This journal was started in 1999 at the dawn of the 21st Century It was aimed at providing leading edge thinking on Africa and the diaspora issues at a time when a stale orthodoxy ruled the Black academy. At the time I had a full time role as partner in a City firm and the journeying around the world consequent on the launch of the first issue made a second issue impossible! However the need for an independent and…
I had something else to do today …but this cannot wait!!! Jeremy Tate and Cornel West have written an opinion piece (The Washington Post 20 April 2021 ) in response to Howard University’s culling of its classics department. If true the proposal by Howard University to cull its classics department is a disaster, the response by West and Tate are catastrophes. For Howard to ‘cancel’ the classics is possibly the result of the long term effects of the neo-liberal…
How does Chinese civilization differ from Western civilisation? A distinguished Chinese Professor at Tsinghua University (Note 1) expresses a view shared with Harvard’s Professors William Kirby and Peter Bol (Note 2)) that the core difference between Chinese and Western culture is that Chinese culture is based on ritual and western culture is based on law. This is the wrong answer to the wrong question. There was a difference between China in 1840 and the US/Europe in 1840 but was…
When the storm broke about Piers Morgan I joked to friends that he would defend his coverage of Meghan by saying there was nothing racial about it as he was equally outrageous to ALL the members of the Royal Family. We all laughed. But here in Mail on Sunday (Note 1), Piers did just that!!! He states: ‘Meghan‘s had no worse media treatment than other Royal brides such as ….Wallis Simpson’. He avoids mentioning the press coverage of the…
Generally, as readers of our blog will have become familiar, I would prefer to write with a full academic panoply of references and sources. Sometimes liberties need to be taken and forbearance pleaded. Some matters may require a more urgent statement while the fully researched and referenced version can await later publication in our Journal. I believe this issue, the US-China conflict, has enough urgency to justify ‘emergency use authorisation’, to coin a phrase. THE MIRROR LANGUAGE OF US…
Ian Murray, former editor of The Press Gazette made a speedy exit following his intemperate remarks about the impossibility of racism in the British Press generally and tabloids specifically. https://images.app.goo.gl/vADqHiToi5oD66aM8 Rushing to the media’s defence Associated Press is reported by the Press Gazette (Note 1) as stating: ‘In a letter sent to CBS on Friday, Associated Newspapers’ group editorial legal director, Elizabeth Hartley, said: “As a responsible broadcaster with integrity we believe… that you will deprecate, as we do,…
As a prelude to some serious review of the work of Skip Gates it is reasonable to evaluate the sources of dissonance. Generally speaking I would disregard attempts at apparent pop psychology but in this case one is seeking a basis for understanding rather criticism and a basis for linking apparently unrelated aspects fo a persons work and personality. To this extent the allegation of impostor syndrome should not be seen as a derogatory slur but a suggestion for…
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Many speakers are getting caught out by Black speakers rehearsing deep racists comments. Prof Stuart Smith (Note 1) was caught out by Skip Gates making points about skin colours that were quite racist. It must be quite difficult to accuse your influential host of being a racist. There is quite a difficult point here. Skip Gates like Appiah is obsessed with skin color and even stated that he is very dark for coloured person!!! For both Gates and Appiah…
Reviewing statements by Kemi Badenoch led me to go deeper into her worldview. A strange world it is. She is clearly a follower of Trump. I discovered she has created a world of alternative facts starting with her CV. The Spectator reports: ‘Badenoch grew up in Nigeria and, aged 16, won a part-scholarship to Stanford University to study medicine, but the fees were still prohibitive.’ Note 1 This would appear to be an outright lie. Firstly, one wonders…
One of the dreary developments of recent decades has been the development of and nurturing of Black faces to mouth statements that conservative whites are too frightened to say anymore. Like Anthony Appiah defending claims that African women like gorillas as lovers, or that young black Americans prefer to spend their days in endless drug induced sex orgies (Malcolm Gladwell). These Black faces say the otherwise unsayable. They are like the Conversos in Spain who made very lucrative careers…
