A curious story surfaced recently, when the parents of Rachel Dolezal, an American civil rights activist, revealed their daughter to be a white woman ‘passing’ as black. With racist ideology still embedded in American society, this triggered a national conversation, raising issues which I will aim to address as respectfully as a white, British, cisgender…
In 2016 the UN General Assembly will hold a special session focusing on the global issue of drugs. To prepare for this, and to review UK drug policy, there will be a parliamentary conference next month. Could we be facing a change in official attitudes towards drug prohibition? It seems inarguable that prohibitionist drug policy…
Despite growing awareness about mental health, as a topic it generally remains taboo. Verbalisation of destructive thoughts is avoided; it interferes with the facade of a society in which the modern lifestyle surely equates to contentment. It is viewed as weakness, or melodrama. Mental illness is surely absurd in a well-off society with people starving…
It is tragically fitting that the week preceding the Ferguson grand jury’s decision ended with a police officer fatally shooting a 12-year-old black child in Ohio. Tamir Rice was playing with a fake gun when police reacted to an emergency services call by descending on the scene and shooting the boy twice when he reached…
When Mike Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri this summer it seemed to be just the latest link in a long chain of similar cases. In a so-called ‘post-racial’ society, the shooting of young black men by police officers appears to be a tragic theme strung out across the…
Last week the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response was launched in Ghana, six months and over 3,000 deaths after the virus emerged in Guinea. It is the first time in history that the UN has formed such a response to a public health emergency, and rightly so, with the World Health Organisation (WHO) and…
A recent study into obesity has found that “fat-shaming” is an ineffective, in fact, a counter-effective, method of encouraging weight loss. The investigation, conducted by researchers at University College London, spanned the day-to-day experiences of 2,944 participants over four years. 5% of these reported weight-based discrimination, of whom 1% were categorically of “normal weight”, and…
Comment columnist Ellen Musgrove talks about the awful events in Rotherham that have been ignored or suppressed by social workers local police.
It is often assumed that, in the history of Britain, multiculturalism is a relatively modern occurrence. According to over a decade of research conducted by Onyeka Nubia, however, this is not so. His recently published book, Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England: Their Presence, Status and Origins explores the underplayed, and even concealed, presence and status…
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