Racism

Thursday

Taki

Why New Yorkers are fleeing the city in droves

New York Back when people used to read newspapers, they called it a ‘human interest’ story. Now it appears as just another statistic. The know-nothings on social media, who express utter drivel on a daily basis, will have pretty much ignored it, but a dreaded pro-Biden sheet actually published the full story. A young Japanese man came over to the Bagel from Tokyo to make it as a jazz pianist, and that he did. He started a trio of his own and toured with several bands until the fateful night of 27 September, when he rode the New York subway after a video shoot. Tadataka Unno is now 40, and

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

A night of angry pipsqueaks: Young Vic’s 50th birthday gala reviewed

When Kwame Kwei-Armah took over the Young Vic a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign was strapped to the front of the building. One of BLM’s aims is the overthrow of capitalism and it’s widely assumed in theatreland that Kwame, who is great fun to meet, has embraced this goal by adjusting the Young Vic’s pay structures so that he earns no more than the bar staff and the cleaners. Happily the pay cut seems not to have affected his mood, and last weekend he was fizzing with anticipation as he hosted the Young Vic’s 50th birthday gala. ‘We’re in the house. Make some noise,’ he cried. ‘Shake off the cobwebs!’ He introduced a

Thursday

Colin Grant

The most important book on black Britishness has one flaw: its author was white

How many black friends do you have? Do you have any? It’s likely that black people have more white friends than the reverse. In part that’s surely down to demographics and the size of the population. No matter your colour, you’re ten times more likely to bump into a white person than a black person, more or less, depending on where you find yourself, of course. The situation is not so pronounced as in the United States where residential segregation has reinforced social apartheid. In the UK black and white people may live cheek-by-jowl, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate knowledge or even empathy. Out of just over 100 households on

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Covid marshals are killing theatre: The Shrine & Bed Among the Lentils reviewed

Covid marshals have invaded theatreland. Arriving for a weekday matinee at the Bridge, I was greeted by stewards holding up illuminated boards. ‘PLEASE WEAR A FACE COVERING.’ Inside, the seating had been rearranged into clumps of twos and threes with the odd single perch sticking out like a toadstool. Nicholas Hytner offered us a pair of the best-loved scripts by his favourite living playwright, Alan Bennett. The afternoon was stuffy and I took sips from a bottle of water in accordance with signage which suggested that masks might be removed for the purposes of drinking. After each glug I diligently replaced my covering. Ten minutes into the show, I was

Thursday

John Phipps

Louis Theroux’s podcast reveals a master at work

I always want to know more about Louis Theroux, which is odd, since I’ve seen so much of him already. I’ve seen him hanging out with Nazis, auditioning for Broadway and undergoing liposuction. I’ve seen him chased by scientologists and given the runaround by Jimmy Savile. I’ve even seen him evading the insistent romantic advances of an American sex worker. Why am I still interested? Perhaps it’s that his personality veers close to seeming like an act. The otterish earnestness, the jerky, mannequin physicality. The spectacles that feel like a prop. There is something in me that wants to lift the lid on the real Louis Theroux, to sweep the

Thursday

Taki

The death of free speech

Oh, to be in America, where cultural decay and self-destruction compete equally with hyper-feminist and anti-racist agendas. Gone with the Wind is now off limits and Robert E. Lee’s statue in Richmond is unlikely to remain standing (I give it a week at most). And over here poor old Winnie is also in the you-know-what. Why didn’t anyone tell me Churchill was a Nazi? The Cenotaph also has to go; those guys it honours were racists. Two weeks ago in these here pages Douglas Murray said it all about a US import we can do without. Alas, when Uncle Sam sneezes, the British bulldog gets the flu. The scenes may

Friday

Lloyd Evans

What are the new rules on race and performance?

What are the new rules on race and performance? In the world of TV, everyone is busy apologising, self-censoring and denouncing their previous work. Ant and Dec have deleted routines in which they imitated Japanese girls and people of colour. The comedian Leigh Francis has expressed contrition for satirising Craig David in Bo’ Selecta! (which was nominated for a Best Comedy Bafta in 2004). Matt Lucas and David Walliams have withdrawn sketches featuring dark-skinned characters. A new order is being created. A new hierarchy of privileges and prohibitions based on ethnicity is taking root. We are strengthening the vice we sought to eliminate. The new rule appears to forbid actors from

Monday

Steerpike

Priti Patel: I will not take lectures from Labour on racism

Priti Patel was in the Commons today, to be asked about the policing of the recent Black Lives Matter protests across the country. And, it was an understatement to say that the Home Secretary was taking no prisoners when it came to accusations from Labour that she or the government did not understand racism in this country. In response to Labour MP Florence Eshalomi – who asked whether the government and the Home Secretary recognised that there is racism and discrimination in the UK – Patel gave a remarkable speech in which she declared that she would ‘not take lectures’ from Labour about racism, and accused those who expect ethnic minorities to behave

Thursday

Robert Jackman

The problem with mystery podcasts like Wind of Change

Did the US secretly write a power ballad in order to bring down the Soviet Union? That’s the question behind Wind of Change, a serial documentary that has topped the podcast charts. It’s the work of an investigative journalist called Patrick Radden Keefe who claims to have once received a tip-off, from an intelligence contact, that the song ‘Wind of Change’ — recorded by the hair metallers Scorpions — was actually a CIA campaign to encourage anti-Soviet uprisings. Now he wants to prove it. This week’s episode, the fourth of eight, takes Keefe to a collectors’ convention in Ohio in pursuit of an internet user called ‘Lance Sputnik’ who creates

Monday

Joanna Rossiter

Cambridge’s ‘reverse mentoring’ scheme was always going to fail

Institutional racism is rife at Cambridge university – that was the assumption behind the university’s ‘reverse-mentoring’ scheme which was launched to much fanfare last summer. The idea was simple enough: senior academics who were white would be educated about racism by their BAME colleagues. But the news that the scheme may be scrapped after its short pilot is hardly a surprise. As I wrote back in July, the singling out of white colleagues for mentoring is flawed on many counts. Worst of all, it embraces the increasingly popular belief that racism is an unconscious state of being that is inexorably inherent in some (but not all) racial groups. This is

Saturday

Kathryn Paige Harden

A book that could save lives: Adam Rutherford’s How to Argue with a Racist reviewed

In the award-winning musical Avenue Q, filthy-minded puppets sang about schadenfreude, internet porn, loud sex, the uselessness of an English literature degree — and racism. Or, more specifically, they sang about the ubiquitous human habit of stereotyping people by race: Everyone’s a little bit racist, sometimes.Doesn’t mean we go around committing hate crimes.Look around and you will find,No one’s really colour blind.Maybe it’s a fact we all should face.Everyone makes judgments…Based on race. The puppets were right: everyone makes judgments based on race. Humans are lazy creatures who like mental short cuts. Thinking in shades of grey is more effortful than thinking in black and white. Evaluating a new person

Monday

The Spectator

Full text: Labour’s suspension letter to Trevor Phillips

News broke this morning that the former head of the Equalities Commission Sir Trevor Phillips had been suspended from the Labour party over allegations of Islamophobia. Phillips has spent his career documenting the realities of race and integration in British life.  The think tank Policy Exchange has now released the correspondence between Sir Trevor and the Labour party disciplinary department. Phillips is a senior fellow at the research institute.  You can read the full Policy Exchange document here and the letters below: Phillips sent the following response:

Wednesday

Alex Diggins

Bernadine Evaristo shoulders weighty themes lightly: Girl, Woman, Other reviewed

It’s a slippery word, ‘other’. Taken in one light, it throws up barriers and insists on divisions. It is fearful and finger-pointing: them, not us. But looked at in another way, it is rangy, open and expansive. It suggests horizons, not walls. That first meaning has done much heavy lifting in discussions of Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other. As the first black British woman to be awarded the prize, this was perhaps inevitable. Evaristo cuts an unmistakable dash through the ranks of past winners: they have been, on the whole, more pale and — damningly — a lot more male. The Booker judges hardly steadied the debate with their

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Full of fascinating data and excellent comedy: Messiah at Stratford Circus reviewed

I’ve joined the Black Panthers. At least I think I have. I took part in an induction ceremony at the start of Messiah at Stratford Circus. ‘Stand up,’ said the actor Shaq B. Grant to the predominantly white crowd. ‘Raise your right fist and repeat after me: “I am a revolutionary.”’ Everyone obeyed and chanted his mantra, some with more sincerity than others. Then the show began. The subject is a notorious police raid on a Panther hideout in Chicago in 1969 which resulted in the death of Fred Hampton, a 21-year-old activist nicknamed ‘the Black Messiah’. The police alleged that the Panthers opened fire first. The Panthers claimed that

Thursday

Greg Garrett

James Baldwin’s radicalism was part Marxist, part Christian

Great biographies try to answer questions about the complicated relationship between their subjects’ inner life and outer workings. How did Winston Churchill turn the pain of his early life and his years in the political wilderness into the words that galvanised the free world? How did Frida Kahlo’s physical impairment shape her vision as a painter? I am endlessly interested in the inner and outer lives of the African–American writer and activist James Baldwin, for my money not just the most important black writer of the past 100 years, but one of the most important American writers ever. Although we differ wildly in our life experience — I am a

Thursday

Michael Hann

Mick Hucknall on women, rejection and cultural appropriation

What makes someone become a pop star? Sometimes, it’s true, pop stardom arrives by accident, and its recipient responds not with joy, but horror. More often, though, pop stardom is sought, sometimes to make up for things that are missing in life, and the newly minted star embraces all the benefits fame brings, until those benefits — unlimited sex, unlimited drugs, unlimited drink — become more of a burden than a pleasure. Mick Hucknall appears to fall very much into the latter camp. What was missing was, first, a mother: she left his father when he was an infant, and records became some sort of surrogate as he grew older.

Thursday

Toby Young

Universities don’t need to be lectured about racism

I’ve been contacted by a professor at a leading Russell Group university who is worried about the spread of progressive dogma in the UK’s higher education sector. He highlighted last week’s report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission which claimed that around a quarter of students from ethnic minority backgrounds at Britain’s universities have experienced racial harassment. He fears that this will be used by left-wing activists on campus as ‘proof’ that the higher education sector is ‘systemically racist’ and lead to further calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’. He’s also concerned that he’ll have to spend more time at ‘equality, diversity and inclusion’ workshops, where he’s lectured by privately

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

A 90-minute slog up to a dazzling peak: ‘Master Harold’… and the boys reviewed

Athol Fugard likes to dump his characters in settings with no dramatic thrust or tension. A prison yard is a favourite. He specialises in bored, talkative characters who squirt the time away swapping memories and indulging in bursts of creative play-acting. It’s dull to watch but good fun to perform. Thesps love to step out of character and road-test a range of fictional personalities. ‘Master Harold’… and the boys is classic Fugard. We’re in an empty restaurant in South Africa in 1950. Lunch service has ended. Two waiters twiddle away the afternoon discussing sex, ballroom dancing and beating women (as if this were a standard feature of male behaviour). Enter

Thursday

Taki

An elegy for New York

New York The master of the love letter to New York, E.B. White, eloquently described the city as a place that can ‘bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy’. Like many of us, he believed that the place would last and that it would always matter. White was an optimist, sophisticated and thoroughly American. He was lucky to die in 1985. I say lucky because fate spared him from seeing the wreckage of his dream city. New York was also my dream place, an indelible part of my youth: a poem of steel-and-limestone majesty, of high-end shops, hotels, theatres and nightclubs, of dandies and high-class women, of

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

A decorative pageant that would appeal to civic grandees: The Secret River reviewed

The Secret River opens in a fertile corner of New South Wales in the early 1800s. William, a cockney pauper transported to Australia for theft, receives a pardon from the governor and decides to plant a crop on 100 acres of Aboriginal land. His doting wife, Sal, begs him to take her and their young sons back to her beloved London. They make a deal. William must succeed as a farmer within five years or pay for their passage home. He clashes with a tribe of spear-waving Aboriginals who make it clear that they want him off their ancestral turf. Neither side speaks the other’s language. ‘This is mine now.