I'm v late to the party in posting this, but:
it's International Blog Against Racism Week 2009, 27 July-2 August.

I've probably posted this in previous years, but this is a very rich site for Black History in the UK: www.black-history-month.co.uk: not just for Black History Month but all the year round, with events covering a very wide range, ( Read more... )

Fascinating interview with Emanual Litvinoff, whose memoir of the Jewish East End before the Second World War has just been reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic. He also wrote a poem attacking TS Eliot for allowing his anti-semitic poems to be republished in the 1950s. Also, after being told in the 1930s by comrades in the Young Communist League ( Read more... )

Martin Bashir addresses women members of Asian American Journalists' Association as 'Asian babes': I think this requires not so much a codslapping, as slapping with either a Giant Mekong Catfish, or a coelocanth, because that too is a living fossil.

***

On a perhaps more cheerful note, happening this month in London:

The London Mela: "The biggest ( Read more... )

I feel that all my readers already know this, but just in case not, it's International Blog Against Racism Week 2008 all this week.

And here is a link to the International Museum of Slavery in Liverpool website.

Also the as-yet rather minimalist site for the Black Cultural Archives: Collecting, Preserving and Celebrating the History of Black ( Read more... )

Naomi Campbell fights racism in fashion. Okay, the number of times one is on the cover of Vogue is not perhaps what keeps most of us awake at nights, but as Hannah Pool says, credit to Campbell for speaking out:
It may seem as though things have moved on considerably since the 70s when Iman, the first black supermodel, was pitched as an illiterate ( Read more... )

More science that appears to have popped through the timewarp from 190?:
Scientists at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, have apparently found a hitherto unobserved link between eye-colour and levels of intelligence:
Blue-eyed people, they claim, are more studious, more strategic, more focused, and thus out-perform brown-eyed people in exams ( Read more... )

Just too late for IBARW:

So horrific are the images conjured up by 'Strange Fruit' that Billie Holiday always performed it with her eyes closed. Caryl Phillips, who used the title for his first play, traces the song's dark history.

Australian novelist Kate Grenville found success with novels about her country's violent history.

International ( Read more... )

The famous (but still apparently largely forgotten) Notting Hill Race Riots, August 1958: official documents finally released indicate that they were the work of white mob rather than "ruffians, both coloured and white" - '300-to 400-strong "Keep Britain White" mobs, many of them Teddy boys armed with iron bars, butcher's knives and weighted ( Read more... )

The Black GIs in UK during the Second World War, and their offspring. The story tends to be told as oh how very much more tolerant and liberal the Brits were than those Yanks, but this account shows how very much more complicated a tale it is and that attitudes weren't that much more accepting. I'm not persuaded that British policy-makers were ( Read more... )

Curiously enough, I was already thinking of doing links focussing on women and race in the UK, and on today's Guardian G2 Women's Page there happened to be this, by Noorjehan Barmania. Rather apposite.

Southall Black Sisters:
established in 1979 to meet the needs of black (Asian and African-Caribbean) women. Our aims are to highlight and challenge ( Read more... )