Category Archives: Race

Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge explores founder’s slavery links

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Historic and contemporary pieces interrogate city and university’s connections to colonialism

An exhibition by the Fitzwilliam Museum will explore Cambridge’s connections to enslavement and exploitation for the first time, both in the university and the city.

Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance features works made in west Africa, the Caribbean, South America and Europe, and interrogates the ways Atlantic enslavement and the Black Atlantic shaped the University of Cambridge’s collections.

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Avon and Somerset police chief admits force is institutionally racist

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Sarah Crew also says force is ‘likely’ to be treating LGBTQ+ people, women and disabled people unfairly

The chief constable of Avon and Somerset police has admitted her force is “institutionally racist” and “likely” to be treating LGBTQ+ people, women and disabled people unfairly.

Sarah Crew said she was determined to fight an unjust system and would “root out” officers proved to be racist or behaving in a discriminatory way, and said she was not motivated by “wokeism or political correctness” but by “common sense”.

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Obama criticizes GOP hopefuls Nikki Haley and Tim Scott over racism stances

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Former president notes tendency among Republican candidates to gloss over effects of racism, prompting pushback from both

Barack Obama has criticized two Republican presidential hopefuls, the South Carolina senator Tim Scott and the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, over their stances on race relations in America.

On a podcast interview, Obama, who became the first Black US president when he was elected in 2008, said that while presenting a hopeful message on race relations was important, “that has to be undergirded with an honest accounting of our past and our present”.

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Greg Abbott signs law banning diversity offices in Texas higher education

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The governor signed the bill prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion offices in addition to another codifying tenure restrictions

Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has signed a bill that will ban diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices and initiatives across higher education institutions in the state.

Under SB 17, DEI offices across state colleges will close starting in January 2024 and activities that seek to promote certain groups of individuals over others based on race, ethnicity and gender will also come to an end.

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Romania recalls ambassador who allegedly compared monkey to African diplomats

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UN’s Africa group ‘not prepared to participate’ with Dragos Viorel Tigau after alleged comment in Kenya

The Africa group within the United Nations said it would never work again with the Romanian ambassador to Kenya in certain forums after he allegedly compared them to a monkey while attending a meeting in Nairobi.

The group also demanded an unconditional and public apology to the people of Africa.

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UK business leader diversity has not increased since George Floyd death

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Nearly 70% of office workers say their firms have not increased number of black, Asian or ethnic minority leaders

The number of senior business leaders from ethnically diverse backgrounds has not significantly increased since the death of George Floyd sparked global protests and $50bn (£40bn) of corporate pledges to address racial inequality in the workplace.

Three years on from the killing of Floyd at the hands of US police officers, which prompted chief executives including Apple’s Tim Cook and David Solomon of Goldman Sachs to declare that leaders also need to do more to address racial disparities in their own companies, nearly 70% of office workers say their firms have not increased the number of black, Asian or ethnic minority leaders.

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Disney’s Little Mermaid flops in China amid racist backlash over casting

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Poor box office performance reflects broader challenge for Hollywood as it vies with domestic productions

The poor performance of Disney’s The Little Mermaid at the Chinese box office has reopened questions on Hollywood’s increasing difficulties in the world’s second-largest economy and the role racism has played in the film’s reception.

The live action remake has grossed just $3.6m (£2.9m) since its release in Chinese cinemas on 26 May, according to Box Office Mojo.

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Abuse has led Sathnam Sanghera to ‘more or less stop’ doing book events in UK

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Writer of Empireland, which examined Britain’s imperial past, says culture war-fuelled online trolling and heckling ‘gets to you’

The writer Sathnam Sanghera has said he barely ever does public events in the UK because of a fear of being attacked amid a culture war-fuelled backlash over his views on Britain’s imperial past, saying he feared a Florida-style push towards the banning of books.

Sanghera, a journalist and author whose bestselling book Empireland assessed how the UK’s colonial territories still infect contemporary politics and discourse, said he had begun to dread holding book events here.

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Asian Americans do not have access to abortion information, survey finds

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Nearly half of respondents said they did not know where to access the medication if they needed it

Asian Americans do not have adequate access to information about how to obtain an abortion, according to a new report.

Cultural stigmas against conversations about sexual and reproductive health and a lack of in-language information on abortion has stifled knowledge of abortion care among Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians, researchers found.

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Mehreen Faruqi reveals she has ‘experienced racism in the Greens’

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Senator’s comments come as leader Adam Bandt says the party is yet to see the complaint of racism foreshadowed by Lidia Thorpe

Senator Mehreen Faruqi has revealed she has “experienced racism in the Greens” as leader Adam Bandt declined to rule out that the party had received complaints about alleged racism beyond one expected from Lidia Thorpe.

Faruqi, the Greens’ anti-racism spokesperson, made the comments at a press conference on Tuesday at which Bandt confirmed the party is yet to see the complaint of racism foreshadowed by senator Thorpe on the ABC on Sunday.

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Post Office Horizon inquiry used racist term for Black people, documents show

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Investigators of alleged fraud were asked to group suspects by racial features, including ‘negroid types’

Lawyers investigating post office operators in the Horizon computer scandal used a racist term to categorise Black workers, according to documents released to campaigners.

Investigators were asked to group suspects based on racial features, the results of a freedom of information request found.

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Three black men in UK say ‘institutional racism’ influenced murder convictions

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Durrell Goodall, Reano Walters and Nathaniel Williams are applying for a formal review of their convictions as teenagers

Lawyers for three black men convicted as teenagers of a 2016 murder in Manchester will apply for their convictions to be formally reviewed, arguing they resulted from institutional racism by the police, prosecution and judge.

The mothers of the three men – Durrell Goodall, Reano Walters and Nathaniel “Jay” Williams – will travel to Birmingham to personally deliver their sons’ 180-page application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC).

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Labour to restore whip to Neil Coyle after suspension over drunken abuse

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Bermondsey MP had whip removed last year after complaint by reporter Henry Dyer about racist comments

Labour is to restore the party whip to Neil Coyle after the MP was suspended for drunken abuse and making racist comments to a journalist.

Coyle was suspended in February last year after a complaint by Henry Dyer, a political reporter for the Insider website who now works for the Guardian, about the behaviour of the MP for Bermondsey and Old Southwark in London.

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US Congress members demand that PayPal end ban on Palestinian business

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Other payment companies do business with Palestinians in the occupied territories, but PayPal only provides services to Israelis there

Eleven members of the US Congress have demanded PayPal end a ban on doing business with Palestinians in the occupied territories while permitting Israeli settlers to use the digital payment platform.

The letter, authored by Representative Mark Pocan, says PayPal is discriminating against Palestinians by denying “equal access to the digital economy”.

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Spanish police make arrests over ‘hate crimes’ targeting Vinícius Júnior

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Three detained after racist slurs directed at Real Madrid forward, with four more held over mannequin hanging from bridge

Spanish police have arrested three people in connection with the racist abuse suffered by Real Madrid’s Brazilian forward Vinícius Júnior during a match with Valencia on Sunday, and detained a further four suspects over an effigy of the player that was hung from a bridge in Madrid four months ago.

In a brief statement on Tuesday morning, the Policía Nacional said three young men had been arrested in Valencia over the “racist behaviour” that took place during the match at the city’s Mestalla stadium.

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Spanish prosecutors investigate racist football abuse against Vinícius Júnior

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Judicial sources say incident during Real Madrid’s match with Valencia is being treated as possible hate crime

Spanish prosecutors have opened an investigation over racist chants hurled at Real Madrid’s Brazilian forward Vinícius Júnior during a weekend match, as the head of Spain’s football federation admitted the country had a “problem” with racism.

The prosecutor’s office in the eastern city of Valencia, where the game took place, was investigating the incident as a possible “hate crime”, judicial sources said, after Luis Rubiales of the Royal Spanish Football Federation called for zero tolerance.

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Q+A host Stan Grant standing down from ABC show after racist abuse

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The ABC presenter says he has been a media target for racism and for now he’s ‘walking away’

The host of Q+A Stan Grant is standing down from the show after receiving “grotesque racist abuse” which escalated after he spoke on the ABC about the impact of colonialism ahead of the King’s coronation.

Grant said in a column published on the ABC website that after Monday’s episode he was “walking away”.

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Hertz apologizes after refusing rental car to Puerto Rican customer

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A worker at the rental chain demanded to see the American man’s passport, apparently unaware that the island is part of the US

The US rental car giant Hertz has apologized and pledged to retrain its staff after an employee denied a Puerto Rican customer a prepaid vehicle on the mistaken belief that he was from a foreign country and needed a passport.

During the encounter with the customer at New Orleans’s Louis Armstrong international airport, the Hertz employee also called over a law enforcement officer even though Puerto Rico has been a US territory since 1898 and has a (non-voting) member of Congress, according to a stunning report the CBS correspondent David Begnaud published on Twitter and Instagram late Saturday.

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Facebook blocks Rockhampton mob leader as Queensland MP prepares to meet with him

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Indigenous community says the plan to meet with Torin O’Brien only legitimises his offensive views

First Nations people in central Queensland say the state government is inflaming local tensions by pushing ahead with plans to meet with the former leader of a far-right “patriots” group, who was booted off Facebook after leading a mob to surround the Rockhampton home of an Indigenous teenager.

Guardian Australia on Tuesday revealed that the ringleader of the group, Torin O’Brien, is the former president of a group that regularly posted offensive anti-Islam content online.

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California’s plan for reparations to Black residents: what you need to know

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First-of-its-kind committee gives final approval to long list of proposals including cash to descendants of enslaved people

A California taskforce on reparations voted this weekend to approve recommendations on how the state may compensate and apologize to Black residents for generations of harm caused by discriminatory policies.

The committee, the first of its kind in the United States, gave final approval to a hefty list of proposals, including cash payments to descendants of enslaved people.

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