Is 'Political Blackness' gone for good?

Analysis

BBC

Government, Politics, News

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2022

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Over the decades, a string of umbrella terms and acronyms have been used in the UK to describe people who aren’t white. “Politically Black”, Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME), ethnic minorities, or people of colour.

Virtually all of them have been rejected by the people they describe, but is there still value in a collective term for Britain’s ethnic minorities? Mobeen Azhar hears stories of solidarity and schism between different groups in modern Britain to find out whether any sense of unity still exists and whether we need a new label.

Contributors:

Clive Lewis, MP for Norwich South Asad Rehman, Executive Director, War on Want Professor Jason Arday, Professor of Sociology of Education, University of Glasgow Ada Akpala, writer and podcaster Dr Rakib Ehsan, research analyst specialising in social integration and community relations Dr Lisa Palmer, Deputy Director of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre, De Montfort University Sunder Katwala, Director, British Future

Presenter: Mobeen Azhar Producer: Dan Hardoon Editor: Clare Fordham Sound Engineer: Rod Farquhar Production Coordinators: Maria Ogundele and Helena Warwick-Cross

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:04.6	My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.
0:08.4	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable
0:14.3	experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC
0:20.4	makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
0:24.6	poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.
0:29.7	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected,
0:33.1	find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.
0:36.5	But the funny thing is like, it is okay to be white.
0:39.7	So example, if you can't even have a shirt that says it's okay to be white without being ridiculed, without being called racist, that's a problem.
0:47.0	On the outskirts of Portland, a crowd gathers, mostly white and and angry.
0:53.6	We as a country have gotten away from racism.
0:57.2	I mean, if we had racism so bad,
0:59.4	why would I even be talking to you?
1:02.4	Because you're colored.
1:06.1	Technically he's right about one thing.
1:08.9	I have brown skin.
1:10.7	It is collared to use his word the man on the street featured in a TV dock I made called a black and white killing
1:18.9	It's about a murder in Portland and race gangs in the American prison system.
1:24.0	When it came out in 2019, it got rave reviews
1:28.0	and Twitter seemed to love it.
1:30.0	Fast forward to 2020, in the shadow of the murder of George Floyd. The series was
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -836 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.