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Society

Essays and videos on social issues, history, political life and the future
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Human rights and justice

My elusive pain

The lives of North Africans in France are shaped by a harrowing struggle to belong, marked by postcolonial trauma

Farah Abdessamad

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Biography and memoir

Passed over as the first Black astronaut, Ed Dwight carved out an impressive second act

13 minutes

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Religion

Inventing Hindu supremacy

Vinayak Savarkar ridiculed Gandhi, preaching that anti-Muslim violence was the only means to unite India into a nation

Mihir Dalal

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Biography and memoir

A gentle soul in an oppressive land – Bonnie’s story of life in America

11 minutes

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Race and ethnicity

Battling implicit bias

Training is a cheap solution to a hard problem. It is the systems that allow for biased behaviour that need to change

Jeffrey To

Two Asian film actors are fighting kung-fu style on the beach dressed in 1970s style casual clothes
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Film and visual culture

Fighting kung fu

From chopsocky films to disco earworms, Asian caricatures have proliferated since the 1970s. Can Hollywood kick the habit?

Stephanie Wong

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Human rights and justice

Do not forget them

Thousands of Indigenous children suffered and died in residential ‘schools’ around the world. Their stories must be heard

Steve Minton

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Art

David Goldblatt captured the contradictions of apartheid in stark black and white

15 minutes

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Biography and memoir

My blackness

At times I’ve tried to escape it. Other times I’ve embraced it. But at all times, people have attempted to define me by it

Colin Grant

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Gender and identity

Timothée built his identity around his absent father. What happens when they meet?

17 minutes

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Cities

Inside the unique London community built by residents to defy housing discrimination

21 minutes

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Human rights and justice

Breakfast with the Panthers

It wasn’t all young men and guns: the Black Panther Party’s programs fed more hungry kids than the state of California

Suzanne Cope

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History of ideas

Blackness in antiquity

To truly see black people in ancient art we need to look beyond the historically recent trope of ‘Blackness = inferiority’

Sarah Derbew

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Gender and identity

What happened when a gay Black man joined the Metropolitan Police in London

25 minutes

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Race and ethnicity

Seeking authenticity in a Chinatown built for tourists and Hollywood movies

23 minutes

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Nations and empires

Being Persian

To be Persian before nationalism was to belong to a generous, plural identity woven through language, kin and manners

Mana Kia

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Human rights and justice

The South African model

What the United States and other settler societies can learn from South Africa’s push to create a nonracial democracy

Mahmood Mamdani

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The ancient world

The whitewashing of Rome

White supremacists fetishise ancient Rome – but antiquity was more diverse and polychromatic than racists will admit

Jamie Mackay

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Nations and empires

Enlisted, enslaved, enthroned

Vandals, Goths, Alemanni, Sueves… the Romans grappled endlessly with the status of ethnic peoples in their vast empire

Douglas Boin

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Thinkers and theories

The necessity of Kripke

No one with an interest in philosophy or debates about identity can afford to be ignorant of the work of Saul Kripke

Stephen Law

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Stories and literature

Empire of fantasy

By conquering young minds, the writing of J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis worked to recapture a world that was swiftly ebbing away

Maria Sachiko Cecire

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Race and ethnicity

Sociology’s race problem

Urban ethnographers do more harm than good in speaking for Black communities. They see only suffering, not diversity or joy

Robyn Autry

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Genetics

The genes we’re dealt

The new field of social genomics can be used by progressives to combat racial inequality or by conservatives to excuse it

Erik Parens

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History of ideas

Philosophy’s systemic racism

It’s not just that Hegel and Rousseau were racists. Racism was baked into the very structure of their dialectical philosophy

Avram Alpert