Kehinde Nkosi Andrews (born January 1983) [1] is a British academic and author specialising in Black Studies.
Andrews is a Professor of Black Studies in the School of Social Sciences at Birmingham City University. [2] He is the director of the Centre for Critical Social Research, founder of the Harambee Organisation of Black Unity, [3] and co-chair of the UK Black Studies Association. [4] Andrews is the first Black Studies professor in the UK and led the establishment of the first Black Studies programme in Europe at Birmingham City University. [5] [6] [7]
Andrews is of British African-Caribbean heritage. [8] He earned a PhD. in Sociology and Cultural Studies from the University of Birmingham in 2011. His thesis was entitled Back to Black: Black Radicalism and the Supplementary School Movement. [9]
Andrews regularly appears in the media discussing issues of race and racism, colonialism and slavery, and British nationalism. He contributes to The Guardian , [10] [11] The Independent, [12] New Statesman , [13] CNN, [14] OpenDemocracy, [15] and often appears as a guest on the BBC [16] [17] [18] [19] and Good Morning Britain . [20] [21] [22] [23]
In 2016, Andrews criticized universities in the United Kingdom for institutional racism, specifically the lack of diversity in students' assigned readings. [5] The following year, Andrews spoke at the Oxford Union, arguing that British education perpetuates racism. [24] He also gave a TEDxYouth talk in Birmingham entitled "How to Stay Radical within an Institution", exploring how Black Studies can exist within the historically racist institution of the university. [25]
In 2019, Andrews took part in a debate on whether or not the West should pay reparations for slavery at Intelligence Squared. [26] He also spoke about his book Back to Black in the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Duke University [27] and gave a talk at Tate Liverpool on the role of Black radicalism in the United Kingdom and the United States. [28] In that year, Andrews appeared on Good Morning Britain, where he argued that the Royal Air Force bombing of Nazi Germany constituted a war crime [29] and equated the racial views of Winston Churchill to those of Adolf Hitler. [30]
Andrews narrated the film The Psychosis of Whiteness, which explores race and racism through cinematic representations of the slave trade. [31]
In July 2019, Andrews criticized the idea that prominent non-white members of the Conservative Party automatically represent racial progress, saying that a "cabinet packed with ministers with brown skin wearing Tory masks represents the opposition of racial progress". [32]
In May 2020, Andrews was a guest on Russell Brand's YouTube channel discussing racism in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. [33] He was also interviewed by the Los Angeles Review of Books discussing Malcolm X and the question of violence in Black radicalism. [34]
In August 2020, Andrews joined calls to drop "Rule, Britannia!" and "Land of Hope and Glory" from the Last Night of the Proms, stating that the lyrics contained "racist propaganda from a time where Britain was the leading slave-trading nation in the world". [35]
In June 2021, Andrews described Elizabeth II as "the number one symbol of white supremacy in the entire world". [36] Following her death in September 2022, he called for the abolition of the monarchy. [37]
Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah was a British writer, dub poet, actor, musician and professor of poetry and creative writing. He was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008. In his work, Zephaniah drew on his lived experiences of incarceration, racism and his Jamaican heritage.
Black British people are a multi-ethnic group of British people of either African or Afro-Caribbean descent. The term Black British developed in the 1950s, referring to the Black British West Indian people from the former Caribbean British colonies in the West Indies sometimes referred to as the Windrush Generation and Black British people descending from Africa.
Hakim Adi is a British historian and scholar who specializes in African affairs. He is the first African-British historian to become a professor of history in the UK. He has written widely on Pan-Africanism and the modern political history of Africa and the African diaspora, including the 2018 book Pan-Africanism: A History. Currently a professor at the University of Chichester, Adi is an advocate of the education curriculum including the history of Africa and its diaspora.
Reparations for slavery is the application of the concept of reparations to victims of slavery and/or their descendants. There are concepts for reparations in legal philosophy and reparations in transitional justice. Reparations can take many forms, including practical and financial assistance to the descendants of enslaved people, acknowledgements or apologies to peoples or nations negatively affected by slavery, or honouring the memories of people who were enslaved by naming things after them.
Racism has a long history in the United Kingdom and includes structural discrimination and hostile attitudes against various ethnic minorities. The extent and the targets of racism in the United Kingdom have varied over time. It has resulted in cases of discrimination, riots and racially motivated murders.
Doreen Delceita Lawrence, Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, OBE is a British Jamaican campaigner and the mother of Stephen Lawrence, a black British teenager who was murdered in a racist attack in South East London in 1993. She promoted reforms of the police service and founded the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust. She was appointed to the Order of the British Empire for services to community relations in 2003, and was created a Life Peer in 2013.
Good Morning Britain is a British breakfast television programme that is broadcast on ITV. It first appeared on 28 April 2014 and is broadcast live every weekday from 6:00 am to 9:00 am across the United Kingdom. The programme features a variety of news, interviews, politics, sport, entertainment, competitions and weather as well as local news bulletins delivered by the ITV regions. The programme is currently presented by Susanna Reid, Kate Garraway, Charlotte Hawkins and Ranvir Singh.
Anti-racism encompasses a range of ideas and political actions which are meant to counter racial prejudice, systemic racism, and the oppression of specific racial groups. Anti-racism is usually structured around conscious efforts and deliberate actions which are intended to create equal opportunities for all people on both an individual and a systemic level. As a philosophy, it can be engaged in by the acknowledgment of personal privileges, confronting acts as well as systems of racial discrimination and/or working to change personal racial biases. Major contemporary anti-racism efforts include the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and workplace anti-racism.
Marc Wadsworth is a British black rights campaigner, broadcast and print journalist and BBC filmmaker and radio producer. He founded the Anti-Racist Alliance in 1991 and two years later, also helped set up the justice campaign for murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence. Wadsworth launched an early citizen-journalism news portal, The-Latest.com. In 2008, Wadsworth's reporting triggered the resignation of Mayor of London Boris Johnson's spokesman.
David Adetayo Olusoga is a British historian, writer, broadcaster, presenter and filmmaker. He is Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester. He has presented historical documentaries on the BBC and contributed to The One Show and The Guardian.
There have been incidents of racism in the Conservative Party since at least 1964. Conservative shadow defence minister Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech in 1968 was both influential and widely regarded as anti-immigrant with racist overtones; the party's leader at the time, Edward Heath, condemned it, although some Conservative MPs defended Powell's speech. Since then, accusations have been made about several leading members of the party and its policies; these have related to prejudice against non-white people.
Priyamvada Gopal is an Indian-born academic, writer and public intellectual who is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her primary teaching and research interests are in colonial and postcolonial studies, South Asian literature, critical race studies, and the politics and cultures of empire and globalisation. She has written three books engaging these subjects: Literary Radicalism in India (2005), The Indian English Novel (2009) and Insurgent Empire (2019). Her third book, Insurgent Empire, was shortlisted for the 2020 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.
Kalwant Bhopal is Professor of Education and Social Justice and Director of the Centre for Research in Race & Education at the University of Birmingham. Her work explores the achievements and experiences of minority ethnic groups in education with a focus on how processes of racism, exclusion and marginalisation operate in predominantly White spaces.
The National Association of Black Supplementary Schools (NABSS) is a resource, information and advice centre for supplementary schools aimed at Black children and parents in the United Kingdom.
Aggrey Washington Burke FRCPsych is a British retired psychiatrist and academic, born in Jamaica, who spent the majority of his medical career at St George's Hospital in London, UK, specialising in transcultural psychiatry and writing literature on changing attitudes towards black people and mental health. He has carried out extensive research on racism and mental illness and is the first black consultant psychiatrist appointed by Britain's National Health Service (NHS).
Christopher Kapessa was a Welsh boy who died at the age of 13 in the River Cynon on 1 July 2019. He was pushed from a height of 2.5 metres into the water and declared dead on the same day.
The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED) was a UK Government commission supported by the Race Disparity Unit of the Cabinet Office. It was established in 2020 in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd. Boris Johnson gave it the brief of investigating race and ethnic disparities in the UK. Johnson argued that the UK needed to consider important questions about race relations and disparities and that a thorough examination of why so many disparities persist and what needed to be done to work out to eliminate or mitigate them.
Eve Pitts is a British priest who was the first black woman to be ordained as a vicar in the Church of England. She is known for being outspoken against discrimination. She is a supporter of Emancipation Day.
In the United Kingdom, racial segregation occurred in pubs, workplaces, shops and other commercial premises, which operated a colour bar where non-white customers were banned from using certain rooms and facilities. Segregation also operated in the 20th century in certain professions, in housing and at Buckingham Palace. There were no British laws requiring racial segregation, but until 1965, there were no laws prohibiting racial segregation either.
The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World is a 2021 book written by black studies academic Kehinde Andrews.