Black History: Implicit Bias, Dishonest Scholarship and Colonial Propaganda

This article is a result of researching the work Akala presented at the Oxford Student’s Union for Black History month. It is part of a series which comes from the researching of one section at a time using the online video as a knowledge resource to structure a self directed curriculum. This methodology is one which has been developed in order to facilitate independent learning especially in informal contexts of the lives of people like myself.

The Missing Story of Mary Burns and Fred: Silences in the Story of History

Coming shortly…. This is a placeholder for an article which is to be published soon as an appendix to a peer reviewed paper submitted to the PRISM Journal and presented at the 2020 Working Class Academics conference. The paper submitted to PRISM is called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons People: A Marmot Overview’ and lays out a perspective on how ‘workingclassness’ can be interpreted as being on a spectrum of having to perform to gain access to sufficiency, the mechanics of a hierarchy of permissions and allowances, the psychology of exclusion, and the effects on life expectancy and health as drawn from Michael Marmot‘s work. Read more…

Aggregate of Recommendations from Multiple Houses of Commons Racism Reviews

This article offers an aggregate of recommendations drawn from multiple Houses of Commons racism reviews which were highlighted by David Lammy MP. It follows an in depth examination of Britain’s involvement in a long history of racism which you can READ HERE. What follows is a brief introduction and a downloadable document which lists all the recommendations detailing which racism review each one came from. Read more…

Britain’s Living Legacy of Racism and Prejudice: A Narrative and Review of Policy Recommendations

This article is responding in depth to the cultural questioning which has emerged through the Black Lives Matter movement especially with regards to the xenophobic discrimination of the Windrush scandal which is an act of vandalism on the institutions of democracy and the outright atrocity of the latest in a long history of incidents illustrated by how George Floyd, a black American man was killed during an arrest (allegedly for a counterfeit $20 bill) when, Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on his neck for nearly eight minutes.
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The 2014 Immigration Act in British Universities by Douglas Cairns

I work at Edinburgh University, where the Students’ Association (EUSA) has recently issued a formal call for the renaming of the David Hume Tower, the University’s most prominent blot on the city’s skyline, on the grounds that the Enlightenment philosopher after whom the building is named held ‘extremely problematic and incredibly harmful’ beliefs regarding ‘the inferiority of non-white peoples’ (‘Campaign to rename Edinburgh University building named after David Hume wins Students’ Union support’, Edinburgh Evening News 6 July 2020).
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Educational History: Dr William Edward Burghardt Du Bois 1868 to 1963

Dr William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, or ‘Doctor Du Bois’ as he insisted on being addressed, was a great scholar, historian, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, and pacifist. He was a picture of the modern intellectual and scholar engaging eclectically in philosophies ranging from Calvinism to Socialism. His thought was to shape the world after it emerged in America against the backdrop of considerable racial barriers. Read more…