News

Germany: freedom to speak on racism under threat

In Germany, an anti-racist academic faces prosecution for questioning whether court negligence could have been a contributory factor in the case of Marwa al-Sherbini, who was stabbed to death in a Dresden courtroom in July 2009. Some of Germany’s foremost academics, journalists, peace campaigners, trades unionists and politicians have formed the Action Group Against Racism

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News

Book now for places on IRR’s training workshops

The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) is running a series of training workshops during March, April and May for voluntary sector organisations working on race/refugee or migrant issues. The free half-day practical workshops on fundraising, the media, immigration and racial violence will allow for the exchange of information and provide practical suggestions for effective campaigning.

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Comment

Forgotten soldiers of the Second World War

Seventy years after the Second World War began there are hundreds of books, films and plays documenting the experiences of British soldiers but the sacrifices made by millions of Black Commonwealth soldiers has been ignored, say veterans. Squadron Leader Mahinder Singh Pujji is one of the two-and-a-half million servicemen who came from the Indian subcontinent,

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Comment

People must be entertained

We publish below a talk on ‘Early 19th century theatre and racial attitudes’ given by Dr Hazel Waters at the Museum of London, Docklands on 19 November. We’re sitting here in a former sugar warehouse in what was once one of the busiest commercial ports in the world, with a network of massive and forbidding

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Comment

The myth of anti-racist kids

The Manifesto Club should not get away with its scurrilous attack on schools’ anti-racist policies. They are at it again – attacking anti-racism. The kind of arguments we got used to from Thatcher’s hangers-on and advisors in the 1980s are re-emerging, but this time under the guise of advice from younger, trendier, media-savvy ‘interventionists’. Anti-racism

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News

The new McCarthyism

Liz Fekete, delivering the eighth Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture, describes the new McCarthyism against Muslims sweeping across Europe and calls for a campaign against racism and Islamophobia in the media. ‘The legacy that Claudia left was all the more remarkable in that she was hounded, censored and persecuted for her political opinions for much of

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Comment

Chris Searle: the great includer

Below we reproduce the speech given by Hazel Waters on the publication of a special issue of Race & Class, honouring the work of educationalist, Chris Searle. It’s fallen to me, as advisory editor on Race & Class – ­or rather, I seized the chance from the journal’s founding editor, Sivanandan – to present Chris,

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Review

Tackling racism in the very young

A valuable new resource for early years educators has been produced. The format of Young children and racial justice: Taking action for racial equality in the early years – understanding the past, thinking about the present, planning for the future is that of a training manual. And as anyone familiar with such manuals will know,

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Comment

Ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka

The Institute of Race Relations’ director explains the roots of ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka in a speech to ‘Marxism 2009’. ‘It’s difficult to talk dispassionately about what is going on in my country, when the horror of what the government is doing to a civilian Tamil population – already shelled and burned out of

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News

New exhibition on the Anti-Apartheid movement

A new exhibition has opened at the Museum of London that celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. The display, ‘Forward to Freedom: The Anti-Apartheid Movement and the liberation of southern Africa’, a collaborative effort between the Museum and the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) Archives Committee seeks to show the brutality and injustice of the

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