Race is once more central to British politics—from Black Lives Matter to the ethnically diverse Tory government’s obsession with deporting refugees, and the rise of a far right claiming that white people are being oppressed by “wokeness”. Several new books… Continue Reading
August 2023 marks the bicentenary of one of the most important revolts by enslaved people in the history of the British Empire, taking place in what was then Demerara (later part of British Guiana, now Guyana) on the Caribbean coast… Continue Reading
A review of The Wrath to Come—Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells, Sarah Churchwell (Head of Bloomsbury, 2023), £10.99 Sarah Churchwell’s new book could hardly be timelier. According to a recent YouGov and Economist poll, “More than… Continue Reading
A review of Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918-1927, Jeffrey B Perry (Columbia University Press, 2021), £30 Hubert Harrison was a black revolutionary intellectual and sometime innovative Marxist who debated the relations between race and class, socialism and imperialism… Continue Reading
The eruption of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on the 25 May was a spectacular highlight to the eerie summer of 2020. In the United States alone, an… Continue Reading
In 2013, during his time as Mayor of London, Boris Johnson gave a lecture to city bankers in which he said: Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality… Continue Reading
There is currently a welcome call to “decolonise” universities and academia.1 This is about more than demanding the removal of statues of old imperialists. The movement sets out to end the dominance of conservative white men as the repositories of… Continue Reading
A review of Jim Wolfreys, Republic of Islamophobia: The Rise of Respectable Racism in France (Hurst, 2018), £14.99 This April, French president Emmanuel Macron urged Catholic bishops to “engage once again” with the “political scene” and “repair” the relationship between… Continue Reading
The following lyrics were written by an anonymous black soldier in the 54th Massachusetts (Colored) Regiment, one of the first black combat regiments, at the height of the Civil War in the United States (1861-5). They undermine the pernicious myth… Continue Reading
Within weeks of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, news and media channels were dominated by charges of antisemitism levelled against his supporters, the National Union of Students and others for their opposition to the State of Israel. The furore… Continue Reading