Race
Who goes there?
Death of a Black Man is a little-known script from the 1970s written by Alfred Fagon who suffered a fatal…
Don’t blame ‘white privilege’ for the plight of working-class kids
Tory MP Robert Halfon is right to say that the underachievement of white working-class students is a ‘major social injustice’. He is also…
Forget race or class, marriage is the big social divide
The latest spark to ignite the culture wars is a report from the parliamentary education committee on the underachievement of…
Taking the knee isn’t the best way of showing black lives matter
As a black football fan who grew up going to matches in the seventies and eighties, I know more than…
Cambridge deserves better than Stephen Toope
Regular readers may be aware that in recent months I have been having a running-spat with a Canadian lawyer called…
France is divided on ‘taking the knee’
Until this month ‘taking a knee’ has not been a French phenomenon. When the Black Lives Matter movement spilled out of…
Kitsch tomfoolery
The latest movie to turn into a musical is Amélie, from 2001, about a Parisian do-gooder or ‘godmother of the…
Dramatically wrong
‘Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.’ Those were the words that Kenneth Tynan, the most celebrated drama critic of…
Reparations for slavery don’t add up
Last week, a bill cleared the US House Judiciary Committee that would establish a 13-person commission to consider federal reparations…
What’s the problem with Apu?
Remember Apu, the kindly Indian shopkeeper from The Simpsons? Well, in the time since most people have stopped watching that…
Language barriers
I haven’t yet read the report published by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. But, looking at the recommendations,…
The facts about race and education
Judging from the reaction to last week’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report, you’d think it had been written…
When ‘white privilege’ doesn’t count
First off the blocks criticising Dr Tony Sewell’s report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities was Professor Kalwant…
Minority report
Almost 20 years ago, Michael Howard spoke about the ‘British dream’: that immigrant families like his could come to this…
In praise of David Lammy, a true Englishman
David Lammy, the shadow justice secretary, has been doing his LBC radio phone-in show. If you believe LBC, he has…
Bop till you drop
Stuart Jeffries on the dark history of dance marathons
Letters
Meghan’s adroitness Sir: Tanya Gold suggests that people criticise Meghan Markle because she is mixed race and a woman, and…
‘His paintings are perfectly meant for our times’
Musa Mayer talks to Hermione Eyre about her father Philip Guston’s cancellation and her fear that he will for ever be known as the artist who painted the Ku Klux Klan
In the mix
Why is it racist to wonder what skin colour your child will have?
Barack and the Boss
Barack Obama wants the world to know how much he loves singing. In his new podcast, which takes the form…
Thriller instinct
Judas and the Black Messiah is a biopic about Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, but it’s not your regular biopic…
The trouble with ‘BAME’
Are Black people and Asians the same? Are they different from other ethnic minorities? What about Jews? And who do…
High life
Gstaad The sun has returned, the snow is so-so, and exercise has replaced everything, including romance. What a way to…
Snopes versus Abraham Lincoln
One of the most dreadful developments of the Donald Trump era has been the rise of the fact-check mafia. Every…
No one wins in the race race
After the explosion of international self-abasement over George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, much theatrical soul-searching ensued. So your basic man…
