tv Studio B Unscripted Al Jazeera December 14, 2020 9:00am-10:01am +03
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one look at the legacy of our revolution and. join us as we assess the changes in the political landscape of the middle east and north africa. on al-jazeera. but on a clock in doha the top stories here on al-jazeera and the 1st u.s. shipments of the finds a biotech coated 900. distribution centers across the country in the nation's largest immunization projects have an operation speed officials hoping to immunize 40000000 people this month 100 reports now from washington d.c. . the united states rolled out the most ambitious vaccination program in american history. to the applause of workers at pfizer's michigan vaccine plant it is a test of an unprecedented national effort to save millions of lives in the nation
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most ravaged by the pandemic. workers low dry ice into boxes containing the super chilled vaccines have to negative 70 degrees celsius. then in a scene not witnessed in this century that scene bearing fedex and u.b.s. delivery trucks are escorted by u.s. marshals the shipments are expected to reach the 1st $145.00 locations on monday and a total of $636.00 by wednesday $20000000.00 vaccinations this this month and then we think will be up to $50000000.00 total vaccinations of people by the end of january and $100000000.00 shots in arms by the end of february just with the derren and foster vaccine but amid the celebration there are warning signs to achieve the herd immunity necessary to stop the disease in the u.s. just say 75 percent of the public must be vaccinated but in a study of one health care system florida's jackson health system half of the
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health care workers said they would not be taking the vaccine another 35 percent said they would not take it in the 1st round the head of the u.s. national institutes of health says that's a major concern and i would like to plead this to people who are listening to this morning to really hit the reset button on whatever they think they knew about this vaccine that might cause them to be so. skeptical please people when you look back in a year and you say to yourself did i do the right thing i hope you'll be able to say yes because i looked at the evidence across the us the virus is reaching new peaks the state of mississippi reports it now has no more intensive care beds available what we hear that people do not understand however is that the resources are finite. they are finite there gets to a point where we have to say. we don't have another place to put another patient
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safely we can't do it with nearly 300000 dead in new infections rising the human toll continues to mount john hendren al jazeera washington there's been an explosion on an oil tanker in saudi arabia it was delivering called good jeddah ports the shipping company so the vessel had been hit by an unidentified external source which calls the blast and then a fire they have been no injuries reported farmers unions in india are on the one day hunger strike in a bid to ramp up protests over new agriculture rules with it like which is now several rounds of talks with the governments have so far failed to find a compromise. parents in old nigeria desperately waiting for information about their sons often attack on a boarding school gunman raided the school friday and hundreds of children are reported to be still missing it's not clear if they were doctored. hikers have infiltrated computers that the u.s.
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treasury department's authorities believe other government agencies could also be affected becomes less than a week after a major u.s. cyber security firm files i so foreign government hackers had stolen tools it uses to probe the defenses of its customers. british an e.u. leaders have agreed to keep trade talks going as negotiators fail to break an impasse the head of the european union commission's says there are still unsolved issues in all parties to go the extra mile john le carre the spy turned novelist who was behind some of the world's best selling espionage fiction has died at the age of 89 he worked for britain's intelligence service before turning to books is working clues think a tailor soldier spy and the spy who came in from the cold yup state headlines more news continuing here an answer right after studio b. unscripted.
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you can really make a record racial this was something as monumentally horrific as slavery a thing under natural and we connect on our collective anger a lot of the time what it what did you do for you is just rock the good. name still isn't punk you can call me. something happens over the mediterranean you go from being someone's child to an immigrant i'm a london based spoken word artist. i'm priyamvada gopal i 1st started at cambridge i want all black faces of my classroom i'm a bitch or a historian and cultural commentator i was born in india i live and work in the united kingdom.
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i was intrigued because how often do you get to. solve problems and have a conversation with someone who knows so much about resistance and colonial power. because i was curious he comes from a different background he has different experiences but i think all roads will cross lacoste stories and all identities i won this game to. pass. to. so recently we've seen
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a lot of western universities reflecting on possible involvement or heritage linked to the transatlantic slave trade your institution cambridge university obviously the same university that i attended there are a survey interesting tweets from you regarding the universities and. investigating its own links to yeah every can you. hear i list a few questions are one more stat it was presented as exploring if cambridge and whether and in what ways cambridge has benefited from the slave trade the point is that there is no major institution in britain whether it's banks or financial houses or the or markets. that have not benefited from the immense wealth creation that slavery leapt to so it's not a question of if but in what ways the point is that slavery lets to benefits
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across societies and they were networked benefits right so if you had a railway set were built in part on slave wealth generated from slavery and those railways came to your town you benefited from slavery if your students and cambridge for instance or any young man came from landed wealth people who had plantations and antigo in jamaica and they were paying fees to you you benefited from slavery is so i think we have to understand that it's a very complex picture of benefits and also one of the thing you can't really make of reparations for something as monumentally horrific as slavery and you can't actually bring back the generations who died and were maimed and lived as chattel what you can do is stalk knowledge studies has led to the impoverishment of subs. generations and that you can make up some uk knowledge in a financial form of the damage that was done you can actually pay back what was
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taken this is one of the biggest frustrations around this we often see reparations being left of the discussion whether on a political front. economic otherwise how do you build the. energy or the momentum. tyo these conversations together i think there are complex conversations to be had certainly about who gets reparations and in what form those reparations are paid out leads taken by some caribbean countries to say actually you know you need to acknowledge that the poverty in the immiseration that we have inherited can be traced back through the you to the centuries of empire and slavery we need to make the connections repeatedly between the present and the past in ways in which the past lives on in the present to generate that energy earthing can agree more so it is slavery has had consequences obviously for the caribbean countries and for parts of africa but it also has an afterlife in black
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british communities or do you think the kind of more consequences for immigrant communities in britain for 2nd generation 3rd generation black british young people is today i think the legacy is twofold so on the one hand you have the. deep sense of displacement statelessness especially being 2nd generation in a country that your parents may not have been received well and there's that displacement there's a sense of. not quite belonging and not really having a measure of way or story starts in what direction you should be aspiring. to progress in yeah that's that's one half of the tragedy the other half is the miseducation of the masses on this a lot of people are literate in history and it creates the tensions this
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conversation is nonexistent in some of the places that anything happened yeah why do you think that is i mean on the one hand there's miseducation as in the educational system is not acknowledging the force of things like slavery any muriel is i mean i mean i was not very much teaching my students don't come with much knowledge of it do you think that the memory off off off these historical process is dying out in communities as well so this is hard to gauge you know but what i sense the older i get and the ugly the conversation around xenophobia in this country turns what i sense is that there is a a lot of pride around empire around imperial exploits around the colonial project there's a sense of. the white man's burden still having some legitimacy and winning gains in terms of spreading knowledge and technology and so on and so forth
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that has gone unaddressed and unpacked for a long time so it becomes further entrenched when it's passed down from generation to the young black british young people asian young people do they have any understanding of the ways in which their lives they're shaped by their heritage of slavery. empire here i think the caribbean community that the when rush generation of the fifty's and sixty's did a very good job in in cork in some sort of cultural understanding the saturday schools at the west indian community was very successful and set up throughout the eighty's but as we know economic pressures and social. attacks on the different fronts really made it hard for the caribbean community to maintain that sense of education so i i see that that's dissing disintegrated a little when it comes to my generation f. and it makes it hard but there is some awareness what i've found tragic is
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especially when you look at young people now for 3rd and 4th generation becoming further and further distant from the information that will give them some sort of sense of where they're coming from what you're left with this is is a shame which i grappled with for a long time and i still do yeah this feeling of having to explain why we are in the situation that we are. in on a personal level feeling that you're doubly or or more responsible and representing you know that the potential of your people you know correcting the mistakes that are attributed to your p.l.r. yeah so in a sense we have to become just audience of these other history communities have to grab them back and remember. for the immigrant there is no government that you are priority to that you know
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you're not in the homeland and over here you have a government that is you know for the majority here is reacting to your presence but is not versed in who you are right right has no record of your achievement of your family so you really need to take some initiative in protecting and honoring your story yeah he said immigrant communities are not particularly anybody's prior . pretty but there is the language of diversity and inclusive it whereby were allowed a place at the tables or a handful of us are allowed to teach at elite universities or be part of elite institutions i know that you've done some work with members of the british royal family and there's been a lot of discussion about the fact that there is a nonwhite member now of the british royal family so i i just wondered whether you had thoughts about the a guest the controversial question of race and the royal family and the whole
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question of diversity can you diversify an institution like the royal family we're not seeing. the diversifying project we're seeing. generational changes so prince harry is the 1st person in his. position of his time that you know represents the monarchy in the 21st century and his marriage to make and mark all represents is is. love is free free choice yeah it's a bit weird for me trying to. square my let's say working class black british sensibilities with my ugandan heritage because the money key is very important to my parents to my kingdom so we understand the idea of a shared heritage or a shared identity in what that you know that family as
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a symbol i may not necessarily. have grown up you know in in the folds of that passion being out here but i respect it i do i know it means to people and i love people but is a multifaceted question i don't know what your thoughts certainly to somebody off off indian descent that the. empire was tied up with the fact of victoria being and persevered india and the british royal family is another british institution which will have benefited from both slavery and empire so there is a question of for instance when we know that famous black poets have refused the honor of the o.b.e. the order of the british empire we know that other. black achievers have accepted it but it's not uncontroversial what does it mean for people who descend from
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formally colonized peoples to carry the empire as an initial after their name there is that whole question of what should all relationship to the institution be should we accept you know the order of the british empire this is so complicated for me you know me specifically. coming from a family that is very close with the ugandan money so my grandfather was the 1st attorney general of our kingdom and went into exile with the king over here we know that the brand of colonialism that the british practiced in africa was one of the friending the chieftains and the leaders of the region reaping the benefits of the land within the context of that relationship but at the same time it means a lot to a lot of people you know to have these affiliations and connections and i suppose that there is a question for individuals here from. minority ethnic backgrounds especially those
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that were on the colonial rule a question of strategy long term what what do you what do you want a degree of assimilation do you want to forward in this country do you want to. continue to build on the trauma of the past or are we just saying we're ripping up the status quo and we're currently figuring out because most of us don't actually have the game plan me oh yeah in your book insurgent empire you talk about resistance to colonialism played out in different contexts. but do you believe is the legacy of that resistance the book sets out to do 2 things in relation to the story the 1st is to park the mainstream british mythology is that when freedom from slavery and from empire came along it was because it was gifted by britain to go and slave and.
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so it sets out to. question that and it points out that slaves rebelled all the time ok so it's really important to put that back in the narrative but the 2nd aspect of the book is just as important that the resistance of slaves was heard back in britain and it helped create a tradition of criticising slavery and empire back in britain we often think of abolition as just some very nice white guys who decided that it was a very bad thing and we're going to have you know free the slaves but actually if you if you look at the written works left behind by abolitionists many of them are really aware that the plantations are in from then and that is slaves are rebelling that the colonized are rebelling the indentured are rebelling and so what i'm saying is that that we need to recover the stories of resistance not just the stories of empire and enslavement both in other parts of the world but also from
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within britain there's a there's a minority dissidents tradition and britain which says not in our name you can't enslave and colonized people in our name and that story has been completely marginalized by mainstream history and our part of the conversation about bringing back all those stories i mean these histories have to be recovered and young white britons have to be reminded that their ancestors won't only just colonists and enslave us but that they also resisted and questions their government and those who claim to represent them. but it strikes me that there might be questions our audience wishes to ask of us or perhaps we should turn to them now please. my questions about the corners in the university and whether or not you think that it'll be effective not just making voices heard that do not conform
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to the norms of academics p. . but also in considering the valid forms of the production of knowledge it's not just about diversifying bringing in a range of voices that is important in its own right but i always explain to my students that the colonisation is about understanding what we know why we know and also what we don't know and also recognizing that the knowledge traditions which are being claimed as european are not only european they have often drawn on the traditions of africa asia and beyond so we need to understand that the knowledge is which are not presented as being kind of great european thought have multiple lines drawing on other parts of the world and that these histories also need to be restored to their place of honor i mean decolonization is often presented as oh
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this is against you know why people it's not it's about saying that the world is diverse and knowledge has been produced across different parts of the globe we need to honor the fact that europe often drew on other traditions in order to produce its knowledge my question is do you think that there is an ascendant orthodoxy on the political left that is weaponize ng identity politics to breed competitive victimhood. and tribalism in a way that undermines martin luther king's dream that we would be judged by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin whatever. strand of identity one gives primacy to thank you great question i think is happening on both. the left and the road to characterize it as either playing into it.
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we see that these kind of identity politics. play up in times of economic downturn or you know in tandem with cycles of big changes as we see in. western europe and other parts of the world when the political rhetoric becomes increasingly polarized and divisive i see it as a dialectic and something that dialogue respectful dialogue contact people being in close proximity with one another can begin to address and break down it's like it's something for i i think a false narrative everybody has an identity everybody is political in one sense or the other so identity politics is with us the difference is whether it is recognized as identity politics or whether it is not so the white majority has an identity and it has a politics so it is often wimmin or black people who are accused of having an identity politics but in fact in an institution like cambridge is full of white
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identity politics it's all over the place because this is. coming up back against an assertion of aggressive whiteness the interesting thing about victimhood today who is claiming victimhood it's a launch of the white elite men they're claiming persecution really. strong trump a multimillionaire claims he represents victims. you know and there's a range of commentators in britain who constantly claiming they're being persecuted by people of color and aggressive woke black and brown women this is a nonsensical narrative and i think that we should say this narrative us floored it does not represent reality and we need to have an honest conversation that isn't determined by the sort of methodology of oppressed white men suffering at the hands of identity politics. we've talked about how the endurance of slavery and
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colonialism have evidently left us with this ystem that is you know stacked against us but i would like to know whether you think that change is better effected by so working within the system working our way up that way or being kind of more of an outside disruptive force what's really the way forward for young people essential to find the good fire is except in the changes you want to see might not happen in your lifetime that's a hard pill to swallow but it's something that i am definitely grappling with not just on the western front being here in the diaspora but also when i return to the homeland the 1st thing i have to accept is that it's not just about me feeling happy with my sphere of existence you were really apply yourself to a long term strategy
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a long term understanding of the challenges secondly on an individual level i think is really important for us all to take responsibility of ourselves of our personal sense of awareness what who you are who i am this is why this is the journey that i've been on in to return poetry at one point i was a cambridge student before that i was a one of the few black boys in a in a grammar school after i went straight into the music industry all of this stuff really disoriented me and it's only through taken time and articulate in myself and given just given myself my whole twenty's to come to terms with who i am but i was able to pinpoint my contribution and land on exactly what i can stomach and exactly what i am able to do i can stomach working with the royal family some people couldn't and it shouldn't be expected of me to you know want to bring everyone.
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to the same for the fighting. one thing i want to add to that it's true that change happens on many fronts and we each position ourselves differently in relation to change and i think that change doss happen if all of us work to enact change but equally we also have to be aware that sometimes it is presented to us as something that only people from above can do it i think part of reclaiming our personal agencies to be able center everybody can can effect change and you do not have to be a member of the royal family or came the dawn has and in my case to be able to make effective interventions but i think wherever we are we can choose to keep a critical perspective i think that is absolutely essential we could be part of any institution but to say i'm not going to inhabit it fully i'm not going to buy it story is as self-evident truths i'm going to sit on the margins and examine things
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in all their reality and in all their honesty. you know what i actually know what it's like to be white because in my country i'm a white woman i'm bored like i want to talk about a visitor world. war is. not a problem for us. al-jazeera world tells the intriguing stories behind 4 classic songs from palestine enjoyed social snapshots of different times and places from the british mandate to 19 fifties jordan and the palestinian diaspora today musical expressions of their cultural identity and the yearning for the homeland that many of the forced from in the 1948 songs for the love of history on al-jazeera.
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minimum biological and chemical agents more real quick and honest throughout history alhaji water persevered its head one man started fighting they had developed by nation state and soon there could be another apple tree check every chart now within reach of those seeking combined in the most toxic substance in the world would need to plan many invisible friends on al-jazeera. there's a wave of sentiment around the world people actually want accountability from the people who are running their countries and i think often people's voices are not heard because they're just not part of the mainstream news narrative. obviously we cover big stories and we report on the big events going on but we also tell the stories of people who generally don't have a voice i mean when i was a child my that's never be afraid to put a hand up not a question and i think that's what i'm sure really does the ask the questions to
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people who should be accountable and also to get people to give their view of what's going on. around the world. helen clark and all the top stories here on al-jazeera and the 1st bunch of the phones a biotech coronavirus vaccine is being dispatched across the united states. $20000000.00 vaccinations this this month and then we think will be up to $50000000.00 total vaccinations of people by the end of january effect a nation of health care workers and the elderly begins on monday that's as the nationwide death toll approaches 300100 has more from washington d.c. in addition to sending these to specific hospitals they're also being sent to c.v.s. and walgreens to drugstores and their pharmacists will receive the vaccine personally
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and in their own vehicles will take them alone within a radius of 75 miles from each of their locations to distribute them to nursing homes where the elderly are most at risk in many cases it will be the frontline health care workers doctors and nurses who will be receiving the vaccines 1st and then it will spread out to the general public over the coming months we are told the general public might start getting vaccinations from march to april may and june there's been an explosion in an oil tanker in saudi arabia it was delivering cargo jet a port shipping company half a minute said the vessel had been hit by an unidentified external source which caused the blast and then a fire no injuries have been reported its. form is unions in india no one day hunger strike could have been protests of the new agricultural laws they've been camped out on major highways for weeks blocking some entry points into the
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capital new delhi the legislation that would change the rules about the sale and prices of purchase. parents in northern nigeria desperately waiting for information about the sons after an attack on a boarding school gunmen raided the school on friday and hundreds of children are reported to still be missing it's not clear if they were all abducted. john le carré be a spy turned novelist who was behind some of the world's best selling espionage fiction has died at the age of 89 the careys agent said he died from a short illness not related to coronavirus he worked for britain's intelligence service before turning to books his work includes think a tailor soldier spy and the spy who came in from the cold because they were headlines more news continuing here on al-jazeera right after studio b. unscripted continues. the health of humanity as its stake a global pandemic requires
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a global response. w.h.o. is the guardian of global health delivering lifesaving to lose supplies and training to help the world's most vulnerable people uniting across borders to speed up the development of test treatments and of that. keeping you up to date with what's happening on the ground in the ward and in the lab now more than ever the world needs w.h.o. making a healthier world for you. to everyone. the british royal family is another british institution which will have benefited from bad slavery an empire for immigrant there is no government there you are a priority to. victim hood today who is claiming victimhood it's a largely white man. can you
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tell us a little bit about your own journey from where you grew up to cambridge which is a very distinctive kind of place and often involves a degree of culture shock can you say a little bit more about what that is entail so only occurred to me. only grew up around black people. to this day 46 percent black african and at the time was put predominantly caribbean so what that afforded me was a very strong sense of self i was. you know within the caribbean community but part of an african family that had a very strong sense of cultural identity so so so many points in my life i had to affirm and reaffirm who i was. take pride in my point of
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difference and celebrate that so by the time i got to a grammar school it was shaken a little bit it was shaken a little bit when i learned what. black and a state meant to other people i never knew that how do these middle class white and indian and. chinese kids asking me about you know what's it like on the a state is it is it dangerous is this thing you know you spoke a little bit elsewhere our power in your going to the grammar school appreciating the discipline that it gave you but also being troubled by what you saw as the enforcement of white norms. can you say a little bit more about that here so i'm very grateful for the school that i went to but i definitely got the message that a sensible gentleman a credible person. is x. and x. doesn't do that doesn't sound like that doesn't talk about it doesn't walk or dress
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like that. really really disturbed me for a long time because i really absorb that narrative you know and it's not until i really came into my own as a poet in cambridge having to articulate my experience with my own words our dialect our colloquialisms to audiences that are not part of our world that i really started to except maybe even after graduating and presenting myself to the world and started to do t.v. and news appearances i still have these rules in my mind don't embarrass your parents don't talk how you talk with your friends because how you talk with your friends is clearly criminal you know and it takes a while before you realise all the ways in which this feeds into the harassment and misunderstanding criminal criminalization hypermasculine a zation of young black men in particular what it what it poetry do for you again
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and this is an explanation there are often not often but in my early years a kind of swerve this explanation is rap. is just right. yeah. because i was like all these poets techniques and devices that we're studying in the curriculum are done to a much higher standard and. so that emboldened me yeah. definitely so for when we've spoken you've referenced your own upbringing and how that gave you a privileged outlook in many respects how do you make sense of that now i've had oh an upbringing that was partly subcontinental and partly in the west and. in india although i'm
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a woman i belong to an upper caste i belong to. a community that. in a way like like you know white britain's does not see its own privileges does not see its own advantages and very frequently likes to think of itself as the victim because other people are making demands so. the lower costs. traditional dominance communities are making demands when i'm in the west as a woman of color against a white majority society i can see i can see it the other way around i can see how white privilege works have a certain double consciousness around this which is i know what it's like to be part of a vulnerable minority i also know what it's like to be part of a privileged majority that doesn't understand its privileges be feels like
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a victim when challenged on those privileges so in a funny way i actually see how whiteness operates i sometimes tell. white men who are a bit threatened. that you know what i actually know what it's like to be white because in my country i'm a white woman. in my country i'm a white woman and i've been through that process where i've only thought about gender and not thought about my cost privilege in the way that we are familiar with with you know women here talking about gender but not talking about their racial privilege so i think the overall consequences to understand the nominal fos are necessarily only victims or only oppressors i think that that part of our exploration of colonialism and decolonization has to also involve understanding all role in it you know what is what is the heritage we come from what in our ancestors do in relation to the imperial project who are there decolonization isn't about
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saying oh well all white people are terrible and all people of color are gras. it's never been about that meticulous narrative that is often propagated as the victim narrative it's about 7 saying we were all influenced by this huge historical process that unfolded over several centuries and i always begin my lectures to students in the beginning after him saying i am here because of colonialism colonialism picked a group of elite indians to be taught english and to be made in english in every way but blood and color and i am the descendant of the people who were treated as privileged intermediaries between the colonial government and the millions whom we govern and so for me to say that i'm here because i'm great and i just did the hard work and i got here without some nonsensical narrative i'm i am i teach today
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at cambridge partly because of inherited privilege so to what extent do you think you've been able to change narratives or to what extent is your work aimed at changing narratives that we don't often question so i think this goes back to earlier point that we discussed about cost or your ship of astoria being our responsibility i think through poetry even just the move from rap to poetry i've been able to say to guys you know that the rumors that we just took for granted that you as a young black man. if you're not the hardest and you're not the most chauvinist stick then you're you know it's harder to know it's you you're less valid in those rules are. completely redundant if you say they're. you know it gives people license to decide exactly who they want to be and that i'm able to impute that simply by cherry picking the aspects of
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my own vironment that i want i want to absorb but if there's a self destructive oppositional force that comes along with it is kind of like taken for granted because 17 years old my biggest fear was another 17 year old black boy i don't like that one someone else can say that it's not for me that kind of thinking. it needs to be scaled and it's very hard when we don't have custody of ship of our own story to ensure that all of our young people are getting the message and what the what sort of stories do you think would actually help make for change at manifest levels like what kinds of things that you think people don't think about that they should be about so a few years ago i went to ted conference in vancouver yeah and these guys were talking that this is that was the big argument the ethics of basically
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a visa system for mars this was 2015 or so but interplanetary exploration lays a new laser treatment faith hiv that's what's missing that's what's missing in communities like mine an awareness of more than racism for a lot of young black people. what is wrong with our situation is kind of delegated to us as our business you must spend the rest the next 20 years fighting the ills of this society however if you really were invited to these conversations about mars' if you thought a stake in cutting edge laser treatment to revolutionize. the battle against hiv if you really thought some ownership in that you would be run in that in that. direction and i see i see that with a lot of much poorer young people on the african continent so i mean are you suggesting that what you describe is kind of self destructive ness is connected to
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not thinking about where else you could go but kind of focusing on the ills that you suffer statelessness we don't belong to anything. that's why a lot of young people can't take the lives of another person. who am i was to. fall in from was the big and car that i need to break out of in order to you know become. more great you really are anger as a young as a young man yourself you're still young but as a teenager do you think is a an unproductive that is self destructive force or do you think it can have consequences that are beneficial. i think under the natural. doesn't do productive unproductive nature is is nature in my life has been helpful i've been able to and in what way is
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a been able to channel it to my starts to just figure out exactly what i want to be in the world while i want to be these things a lot of the unanswered questions about who i am and why my environment is the way it is drove me to become a socialist and empowered me to be able to feed back into my community and we connect on our collective. i don't know what your experience of that has been i would say all the thinkers who have theorized resistance and change and rebellion at some level have been driven by indignation by a sense that injustices have been committed and the world has to be set to right it so i completely concur that anger can have it can manifestly have sort of destructive consequences if it's not thought about and not channelized towards thinking through facts so you know currently we have certain forms of majority rage in many contexts not just in britain and contexts across the world but that
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rage i think is different from righteous indignation you can be angry and you can blame any number of people you want for your situation that doesn't mean it's factually correct but legitimately harnessed indignation which studies the situation and understands what injustice is are and thinks about it carefully that can be a very productive kind of emotion but random rage at having your privileges snatched away i think that's that's one of the dangers that we're looking at in the present day that's interesting to use in the ability to articulate exactly where your anger comes from is what legitimizes young girl i think to understand what it is you're upset about and who is who and what is rationally responsible for. so in a situation where you are upset about austerity it doesn't make sense to blame immigrants it is your government and it is the rich of this country who have inflicted austerity and.
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so this is to say that anger makes sense if you can wield it with precision and with wield it with care simply lashing out at the nearest vulnerable object in rage that's not a good thing. is it does not become a double edged sword when we get really you know the age of the demagogue. able to put together a narrative that holds true in the minds of a lot of the audience it is extremely wanting in my own country we now have the rise of majority hindu nationalism which absolutely feeds off the rage of people and invites them to think about muslims as their main enemy and in fact it has been immensely successful and it is immensely dangerous and i was tremendously about a nation that is still fairly young it's about 7 you know 70 odd years old which
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began as a kind of dream of inclusiveness inclusive ety and secularism and multiple religions flourishing now turned into a singular rage against minority groups and i think that's deeply dangerous. i think with some ordeals questions actually so many of us in this room have benefited open of fisheries of the legacy of the british empire. but a lot to ask you. should we take responsibility for its wrongdoings of the past and what do you think are the best ways that we can atone for sins in the modern. the 1st thing i want to say is that i'm personally don't use the language of atonement and repentance i mean i think if people want to atone that's a private act between them and their god or their church the language of responsibility is slightly different colonialism didn't end all that long ago for
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many african countries they ended in the 1980 s. so you know it's within a lot of people's living memories and the continent of africa and much of asia struggles with those legacies so what we have to do is to say what are the manifest ways in which populations peoples communities within this country have been damaged by the legacies of slavery and colonialism and one of the ways in which we can start to enact structural changes which address the disenfranchisement and the injustice we cannot have an attitude to the past where we say we're really proud about you know the 2nd world war and the british victory in the 2nd world war but colonialism that was in the past i think that that particular false proposition has to be. my questions more on how in generalities in the workplace the kind of be unable to find our own identity how do
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you think be able to overcome them across to not being able to be are genuine selves at work and if anything will ever be done about it. i think. back to the idea of statelessness and us not necessarily feeling like we have a space different communities different ethnic minority communities have different coping strategies for that kind of. dynamic often my asian friends were quite happy to talk to their names or their appearances in order to just you know move on. in our world as a you know a black person is a to boo so. don't start playing with your name as a disrespect to the ancestors however i also became aware that not everyone takes that personally and i think oftentimes that community in the family but the
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so something like doctor in your name for the school is just business is just a transaction don't take it that personally however i feel i when it comes to us or me me in particular with that sense of statelessness i take a final a lot harder to make those kinds of decisions and the solution that i have created over time is just to make my own space where i only account for myself and that happens through enterprise but before the enterprise aspect it had to happen personally i had to be in cambridge and be able to just be exactly what i am so until you reach that sense of absolution. there will always be that tension on the front of the workplace or wherever else you have to do with this. i always come across this term i don't see color. color blindness expression when i have conversations about identity politics with 2nd or 1st generation immigrants and
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they say oh if i recognize raise this structural racism i'm perpetuating this thinking obviously we see color and from my observations most of the people who bring up this term are relatively well off or they win the game already so in my understanding for these game winner they are supposed to have more issues showing cultural capital to be the game changer but why would they have to scream of thinking and what were your advice to talk to these kind of people you know there are penalties for talking about race my 1st 15 years at cambridge i never used the word race or whiteness or anything. it was very clear that the norms enforced the fact that anybody who discussed race was a troublemaker so 2nd and 3rd generation people who want to be successful and
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you say they are you know fairly well off. lets face it they are understand the price to be paid for being incorporated into the mainstream off the society and $1.00 of the things that you are required to do in your door to do several things with one is play the game that there's no color nobody sees color and therefore there is no racism but you have to collude in that mythology secondly you are invited to perpetuate the mythologies of the mainstream society so you not only agree to play along you also act as its mouthpiece you know that you know there's there's a problem with identity politics is a problem with the right people claiming victimhood there's a problem with snowflakes there's a problem with you know no platform so i think we need to. think about that you know you something gauge meant that people of color are required to you in order to be successful and i think that you in a sense you answered your own question thank you it is
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also the very real experience of a lot of people of color who through a point feel burdened by this constant conversation of race like i said we're taught a young age that our business that's where you get to do it that's where you get to be an expert any time you see a young black person on the news but they're going to be talking about race but. i personally can identify with a frustration with that cycle for example last year i had an incident with the police i was sitting in my car the engine was of my parents' house they search me for weapons no that is classic racial discrimination but one phrase that i kept repeating because the thing was recorded and a lot of people saw it and some people took issue with this particular phrase ok i
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don't have time for this and that's the frustration of a black man that's been dealing with this all his life i'm bored. look i want to talk about these are 2 months. worth of them. so i grew free of there is a degree of game playing among a lot of us but there is also a degree of exasperated and frustration because we're not given the tools to have these conversations in a constructive way to extend that story i was on b.b.c. question time later on the year and i was thrown a question about immigration a mention the word than a for we are. really upset a lot of people so we often find that there's a circular element of conversations about race that puts us off talking about it or seeing it in general and sometimes that you have to read the situation and give
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people that that respectful distance. this is a question for george actually you and i have discussed. only she's on racism and prejudice but it would be nice to hear your views as a poet huge so you can you recite a poem for us. one poet. ok. the defining characteristic of a hate crime is not actually hate it's prejudice we use the word hate to define it because the prejudice is born of a hateful crime that a crime is a collective mood it's not an individual so that. now in the face of political
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of. the latest winter low is spinning up in the eastern side of the mediterranean which means significant rain for turkey snow white and the whole lot expands down to northern egypt and across into the levant now initially it's not going to be particularly cold it'll just be shower is the forecast for gods to get through monday tuesday and wednesday showers on tuesday wednesday a bit of a breeze temps are dropping below 20 degrees and it goes probably low that jerusalem's forecast is a 15 time we get to tuesday the rain the 1st band is going through as a cold fronts are iraq the northern edge of course the high ground is going to be bream or snow potentially big thunderstorms in its way down through saturday across to kuwait and of course when we contact the western side of iran significant right and significant snow possibly once again even the capital up in tehran otherwise it's quiet and the next season already we come across is of course in southern
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africa and there's masses of it but really the line takes you from angola dian through zambia and towards madagascar but significant big sun the story's been around in south africa there continue and in zimbabwe but always a good example of 3 days of the. i don't have a narrative i have a question join me richelle carey on out front is my guest from around the world take a hot seat and we debate the week's top stories in pressing issues here on our just your true confession will never be cleaned up for money or a cynical example of communist propaganda. to participate. i want to do it. in 2010 al-jazeera access to north korea to investigate the alleged use of biological warfare by the us during the korean. rewind
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revisits dirty little secrets on al-jazeera. think. the 1st shipments of covert 19 vaccines began rolling out across the united states was the government just americans to take them. as al-jazeera live from doha also coming up. indian farmers block a key highway and union leaders go on hunger strike after talks with the government fail. i'm afraid that it will not take long for them to come up to me choosing a line.
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