tue 10/06/2025

race issues

Extract: Blackface by Ayanna Thompson

Nearly a year has passed since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police on 25 May. Nearly 200 have passed since the birth of “blackface minstrelsy” as a performance mode: white actors applying racial prosthetics to perform and make a mockery of...

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Album: Genesis Owusu - Smiling With No Teeth

The debut album by Australian-Ghanaian artist Genesis Owusu is so musically restless it’s exhilarating. What’s clear is this guy doesn’t want to be placed in a box, marked hip hop or anything else. Over a wild variety of music, he adopts multiple...

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Typical, Soho Theatre online review - powerfully poetic and painful

As the events of last year made clear, the police have a problem with race on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, BAME people are more than twice as likely to die in police custody while being forcibly restrained than people from other social...

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Eddie S Glaude Jr: Begin Again - James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Today review - can America avoid the fire this time?

I suspect that the work of James Baldwin is not all that familiar to readers in Britain, perhaps not even to black readers in Britain – just as, for a time at least, it seemed that Martin Luther King, a much more visible figure in black history...

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One Night in Miami review - black history come alive

In 1964, Cassius Clay, NFL superstar Jim Nathaniel Brown, soul legend Sam Cooke and political firebrand Malcolm X gathered for one night in a dingy room at the Hampton Motel. It was a meeting that became a symbol of hope for black Americans. A photo...

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Courttia Newland: A River Called Time review - an ethereality check

It is near impossible to imagine what the world would look like today if slavery and colonialism had never existed, let alone to write a book on the subject. Courttia Newland sets himself this daunting task in his latest novel, A River Called Time....

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Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative, Royal Court online review – the news, but better

Edition 2 of Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative, an experimental new piece of online theatre from the Royal Court, doesn’t mess around. Within minutes, a cry of "Tory scum" is echoing around the Jerwood Theatre – the refrain of an anarchic...

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Goran Vojnović: The Fig Tree review - falling apart together as Yugoslavia splits

Seven years ago, at a literary festival in the Croatian port of Pula, I heard Goran Vojnović talk about the vicious petty nationalism that that had poisoned daily life in the republics of former Yugoslavia. At that point the splintering of...

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Small Axe: Education, BBC One review - domestic drama concludes groundbreaking film series with quiet power

The fifth and final film in the Small Axe series is titled Education. At first, it appears this refers to the education of the central character, 12-year-old London boy Kingsley Smith, impressively played by Kenyah Sandy, who’s transferred to a...

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Small Axe: Red, White and Blue, BBC One review - sobering real-life story of police officer Leroy Logan

The third film in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe quintet (BBC One) took for its subject the real-life story of Leroy Logan, the Islington-born son of Jamaican parents who joined the Metropolitan Police in the early Eighties. Despite encountering racism...

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Extract: 'On Loneliness' by Fatimah Asghar, from 'The Good Immigrant USA'

The infamous border wall. Prolonged detention. Children in cages. Even as Biden's election promises a sea change in Trump's devastatingly hardline immigration policy, immigrants, both first- and second-generation, face a spectrum of prejudice,...

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Sarah Cooper: Everything's Fine, Netflix review - star-studded special for Trump lip-syncer

When the world was in lockdown and performers turned to TikTok to keep in touch with their fans, Sarah Cooper started using the online platform for short videos where she lip-synced Donald Trump's speeches, and they quickly went global. Not many...

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