Being Brown in a Black and White World: Conversations for Leaders about Race, Racism and Belonging

Product Information

I want my kids to have peers who are also navigating the world as kids of color, who can provide that space to exhale, and who can say, “Yeah, I get it. I married a white man that I loved and started a family; I made white friends who I felt accepted me for who I am and with whom I felt safe, and I moved into a community that, on the surface, felt both diverse and welcoming of diversity.

Universities are acting on a swathe of recommendations, including engaging with schools, hosting more talks and looking to diversify reading lists and course content. For my parents ( who came here in the 1960s) racism was an ever-present part of their early lives in the UK.

I am faced with the choice of staying quiet and swallowing that repeated experience of oppression or speaking up and risking angering and alienating my white peers. This contrasts with Piet Uithalder, the fictional protagonist of the satirical column "Straatpraatjes" (whose actual author was never revealed but who is believed to have been Abdullah Abdurahman) that appeared in the Dutch-Afrikaans section of the newspaper APO between May 1909 and February 1922.

That wasn’t the cause of Black disease, of Black death, and even Black people being disproportionately arrested and incarcerated. Mr Stevens had allegedly rejected claims made by Ms May that the NHS had been given more funding than required.He spoke of them in warm-hearted terms: “The large numbers of doctors from overseas who come to add to their experience in our hospitals … provide a useful and substantial reinforcement of the staffing of our hospitals and … are an advertisement to the world of British medicine and British hospitals. He said systematic racial biases meant that “Asian doctors ended up working in the Cinderella services of the NHS”, faithfully capturing the fact that migrant doctors were shunted towards less desirable specialties and towns, away from the prestigious teaching hospitals and towards the under-resourced peripheries of the country.

Diversity specialist and business psychologist Prof Binna Kandola says it can be easy for BAME students to feel excluded by lack of representation in the historical account.

He is the author of The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory and the coeditor, with Felice Picano, of Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing. In effect, they were trapped, semi-voluntarily, in a system that promised much, but was, in practice, nearly impossible for migrants to succeed in. The result was that two-thirds of these migrating doctors ended up working in specialties that were not their first choice, and half were not satisfied with their experience of the NHS.