May 20, 2022 On May 17, US President Joe Biden declared: “We need to say as clearly and forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America. None. Look, failure to saying that is going to be complicit. The silence is complicity.” Mr Biden was speaking in the aftermath […]
March 24, 2022 Earlier this month, the American conservative press expressed great umbrage at the news of an appointment to high public office of a black woman. It was not Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the American Supreme Court. Rather, it was Stacey Abrams, a Democratic community organiser from Georgia. What was striking was not […]
Febuary 09, 2022 Last month, the government of Canada decided to appoint a special representative for combatting Islamophobia. The announcement was made on the fifth anniversary of a terrorist attack against a mosque in Quebec; an attack that was inseparable from deeply problematic discourse that had become mainstreamed in Canadian society. That relationship has played […]
January 03, 2022 “Boys will be boys” is the kind of sentiment that is applied to the boisterousness that boys in the playground can exhibit among themselves. The notion can sometimes, rightly, allow young children to work out their issues on their own and mature in the process. But all too often, the same kind […]
December 14, 2021 The headline of a CBS news article a fortnight ago was: “Omicron Covid-19 variant was in Europe before South African scientists detected and flagged it to the world.” This report was a few days after a number of countries beyond sub-Saharan Africa suspended flights from southern Africa. There was no corresponding news […]
November 22, 2021 Last week, Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson was invited onto one of the UK’s premier TV debate programmes, Question Time. As the panellists discussed the topic of institutional racism in British cricket, Prof Peterson launched into something of a tirade against the notion of structural racism. His suggestion was that “the concept of […]