Analysis: Twitter, Facebook and others condemn hateful speech, so why is it so easy to find on their sites?
The world’s biggest social networks say racism isn’t welcome on their platforms, but a combination of poor enforcement and weak rules have allowed hate to flourish.
In the hours after England’s loss to Italy in the European Football Championship, both Twitter and Facebook, which owns Instagram, issued statements condemning the swelling racist abuse.
Continue reading...A fascinating new podcast delves into the life of Harry Pace, forgotten founder of the first black-owned record label in the US – and unlocks a shocking and prescient story about race
There are, according to the academic Emmett Price, “six degrees of Harry Pace”. He is referring to the man born in 1884 who founded America’s first black-owned major record label; desegregated part of Chicago; mentored the founder of Ebony and Jet magazines and spearheaded the career of blues singer Ethel Waters. Pace is a figure who is seemingly everywhere at once, yet his name has been suspiciously absent from the history books.
“This story encapsulates how progress comes about in America – and it is never in a straight line,” says Jad Abumrad. “It is often a cycle – one that contains hope and despair, smashed together.”
Continue reading...Exclusive: Steve Baker says ‘this may be a decisive moment for our party’ amid backlash over abuse of footballers
Conservatives urgently need to change their attitudes towards people taking the knee, an influential Tory MP has said amid an angry backlash against the government over the racist abuse of England footballers.
Steve Baker, the former minister and hard Brexit campaigner, broke cover on Tuesday to plead for his party to think again about dismissive attitudes towards the taking of the knee and calling for better understanding of the motives behind it.
Continue reading...Community comes together to back England footballer and oppose racism after mural was defaced
“We’re going to take the knee like the footballers do,” said Nahella Ashraf, leading a crowd of at least 300 people in performing the anti-racism gesture in front of the freshly repainted mural of Marcus Rashford on Tuesday evening.
Ashraf, a member of Manchester Stand Up to Racism, said she aimed to show “we are the majority” after the mural was defaced in the wake of England’s Euro 2020 final defeat.
Continue reading...Draft Nice guidelines for England, Wales and Northern Ireland will not solve poorer maternity outcomes for women of colour, say doctors
Proposed guidance that recommends inducing labour at 39 weeks in pregnant women from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds has raised concerns from doctors and midwives and been branded “racist” by activists.
White women with uncomplicated pregnancies should be offered an induction of labour at 41 weeks, according to the draft guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice). The institute’s clinical guidelines such as this apply in England, Wales and Northern Ireland but do not cover Scotland.
Continue reading...The standup’s new memoir traces her London childhood and battle for recognition in the UK. She discusses coming out, moving to the US and making it big
It is 14 years since Gina Yashere walked out on Britain. The standup comic was sick of accepting second best. It’s not that she wasn’t successful – she was. She had a recurring slot on the BBC’s Lenny Henry Show between 2004 and 2005, sold out theatres when she toured and was a regular guest on the TV panel show Mock the Week. But it wasn’t enough. She felt that any number of less-talented standups had their own TV shows, while she was always on a promise that never materialised. And it was beginning to destroy her. So she packed her bags and headed to the US, where she was an unknown.
“I always knew I had something special, and I wanted to swim with the big boys. I’m not going to stay in England begging for crumbs,” she says. “To get off my arse and start again, knowing it may take me years to get recognition, if any – you’ve got to have a pretty astounding amount of self-belief to do that.” And, to be fair, she did have. “I wasn’t doing it in the way Ricky Gervais and Russell Brand were doing it, where they were coming off hit shows in England, and coming over to America already recognised, with their faces on billboards. Nobody knew who the fuck I was, and I literally started again, doing open mics, performing wherever I could.”
Continue reading...Statues of Confederate generals Robert E Lee and Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson were taken down in the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, nearly four years after white supremacist protests over plans to remove them led to clashes in which a woman was run down by a car and killed. A small crowd of onlookers cheered as the statue of Lee was hoisted away first, lifted by crane from its stone pedestal and taken away on a flat-bed truck.
Continue reading...He’s the most successful driver Formula One has ever seen, and its only Black star. Now Lewis Hamilton has a new mission: to change the sport that made him.
As Lewis Hamilton rose through the ranks of competitive go-karting, his father, Anthony, told him: “Always do your talking on the track.” Lewis had a lot to talk about. Bullying and racial taunts were a consistent feature of his childhood in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, a new town 30 miles north of London; his dad taught him the best response was to excel at his sport.
The trouble was he didn’t have many people to talk to about what he was going through. Lewis is mixed-race, born to a white mother, Carmen Larbalestier, who raised him until he was 12, when he went to live with his Grenadian-British father, from whom she had separated. “My mum was wonderful,” he tells me. “She was so loving. But she didn’t fully understand the impact of the things I was experiencing at school. The bullying and being picked on. And my dad was quite tough, so I didn’t tell him too much about those experiences. As a kid I remember just staying quiet about it because I didn’t feel anyone really understood. I just kept it to myself.” Sport offered him an outlet. “I did boxing because I needed to channel the pain,” he says. “I did karate because I was being beaten up and I wanted to be able to defend myself.”
Continue reading...Black artists pioneered dance music, but the scene remains white-dominated. UK rising star Sherelle is dodging the trolls and trying to make change with her platform Beautiful
Wearing a fleece jacket covered in black and white acid smilies, Sherelle is a walking embodiment of dance music when I meet her. The 27-year-old north Londoner and self-professed “bocat” – a Jamaican slang term used in a derogatory manner to describe someone who enjoys giving cunnilingus, now proudly reappropriated by her on her T-shirts – is one of the UK’s most purely enjoyable new DJs. By blending various global forms of dance music, she is a catalyst for unrestrained raving who has stormed her way into the limelight at 160 beats per minute.
She grew up on dancehall booming out of her mum’s hi-fi system, and hip-hop and R&B music videos on cable TV. “In my house we had cable illegally, because we couldn’t afford to pay for it,” says Sherelle, whose younger self would cringe at her mother and older sister. “Whatever they were watching, they would dance to. I have a graphic image of Beenie Man’s Who Am I, around the time the tune came out, and my mum and sister having the greatest time. I was mortified.”
Continue reading...The director has spoken about race at the Cannes film festival, where he is the first black president of the Palme d’Or jury
Spike Lee commented on the US’s current racial justice crisis in typically forthright fashion at the Cannes film festival on Tuesday, saying he hoped the time had come that “black people will stop being hunted down like animals”.
Lee, who is the president of the jury that will pick the winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or, was speaking at the jury’s press conference on the first day of the festival. Having been asked a question about his 1989 film Do the Right Thing, which contains a scene in which a black youth, Radio Raheem, is killed by police, Lee responded: “I wrote it in 1988. When you see brother Eric Garner, when you see king George Floyd murdered, lynched, I think of Radio Raheem; and you would think and hope that 30 motherfucking years later, that black people stop being hunted down like animals.”
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Chile to Cambodia
Continue reading...Public health bodies and families say term carries racial bias and is used to justify lethal use of force by police
Public health bodies, charities and the families of men who died after being restrained by police have condemned the inclusion of a controversial medical term in one of the UK’s leading medical handbooks.
Acute behavioural disturbance (ABD), more commonly known as “excited delirium”, a contentious expression used in fatal cases of police violence, has recently been added to the Maudsley Prescribing Guidelines (MPG).
Continue reading...Report launched in aftermath of George Floyd murder cites example of 2018 death of Kevin Clarke in UK
A UN report that analysed racial justice in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd has called on member states including the UK to end the “impunity” enjoyed by police officers who violate the human rights of black people.
The UN human rights office analysis of 190 deaths across the world led to the report’s damning conclusion that law enforcement officers are rarely held accountable for killing black people due in part to deficient investigations and an unwillingness to acknowledge the impact of structural racism.
Continue reading...When she was pregnant, Anna Malaika Tubbs was thrilled – then terrified, knowing the shockingly high death rate of Black women in childbirth. Could she find a way to stay safe?
In the bathroom of a friend’s house in Washington DC, I waited anxiously for a few minutes before turning to look at the pregnancy test. It was positive. My eyes filled with tears; I was overjoyed, grateful and excited, but also very scared.
I think many parents can relate to this feeling, which seems to start as soon as we see that test result, and continues until our children are adults; we are overwhelmed with happiness for their mere existence while simultaneously terrified of the possibility of losing them. But as a Black feminist scholar, I was well aware that I had even more reason to worry.
Continue reading...As many as 751 unmarked graves, some of which are believed to be of First Nation children, were discovered in Canada’s Saskatchewan province just weeks after a similar discovery in British Columbia, prompting a fresh reckoning over the country’s colonial past.
The graves were found on the site of the Roman Catholic Marieval Indian residential school, and Chief Cadmus Delorme of the Cowessess First Nation has asked for an apology from the pope and the church.
From the 19th century, more than 150,000 First Nations children were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools as part of a programme to assimilate them into Canadian society, many were beaten and verbally abused, and thousands died from disease, neglect and suicide.
Continue reading...Top Pentagon leaders on Wednesday passionately defended the military's approach to addressing racism and said that it was important for personnel to study critical race theory, after Republican rep Matt Gaetz and others questioned them about it, saying it was lowering moral.
Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said the military need not apologize for fostering open-mindedness and that he wants to 'understand white rage'.
Critical race theory is a concept developed by academics and leading scholars of jurisprudence, with intellectual origins in the 1960s which were organized officially in the late 1980s. The theory states that racism is embedded both in US history and modern American law. It holds that legal institutions in the US are inherently racist.
Continue reading...Video footage challenges official claims that the cause of death was unrelated to man’s arrest
Video footage of a police officer kneeling on the neck of a Romany man who later died in an ambulance is being shared among Czechs on social media, leading many to compare his treatment to that of George Floyd.
The video, shot on 19 June, shows three police officers in Teplice, a town in the north of the Czech Republic, detaining a Romany man on the floor. As one officer holds the man’s feet, another appears to kneel on his neck, and a third tries to handcuff him. Voices of several Roma bystanders are heard in the video.
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms from China to Colombia
Continue reading...People across the US came together to celebrate 19 June 1865, the day which commemorates the end of slavery in America
Continue reading...Days after Juneteenth was made a national holiday, communities across the US are coming together to celebrate 19 June 1865, the day when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached Galveston, Texas, freeing slaves in the final Confederate state to have abolition.
Related: The martyr who may rise again: Christian right’s faith in Trump not shaken
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