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Tag: Race issues

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It made me question my ancestry: does DNA home testing really understand race?

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Dubious results, emotional fallout, privacy concerns: inside the 7.7bn industry that promises to tell you who you really are Last year, I did what 12 million people from all over the world have done and surrendered my spit to a home DNA-testing company. I hoped a longed for a country to attribute my blackness to, or for help answering the ubiquitous Where are you from? question. Id spent years making up exotic-sounding combinations to justify my appearance (some days Jamaican-Spanish-Swedish; other days half Brazilian, or half Iranian). But, at 24,…

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Australia is deplorably racist, as people of colour are reminded when they speak up | Jack Latimore

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There can be no reconciliation until politicians acknowledge the harmful impacts of race baiting Theres no question that Australia is a far more racist country than its political class like to admit. No amount of spin should be capable of disorientating hard facts sufficiently to obfuscate that reality. Yet incredibly I still receive abusive mail ridiculing me for jumping at shadows, protesting it just aint so. I understand how a certain amount of privilege in life provides a buffer to the kinds of racialised discrimination, prejudice and hate speech that…

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The Black Panthers still in prison: after 46 years, will they ever be set free?

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Over two years, Ed Pilkington has interviewed eight African American radicals imprisoned since the 1970s. Will they ever be freed? Antoinette Russell vividly recalls the first time she was led to believe she would finally meet her father as a free man. He called her up on a prison phone, his voice shaking with excitement, and told her: Im coming home! That was 17 years ago. Since then, every two years, shes been put through the same agonizing drill. Hed call saying the same thing: Im coming home, she said,…

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‘They don’t belong’: police called on Native American teens on college tour

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A mother on the tour told authorities the young men were creepy and really stand out, causing them to miss the rest of the event A mother on a Colorado college tour called the police on two Native American students in the group because they looked like they dont belong, in the latest episode to ignite outrage over racial profiling and needless calls to law enforcement in the US. Two teenage brothers had traveled from New Mexico for the tour at Colorado State University (CSU) on Monday when a parent…

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How should white people talk about Kanye West?

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There are good reasons to be concerned about the very harmful comments that Kanye has been saying. But theres one catch you arent black, and Kanye is As the entirety of the internet seems to be discussing Kanye Wests most recent ass-hattery and all of black Twitter seems to be heartily enjoying #IfSlaveryWasAChoice shenanigans, you, a concerned non-black person may be wondering how do I join in this discussion? Maybe you were a big fan of Wests music and now you feel personally let down by how hard hes trying…

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Amber Rudd resigns hours after Guardian publishes deportation targets letter

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PM accepts Rudds resignation after 200 MPs sign letter accusing her of making up immigration policy on the hoof Amber Rudd has dramatically resigned as home secretary, after repeatedly struggling to account for her role in the unjust treatment of Windrush generation migrants. The home secretary was forced to step down after a series of revelations in the Guardian over Windrush as the Guardian revealed that in a leaked 2017 letter to Theresa May, Rudd had told the prime minister of her intention to increase deportations by 10% seemingly at…

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Anti-Muslim campaigners denied entry to UK at border

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Martin Sellner and Abel Bodi stopped at Stansted en route to far-right event in London Two prominent anti-Muslim campaigners have been denied entry into the UK ahead of a conference held by Britains newest and most active far-right group. Martin Sellner, from Austria, and the Hungarian Abel Bodi were due to attend the private Generation Identity conference in London on Saturday. They were detained at Stansted airport the second time in a month that Sellner, the leader of Generation Identity, has been prevented from entering the UK by border officials.…

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Emma Watsons willingness to face the truth about race is refreshing | Lola Okolosie

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I hope that the actors acknowledgment that she has benefited from being white will lead others to ask themselves hard questions too, says Lola Okolosie, an English teacher and freelance writer Feminism, to quote Sojourner Truth asked the Womens Convention in Akron, Ohio, Aint I a Woman?. There she was demanding that white feminists include black womens struggles in the fight for womens rights. It was there, too, in acknowledged this week. To have a Black Feminist, wrote: The feminist story belongs to all women everywhere but that is not…

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Zora Neale Hurston study of last survivor of US slave trade to be published

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Due in May, Barracoon is based on the novelists 1931 interviews with Cudjo Lewis, who had arrived in the US in 1860 A previously unpublished work by Zora Neale Hurston, in which the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God recounts the true story of the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade, is set to be released next year, more than half a century after her death in 1960. Barracoon is based on the three months Hurston spent in Plateau, Alabama, in 1931, interviewing Cudjo Lewis, who had…

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I am the woman in the ‘racist Dove ad’. I am not a victim

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When Dove offered me the chance to be the face of a new body wash campaign, I jumped. I had no idea I would become the unwitting poster child for racist advertising From a very young age, Ive been told, Youre so pretty for a dark-skinned girl. I am a Nigerian woman, born in London and raised in Atlanta. Ive grown up very aware of societys opinion that dark-skinned people, especially women, would look better if our skin were lighter. I know that the beauty industry has fueled this opinion…

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Did Russia fake black activism on Facebook to sow division in the US?

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The popular Blacktivist account claimed to be a force for community organizing. Now it looks to have been part of Russias effort to influence politics When longtime Baltimore activists first saw a Facebook account called Blacktivist organizing a local police brutality march, they were immediately suspicious. The page honoring died in police custody a year earlier, quickly acquired a sizable following, but no one knew who was running it. Heber Brown III, a pastor and community organizer, messaged Blacktivist asking if the person lived in Baltimore. No, replied Blacktivist on…

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‘America has done a terrible job of telling the truth about racism’

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Montgomery was a vital artifice of the domestic slave trade throughout the 19th century, a fact that often gets overlooked If one set out to crown a symbolic epicenter for the 400-odd year odyssey of white supremacy in the US, they would be hard-pressed to do better than Montgomery, Alabama. It was at the statehouse in Montgomery that Jefferson Davis was first inaugurated as the president of the Confederacy in a bid to preserve the institution of slavery and in defense of the inferiority of the black race. It was…

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Take away Aung San Suu Kyis Nobel peace prize. She no longer deserves it | George Monbiot

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Once she was an inspiration. Now, silent on the plight of the Rohingya, she is complicit in crimes against humanity, writes the Guardian columnist George Monbiot Few of us expect much from political leaders: to do otherwise is to invite despair. But to Aung San Suu Kyi we entrusted our hopes. To mention her name was to invoke patience and resilience in the face of suffering, courage and determination in the unyielding struggle for freedom. She was an inspiration to us all. Friends of mine devoted their working lives to…

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Why are white people expats when the rest of us are immigrants?

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Surely any person going to work outside their country is an expatriate? But no, the word exclusively applies to white people In the lexicon of human migration there are still hierarchical words, created with the purpose of putting white people above everyone else. One of those remnants is the word expat. What is an expat? And who is an expat? According to Wikipedia, an expatriate (often shortened to expat) is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country other than that of the persons upbringing. The word comes from…

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Charlottesville: far-right crowd with torches encircles counter-protest group

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People gathering to oppose Unite the Right demonstration say they were hit with pepper spray and lighter fluid in clash on University of Virginia campus Hundreds of far-right demonstrators wielded torches as they marched on to the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville on Friday night and reportedly attacked a much smaller group of counter-protesters who had linked arms around a statue of Thomas Jefferson. Starting at a municipal park less than a mile away, alt-right protesters who have gathered for the weekend Unite the Right rally marched in a…

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