This article is dedicated to late Professor BM Mayosi.
At South African tertiary institutions, all employees – both black and white – lived in terror of it.
It was (and still is) at the very least a career limiting indictment and, at worst, it could mean public disgrace or suicide. This fear is the fear of being (falsely) accused of racism or being associated with any form of white supremacy.
No matter how advanced we regard our society; no matter how ignorant we perceive our forebears; no matter how comfortably we enjoy our lives, one of the most devastatingly cliché human questions still haunts us, and becomes ever harder to answer: who are we?
I was recently interviewed by Max Klinger of the E2 Review Podcast about Political Activism in Education.
A recent front-page headline in The Guardian newspaper proclaimed that ‘Minorities in UK face ‘shocking’ jobs bias’. According to the report’s author Haroon Siddique, research had found that: “…applicants from minority ethnic backgrounds had to send 80% more applications to get a positive response from an employer than a white…
The ethnicity pay gap was highlighted in a report published last year by the Resolution Foundation, authored by Kathleen Henehan and Helena Rose. It was found that even after accounting for individual characteristics and background factors, large gaps in hourly pay persist between ethnic minority people and the white British…
When Theresa May first entered Number 10 she announced her desire to tackle the“burning injustices” of British society, including racial and ethnic disparities. In particular, she pointed to such things as the ethnic minority employment gap and the outcomes for different ethnic groups in the criminal justice system. Her flagship race…
Two years ago, I took a visiting German colleague to a Diwali dinner at an Indian friend’s house in the UK. The guests were a mixed bunch, mostly Southeast Asian but several English and mixed-race couples. The serving staff were English.
In 2013 amendments initiated in the House of Lords decided that specific legal protection against caste discrimination should be introduced in the UK, by making caste an aspect of race in the Equality Act 2010. The underlying assumptions were that caste discrimination is rife against the 500,000 Dalits in UK (a figure that cannot be confirmed, since no caste based data are currently collected), and that current legislation neither protected them nor acknowledged their unfair treatment in UK. The Government set out a public consultation and the responses are being analysed now.
The announcement yesterday that the government has chosen Sara Khan as the Lead Commissioner for its new Counter-Extremism agency has provoked predictable condemnation from the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and one of its most high profile allies, Conservative peer Baroness Sayeeda Warsi.