Gary Younge

Jan 9, 2025 | theideasletter.org | Gary Younge

In the film American Fiction, the culturally refined Dr Theolonius “Monk” Ellison, an African American author and professor, is struggling to get his highbrow novels published: the white gatekeepers to the literary world believe they are not “Black enough” and would rather put out ghetto stereotypes. So he writes a spoof novel, set in the hood, under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh.

Oct 30, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Gary Younge

When the United States joined the Second World War there was concern, at the highest levels of UK government, about resisting US-style racial segregation on British soil. Britain’s racism operated very differently and there was a concern that allowing the US’s particularly crude form of exclusion in the UK would aggravate colonial visitors and soldiers.

Oct 10, 2024 | faber.co.uk | Gary Younge |Tim Woodall

White people also deserve a sense of history that is accurate, honest, antiracist and inclusive. So what would White History Month look like? The Nation, 21 February 2007, New YorkWhatever happened to James Blake? He is probably the most famous bus driver ever. And yet when he died aged eighty-nine in March 2002, the few papers that bothered to note his passing in an obituary ran just a few hundred words of wire copy and moved on.

Sep 26, 2024 | nybooks.com | Gary Younge

One night in late August 1958 a white Swedish woman, Majbritt Morrison, got into an argument with her Black Jamaican husband, Raymond, outside the Latimer Road tube station in West London. When a group of young people known as “teddy boys”—distinguished by their high, slicked-back hair, big suede shoes, and Edwardian-style frock coats—joined in and started hurling racist insults at Raymond, Majbritt turned on them.

Sep 7, 2024 | theguardian.com | Gary Younge

In Diane Abbott’s Westminster office, alongside a picture of her with Jesse Jackson and the framed front page of The Voice from 1987 declaring “A New Era” with a picture of Abbott, Bernie Grant, Paul Boateng and Keith Vaz – the four newly elected Black MPs – there are a number of large empty packing boxes. Abbott points at them and laughs. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t bother.