madam afghanistan the demand of the afghan people must be included in peace talks such mistake and crime should never be repeated again any group that lives here should accept that these cultural and historical artifacts belong to the people history and culture of afghanistan by a problem because when the sun comes up the lights go down and the bhutto's disappear once again leaving only very good halls a grim reminder of the kind of violence afghans fear could happen again if the taliban come back zain bus ravi older 0 by me on. your shoulders there with me so rob a reminder of our top stories the container ship has blocked the series canal for almost a week has been partially refloated canal thought he say the hope that the ever given will be fully freed during high tide. military is carried out more astroids

talking separatist fighters and current state thailand is preparing for a flood of refugees as thousands flee across the border tony chain has more from the thai capital bangkok this may be the myanmar military trying to seize the initiative we've seen them. in conducting these airstrikes on the qur'an the k n u down in the south there's been clashes up in the north think of chin state overnight in callin in a strategically important town in the chin state there were clashes to the army fighting local residents not armed insurgents of the local residents but using things like r.p.g. screen aids so they really have decided to step up the attack. foreign companies are being told not to mix business with politics if they want to keep operating in china the warnings come from a spokesman for jean jennings regional government at

a news conference where he was asked about the alleged use of ethnic weekers as forced labor to produce cotton. there's a big military says dozens of defenseless civilians have been killed in a 5 day siege among them where 7 people on boast as they try to escape a hotel in the northern town of parma. national civil rights leaders in the u.s. are calling for justice for lord george slowey they held a press his family before the start of. the trial later on monday. 4 were minneapolis police officer is accused of killing floyd in may last year by kneeling on his neck for almost 9 minutes and police in indonesia discovered explosives they say a link to sunday's suicide attack on a cathedral in the city of the killed and injured 19 officers raided several places including the home of the bombers those were the headlines rob's here with the news in less than half an hour to stay with us here on al-jazeera. on counting the cost

to the rich countries in. developing countries the technology. to get mental health. mobile economic growth plus. the really just. counting the costs on al-jazeera. just as we all have it within our socialized to be science is political and always has been political and if he say it's not you haven't been paying attention for the last 500 years. he gets to write the script he gets to coach the team he gets to be the. greatest irony of the field of human genetics is that it was founded by racists to prove their superiority but as it develops it is actually dismantled the myth of biological rights the question is well has racism returned well here's

a surprise for you never went away my name's. i'm a geneticist author and broadcaster. i'm by 16 i'm an economist one time political types a and activist ironically my mission is to prove that my journey from watching cost beginnings to oxford university makes me an anomaly not the norm it's not every day door of a comic having to make it all the way to the united nations to push for change i used to to sticks to show how an unequal system is built and justified to racial cost gender and other forms of prejudice to the other. for the progress we've made as humankind the world still lives under the shadow of empire. as we see of rising populace and not just politics adam and i are using our

different expertise to tackle some uncomfortable questions like has science been co-opted part of the ticks and kind of gene test provide proof of someone's racial superiority just how racist classist sexist is the economy how can we plan for a future where people and planet come before profit i'm curious to see why it is an economist and a geneticist might have in common join us to find out. one of the shared things that we have is identity so what is your identity what is was it means you have multiple identities like i think most of us to you i think if i started listing them london. stymie. british muslim female working class background and it's all of these different things that

come to minds and it's many. we would be really hard for me to say this one he does that makes perfect sense to me i'm exactly the same and have those sort of multiple strands to one's identity but i think trying to understand identity from a scientific point of view and why people so focused on identity that's a big so the strength of my work i guess is the same for you but from an economics and from an inequality point of view it kind of didn't start off that way i think one of the things about i mean i actually didn't want to get pigeonholed i wanted to be an economist because i thought you know that will mean i don't have to talk about race in the time but one of the things i noticed when i started doing economics is stop other economists and just in general the whole sector doesn't even consider prejudice and racism and how it's playing into the economy so i ended up i guess doing both in the end talking about race and class than as well as the economy the way you said that is it has not never been expressed to me so clearly

because that reflects my own experience i didn't get into being a geneticist or studying evolution because i was interested in race and then at one point or some point you realize you can't talk about human variation you can't talk about the genome. without addressing the fact that you're actually talking about the sort of structure that in the west has given us the racism that we enjoy today and i think it's also like do we have a choice so i'll want to talk about what we should do on wage. and what we should do on you know tax but ultimately i will also be honest about. the cost and so. i just i feel like it almost became kind of not a choice i could just i had to have that conversation on clause which i think often people of color don't get a chance to talk about every time i went on t.v. someone by you didn't say your t.'s and i get like horrific even let is written to

me like you don't know how to speak properly and i got no i just sound like the people who grew up with me something. so it's only things like come at you and you have to reply and say something do you find that you get pushback from other economists or you know within academia who become because traditionally we don't address things like well specifically race because i certainly experience that in in academia within genetics when you say there's structural biases and structural racism within science which is factually correct and a lot of people push back and say we're it doesn't affect my work you know because we're trying to pursue objective truth and then you say well yeah but the way you do that is in a system which was fundamentally founded in order to serve a political ideology which was europeans mansion was the reaction to that because generally whenever you talk about race or racism people act defensively biology and anthropology and genetics which is my sort of area of expertise is really founded

in a racist ideology and you say that to a historian and they go that's right and often when i say it scientists the reaction is either well a complete ignorance is it i have no idea or b. but you know the data is neutral right i've got this data set the data itself has no structural biases about you and i do that really. and then sometimes you get i get my astrophysics saying i count stars does that have structural biases in it and admittedly that is more difficult but economics is the study of inequality surely is not just sort of foundational to i want to talk about inequality and i've come at it from an more of an economics background but when i say we should also think about the role of prejudice in the room kind of goes quiet because. in may and there is prejudice in decision making in the economy how it is that low pay people tend to be in migrant labor disproportionately women in care what you know that

ultimately comes down to prejudice and who's got power and this just sometimes a conversation economists don't want to have because i guess it's similar to scientists because that makes it political when we're not being political when everything of course is political and comes through in every way in which we look at things i inevitably look at always think about things raising costs lens because it's an important part of my identity yeah but it's not just it's not just your identity there is it's recognizing that our society has structural racism built into it and she's a thing that a lot of people are less willing to to discuss and you know we're going through this we had periods in britain where on the one hand a lot of people want to talk about empire and yet it's completely absent from it why it's a marker had this resurgence because i keep know in as well the small bits on empire people want to talk about it why do you think it's come about at this time well i don't know i mean the private it doesn't exist really significantly you know

school school curriculums i think it's fascinating you know i know more about henry the 8th 6 wives than i do about empire how did you learn about empire as an adult right through to writing books you know we talk about british history i mean talk about empire history in their books british history is the history of empire and science is an integral part of that you know sometimes i think scientists hold themselves to a higher account of they think that science is sort of immune or separate from for the lived lives real world experiences subjectivity and so on but it's not it's built into the system i find that it's part of that resistance is because people don't want to think they're racist and by exposing these these prejudices and the ways in which we've got. blind spots convenient blind spots you know some aspects of our history and racism in different types of prejudice when you start bringing the op peoples take it very personally very quickly the question i wanted to ask

you having written this on racism is whether you've got lots of racism as a consequence every time i talk about racism or it's we i will inevitably get e-mails in a twist or i meant just loads of racism i'm being called a racist because i'm talking about race is absolutely i get a lot i partly because i caught it because i quite like the fight or else we would be doing it what i think has been interesting and i think again another parallel i see between us is that how one's own personal identity plays into how people understand the work that you're trying to do and again it relates to the sort suppose it a morality or a political nature of science which i don't think either of those things are true but also the sort of imposition of identity on to me you know you're only saying these things because you're mixed race you mentioned beginning your identity as

a working cross woman of color. muslim to people come to you and say we're not saying that because of this i think that's implied in conversations i can have with people as i run to be an m.p. where i grew up and i said and i still live and so. people kind of recognize my face from having run a campaign and someone stops me and said you know always vote conservative and i run for the labor party and they said you know you would have been great for the area but you need to stop talking about racism. and i just said racism 0 and he was like yeah it is and i was like so why would we stop talking about it i go britain is one of the least races countries on earth but my response to that is well you know the least racist country is still racist i mean i just think people feel very threatened by some of that conversation you know for me the biggest frustration about not talking about empire in this country is that people don't understand why

people like me are hair right and i'm always fly you know i'm half feagin half of my mom's family from pakistan that's moved during partition in my great grandmother ended up in fiji as indentured labor which i know is a have a similar story to you in that way and the money that explode back from her labor all the way in the fiji islands is came back to the u.k. i mean i've been paul of the british working class generations we've been part of it our history is a so intertwined so it could be a point of solidarity and connection and yet it's a conversation that just leads to division and fight and you're not really british i guess not a lot i was born in the switch there isn't a way that i could be more british and yeah i think the tenor of that conversation is to say well you are ok so you're legally british you have a british passport you're not as british is as someone else who doesn't look like this that phrase you know we are here because you were there our parents were

british is when they came here one of the things that really struck me as well about conversations about empire and i sensed here when it's you know when people want to attack me on and i'm like go and look at the fijian flag the fijian flag still has the union jack. you know don't tell me that i'm not british i'm less british or you know his history is that my history right now in the u.k. and unfortunately in so many countries in the world a kind of certain type of ethno nationalism patriotism has come up that. could lose as many people as possible in order to create what we call hare in the u.k. these culture wars you know if something's going wrong in government if you've made the wrong decision about something can the pandemic quickly moan about black lives matter and talk about statues as a distraction and so we are constantly being thrown under the bus and you know if i'm me one of the most of say in things about where the political conversation is

going in the u.k. and i can see in other parts of the world too. is that it's more divisive and it's harder to talk about racism and it's harder for someone like me to be considered british than it was even 5 years ago i know it's like people being wound up about certain issues and that has really toxified our conversation yeah that is definitely and demonstrably true i suppose one of the things that supposes for take from that is the notion that we talked about race much less in the past and maybe it's a better thing to expose these fractures which are in our society the fact that we can have this conversation is part of. making a better yeah but it's been used against us so a positive conversation that is able to build solidarity and understand then is then used against us so why do people tell me i'm a racist when i talk about racism and they say you know you're dividing us by talking about racism but don't bring it up is there any chance that you're not

going to talk about it not me nothing but the same here. i think this is a good point to go to the audience and get some questions you can see all these lovely faces on the screen. before we do so history. is this is where racism is likely to arise and voice social conditions you know we can get a situation where those very very little is just. bigotry is eternal right it's a part of the human condition we try to battle against prejudice but it is inbuilt but the racism that we endure today which is part of this what we're talking about the structure of western civilization and by extension via colonialism the the racism that exists all over the world that is i'm an invention i like is an invention of the enlightenment and this is why i'm part of this conversation because it's an invention which is predicated on pseudo science that was

specifically invented to serve the political ideology of european expansion so it's not so much that you know we can look at specific points in our history of empire history of civilization it's more to understand how the structures were so into society and whether there ephemeral whether there just is just the last 300 years or so you know from my point of view as a scientist why i think scientists should know their own history but more broadly why we should just be better at understanding the complexities of history yes i've been working with several different countries around the wilds looking at the landscape of inequality. what we call exclusion so marginalized groups and thinking a lot about the history of those how those cleavages and those problems and challenges came up and the relation ship over time and now between an economic inequality and the way in which capitalism is working in different parts of the

wild and the elites are taking up power and wealth and how that is result in. more prejudices coming now you know when i think about how we tackle inequality going forward and where it's been tackled in history it's really 2 key things one is having universal policies like universal health care you know the king osteo population and treating them equally through the state and secondly really actually getting into the issue of why we are disliking each other and trying to build bridges you've got to tackle both the economics of it as well as the sense of belonging so that different groups feel part of society and feel that they have a say oh i want to do as a person of color i come across discourse an argument about race is a lot of time and one particular debate that i come across is when people try to

argue with our diverse jury system is real how do you recommend ducking the debate . yes this is something that comes up quite a lot but actually now the people they all. finding that hard you know are less likely to get a job out of white men for instance and i is a trope in the argument that's used really often but still when you look at the statistics of who is in the top jobs it's. so often in disproportionately men white men and from very privileged backgrounds right so we still have in this country where we have you know over 70 percent of our judges went to private school or like we still got. more men than women in ruling conservative party and you know just actually looking at the facts it's just not true to say that in this context in the u.k. that you are being held back because of your identity yet when you look at all of

the other stats for you know black men or muslim women you know they will tell you the exact opposite story that is still harder for them. to get walk you know i think in my experience most people's understanding of racism is sort of personal insult right so attributing physical characteristics. and bigotry based on those physical characteristics which is which are part of one's ancestry when actually a major chunk of racism is is what pfizer was just talking about which is these these structural biases but are laden in decades or centuries of of history there's a phrase or use in the book which i borrowed of a feminist writer called this which is if all you've ever known is privilege then equality feels like oppression and i think it's the most important sentence i've ever copied or someone else because it's really hard to recognize one's own privilege i think it's like an underlying story that's also told alongside this

that i hair is where people should just get the job because they're the best die and they've got the most skills but his given the opportunity to get those skills and go it's a go it's about university and go it's about private school is so much to do with it race and color so whatever you know particularly i particular marginalise characteristic there is in your community in your country ok let's have another question from american countries who are facing well if you can lead from the bears are these you seen by really really since you listen. to 5 minutes and if you write how can we reach those in power who are the ones producing i'm benefiting from this polarization really it does come back to power. and it does come back to how you build new finance to counter that because often. they're not just going to give away thing and just do it because there are nice tests and then might be the

odd benevolent leader that is you know that might be a good. person that wants to make genuinely want to make the country better and attack when equality but unless you have count him if men's off then that power isn't kept in check and that's true of. high medium low income countries and that's much easier said than done especially in countries where you're going to you know get a big force back and you know there's a very strong say violent reaction at times i think actually is about having nice minson demonstrating that you can't take those kind of actions were not going to stand for it we the people are not going to stand for it i think science is a slightly different role to play in this which is that politicians and indeed people use science as a sort of crutch to defend their arguments and you see this all the time we've seen it through covert and there was the immediate racialization of covert assoon as it

was apparent. in this country black and asian people were more susceptible to infection and in america back asian and. hispanic latino people the same immediately the conversation goes well what is the molecular biology of this is this something to do with biological essential has made it to do with that mindy metabolism well you know it might be in a very what a very small way we don't know the answer to that question yet but the truth of the matter is that we can account for the majority of that disparity in very straightforward socio economic terms because it's not you need to cove it right it's the same for all diseases because race is part of our societal structure and medicine is racialized for exactly those same reasons so we know that people of minority ethnic backgrounds are more likely to be in key work at jobs. more likely to live in urban areas in densely populated areas with multigenerational households

and all of those things are factors which increase the racialization of medicine none of which are biological it was really striking how quickly they went to pseudoscience blaming black and brown people as genetics essentially rather than recognizing that they are disproportionately on the frontline manning the national health service jiving the taxis driving the buses you know doing the delivery walk and and what could have been a moment where we say look at the multi ethnic working class and the way in which they contribute to this country even though what they are and some of the lowest wages is became a conversation about all this black and brown people dying because then unhealthy to have another one and you have spoken about science is racist and how it has been used to assert inferiority or the minority communities it is this lack of confidence in the middle cleans to sions which is now fueling fear and hesitancy

tools of vaccines so will most medically. governments and science to in general to rebuild that trust i think community engagement is the real answer and you know just what you are saying the n.h.s. is is peopled by such a an astonishing array of ethnic diversity and yet we do see we see resistance to into medical interventions such as vaccines from particular communities so we need those communities checked you know to be champions and to have people like just trying to get us over those sorts of barriers because it's going to be absolutely essential otherwise what we're going to end up with these pockets of exacerbated social disparity and socio economic schisms the in a sort of spiral part of the reason why this isn't getting the attention that is shit and part of the reason that there wasn't. a clear plan it was very evident

that black and brown people were dying now. is because of racism is because certain groups are overlooked and then all and prioritized when it comes to government policy making if it was more white men dying then what would the conversation be and what would they have put in place for a particular plan saying there's something going on haven't it it's just been really hard to get any real action on this even though we've seen from the death rate the fact that bad i do think representation is extremely important in this just like in the rest of society there is there are disproportionately few black and brown scientists and all labs and that's not even equally distributed within i think minorities or ethnic groups within science but i think about it in terms of. being a normalizing process by that if it takes some crumbs reaction now in 10 years time we're not having this conversation right please i don't know we having this conversation instead i feel i've been saying the same things for 10 years already

inside clear but in a few years time it stops being an issue why we stop talking about it. the concept of anti racism has been weaponized against until racists which is you know fundamentally problematic today the stereotype about the white working class is a really negative because there are ties into like this phrase the screen humankind is no exonerates from this conversation is the natural phenomena that this endemic occurred it's because of our changing relationship with the environment. from the al-jazeera london broadcast center to people in thoughtful conversation i got much worse races than when i was at the university of oxford which really scared me because i was like these people are going to be in positions of power

with no host and no limitations empire is the reason that we live in a multicultural society part 2 of pfizer's shaheen and adam rather fit studio unscripted on al-jazeera collegial country onto the pitch is a special moment for any football to do it as a palestinian woman is a remarkable achievement. footballing legend eric cantor now introduces honeyed saga who broke through social and political barriers to inspire a generation of female players across the middle east. could both rebels bets their way. on al-jazeera. when the news breaks 4 months ago janine onions was president of bolivia now she's under arrest when people who need to be her more than 11000000 people infected hospitals in brazil are struggling to cope al-jazeera has teams on the ground the last time voters lined up to cast their

ballots in the central african republic an attempted coup was taking place to bring you more room mood when documentaries and lighting us on air and online. al-jazeera. hello i'm rob matheson this is the news hour live from doha coming up in the next 60 minutes hopes of reopening this it was a massive container ship base partially refloated after blocking the busy waterway for danes. the trial is set to begin of the police officer accused of murdering georgia floyd whose death sparked protests around the world.