It's the sort of thing that you can either wrack your brains for, or construct a SPARQL Query for WikiData⁰. I was bored and asked ChatGPT.

The new Omni model claims to be faster and more accurate. But, in my experience, it's wrong more than it is right and is a bit more racist.

I asked "Which Oscar winners have appeared in episodes of Doctor Who?" Here are the results:

OK, first up, those are all entirely accurate! Capaldi is an Oscar-winner Doctor Who. Coleman the only Oscar-winning baddie. And I am happy to spend hours in the pub arguing over whether The Curse of Fatal Death is cannon¹.

But then things get… weird.

John Hurt didn't win an honorary award in 2012. He was mentioned in the memoriam montage in 2017

Ben Kingsley was rumoured to be playing Davros back in 2007 - but it never happened. He did win an Oscar though.

Ecclesdoc was in The Others. It did win many awards. But not a single Oscar. There isn't even an award for "Best Art Direction".

Finally, this is tacked onto the end.

Look, we all love Lynda Baron - and she was excellent in The Gun Slingers, Enlightenment, and Closing Time. I was surprised to find out she was in Yentl - but indeed she was! However the songwriting Oscar went to Michel Legrand and Alan & Marilyn Bergman. Not her.

Why is this racist

This "AI" would rather hallucinate than acknowledge the Black actors who have been in Doctor Who.

Sophie Okonedo plays Queen Elizabeth the 10th in "The Beast Below".

Not only is she "the bloody Queen, mate" - she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Hotel Rwanda.

She has as much right to be in the list ChatGPT provided as John Hurt. With no disrespect intended to Kingsley, Eccleston, and Baron - Sophie Okonedo is much closer to the original question than they are. This isn't a knowledge cut-off issue either, she was nominated before Oliva Coleman won.

It's not like she's a bit-part. She's not an alien under a mountain of prosthetics. She's literally top of the credits after The Doctor and Amy!

And then, there's the small matter of Planet of the Dead. It isn't a great episode. But it has a nice turn from Michelle Evans and Lee Evans². Oh, and this guy…

That's ACTUAL FUCKING OSCAR WINNER Daniel Kaluuya. He got a nomination for Get Out, but won for Judas and the Black Messiah in 2021.

Again, he isn't an unnamed background artist. He isn't there under his pre-fame stage name. He's an integral part of the show.

What does this teach us?

The query I asked wasn't a matter of opinion. It isn't a controversial question. There aren't multiple sources which could be considered trustworthy. It is a simple question of facts.

So why does ChatGPT fail?

LLMs are not repositories of knowledge. They have a superficial view of the world and are unable to tell fact from speculation. They are specifically built to be confidently wrong rather than display their ignorance.

And, yes, they are as biased as hell.

There is no way that you can explain the exclusion of Sophie Okonedo and Daniel Kaluuya without acknowledging the massive levels of racial prejudice which are baked into either the model or its training data.

But then I started reading about how Blumenbach literally invented the concept of distinct human races. And about how the discredited "Science" of race is making a comeback. And then about the Philosophy of Race weaves its pernicious influence. And I found it illuminating.

Of course, theorising is a different experience to lived reality.

I visited Kuala Lumpur recently. As I registered for various apps and websites, I kept being asked the same question - "What is your ethnicity?"

Here are the options I was commonly given:

One app went a little further:

I was very literally being othered.

By contrast, here's the "What is your ethnicity" form presented to me by a recent NHS survey in the UK:

Race, ethnicity, background, tribe. They're all important in context. The number of Latina/Latino people in the UK is negligible compared to the USA⁰. I doubt there are many Irish Travellers in Malaysia. There are large numbers of Japanese and Korean people in the UK - but they all get lumped under "Other Asian".

Here's how the England and Wales Census records ethnicity:

It is important to understand that race is a social construct.

For example, the Census questionnaire in South Africa asks if you are "Black African, Coloured, Indian or Asian, White, Other". What is "Coloured"? If you identify as such, which box would you tick on the UK census?

The US Census has ethnicity categories for "American Indian or Alaska Native" and "Hispanic or Latino". Where do people in those categories fit in with, say, the South African census?

The New Zealand Census has 180 different categories for ethnicity!

Do all these "races" exist? If one of your grandparents is Japanese, one Coloured, one White Irish, one Bumiputera - what box do you tick?

It is important to make sure you aren't discriminating against people. And it can be useful to know the demographics of people who are interacting with you. And, sure, you probably want broad enough categories which are relevant to your culture.

But... Are you measuring something which meaningfully exists?

It's always worth re-examining our relationship with "classic" works. There are some very obvious immigration issues in Shakespeare - and this book does a plausible job of uncovering some of them. It also takes us through some of the issues facing Elizabethan England - for example, how the Welsh "immigrants" were treated by the "native" London population, and how that manifests through Fluellen in Henry V.

Some of the essays are a little more scattershot. One attempts to compare the US's Green Card Lottery with Portia's caskets test in Merchant of Venice. I sort of get the parallel, but it really only warrants a paragraph or two, rather than an entire essay.

As usual with theses sorts of books, it was a little too academically written for my tastes. I think it might have benefited from a more populist tone. There are acres of fascinating stories and titbits hidden behind some exclusionary language.

But, in the end, I can't help but agree with its conclusion:

Access to alternative perspectives changes our orientation with regard to Shakespeare’s work because, from the vantage point of other possible homes, the home that Shakespeare offers is not always optimal and, instead of the stranger in Shakespeare, we may find that Shakespeare has become the stranger.

Ira Aldridge -- a black New Yorker -- was one of nineteenth-century Europe's greatest actors. By the time he began touring in Europe he was principally a Shakespearean actor, playing such classic characters as Shylock, Macbeth, Richard III, and King Lear. Although his frequent public appearances made him the most visible black man in the world by mid-nineteenth century, today Aldridge tends to be a forgotten figure, seldom mentioned in histories of British and European theater. This collection restores the luster to Aldridge's reputation by examining his extraordinary achievements against all odds. The early essays offer biographical information, while later essays examine his critical and popular reception throughout the world. Taken together, these diverse approaches to Aldridge offer a fuller understanding and heightened appreciation of a remarkable man who had an exceptionally interesting life and a spectacular career.

After reading "The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race", I decided to pick up some more books about the history of Black people playing Shakespeare. First up - Ira Aldridge.

Ira was, reportedly, the first Black man to perform Shakespeare plays in the UK. He seems to have been incredibly popular with audiences - although less so with some critics.

The book contains all manner of contemporary accounts - reviews, pamphlets, and letters. They give us a fascinating glimpse into what the reaction was from all sections of society. There are some astoundingly racist contemporary comments - apparently Black people's lips are the wrong shape to pronounce English properly! On that note, because of the verbatim reproduction of documents, there are a wide variety of offensive words and sentiments embedded in the story. The past isn't always a pretty place - and we have to acknowledge that.

Similarly, Ira Aldridge himself isn't treated as a saint. Clearly a talented individual - but with some disturbing aspects to his personal life. The book doesn't shy away from discussing him as a complete human.

It isn't quite an autobiography - there's no narrative arc. Instead, the book is a bit of a hodge-podge of essays - and suffers a bit from being repetitious. One of the essays is a series of letters to Aldridge from his admirers - which might be interesting to the completionist, but otherwise just feels like padding. Unfortunately, the eBook version is missing the images from the printed version. That's just hostile from the publisher.

Ultimately, it is a fascinating glimpse into the life of a man who helped redefine audience's expectations of Shakespeare. It's also contains a number of disturbing facts about the past - I had no idea that African-American New Yorkers were banned by the police from playing Shakespeare!

It also made me think about how we define civilisation. Aldridge was performing towards the end of the legality of the slave trade in Britain. He became a symbol to many people - "proving" that Black people were capable of attaining moral and intellectual greatness. Why is acting in the classics seen as something which elevates men above each other?

If you have even a passing interest in the way Shakespeare was performed, and how one man became such a star only to fade into obscurity - this is a great starting point.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race shows teachers and students how and why Shakespeare and race are inseparable. Moving well beyond Othello, the collection invites the reader to understand racialized discourses, rhetoric, and performances in all of Shakespeare's plays, including the comedies and histories.

Race is presented through an intersectional approach with chapters that focus on the concepts of sexuality, lineage, nationality, and globalization. The collection helps students to grapple with the unique role performance plays in constructions of race by Shakespeare (and in Shakespearean performances), considering both historical and contemporary actors and directors.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race will be the first book that truly frames Shakespeare studies and early modern race studies for a non-specialist, student audience.

I'm not sure I'm qualified to read or understand this book. I'm not a scholar, but an occasional Shakespearean actor. I also have very little understanding of literary theory. But I'm greatly interested in both Shakespeare and race - so let's dive in!

It's a series of (mostly) good essays setting out the modern literary criticisms of Shakespeare's attitudes to race. It takes great pains to say that it isn't being critical of Shakespeare the person but it is a critical reading of its works to help us understand the prevailing attitudes of his contemporaries.

We know that there were Black people living in Tudor England - but how did Shakespeare's audience understand the concept of race? What historic literary allusions does Shakespeare use which would be understood in The Globe, but are lost to modern audiences?

I found the introduction slightly muddled. We're told that scientific race does not exist. And that notions of race are a relatively modern invention. So how can there be prejudice and systemic discrimination on something that doesn't exist? The book introduced me to the terms race-making and racecraft - which attempts to define a form of racism outside of notions of race. I found the arguments somewhat circular and, to be frank, a little question begging:

In the past some scholars have argued that the malleability and inconsistency of racialized discourses in the early modern period are evidence that Shakespeare and his contemporaries were not engaged in a racialized epistemology. In their formulation, inconsistency is a negative indicator of racecraft. Let me be clear, critical race theory has slain this dragon. Constructions of race are inconsistent and opportunistic; that is one of the hallmarks of race-making and racecraft.

I find that a difficult statement to get on board with. It might be my lack of familiarity with the arguments - but I don't understand how something inconsistent can correlate strongly with an attitude. Nor how non-modern attitudes can be successfully applied to historic attitudes.

Some of the essays are disappointingly short. Patricia Akhimie's discussion on "Racist Humor and Shakespearean Comedy" could easily have been twice as long. As she says, explaining a joke kills it - but it would be lovely to have gone into a deeper dive.

With other essays, the phrases "what if…" and "perhaps" do a lot of a the heavy lifting. Yes, maybe Othello's Bianca is intended to be Black. That's certainly an interesting reading of it - and brings up all sort of questions. But there's scant evidence to support it.

A few of the essays barely touch on Shakespeare. While it is nice to understand some of the geopolitics - it sort of feels like padding. There are some impressive essays giving context to what audiences of the time would have expected from the plays in terms of racial tropes. And the discussion of the practical nature of "blacking up" and general stagecraft are excellent.

On the literary theory side, I found the constant assertion that the word "black" automatically referred to skin colour a little facile. A dark and stormy night doesn't necessarily mean that people equate blackness with unpleasantness. In my (uneducated) opinion, the over-reliance on dubious semiotics does no favours to the overall thesis. I also didn't agree with lumbering in the bloodline of kings with the notion of race - but found the look at how the different nations were stereotyped a useful primer in the ways that Shakespeare and his audience thought about social differences. Indeed, several essays cover attitudes to religion, class, and sexuality - which are often intersectional with race.

The book also introduced me to Ira Aldridge - an African-American actor who played Shakespeare around the UK in the 1800s! I had no idea of his story - nor his struggles - and I'm eagerly looking forward to reading more about him.

Adrian Lester brings some much needed modern perspective. The unique voice of an actor - who has extensive practical experience performing rather than theorising - is refreshing. He identifies the inherent tension in performing in front of an audience with a modern understanding of race. Sadly, there are still too few non-white actors on the British stage and screen.

One thing it doesn't look at is the future of interpreting race in Shakespeare. Modern performances often play with race. And audiences are used to gender-flipped and age-blind casting. But it's rare (in the UK) to see an all-Black cast play Shakespeare. What does it do to our sense of the plays if Juliet is Japanese and Romeo is a love-sick Weebo? If Lear is played as an Angry Black Man? What if Oberon, Titania, and the fairy court are all Māori? Do we feel more sympathy to Shylock if he's Ethiopian?

In short - how does a modern audience understand the race aspects of the plays?

With all that said, this is a fascinating look at what "race" meant to Shakespeare and how it is expressed in his works. Are some of Shakespeare's jokes racist? Yes. But they're also classist, ableist, and homophobic - he was an intersectional bigot.

This is an excellent book. I found it a difficult read - there were lots of words and phrases I was unfamiliar with. But it will certainly stretch your brain and force you to confront the genteel stereotype of Shakespeare.

The death of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests have made clear to everyone the vicious reality of racism that persists today. Many of those privileged enough to be distanced from racism are now having to come to terms with the fact that they continue to prosper at the detriment of others. Having spent the last four years researching, writing, and speaking about the benefits of diversity for society, June Sarpong is no stranger to educating and challenging those that have been enjoying the benefits of a system steeped in systemic racism without realising its true cost. In The Power of Privilege, June will empower those fortunate enough not to be 'otherised' by mainstream Western society to become effective allies against racism, both by understanding the roots of their privilege and the systemic societal inequities that perpetuates it. The Power of Privilege offers practical steps and action-driven solutions so that those who have been afforded privilege can begin undoing the limiting beliefs held by society, and help build a fairer future for all.

Yes! This is the book that I've been waiting for. This is a short and extremely practical guide to challenging racism in all its forms. Unlike Emma Dabiri's "What White People Can Do Next", Sarpong's book gives a dozen concrete actions that people can take to slowly make the world a better place.

What's remarkable is just how focussed this book is - and that's reflected in the price (£3 on Kindle). There aren't long padded-out passages about her childhood - just a couple of "this happened, this is how it made me feel, this is what I did" anecdotes. It also isn't bogged down in endless academic citations and definitions.

Basically, it's the perfect book for the busy (PSM) executive on the go!

Much like Afua Hirsch's "Brit(ish)", this mostly focuses on the UK experience of racism. American cultural hegemony casts a long shadow though. So some of the book is viewed through the recent trauma stateside. I would have preferred more of look at UK statistics - there are some, but feels like the US gets the spotlight.

I'm (reluctantly) dropping half a star because the eBook version is very poorly formatted. Some of the footnotes don't work, there's the occasional missing letter from the start of paragraphs, and a few hard-hyphens. It doesn't detract from the message of the book - but makes for a slightly frustrating reading experience.

A perfect read for a book club, and cheap enough for your office to buy a copies for everyone.

Recently, I tried to register with phone company EE. When someone asks for my first name, I usually just give my initial. But this box wasn't having any of my nonsense. It demanded two characters - and no "unusual" characters.

What are unusual characters?

About 16% of the world use "Chinese" characters (it's more complicated than that).

In the UK, where I am, it is pretty normal to find people with fancy European diacritics.

It's the banality of the bigotry which gets to me. Usual. Normal. Standard. They're just dull ways for dull people with limited imaginations to dehumanise other people. The people who designed this form probably didn't think of themselves as racist. They just designed, built, or perpetuated a system which was exclusionary.

Language matters. We're a decade on from "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" - so ignorance is no excuse. And telling people that their names are abnormal is rude.

The form itself doesn't actually do a good job of validating names. It quite happily allowed me to register with my name consisting of two apostrophes.

Basically, if your form can't register Beyoncé - it has failed.

If you've read recent books like Algorithms of Oppression and Race After Technology - you probably won't find anything new. But it is nice seeing academics in their natural habitats. It really helps to personalise the problems by placing them in social context.

Some of the arguments are simplified a little for a Netflix audience. That's understandable - they're trying to change minds in 90 minutes rather than provide a thoroughly robust argument for a thesis. There's a little too much "Documentary Filler" - panning shots of universities, and people wandering through bookshops - but that's the price you pay for a mainstream documentary. And, again, goes to the theme that these are real issues affecting - and discussed by - real people.

There's a weird little undercurrent of Sinophobia in some of the comments. While there's a brief discussion of China's "Social Credit" system, it is a slightly underdeveloped and feels like it is part of a different documentary.

This could easily have been a multi-part series, with a deeper dive on each issue. So think of it as a teaser trailer for reading some excellent books.

The movie is now streaming on Netflix but - be warned - watching it will irrevocably alter what the algorithm recommends in the future...

When it comes to racial justice, how do we transform demonstrations of support into real and meaningful change? With intellectual rigour and razor-sharp wit, Emma Dabiri cuts through the haze of online discourse to offer clear advice.

This was a refreshing and necessary book to read. Refreshing because so much of the discourse on race is driven by the USA's cultural hegemony - whereas this book is rooted firmly in Ireland and the UK. While it does cover some of the US experience, it isn't exclusively focussed there.

And necessary because *gestures widely*

The book is written in an intriguing style. It effortlessly blends casual and formal language. It isn't as dense as some scholarly works of race that I've read recently, and that's a good thing. It is a good mix of history, background, and practical discussion. It also contains some - rightful - rages against the current state of "activism":

The nature of social media is such that the performance of saying something often trumps doing anything, the tendency to police language, to shame and to say the right thing, often outweighs more substantive efforts.

Yes! While it may feel great to rant and rave on Twitter - it has almost zero impact. You need to actually go out and do something. Whether that's lobbying a company, speaking to your elected representatives, or giving to charity. What we can't do is weaponise class differences - telling people that they have white privilege isn't sufficient to cause change:

We might abhor it, but if a tenuous and fragile feeling of superiority over black people or other minoritized people is all Donny has, why is he going to give that up? What is being offered in return?

I wrote something similar a while ago. As the book makes clear, we have to realise that racism hurts all of us. It isn't just about those who it targets - it is a poison which corrupts everything.

One of the most startling revelations, for me was the notion of how "European style ‘formal’ education, have all imposed the ‘white gaze’." It's quite a concept that our society doesn't exist in a philosophical "neutral zone". Just like how the male gaze defines how movies are made and laws are passed, it is fascinating to understand that we have created systems which don't reflect reality, only a subset of it. I recommend reading “Philosophy of Race: An Introduction” by Naomi Zack for more.

I think the only real flaw is that it doesn't quite contain enough practical steps. In order to build a treehouse, it isn't enough to say "buy some wood and assemble". As the author acknowledges:

Frankly, there’s a huge gap in terms of what comes next. While we need to identify what to do, it’s important not to fixate on an endpoint or a final destination; such thinking is part of the problem. Rather we have to understand our lives as a dynamic flowing of positions.

The chapter headings are a great précis of the internal steps white people need to take - what do you need to realise about your behaviour? - but stops a little short of concrete actions.

It's a short, but thoroughly interesting book.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. The book is out now and you can buy it via the below links.

A font file contains a list of characters (usually letters, numbers, and punctuation) and glyphs (the drawn representation of that character). It is, of course, a lot more complicated than that.

Each character has a codepoint which is represented in hexadecimal. For example, U+0057 is the Latin letter Capital W, U+20AC is the Euro Symbol €, and U+1F600 is the Emoji Smiling Face 😀. These codepoints are assigned by the Unicode Consortium.

A font which contains thousands of characters will be multi-megabytes in size. That's annoying when downloading a font file to display text on a website in a particular font.

It is possible to create a "subset" of a font which only contains the characters that you want. This makes the font file smaller, which makes downloading things quicker for the user.

Again - it is all a lot more complicated than that, but it's a good approximation of the truth.

Traditionally, it makes sense to subset fonts by human languages. If you are writing in English, you don't want the Greek set of characters. If you're writing in Vietnamese, you don't want Cyrillic characters.

Once a subset has been created, you can refer to it in CSS like this:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'CoolFont';
  src: url(https://example.com/font.woff2) format('woff2');
  unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131;
}

This tells the web browser that the font covers the characters U+0000 to U+00FF and, additionally, the character U+0131 - "Latin Small Letter Dotless I".

U+0000 to U+007F are "Basic Latin". They contain the traditional English letters, numbers, and some symbols.

U+0080 to U+00FF are "Latin-1 Supplement". They contain "European" symbols like Ñ, å, and ÿ.

As Unicode has added more languages, they have scattered characters across the specification. And that's where the problem lies.

The Problem

A user in India has complained that Google's font subsetting ignores Indian users.

Here's an example.

Google's Roboto font has the following characters as part of its Latin subset:

• U+0000-00FF Basic Latin and Supplement
• U+0131 ı Latin Small Letter Dotless I
• U+0152-0153 Œ and œ Ligature Oe
• U+02BB-02BC ʻ and ʼ Modified Punctuation
• U+02C6 ˆ Modifier Letter Circumflex Accent
• U+02DA ˚ Ring Above
• U+02DC ˜ Small Tilde
• U+2000-206F - General Punctuation
• U+2074 ⁴ Superscript Four
• U+20AC € euro sign
• U+2122 ™ Trade Mark Sign
• U+2191 ↑ Upwards Arrow
• U+2193 ↓ Downwards Arrow
• U+2212 − Minus Sign
• U+2215 ∕ Division Slash

You can argue how useful or not some of these characters are - but what's interesting is what's missing.

India has twice the number of English speakers as the United Kingdom.

A website written for an English speaking audience in India is likely to want the Latin subset of a font. But it will also want one local character - ₹ - U+20B9. The Rupee is the currency of India and its character is part of the "Currency Symbols" Unicode block.

So should the Rupee be part of the "Latin" subset?

Colonialism In Tech

The original complainant says:

this symbol [₹] is excluded (subsetted out) of many Latin fonts that originally included it due to an American assumption that English is not spoken in India.

I don't know whether their assumption about Google is correct. But it seems odd to specifically include € in Google's Latin subset, but not the Rupee. Latin is not synonymous with "European".

Through a quirk of history, the Dollar symbol - $ - is in Basic Latin. The Yen currency symbol - ¥ - is included in the Latin-1 Supplement, as is the Pound - £.

Roboto's Latin subset contains Old English characters like þ (Thorn) and Ð (Eth).

Are obsolete characters used only in mediaeval text really more important to include than the currency for a billion people?

Google do include the ₹ in their "Latin Extended" subset. So if an Indian user wants to use their currency, they need to download a separate font which includes 1,011 characters they don't need.

This is inefficient. It increases the download weight and energy usage of billions of people.

Some Simple Solutions

There are a few things which can be done here.

I think that Google probably should include a popular currency symbol in their Latin subset font. Yes, there's a risk that the font might grow in size as more useful symbols are added. And, no, Latin doesn't mean English and English doesn't mean Indian - but we're all trying to get along on this crowded planet. So let's be flexible.

Google could create an "en_IN" subset which includes all the popular and useful characters needed by an Indian audience. It seems like there is sufficient demand for it.

Users should use the Google Font API to create a subset which has only the specific characters they want. That way they aren't reliant on the whims of a megacorp to decide what counts for their language.

Finally, as developers, we should understand that what is "logical" and "orderly" isn't always how our users see things. We have a huge range of biases and unexamined assumptions. Some of the earliest foundations of computer science are based on a very rigid and limited set of assumptions about the world. Let's do our best to be more inclusive.

Run a Google search for “black girls”—what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.

One of the essential texts of the algorithmic age. It neatly sets out how Google (and it is almost exclusively Google in this book) has corrupted the way we view the world. The writing is a bit "academic" for my liking - but it is a compelling read and shows the reader how Google's putrefying lens distorts everything.

There are a few things which I found a bit annoying. It is mostly focussed on the African-American experience. Other races and cultures don't get much of a look-in. So many books about the Internet's problems are really about the American Internet.

The book correctly identifies that Google is too big to effectively regulate and should be broken up. That's something I agree with. Too much of Google's efforts go into promoting other Google products, rather than what's best for the user. But that doesn't solve the problem of monetising misinformation.

There's a distressing example of an American terrorist who searched "black on white crime" and got radicalised because one of the prominent search results was racist misinformation. A search today reveals a very different set of results:

But this leads me to my major criticism of the book - who should decide what information should be surfaced? The original Google returned "neutral" results - in that the algorithm didn't take any human intervention and thus returned results in line with current biases. The current Google results are, of course, tweaked to ensure Google remains profitable - and that means removing offensive or hateful content.

Should Google be more editorial in its search results? Should it be a radical librarian and redirect people to things need rather than want? Again, I like the sound of that - but the book gives no indication of how that would work, nor the dangers it would bring.

A brilliant, if sometimes frustrating, book.

You’re British. Your parents are British. Your partner, your children and most of your friends are British. So why do people keep asking where you’re from? We are a nation in denial about our imperial past and the racism that plagues our present. Brit(ish) is Afua Hirsch’s personal and provocative exploration of how this came to be – and an urgent call for change.

Yes! This is the book I've been longing to read. The American experience of race and identity seems to dominate both literature and the general discussion of such issues. Afua Hirsch captures the quintessentially British experience of our mangled approach to race.

It's a deeply personal book - expertly straying between emotional autobiography and dispassionate statistics. That works brilliantly and drags the reader through some uncomfortable territory.

With books like this, I always find it hard to separate the experiences I think everyone has, with the racist experiences the author has. She recalls being nicknamed "Shaggy" after the only other black person her peers knew. I was called "Trent Darby" for a spell - after the only other "Terence" known to kids in my class. I don't say this to make the experiences sound equivalent - but to point out that kids are equal opportunity bastards and will pick on anyone and anything. Her schoolmates were being racist - but they would have taken any cheap shot.

The quest for identity isn't something I can relate to. I don't know if that's because I'm suffused in it or because I find it a suspicious concept. The book points out the brutality of the English culture being defined only in opposition to the change unfolding around it.

The book also skewers some of the self-serving myths around the UK's tolerant past - and present. Overall, a compelling and timely read.

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.

Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.

I have mixed feelings about this book. It doesn't contain much new data - to people who have been paying attention - but it does synthesise everything neatly to present a compelling case.

But, like many similar books, it is relentlessly American. And, almost exclusively African-American. That's not to detract from its central point, but it does rather limit the discussion.

It's incredibly well referenced - almost to the point of making it difficult to read. But - related to the above - it does have a number of cultural blind-spots. One sentence in particular assumes the reader knows what "Shondaland" is. Do you have any clue? Turns out it's an American TV production company.

For all that, it is a brilliant read and full of well-nuanced arguments. One part which took my breath away was this:

However, a universalizing lens may actually hide many of the dangers of discriminatory design, because in many ways Black people already live in the future. The plight of Black people has consistently been a harbinger of wider processes – bankers using financial technologies to prey on Black homeowners, law enforcement using surveillance technologies to control Black neighborhoods, or politicians using legislative techniques to disenfranchise Black voters – which then get rolled out on an even wider scale. An #AllLivesMatter approach to technology is not only false inclusion but also poor planning, especially by those who fancy themselves as futurists.

Emphasis added

What an amazing spin on "the future's here, it's just not evenly distributed.

The end of the book goes off on a slightly weird tangent about design thinking. It feels out of place, and I'm not sure I followed the argument.

I sound grumpy, and I don't know why. Probably because I don't like my assumptions about technology challenged. This is a timely and useful book. It captures the reality of how technology creates and perpetuates a racial underclass.

I think I need to find some more UK focussed books. Suggestions welcome!

Individually, they are tiny pinpricks of discrimination. None of them large enough to be worth kicking up a fuss. Each one easy to dismiss as a faux-pas.

When I experience them it's a painful reminder that some people think I don't belong.

At a recent diversity workshop, I was introduced to the phrase "Micro-Incivilities".

It was new to me - and to most attendees. It covers the same behaviour, but subtly shifts the emphasis to make the transgressor feel more comfortable.

As I understand it (and I'm no expert) the theory is this. Most people using micro-aggressions are not being aggressive. They're not shouting at you, punching you, or dominating you. What they're doing is the equivalent of rolling their eyes, talking over you, or ignoring you. They're being rude.

If you criticise someone for being aggressive - so it was described - then they are likely to react negatively. Aggression is seen as a deliberate and severe way to cause harm.

But if you tell someone they were rude... Well... We've all been unintentionally rude, right? Being rude is unfortunate, but it isn't show-stopping. We understand that if our behaviour is seen as rude, it's up to us to modify it.

Hence, micro-incivilities.

You can read more about the theory.

I have mixed feelings. I'm not sure that centring the needs of the transgressor is as important as acknowledging the pain of the victim. And incivilities sounds a little minimising.

But, if people are more likely to change their behaviour if they are told they are being rude... who am I to argue?

I suspect that, whatever the merits of the argument, the original phrase is here to stay.

A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptised in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From long-forgotten records emerge the remarkable stories of Africans who lived free in Tudor England…

They were present at some of the defining moments of the age. They were christened, married and buried by the Church. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. The untold stories of the Black Tudors, dazzlingly brought to life by Kaufmann, will transform how we see this most intriguing period of history.

I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time at school learning about the Tudors. I even went to see the recovered wreck of Mary Rose. Twice! All we were taught was the lives of Kings and Queens. We didn't hear about any commoners, so this book is a blessed relief - it is an in-depth look at ordinary people in Tudor Britain who were Black.

We hear about trumpeters in the Royal Court, freed slaves, pirates, and milkmaids - a delightful stream of anecdotes drawn from the historial record.

This is very similar to The Five by Hallie Rubenhold. The authors both perform the same sleight of hand - take a scrap of information from an official document and attempt to weave a narrative around it.

Don't get me wrong - it works, but the words "perhaps", "maybe", and "it is possible" do a lot of heavy lifting here. It spends a bit too much time focussing on the historical background of some of the peripheral white character - but it is well researched and gives us a tantalising glimpse into historic British attitudes to race.

It's a great book and well worth reading.

Particularly recommended for racist uncles who whine about "hIStOrICal AccUrAcy!"

For millennia, dominant societies have had the habit of believing their own people to be the best, deep down: the more powerful they become, the more power begins to be framed as natural, as well as cultural. When you see how power has shaped the idea of race, then you can start to understand its meaning.

In the twenty-first century, we like to believe that we have moved beyond scientific racism, that most people accept race as a social construct, not a biological one. But race science is experiencing a revival, fuelled by the misuse of science by certain political groups.

The thing I don't get about racists is - even if they were right, so what? If people from group X are Y% worse at something than people from group Z - does it matter?

Let's take intelligence. Even if you could reliably tell what race someone is (you can't) and you knew that race's average intelligence (again, you can't) all that tells you it that the individual is somewhere on a bell-curve.

But we aren't randomly selecting people out of a pool in order to turn them into astronauts and presidents. We're in an era of hyper-personalisation. We have the resources to treat people as individuals when it comes to learning, medical needs, and employment.

The race science argument is flawed and, even if it were accurate, it would be little more than a curio.

This is, obviously, a timely book. It neatly skewers some of the pernicious myths about race "science" and gives a good overview of how we came to this point.

It's also an excellent introduction for why many of our ideas about race are just social constructs.

The book is well paced and sets out its argument clearly and logically. A highly recommended read.

Philosophy of Race: An Introduction provides plainly written access to a new subfield that has been in the background of philosophy since Plato and Aristotle. Part I provides an overview of ideas of race and ethnicity in the philosophical canon, egalitarian traditions, race in biology, and race in American and Continental Philosophy. Part II addresses race as it operates in life through colonialism and development, social constructions and institutions, racism, political philosophy, and gender. This book constructs an outline that will serve as a resource for students, nonspecialists, and general readers in thinking, talking, and writing about philosophy of race.

This book is part of the Palgrave Philosophy Today book series.

This collection of essays is designed to be an introduction to the philosophy of race. This is firmly pitched at a beginner lever - and I'm glad of it. It sets out historic and contemporary ideas about race, racial identity, and prejudice.

It mostly focuses on American racial issues. There are some interesting diversion into historical European attitudes, and a brief look at the Rwandan genocide. There's a quick passage on Japan, and a look at the caste system in India - but almost nothing else. The locus is firmly on USA. That's disappointing, but understandable.

A few minor criticisms. In one essay, the author cites Reddit(!) as the source for a historic economic claim. As it happens, the currency conversion tool cited on Reddit disagrees with her calculation by a factor of 20.

The author believes that the people who live in the country of "Whales" are called the "Welch"!

Intersectionality gets a chapter but, again, very American focussed.

If you want an overview of the philosophical ideas behind our modern understanding of race, this is a great start.

Both the PDF and ePUB are currently free when downloaded directly from the publisher.

Decentralised sticker production is a mixed blessing. Anyone with a printer and an Internet connection can print off dozens of lo-fi propaganda hits.

Of course, the crappy stickers were of crappy quality.

All the stickers in my community were removed. I reported them to the police, which took the issue seriously but - as they said - they can't exactly dust rain-sodden stickers for finger prints. So, next time you see a hateful defacement, report it to your local council on FixMyStreet - and do feel free to remove it. Or, replace it with something more uplifting.

Brett Roberts

@brettroberts

Brilliant ! pic.x.com/v8OSVsDMrr

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In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist. Angela Y. Davis

Exploring issues from eradicated black history to the political purpose of white dominance, whitewashed feminism to the inextricable link between class and race, Reni Eddo-Lodge offers a timely and essential new framework for how to see, acknowledge and counter racism. It is a searing, illuminating, absolutely necessary exploration of what it is to be a person of colour in Britain today.

Sparked off by her explosively popular blog post, this is a timely and deliberately provocative book.

Some parts absolutely struck a chord with me - especially the lack of education in Britain about the country's role in the slave trade. I also found the discussion of the structural biases within certain institutions to be extremely relevant.

If I'm being selfish, I'd have liked to have seen some discussion of events like the Battle of Bamber Bridge, where white British people weren't quite as awful as they might have been.

I felt the polemic occasionally got in the way of the argument. But perhaps this isn't a subject which deserves dispassionate analysis.

All that's thin criticism to an excellent and convincing book. Highly recommended.

The lectures are consistently interesting - although of inconsistent audio quality - and offer a fascinating glimpse into the minds of its speakers.

Last night, the crackly audio gave way to a familiar voice; Nelson Mandela.

In this lecture from April 2000, Mandela talks about how people should comment on and judge African leaders.

One of the key point that he makes is that leaders like him came from a family with no history of education. He went to school hungry and unable to concentrate. The schooling he received was not in a fully equipped classroom, nor did he have dedicated teachers. Crucially, the language of education was not the same language as he spoke at home.

To me, it's almost the perfect "check your privilege" to journalists, world leaders, and anyone watching.