Tag: The Guardian

  • Pete Souza: photographing the real Barack Obama The Guardian 2016-05-29 Jonathan Jones President Barack Obama fist-bumps custodian Lawrence Lipscomb in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Photograph: Pete Souza/The White House Over two historic terms, official White House photographer Pete Souza has chronicled the most intimate, candid and comical moments of Barack Obama’s presidency It was…

  • ‘In Negroland we thought of ourselves as the Third Race’ The Guardian 2016-05-22 Margo Jefferson An extract from Negroland, Margo Jefferson’s memoir of growing up in postwar America’s emerging black elite Margo Jefferson: ‘I was anxious about using the word Negro in a book title’ I was taught to avoid showing off. I was taught…

  • Seven days, three speeches: one week in the life of having a black president The Guardian 2016-05-09 Steven W. Thrasher After seven years, Barack Obama is in his last months in the White House. When he leaves, nothing will be the same. For black people, nothing will be resolved Like so many people I have…

  • Marvin Rees’s triumph as mayor defies Bristol’s racist past The Guardian 2016-05-08 Simon Woolley Source: Marvin Rees The descendant of enslaved Africans is now running a former slave city. His symbolic victory gives hope – and should not be forgotten While much has been said, rightly so, about a Muslim now leading London, we must…

  • I’m the new NUS president – and no, I’m not an antisemitic Isis sympathiser The Guardian 2016-04-24 Malia Bouattia ‘Some may not agree with my politics and ideologies, but I do believe the student movement has a shared goal.’ Photograph: Vicky Design/NUS website The accusations being directed at me this week are deeply troubling and…

  • Malia Bouattia’s election as NUS president proves deeply divisive The Guardian 2016-04-22 Jessica Elgot At the NUS conference, Bouattia won on the first round. Photograph: NUS/PA Jewish student groups alarmed by her election, but the first black Muslim woman in the role has nerves of steel, and young activists love her for that It is…

  • Blackass: a race rewrite of Kafka’s Metamorphosis The Guardian 2016-04-13 Ainehi Edoro Ainehi Edoro reflects on Blackass, a novel that subjects Kafka’s classic to African literary conventions – and, in the process, gives an iconic European story ‘an extreme but necessary makeover’ Last year, I received a review copy of A Igoni Barrett’s Blackass from…

  • The problem for poor, white kids is that a part of their culture has been destroyed The Guardian 2016-04-04 Paul Mason Our culture was the one celebrated in Ken Loach movies … a scene from the film Kes. Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock Thatcherism didn’t just crush the unions, it crushed a story – as the report that…

  • “For me growing up as a mixed-race person, you’re forced to see both sides,” he explains. “I grew up in a house where my mother was Xhosa, my dad was Swiss, my stepdad was Shangaan, my friends were Zulu. I lived in such a melting pot that I never grew up with a preconceived notion…

  • Pao by Kerry Young – review The Guardian 2011-07-03 Ian Thomson Young, Kerry, Pao: A Novel (London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011) Kerry Young’s mesmerising first novel celebrates Jamaica’s ethnic melting pot, and the lost world of Kingston’s Chinatown Jamaica, where Kerry Young was born in 1955, is an island of…