Racism

I had never heard the acronym Soas before I started work at the BBC, almost 30 years ago. But as a very young producer at the corporation I was asked to fix up a story about something appalling happening in Africa — I can’t remember exactly what. Famine or cannibalism maybe. Or perhaps one mitigated by the other. The senior producer told me to get someone from Soas to explain it all. What’s Soas, I asked? ‘The School of Oriental and African Studies,’ I was informed. ‘It’s in London. It’s basically a place where we try to work out what on earth the natives are up to now.’ It was

You can tell a lot about a country from its sexual politics. Out one night at La Fabrica, a state-funded arts venue and club in suburban Havana, a friend and I got chatting to a group of local girls. While we were talking, a trio of young black men were doing some kind of coordinated dance routine next to us. ‘That’s cool,’ I said. One of the girls rolled her eyes. ‘I would never dance with a black guy,’ she said, with a nonchalance suggestive of something that subsequently became very apparent. Racism is normal, and everywhere, in Cuba. Since Castro’s death we’ve heard everything about the perceived successes and failures

There are no roads from the Peruvian river port of Iquitos, but the rich take aeroplanes. Those who cannot pay to fly may pay the premium for the 40ft motorised express canoes that take only a day to roar to and from the upriver port of Yurimaguas with its bus station. But losers in the global race cannot afford speed. For them there are only the big, slow, hot, lumbering cargo boats: nearly four days’ journey from Iquitos to Yurimaguas. So the moment a passenger walks up the gangplank and strings their hammock between the iron rafters of the open–sided deck, we can guess he or she is not one

Britain is in the grip of an epidemic, apparently. An epidemic of hate. Barely a day passes without some policeman or journalist telling us about the wave of criminal bigotry that is sweeping through the country. It’s been bad for years, they say, but has become worse since the EU referendum. Police forces tell us that hate crime has ‘soared’ in recent weeks; there’s been an ‘explosion of blatant hate’, according to some newspapers. Twenty-first-century Britain, it seems, is a pretty rancid, rage-fuelled place. Brendan O’Neill and Kevin O’Sullivan discuss the real hate crime scandal: If you feel this doesn’t tally with your experience of life in Blighty in 2016,

It keeps being said that racist ‘hate crime’ has increased as a result of the referendum. One must bear in mind how the public authorities define these things, as confirmed this week by Alison Saunders, the Director of Public Prosecutions. The Macpherson report on Stephen Lawrence set the current rule. It defined a racist incident as ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’. The police are instructed to log all such incidents as racist incidents. So you only have to have more people reporting what they see as racist incidents for an exactly corresponding rise in the number of recorded racist incidents.