage the format. Starbucks is trying. In 2018 the coffeehouse company became a national punching bag after a café manager called the police on two Black men for sitting and not ordering anything in one of its Philadelphia locations.

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'Rocking the Boat: Women of Colour as Diversity Workers' (Sara Ahmed, p331-348)

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'Rocking the Boat: Women of Colour as Diversity Workers' (Sara Ahmed, p331-348)

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"This collection of essays is a timely intervention given the discussions going on in Whitehall and on campuses about access, equality and the legacy of colonialism and empire in our universities. Whilst attention must of course attention must be paid to who is able to participate in higher education, we must also focus on issues of race within the institutions themselves." (The Rt Hon David Lammy, MP, The Labour Party)

"Arday and Mirza tackle the perennial status of racism in the academy. Beyond the common refrain that Whites are the center of the problem, the contributors rightfully focus our efforts at dismantling the ideology of whiteness itself." (Professor Zeus Leonardo, University of California, Berkeley, USA)

"This book is an essential guide to the most important questions facing Higher Education globally. Behind a façade of pleasant sounding aspirations, such as 'free speech' and 'academic standards', a war is being waged to determine the knowledge that universities are allowed to teach and the racialized nature of the staff and student body." (Professor David Gillborn, University of Birmingham, UK)

"This landmark publication takes on an ambitious project: fiercely critical analyses intertwined with intersectional visions of hope and tools for a different practice. A new generation of critical voices takes us closer to the tipping point where 'enough =enough' can trigger genuine transformation." (Professor Philomena Essed, Antioch University, USA)

"Dismantling Race in Higher Education is a must read edited volume for those individuals who are really interested in understanding the influences of race within the UK higher education enterprise. Both Dr Jason Arday and Professor Heidi Safia Mirza assembled an all-star team of UK 'race studies' scholars and researchers to put this book together. In my opinion, it includes important content that may stimulate a new generation of 'race studies' thought leaders in the UK. This edited volume has immense potential to become a classic text for higher education scholars and researchers throughout the UK higher education system and beyond." (Professor James Moore III, The Ohio State University, USA)

"Covering multiple experiences, histories, policies and pedagogies, Dismantling Race is an impressive contribution to scholarship on higher education. Across a set of beautifully curated chapters the imbrication of whiteness in the British Academy is catalogued, reported and explained. Few, having read the book, will doubt that higher education is institutionally racist; and few will doubt the urgency of contemporary decolonizing initiatives." (Professor Robbie Shilliam, John Hopkins University, USA)

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"This collection of essays is a timely intervention given the discussions going on in Whitehall and on campuses about access, equality and the legacy of colonialism and empire in our universities. Whilst attention must of course attention must be paid to who is able to participate in higher education, we must also focus on issues of race within the institutions themselves."

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Hello, I'm Tyla. I'm neurodivergent. In this corner of the internet, we try and make sense of adulthood. Every other week, I post a video exploring topics related to autism and adulthood. My videos are for Autistic Adults who want to live without burnout and those who help support them.

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'Dermarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex ...' (Kimberlé Crenshaw, 1989)

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'Dermarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex ...' (Kimberlé Crenshaw, 1989)

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Critical Race Theory, microaggressions, psychoanalysis

Copyright 1970 by Floyd B. Barbour Library of Congress Catalog Number 74-133967

Porter Sargent Publisher 11 Beacon St., Boston, Mass. 02108

leading black authors look at the present and reach

into the future

The Black Seventies

Floyd B. Barbour, editor

1\n Extending Horizon Booll

\

The athletic playing field can b,e a training ground for more than sports. Dr. Pierce studies the offen-sive mechanisms which, applied on the football field, are also all too often applied in human relationships.

CHESTER PIERCE was born in Glen Cove, New York, and is a member of both the Faculty of Education and the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University. Since 1966 he has been co-investigator of a National Science Foundation project on the effects of the environment on men living on Ameri-can bases in the Antarctic. A graduate of Harvard College (A.B. 1948) and of Harvard Medical School (M.D. 1952), Dr. Pierce is the author of over sixty articles published in psychiatric and medical jour-nals. Among his many other professional activities, He serves as a Senior Consultant to the Peace Corps and the Office of Economic Opportun-ity. He is Chairman of the American Psychiatric Association's Committee on Academic Education and a member of the Association's Commission on Manpower.

. Chester Pierce

Offensive Mechanisms

In traditional and orthodox teaching of psychiatry, the role of defensive mechanisms is deemed crucial. These mechanisms act to reduce or dilute shame and guilt. They perml! the organism to function without being overwhelmed by anxiety. Much of psychotherapy is devoted to understanding and then re-inforcing or loosening defensive mechanisms.

There is, however, no emphasis placed on offensive mecha-nisms. It is the purpose of this article to introduce the concept of offensive mechanisms, and to discuss this concept in the framework of the violence and aggression it facilitates within the society. Just as in one-to-one psychotherapy the therapist studies anxiety and the resultant defensive maneuvers, the social therapist, as he seeks ways to affect masses of individuals, must study superiority and resultant offensive maneuvers.

For it is from feelings of superiority that one group of people proceeds to brutalize, degrade, abuse, and humiliate another group of individuals. The superiority feelings and the accom-panying contemptuous condescension toward a target group are so rampant in our society that it is virtually impossible for any negotiation between blacks and whites to take place without the auspices of such offensive tactics. Thus it happens that this article will consider black-white relations, although it may be true that offensive mechanisms are used generally in many other areas or inter-personal interactions.

Most offensive actions are not gross and crippling. They are

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266 The Black Seventies

subtle and stunning. The enormity of the complications they cause can be appreciated only when one considers that these subtle blows are delivered incessantly. Even though any single negotiation of offense can in justice be considered of itself to be relatively innocuous, the cumulative effect to the victim and to the victimizer is of an unimaginable

in need of new laws plans as much as it stands in need of eliminating

offensive maneuvers from any process of interaction which involves majority and minority citizens. Before detailing some reflections about offensive mechanisms, it is necessary to re-view briefly Some medical aspects of racism. For racism to he so witheringly effective, strong offensive maneuvers are mandatory.

Racism

Racism in the United States is a public health and mental health illness. It is a mental disease because it is delusional. That is, it is a false belief, born of morbidity, refractory to change when contrary evidence is presented concerning the innate inferiority of any person with dark skin color. Thus everyone in this country is inculcated with a barrage of sanc-tions which permit and encourage any white to have attitudes and behavior indicative of superiority over any black. Since everyone is involved in this delusion, then by definition it is a public health problem. The extent of the public health involve-ment is judged in terms of other definitions of a public health illness. In the classical mode of such illnesses, racism, besides affecting masses of population, also defies therapy on an one-to-one basis, produces chronic, sustained disability, and wilJ cost large sums of money to eradicate.

Offensive Mechanisms 267

There are still other dimensions to the medical description of racism. It is a contagious disease. There may not exist a'. white or black man in this country who has never had to operate from one side or the other of a line drawn against the; black man. For the black man to violate this line, often legally IIrawn, is to invite the most sinister and ultimate catastrophe. While the white man, even the most indefatigable, non-conforming liberal is liable to have to take advantage of racial prerogative :to the detrimental exploitation of some hapless - if unseen -, black. Who has not known of relativ'ely immune places such a~ small Scandinavian villages which seemed relatively bereft of negative racial attitudes until the arrival of a contingent of vociferous, outraged white Americans?

Yet another medical relationship of racism is the fact that it is a perceptual illness. In almost any black-white negotiation each participant views things differently, depending on whether he is white (the offender) or black (the offended). For instance, the psychological hallmark of racism .is the altogether too well-known tendency for whites to congratulate themselves, before a black, concerning what marvelous IIprogress" is being made. To the perception of the white offender, this is true and reasonable. From the vantage point of the black offended, however,this is both untrue and unreasonable. If the black offended then indicates in any manner whatsoever that he is not convinced that congratulations are in order, he is gruffly perceived as at best an ingrate or at worst an ignoramus who refuses to comply to the rules set up by his oppressor. This sparks white animosity and hostility. In turn the poorly understood black is goaded to counter-hostility. It is in this way that the micro-aggressions of offensive maneuvers can accumulate and build to explosive white violence and retaliative black counter-violence.

Offensive mechanisms serve in other ways as a vehiCle for the micro~aggressive episodes that come to total up racism. One of the most grisly of these considerations involves the fact that racism is a lethal disease. The offensive mechanisms. which assure that the person in the inferior status is ignored, ~tyran~ nized, terrorized, and minimized constitute the fabric from which is cut the cloth of' statistics that describes the plight of

"

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268 The Black Seventies

the ghetto citizen. It is a summation of collective micro-offenses by the majority that ignores the fact that a massive commitment is needed to make the ghetto school fail.

Up until now, the education system has succeeded in pre-paring generation after generation of blacks to accept the docile, passive positions of abused, disenfranchised, second-class citi-zens. It is a summation of collective micro-offenses by the majority that permits police department after police depart-ment to tyrannize black communities. It is a summation of col-lective micro-offenses by the whites which applies economic terrors to poor blacks who have the temerity to demand what the law provides. It is a summation of collective micro-offenses by the whites to minimize the social importance of any black or any black achievement so that blacks will see themselves as useless, unlovable, unable.

These are the sorts of micro-offenses that lead to the statisti-cal early demise of blacks and to their incomparably higher morbidity and mortality rates. In the psychological perceptions of the black, such deaths are perpetrated, calculated murders by the white offender, whose ever-growing collective micro-aggressions presage more slaughter and even more repression. It is difficult, if not impossible, for a black to understand how a white, particularly a privileged white, can exhibit offensive micro-aggressions without considering himself a murderer. It is axiomatic that the more privileges a person enjoys, the more responsibility he should bear to eliminate the process of offen-sive micro-aggressions from the confines of his own institutions. It is not the janitor in the hospital who determines the process interactions between black and white. It is the hospital director and the board of trustees and the senior staff.

So much for a psychological fraction of truth about racism as viewed by a black psychiatrist. Racism is a mental health and public health disease characterized by perceptual distortion, contagion, and fatality. The vehicle for these characteristics is the cumulative effect of offensive mechanisms, individually ex-hibited but collectively approved and promoted by the white sector of this society. I turn now to a more refined description of offensive behavior.

Offensive Mechanisms 269

Offensive Behavior

There would be many areas from which a theoretician could command literature to help him understand offensive behavior. As such, one could study the extreme aggressive act, homicide. Or one could look to animal studies, particularly the social be-havior of animals. Another route would be to examine what is known about the relationship of endocrine glands to aggression, In political science there is an ab

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Embed Size (px) DESCRIPTION Critical Race Theory, microaggressions, psychoanalysis Copyright 1970 by Floyd B. Barbour Library of Congress Catalog Number 74-133967 Porter Sargent Publisher 11 Beacon St., Boston, Mass. 02108 leading black authors look at the present and reach into the future The Black Seventies Floyd B.

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National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)

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Kimberlé Crenshaw: What is Intersectionality?

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The urgency of intersectionality | Kimberlé Crenshaw | TED

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I’ll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago. 

Most classroom practice is astrology. https://t.co/zI7553tp4L

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I’ll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago. 

Most classroom practice is astrology. https://t.co/zI7553tp4L

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.referenced_tweets[].text
Here's something I am wondering... as a parent... Why are there so many tests happening during remote learning? Aren't there other ways to assess at this point that would be more logically aligned with the type of learning environment students are in?

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I’ll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago.

Most classroom practice is astrology. https://t.co/zI7553tp4L
— David Bowles (@DavidOBowles) October 5, 2020

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I’ll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago. 

Most classroom practice is astrology. https://t.co/zI7553tp4L

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.includes.tweets[].text
Here's something I am wondering... as a parent... Why are there so many tests happening during remote learning? Aren't there other ways to assess at this point that would be more logically aligned with the type of learning environment students are in?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
I’ll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago. 

Most classroom practice is astrology. https://t.co/zI7553tp4L

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
I’ll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago. 

Most classroom practice is astrology. https://t.co/zI7553tp4L

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.referenced_tweets[].text
Here's something I am wondering... as a parent... Why are there so many tests happening during remote learning? Aren't there other ways to assess at this point that would be more logically aligned with the type of learning environment students are in?

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Tré Ventour is a Midlands-based writer-poet, curator, and race + Black history educator. Much of his work centres around race, identity, Black history, and issues relating to social justice, and has had articles published in regional journalism and online blogs, including Northampton Chronicle, Diverse Educators and Wonkhe.

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Macpherson report: what was it and what impact did it have?

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Prompted by Stephen Lawrence’s racially motivated death, it sparked debate about policing and racism

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The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (Macpherson Report, 1999)

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The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (Macpherson Report, 1999)

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Stephen Lawrence - What happened? What went wrong? | BBC

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A series of films about the black British experience, directed by Steve McQueen.

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'Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment' (Amelia Gentleman)

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'Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment' (Amelia Gentleman)

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The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment

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The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment | Amelia Gentleman | download | Z-Library. Download books for free. Find books

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'The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files' (David Olusoga)

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'The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files' (David Olusoga)

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David Olusoga opens secret government files to explore the Windrush scandal.

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More - https://youtu.be/4HAII7QWr_c

https://youtu.be/_wl3HCKQ6WI

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Society of the Spectacle: WTF? Guy Debord, Situationism and the Spectacle Explained | Tom Nicholas

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Stuart Hall - Race, Gender, Class in the Media

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When the first cases of the Windrush scandal began to emerge in 2017, the government was dismissive. When challenged in parliament over the treatment of Sylvester Marshall, who was denied cancer treatment because hospital staff wrongly believed he was an undocumented migrant, the then prime minister Theresa May said she was not aware of a problem.

A string of damning articles by the Guardian's Amelia Gentleman followed, each with more shocking details of how people, mainly from the Caribbean but who had spent most of their lives in the UK, were being denied services or worse being detained and deported.

They were people like Paulette Wilson who once worked in the canteen of the Houses of Parliament but was later held in Yarl's Wood detention centre and threatened with deportation to Jamaica despite having left the country when she was 10. Paulette died just two years after her case became public. Or like Northampton's Ivan Anglin who was deported under a Labour government in 1998 after returning to the UK from his sister's funeral. It was another 20 years before he was able to return to Northampton after his case was raised by the Guardian.

As pressure grew on the government the home secretary at the time Amber Rudd apologised for the scandal saying "how they have been treated has been wrong, has been appalling. I am sorry". A taskforce was set up to handle thousands of cases and compensation was promised. But for many in the Windrush community the hurt caused by the scandal remains.

"We can forgive but never forget," one Northampton resident told volunteers from The Windrush Generation Doorstep Befriending Team, a scheme set up to support people from the Windrush community during the Covid pandemic. The group delivers cultural hampers packed full of items sourced from local Black and independent businesses.

The initiative was started by Shereen Ingram, owner of local business Boxfood and founder of the organisation Norfamton.

"It's really important that we understand the Windrush scandal and how it crossed over with the Coronavirus pandemic. Both have devastated lives and continue to do so," Shereen says.

"I've always been aware of the size of the Windrush community in Northampton because I am from a big Jamaican family myself and I knew that the elderly had been particularly hit hard by the pandemic so I wanted to do something aimed at those people."

Shereen's own grandfather Vincent Ingram came to the UK during the Windrush era. 'Maas Vin' as he was known to family and community members went on to become one of Northampton's first black train drivers and worked on the trains for many years.

"The Windrush scandal hasn't been put right, we know there are still people with outstanding cases or that haven't received compensation yet and these are the same people who are being hit hardest by the pandemic," Shereen says.

"Covid has impacted people from all walks of life but it has had a disproportionate impact on Black communities, including those that are both Black and elderly. With the hostile environment and the Windrush scandal still continuing, community outreach and wellbeing is more important now than ever before."

Data published by the Home Office last summer showed that at the time nine in 10 applications to the Windrush compensation scheme were still awaiting an outcome, with just 143 claims out of 1,480 being settled. Payments were stepped up in the months that followed but the Labour Party said last month that over 1,500 people were still waiting for their claim to be paid.

The team in Northampton has only been running since February but has already visited around 20 people. They say everyone is thrilled to receive one of the packages and often ask 'why me?'.

"They are so grateful for the hampers, they sing and dance when we turn up. People can't forget what happened but they won't be held hostage to the past either. It was a horrible thing that happened but we also hear so many funny and happy stories about people coming over on the boats - some met their husband or wife on the way over. They are stories of love and hope. We have a lot to learn from them."

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When the first cases of the Windrush scandal began to emerge in 2017, the government was dismissive. When challenged in parliament over the treatment of Sylvester Marshall, who was denied cancer treatment because hospital staff wrongly believed he was an undocumented migrant, the then prime minister Theresa May said she was not aware of a problem.

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The team behind a ground-breaking new book collating stories about the Windrush generation in Northamptonshire are calling for more contributors.

Anyone with connections to those who arrived in the UK from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1973 are being urged to get in touch with community group Norfamton.

They can either talk to a member of the team or write their own story or poem to be included in the collaborative book, which author Alan Moore is writing the introduction for.

Two of the elderly people Norfampton has provided with a hamper full of essentials during the coronavirus pandemic, who inspired the Windrush generation book project

Shereen Ingram, from Norfamton, said: "Many people are confused with what the Windrush generation means so it would be nice to clear it up and to have the whole community involved in a collaborative book - that would be awesome.

"That's why we want people from different lives involved so people feel part of it.

Shereen came up with the idea for the book while delivering essentials to people who were shielding during the coronavirus pandemic through Norfampton's Windrush Generation Doorstep Befriending Team.

Norfamton's Shereen Ingram delivers hampers to elderly people in Northampton shielding during the coronavirus pandemic

She wants to highlight how important their contribution to British culture has been as well as the deep-rooted racism they have had to deal with that is still being felt today.

"The people I was going to had such amazing experiences of love, life and discrimination and I just thought, 'this needs to be documented'," she said.

So Shereen got in touch with writer Tré Ventour to help put the stories onto paper and put the book together.

He believes it would be the first of its kind to document the lives of the Windrush generation outside of the big cities and Black British history.

"We are just looking for members of the Windrush generation interested in being interviewed and people who want to write their own stories about the Windrush," he said.

"So if we can get as many different perspectives across the community that would be good - not just Carribean people but Irish, Sri Lankan and others."

Much of Britain's communities can trace their ancestry to the Windrush generation, which takes its name from the HMT Empire Windrush ship, which brought one of the first large groups of Caribbean people to the country in 1948.

Many took up jobs in the newly-formed NHS and other sectors affected by Britain's post-war labour shortage and were automatically British citizens because of the Commonwealth, according to the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.

In 2017, it emerged that hundreds of Commonwealth citizens who came to the UK had been wrongly detained, deported and denied legal rights - known as the Windrush scandal.

Norfamton has organised a festival to celebrate the Windrush generation's contribution to British culture in food, art and music, hence the name FAMfest.

Shereen hopes the festival and the book will help to raise awareness of their importance to the UK but she knows that time is running out to hear their stories first-hand.

"Many members of that generation are dying especially with Covid and we didn't get to record their stories," she said.

"So this is quite urgent as they are getting to an age where they are not going to be here. If it's not done now, it will never be done."

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Appeal for Northamptonshire's Windrush generation to share their stories for ground-breaking new book

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The team behind a ground-breaking new book collating stories about the Windrush generation in Northamptonshire are calling for more contributors. Anyone with connections to those who arrived in the UK from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1973 are being urged to get in touch with community group Norfamton.

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Nationality and Borders Bill - Apsana Begum, MP for Poplar

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Nationality and Borders Bill - Apsana Begum, MP for Poplar

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Comment: We must resist the government’s ‘racist’ Borders Bill

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Tre Ventour explains why the Nationality and Borders Bill is so dangerous

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'The Alternative History Behind the Windrush Scandal' (2021)

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'The Alternative History Behind the Windrush Scandal' (2021)

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Working with Norfamton these past weeks on the Windrush Doorstep Befriending Team, it was interesting talking to Shereen on how the original critiques of the Scandal did not go far enough in their primary challenges to the Home Office.

My family history in Britain goes back to the 1960s. L-R: Great-Grandma Toiley, Cousin Rita , Grandma Cathy, Great-Auntie Rosie, and Great-Auntie Mona (front) (Source: Noel Family Archive)

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LONG READ: The Alternative History Behind the Windrush Scandal

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LONG READ: The Alternative History Behind the Windrush Scandal. Working with Norfamton these past weeks on the Windrush Doorstep Befriending Team, it was interesting talking to Shereen on how the....

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'World on Fire: Returning Diversity to the Forefront of Wartime' (2020)

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'World on Fire: Returning Diversity to the Forefront of Wartime' (2020)

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World on Fire: Returning Diversity to the Forefront of Wartime

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In watching World on Fire, I want to hope this is a cornerstone of how the small screen can do diversity in The Period Drama, showing that…

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For a while now I have been having lots of conversations with friends and colleagues that identify a Mixed-Race. Whether they call themselves Multiracial, Mixed-Race or Biracial, there are multiple terms for the people that do not fit into the monoracial boxes society assumes for us. Whether we're talking two (bi) or multi (two or more). In the not so distant past, the derogatory term " half-caste " was a socially accepted term, and it is still used to varying degrees. However, in my love for history, pertinently the stories featuring those that are racialised as 'Black', I have found society more widely has "adopted" in a manner of speaking, Mixed-Race people as Black.

A monoracial history may not seem an issue to some, but it is doing a disservice to a race that also have a history in its own right (beyond slavery). Including Multiracial people into a Black history such as Walter Tull, says so much about society and their focus on his Blackness. Although it's not widely acknowledged, part of Walter Tull is a product of his white working class ancestry through his White English mother and the other part is from his Black Bajan father. He was a product of not only an interracial relationship, but a united one through marriage.

In "adopting" Multiracial individuals into the Black historical narratives without thinking about other parts of their racial, cultural and / or ethnic identities, we are missing opportunities to have vital discussions about not only Multiracial identity but also class and Whiteness.

What we are also missing out on are prevalent conversations on unconscious bias in the sense that there is really only one dominant narrative of what "Mixed-Race" can look like, consistent with lighter skin and looser hair. However, I have known Multiracial people to have hair textures ranging from 2c/3a all the way up to 4c, also well-depicted in the Emma Dabiri nonfiction text Don't Touch My Hair. There is also a narrative here of 'good' and 'bad' hair (but that's another conversation). Moreover, the connotations that light-skinned Black people can be stereotyped as Multiracial tells me that the common thoughts about those from Multiracial backgrounds is that they must have "lighter skin." Yet, plenty who have monoracially Black parents also have lighter skin tones. So, there is lots to unpick here, and discuss, not only in terms of identity but also the unconscious bias against Multiracial people from all ethnic groups.

I grew up thinking of myself as Black but if we take this definition of "Multiracial" into its fullest meaning, I would also fit into this demographic, having Multiracial grandmothers on both sides my family with White Irish and Indo-Caribbean heritage. Has this changed how I think of myself in relation to my race and my cultural identity?

What we also have to realise is that Black has changed meaning over time and Black is not a monolith, just as Mixed-Race is not a monolith. Blackness is fluid. It brings me to ask questions about the Caribbean diaspora and how in somewhere like Jamaica, there is an African presence. There has also been a European presence (still is) and there is an Indigenous American presence. Also to include Jewish, Chinese, Indian and Lebanese people. Jewish and Lebanese communities came to Jamaica as part of the merchant trading class, and Indian and Chinese communities came as indentured labourers after the end of enslavement in 1838 in order fill the new labour market made in the abolition of enslavement. Consequently, these immigrant settlers had interracial relationships and thus created a Multiracial community.

Within Black communities there has been contestation of who is / isn't Black and like most identities, it is not something one gets to choose. I have met Multiracial people of African and Caribbean heritage that look like me that would call themselves Black and have also met others that identify as 'Mixed-Race.' However, one of the issues I have, is not that Multiracial Black-racialised figures are included in Black History Month campaigns, but by including these individuals, there is no gesture or want to discuss Blackness as fluid, which would also mean that Black History has multiple facets and many identities.

In African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power, in the second episode, journalist and broadcaster Afua Hirsch is in Sénégal. She says "the French legacy lingers in Sénégal today: in language, in architecture, but also in the people themselves." The city Saint Louis was at the centre of French colonialism in this country. Hirsch also says "France turned Saint Louis into a grand experiment, seeding a hybrid Creole culture, like that of Havana and New Orleans. And it created a new caste that would bolster their rule."

Like what happened in places like India, European colonisers had children with Sénégalese women, thus creating a new Multiracial population, who were then called the metis(se), and became a merchant class influencing much power within the colonial structure.

Whilst Black History Month campaigns so often discuss Multiracial individuals, why is that only in proximity to their Black identity? Why do we focus on the most visible identity, often the Black identity? Much alike the one-drop rule, why do we focus on the most visible identity? Frequently, I hear things like "Mixed-Race is the fastest growing racial group." My question is, if this is the case, why are these conversations about Multiracial identities not being had on the same level and enthusiasm as that of Black identity? Blackness is fluid - and whilst lots of Multiracial people may be racialised as Black, they may not all see themselves that way in terms of racial identity.

Many of my friends and colleagues that are part of this race identify as Multiracial, especially those that grew up with their White family members away from their Black relatives. Some have been made to feel othered by both society and White and Black relatives. But some are also quite proudly Mixed-Race. In our discussions about race, more could be done to talk about fluidity of Blackness, especially historically. It is a constant and as society becomes more diverse, definitions of Blackness will shift again.

Mixed-Race / Multiracial doesn't have a face because it is diverse

Both Walter Tull and Mary Seacole have become establishment figures, indicative of 'good Black British history.' Both of them had jobs that are considered respectable - in, the military and healthcare - and names that are easy to say. On the surface of those Black postboxes, we are witness to a metaphor that 'we will celebrate you' if you are not too angry or too political - which makes talking about the history of this country within these isles and its former-colonies so difficult, as much of it is angry and very political. And even in discussing Walter Tull, there is a lot of focus on the "good history" (his achievements in football/breaking the British Army's colour bar), but not much thought or discussion goes into actively interrogating the institutional racism at the time, nor narratives of class or the history of the care system - a history that him and his brother Edward Tull were part of.

One of my biggest qualms in Black History Month campaigns is this notion that all Black History has to be positive. I disagree. Not all stories have to empower, not all stories need to. The focus on that is to varying degrees problematic. In establishment figures like Mary Seacole, an example of 'good history', there is a Mixed-Race history, coming from a White Scottish father and Jamaican mother. Mary Jane Grant Seacole was a Mixed-Race Jamaican Creole woman. Whilst it is important to show the ways Black and Black-racialsed people have positively contributed to the world, we also have to tell the stories of struggle, not only but also including transatlantic slavery, the revolts and rebellions, and the anti-racist movements of the 20th century.

Mary Seacole (Artist: Martin Jennings)

In closing, more can be done to discuss narratives of Multiracial communities, especially as it is an interesting avenue into discussing the complexities of Whiteness, class and White identity. From Barack Obama and Akala alike, being raised by their White mothers - to Frederick Douglass reportedly being the son of the White slave master, and Mary Seacole, Naomi Campbell (Chinese grandmother), Stephen Graham (mixed-race half-Jamaican father) and the Black Georgians and Black Victorians that married interracially in the 18th and 19th centuries.

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For a while now I have been having lots of conversations with friends and colleagues that identify a Mixed-Race. Whether they call themselves Multiracial, Mixed-Race or Biracial, there are multiple terms for the people that do not fit into the monoracial boxes society assumes for us.

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'Mixed-Race Identity Has Plurality: On Being Irish, Jamaican, and Black' (2020)

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'Mixed-Race Identity Has Plurality: On Being Irish, Jamaican, and Black' (2020)

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Mixed-Race Identity Has Plurality: On Being Irish, Jamaican, and Black

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Mixed-Race Identity Has Plurality: On Being Irish, Jamaican, and Black. It wasn't until I was twenty years old that I found out I come from a very recent Mixed-Race background - when my father told me my....