Leaders in SHAPE: Gary Younge
7 Sep 2020

Meet the most influential figures within and beyond academia shaping the fields of social sciences, humanities and the arts.
As part of the Leaders in SHAPE series, award-winning author, broadcaster, professor and newly elected Honorary Fellow of the British Academy Gary Younge joins Desmond King to discuss his life and career.
Join the conversation online too, using the hashtag #ThisIsSHAPE.
Speaker: Professor Gary Younge Hon FBA, Professor of Sociology, University of Manchester; Journalist and Author
Chair: Professor Desmond King FBA, Andrew W Mellon Professor of American Government, University of Oxford
The following transcript was developed using speech recognition software and human transcribers. Although all care has been taken to check, proofread and correct the transcript, it may contain errors.
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00:00:04
Professor Desmond King FBA: Good afternoon and welcome to this British Academy event. I am Desmond King FBA, a fellow of the Academy and a professor of American government. Founded in 1902, the British Academy is the UK's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. We are an independent fellowship of world leading scholars, a funding body that supports new research nationally and internationally, and a forum for debate and engagement.
Today's event is the first in our new series of Leaders in SHAPE. SHAPE refers to social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy. Very pithy, as you can see. We’re in this series to meet the most influential figures within and beyond academia who are shaping the fields of social sciences, humanities and the arts.
It gives me enormous pleasure to welcome Professor Gary Younge to our virtual stage to launch the series. Gary, as many of you will know, is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester. He was formerly a columnist at The Guardian. He's written numerous books, the most recent of which is Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicles of Ten Short Lives.
I'm delighted to say he was elected to an honorary fellowship of the British Academy this year. Very warm congratulations on that, Gary. And it's very good news for the academy to have you among the fellowship.
Today, we are going to discuss Gary's life and career for around 30 minutes before taking a selection of audience questions. If you would like to ask a question, please submit this in the YouTube chat section. You're also welcome to tweet during the event and can copy in the Academy's Twitter handle, @BritishAcademy_.
Gary, welcome and thank you for joining us. To start our conversation I wanted to touch on an article that you wrote for The Guardian in which you said that much of the politics that has informed your writing came from your mother. And in one of your books, there's a very moving essay where you describe travelling back from Edinburgh, where you were studying to London at the time she passed. Can you tell us about her influence on your life and how your upbringing shaped your sense of identity and engagement and so forth?
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00:02:38
Professor Gary Younge FBA (Hon): Yes. Also, thank you very much for having me here and for taking the time.
My mum's influence was really split into two sections and one was her life, really. She came to Britain and she would have been 18 or 19 after A levels, became a nurse, had three kids. My dad left. She raised us on her own. Switched to teaching and there was a resilience about her life and a kind of toughness to her, which shaped an awful lot of how I deal with things. She'd say if life was fair I'd be a millionaire. It's not fair. You got to get on with it and so on.
But also, she led by example, and she would face people down. The first time I heard the term "ethnic minority" was when there were some people shouting abuse at us up the street. They wouldn't stop. She called the police, ask them to talk to them, and the policeman said, “Well, you're an ethnic minority, so you'll have to learn to deal with this.” I said to my mum "what’s an ethnic minority". I must have been about five or six. And she said, "well, he thinks that means that they can do whatever they want to us, but they can't." And then she called the police station back and said "I asked for a policeman and you sent me an idiot. Send me a policeman."
So there was this toughness and she would stand down union officials, neighbours and so on, but she would also stand up for people. And she was a community activist. She ran a local disco. She had this thing that really shaped my political identity that these are your people. And she had a very anti-racist, anti-colonial outlook, but these were your people. They were white working class people and Irish people.
She made me stay up and watch the Holocaust miniseries and she said this is your story. She had this way of saying, look, this is all a part of you, and you are a part of it, and the main way that shaped my social identity, if you like, is to feel that I had an ironic relationship with almost every single community that I was a part of.
I was Black, but we grew up in Stevenage where there were few Black people. We were working class, but we were Black and working class, and we were also driven to do really well at school. We were British, but not quite. We were Barbadian, but not quite. And so you have an almost gimlet-eyed view of whatever you were in. You were always on the edge.
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00:05:56
Professor Desmond King FBA: It's fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Thank you for that. Just moving on to your career, then. We'll come back, perhaps, to some of those thoughts later on.
While most people will know you as a writer and broadcaster, now a professor of sociology, you began your career teaching English in a UN refugee school in Sudan, I believe, teaching Eritrean refugees, before you went to study French and Russian. Do you have a particular interest in studying languages? Did you have teachers who were encouraging in this, or was it something that just came to you from your experiences in this year abroad?
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00:06:44
Professor Gary Younge FBA (Hon): I did French at my local FE college, and I had this wonderful teacher Pierre who really gave me the gift of learning because I started doing this course, I was 13 or 14, and I said to him, “How much homework do we have to do?” And he said, “You don't have to do any. You don't have to be here.” And I thought this was wonderful, and I did none, and I got no better. And then there was this switch went off in my mind – you really don't have to be here. You can go home. I mean, you have to answer to your mum if you do go home, but you could go home, but what's the point of being here?
It was the beginning of understanding, and it was a gift because it was at such a young age that you own your education. That this is for you. It's not really for anybody else. And I got good at French. I was interested in the Soviet Union and I wasn't very good at German or very interested in Germany. But languages were also a way of traveling, and I knew I wanted to travel. I didn't know exactly where I wanted to travel, but I knew I wanted to travel, so languages was partly about what I got to first, but it was also the means of getting around.
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00:08:32
Professor Desmond King FBA: You might have a view now about language teaching, that there should be more of it in Britain at the moment. Compared to countries like the Netherlands or Germany or Scandinavian countries, for instance, it seems we're much closer to America, where few languages are taught in high school.
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00:08:54
Professor Gary Younge FBA (Hon): Yeah, I think that there is something about how you position yourself. If you think that everybody is going to speak your language, if you think that it's natural that you should go to Germany and people will listen to you, then that speaks to how you're going to understand the world. It speaks to what your position is going to be in the world.
It is quite stunning quite often when people talk about particularly asylum seekers and refugees who come to this country and they talk about them being grifters and scroungers and adding nothing. And I think for starters, they're probably on their third or fourth language when they're talking to you, and sometimes they speak better English than the people who are berating them.
So there is definitely something about how one sees oneself and how one understands one’s culture and one’s place in the world and language because most of the world, I think is bilingual or it's certainly multilingual. Most people in the world have to negotiate some other language in their life where we're quite rare in that.
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00:10:12
Professor Desmond King FBA: Yes, I agree. Just moving on then. At the end of your university years, you won a bursary from The Guardian to study journalism at university and then joined The Guardian as a journalist where you worked for some time. What drew you to journalism and did you have alternative careers that you had thought about or were you just focused on this?
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00:10:41
Professor Gary Younge FBA (Hon): I didn’t really have alternative careers. When I finished university, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I’d trained to be a translator and an interpreter. I was fairly sure when I finished that I didn't want to do that. But what it taught me was the joy of language and manipulating language, and what I loved about journalism was it gave me the opportunity to tell stories, and to make arguments. And so it was the first thing that I’d done that I really enjoyed, that I got paid for. And I thought, well, you know, I'll try this.
Tellingly, The Guardian had a bursary scheme for ethnic minorities and people who would otherwise be discouraged from going into journalism, and so that was also a signal to me. Well, it looks like this is a place this is a profession where you might thrive, where there’s a gap in the market.
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00:11:54
Professor Desmond King FBA: That’s very interesting indeed. And then as a journalist, you’ve worked in many places and you’ve reported from the Caribbean, from Africa, from Europe, and particularly from the United States, which I’ll come to in a minute.
I very much enjoyed your reporting from other places. Some of your essays are collected together into one of your volumes. You have a brilliant essay on the Rose of Tralee, which appeals to me in particular, of course. But it not only tells us about that event, but puts it in the context of Irish history, economic development, and the political changes that have occurred in the Republic of Ireland since the 1990s.
Now it's America that has arguably had the most impact, it seems, on your life and career with books covering the civil rights movement, inequality, racial divisions, immigration, and so forth. You worked as The Guardian's US correspondent for 12 years. Can you reflect on that time and what sort of pressures you felt under and what the key issues were during those years? I know that's a rather broad question, but you may have one or two wins that seem valuable for us today.
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00:13:13
Professor Gary Younge FBA (Hon): Well, it was a very rich time. I arrived a few months before the Iraq War, so there was that. Then there was the 2004 election, then Hurricane Katrina, then Obama, the crash, the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, and then Black Lives Matter, and I left shortly before Trump. When I left, everybody thought that could never happen.
It was a rich time. And there were a few things I was constantly stunned by. They would talk about the kind of lost innocence, and they seem very careless about this innocence. They would lose their innocence and then they would find it again just in time for the next tragedy or travesty.
And a kind of a real panic, which I think we're seeing the [inaudible] of that now, is with the demographics that white people will be a minority sometime in the next 20 to 25 years and an urgency within an element of white nativist America to protect itself, though, from what it was never quite clear.
So these centuries old divisions, you know, back to the Civil War and before are returning and unravelling. And I was also just struck by the power of the idea that African Americans whose parents have been denied the vote, whose experience was one of degradation or discrimination or they would still believe in the notion. Many of them would believe that it had been denied them.
I heard a few people say “When I grew up, I always thought that America was the best place in the world. It just wasn’t the best place in the world for me,” which speaks to an incredible local cultural power, really.
I guess the other thing that really struck me, particularly during the Obama years, was this, and it links to that last point, tension, the conflict between symbols and substance that people really, particularly African Americans, but not only by any means, felt. Obama kind of personified desire for a cosmopolitan, worldly, métissage, a way of being as new, different country symbolically.
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00:17:01
I was in South Carolina when he won and the crowds were shouting, "race doesn't matter, race doesn't matter". Well, there's a Confederate flag on the top of the statehouse, so it mattered to someone, but the degree to which he symbolised the hope for a considerable number of people, not just African Americans, and how the substance of what he achieved or one may say what he could achieve was so much more limited than the symbolic value of who he was.
So when Black Lives Matter started under his presidency, it took place with almost no reference to him at all. It was out there somewhere else. He was the picture in the barbershop and the bodega. And then there was this other thing going on. So African Americans could be the president or Black Americans could be President, but they couldn't necessarily walk down the street without getting shot.
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00:18:09
Professor Desmond King FBA: That's a very vivid account. I like very much like the distinction between symbols, substance and their significance. I mean just building on this, on your wins there, your most recent book is called Another Day and the Death of America, A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives, and for those who don't know, it's built on the premise that on an average day in America, seven children or teenagers are shot dead, killed by gunfire.
You picked a random day in November 2013 and wrote about the 10 young lives lost on this day, and I think your aim was to alert Americans, and the wider world about the victims of gun violence, most of whom receive no coverage in national news.
If we fast forward to now, September 2020, seven years later and gun crime, police brutality and racial violence in America are dominating the news worldwide. While the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, including poor Michael Brown back in May 2014, in Ferguson, are fuelling these protests, does it feel like there's been a step, change or no change in how society and the media are responding to these atrocities?
You have a lovely quote in your one of your books that you say that the idea that journalists can be objective is nothing less than insidious. I wonder if that's relevant to how these events should be covered.
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00:19:51
Professor Gary Younge FBA (Hon): It's a very good question. I feel that there are elements of the very clear morality play that can cut through sometimes. So the video showed white policemen with the badge killing George Floyd. That can cut through and then there are the less clear morality plays which are still the consequence of inequality and discrimination and so on, of the just sheer number of Black people who are killed by gunfire.
First of all, there is a way in which, if Black people die in certain areas in certain ways, no matter how young, then it doesn't really interrupt the notion of how the world works. It confirms it. And then there are moments, say, like with George Floyd, where it's not that in a sense we look at that and think "how could this happen?" We think "oh my God, it's happening again."
There is something about the recurrent, and it does make you think of all the ones that aren't videoed, and all the ones that don't start a bushfire, because what was peculiar about Black Lives Matter is as far as I was aware, there wasn't an increase in the number of Black people being killed by the police. There was just an increase in the awareness that Black people were being killed by the police, which is what I think we are dealing with now, which is a growing consciousness.
To come back to your question about journalism. When I was training to be a journalist at City University, there was this phrase we were taught, and it was framed in this gendered way. If a dog bites a man, that's not a story because we know about dogs biting people, but if a man bites a dog, that's a story.
There are times when I think journalists have to stop and think and ask, “But who owns these dogs? And why do they keep biting the same people? And how can we keep these dogs under control?” I'm not saying the policemen are dogs here. I'm just saying that sometimes the things that we have become used to are actually appalling. And we have simply factored it in to matters of life and death.
So any number of times with journalists, I would call them about the children who had been killed on that day, and I would say, did you follow it up? Did you speak to anybody from the family? And they would say it's not really a big surprise that a kid would get killed down there. And so this is where I think the notion of Black Lives Matter comes from is because they don't, actually, to large numbers of people with significant amounts of power.
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00:23:31
Professor Desmond King FBA: That's very telling. Thank you very much for that. I think that fits very well with my own understanding and how I would see it. I think one of the most frightening images in the last few months, and there have been many, is of that couple in Saint Louis who were brandishing their weapons as a peaceful march walked by their house, and we've seen them subsequently. So the gun culture is terribly important in the US.
I love your account from City University. It reminds me of when I was growing up and the writer Flann O'Brien used to have a column in the Irish Times called Man Bites Dog each week with various humorous accounts of what was going on in the Irish Civil Service where he worked at the time.
We're going to come to the end and go on to questions fairly soon. I would just like to ask you two quick questions. First, Gary, one is about what you're planning to write from your position in Manchester, and now as a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester, and if you see that as a particular change in focus, and I also wanted to ask you a bit about the what's been going on in Britain, particularly, to deal with Windrush and the response to that. But let's take the Manchester agenda first. What are you thinking of working on?
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00:25:23
Professor Gary Younge FBA (Hon): Well, before I'd even got the job at Manchester, I had started to work on post-war Black Europe, which has long been a real interest of mine, but has crystallised of late.
I mean I studied French and Russian. I speak German. I actually graduated in 1992, the year of the Single European Act, and the complicated notion of Black people in Europe, not least because if you look at the Euro bill, you see, particularly if you're lucky enough to have a €50, down, I think, on the left-hand corner, these islands. That is because it's where the euro is used. And of course, it's in French Guiana and Martinique and Guadeloupe and Réunion and Saint Martin for the Dutch and so on.
At the end of the war, actually under European jurisdiction, not necessarily citizens, non-white people outnumbered white people. Britain had India and certain countries, and France had big chunks of Africa and the process by which those places disengaged and then re-engaged through migration, which is kind of where I come from, literally, I think is worthy of more examination. I mean, we look a lot at Black America, and rightly so. I think there's a lot to learn closer to home.
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00:27:20
Professor Desmond King FBA: That's very helpful. Thank you very much. And then I just wanted to finish with a reference. The wonderful book by Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. There was a new edition in 2018 and you wrote the foreword. You said of the book that it “provides us with the necessary tools to unravel the morass of self-congratulation, myth, laconic nostalgia, and hollow, narrowly tailored remorse that tends to underpin schedule moments of racial commemoration.”
Could you elaborate a bit on what these necessary tools were? You were talking about reconstructing history and understanding historical processes that have produced the present day, and felt it had a lot of resonance with the findings of Wendy Williams's investigation into the Windrush scandal, and particularly where she concludes, I think, very cautiously that there was an institutional failure but not institutional racism.
She does qualify that she was not given the criteria for institutional racism, so wasn't really able to investigate that, but what she describes as institutional failure seems to me fairly close to what we've come to think of as institutional racism from the US, and since the MacPherson inquiry. How does this account of history connect and allow us to understand these current sorts of events and findings?
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00:29:05
Professor Gary Younge FBA (Hon): I mean, it's a very good question. And I think, kind of interestingly, connected to current events. If one thinks of the Colston statue in Bristol and the peculiar accusation that that was about erasing history as opposed to memorialising a certain part of history, but also that now actually we would like more of British history to be told.
We would like to have you understand the full nature of British history, slavery. How do you understand Vanity Fair or Jane Eyre or Burmese Day? How do you understand those? Or Passage to India. How do you understand those without fully understanding the history of British colonialism, so we want a fuller account rather than a lesser account of British history. Those tools of excavation, which is what Peter Fryer did, and what other scholars have done, to say, look, we didn't just arrive yesterday. This country, the history of this country makes no sense without us.
That then does equip you to kind of understand what happened with the Windrush scandal in a very different way. It locates it as part of a continuum. It shows you where that institutional failure, if that's what it is, comes from – this selective amnesia, this refusal to connect the past and the present, and so to end up in this abstracted place where statues just arrived and Black people just arrived and there's no rhyme or reason to it. So I feel that the tools are one of establishing a coherent narrative, not just a Black history in Britain, but a British history both here and around the world.
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00:31:34
Professor Desmond King FBA: Thank you very much indeed, Gary. This has just been fascinating. I'll thank you more formally in a minute, but we have a number of questions coming in from people watching this discussion and hearing your account of the building of your career. And one question which has come in is quite pertinent to what we've just been discussing, I think, which is what advice do you have for young Black historians or social scientists who are attempting to build a career in academia?
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00:32:13
Professor Gary Younge FBA (Hon): I mean, that is quite tricky for me, just because I've only just joined. I've only just joined the Academy. Both the British Academy, but the academy in general.
I guess if I relate it to my broader career, I would say, plough the fields you're interested in in the hope, really, although that can bleed into knowledge, depending on how confident you are, that the market will sustain it. That there is a constituency out there for the things that you are interested in, and it's not going to be easy, and you're going to have to navigate institutionally the places where the money is, the places where the support is, and you're going to have to find community that all of those things are true.
I did not realise when I became a professor that a Black professor is somewhat like a white rhino. There are very few of us. I didn't realise just quite how scarce a commodity that was, but that the things that you are interested in are valid, and the things that you were interested in are useful, and that the world may not fully understand that yet. The Academy may not fully understand that yet, but that they can, and with sufficient effort, they will.
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00:34:03
Professor Desmond King FBA: Thank you. There's a couple of other questions. One is asking about the term "BAME". And the questioner argues that this is not “a true reflection of who we are as Black people”. However, what's your position or thoughts on the letters used in this?
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00:34:31
Professor Gary Younge FBA (Hon): BAME was invented while I was in America, I think. I don't particularly like it. I don't use it that often. You know, I might have to if I run out of synonyms.
But the question of blackness is a vexed one, and it's vexed because there's cultural blackness, descendants of Africa or not, and then there's political blackness.
So BAME is not a word that I would claim or covet, but I was raised in a period of time when politically Black, and that meant people who weren't white, who had suffered racism, who had a colonial experience, were understood as having enough in common to create a category, which didn't mean that there were none within that group Asians and – Black people and Africans and Caribbeans and so on.
But I'm of an age where I still find that as a working category for organising, I find that useful. As a cultural category for description, of course it is not. But then once you decide, well, that doesn't describe me, people often end up falling into their cultural lagers because black doesn't really describe most people either, apart from arguably phenotypically. If you've ever seen a Barbadian and a Jamaican go at it, or a Nigerian and a Ghanaian go at it, that Britain made us black.
This was Stuart Hall's point. He wasn't black before he came to Britain. In Jamaica that would have made no sense at all. And so while I don't use the term BAME, I think the issue of the descriptor is a constantly vexed one, and possibly necessarily so, because our experiences change and evolve and the constituencies that we are part of also change and evolve.
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00:37:09
Professor Desmond King FBA: Thank you. There are a lot of questions about American politics. Just to put two of them together. One is whether you think the Movement for Black Lives will peter out in the way that previous protests have and be forgotten, or whether it will be able to achieve significant change. And relatedly, there's several questions about the Obama presidency, with people wanting to know whether you were disappointed in his eight years, and whether there might be prospects for a Biden presidency to be able to tackle systemic racism more fundamentally.
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00:37:59
Professor Gary Younge FBA (Hon): So with the Obama presidency, I wasn't disappointed because I didn't expect that much. There was very little actual policy difference between him and Hillary when they stood, and his symbolic importance was always, to me, much more important than anything substantial. He was a fairly mainstream Democrat, and fairly mainstream Democrats generally don't achieve that much.
He did come in the middle of a crisis, and that crisis would have been an awful lot worse if the Republicans had won, I believe. But by the end of his presidency, he kind of have become "yes, I tried" and he did. The healthcare thing was good, and we've seen it being dismantled, and the fact that they can't dismantle it completely is important, but I never expected that much.
It was intriguing when he [was] announced on the weekend that my son was born, and people would say "this would be a wonderful thing for your son." And I would say to them, “How? Why?” And they’d say “Because it's great that he could be president.” That's wonderful, because my son's born in America. But it's much more likely that he could go to jail. The odds on him going to jail are much higher than him being president, and so I'm interested in a Black person who can limit the odds for my son going to jail.
I don't think the Black Lives Matter protests have actually petered out. I think that we're in a movement moment where things do burn brightly and then fade and then erupt somewhere else – Portland, Kenosha, Los Angeles, and it's much more difficult to track.
And I don't want to sound Pollyanna-ish, but there is a kind of pollination that happens. So we have these movements where Black Lives Matter is like a floating signifier that attaches itself to a kind of pre-existing movement or group and then gives it this broader significance.
It’s not like if you go to Chicago or Kenosha or L.A, that you will find a Black Lives Matter office. If you said "take me to your leader", there’s no leader. It’s a very decentralised, fast break, caffeinated by movement, caffeinated by social media.
I feel that Joe Biden's history when it comes to race is not great. He led the charge on the crime bill in 1994. I think he'll do what he's made to do. And he knew that he had to take on a young woman, and I think a Black woman, Vice-President. I don't think that would have been his choice generally. I think he knew that's what he had to do, so I think, like most leaders, he'll do what he's made to do.
There’s a great Frederick Douglass quote, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.” I would also say this about Joe Biden. He has to win first, and I don't think that's a foregone conclusion.
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00:42:17
Professor Desmond King FBA: Thank you. I agree very much with those analyses, Gary, particularly of the Obama presidency. We tend to forget that he really only had two years with strong support in the Congress, and then for the last six years, he faced opposition from a Republican Party that was remarkably unwilling to reach any sort of senses or accommodation with the Democrats.
The most outrageous example of this was the decision not to consider Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court for the last 12 or 14 months of his presidency, which was unprecedented. But that's where things were going, and we have a good sense of that now.
There are some other questions and we have time, I think, just for one more, and the question is about reparations. Somebody says, "do you see racism as a legacy of enslavement? And does the Movement for Black Lives add to the call for reparations? And what more can we do to achieve reparations?" This doesn't seem to me to be a particularly peculiarly American question, but a broader one. I wonder if you have any thoughts on it.
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00:43:40
Professor Gary Younge FBA (Hon): I do see it as a result of enslavement; I think it's very difficult not to. You have a country that is roughly 240 odd years as a slave state, and then is an apartheid state for 100 or so years, and then is a non-racial democracy in name, certainly, only for the best part of 60 years. It was a slave state much longer than it's not been. And so we should expect that history.
You know my granny knew people who had been enslaved or, you know, my wife, who's American, her dad grew up under segregation. My granny didn't know people who had been enslaved, she knew people whose parents or grandparents were enslaved. So it's not within my living memory or even my granny's living memory, but it was still able to be connected through people, if you like. And that doesn't even remotely mean that we have to live in the past, but you have to learn from the past. If in Britain we can talk about 1066 as a kind of founding moment, then why we can't talk about 1619 or much more recently, I'm not sure.
When it comes to reparations, I feel like there has to be some kind of collective restitution. There has to be some kind of recognition and that recognition has to take a material form. I did a documentary about artefacts in museums and had an interesting conversation with head of the British Museum, and he was saying, "you know, maybe we can loan the Benin bronzes back to Benin", and I said, "how can you loan something you stole?" And he said "there's a debate about that." And I said "what possible debate could there be?"
So there is this notion that does actually, in some ways, underpin this otherwise vague slogan, Black Lives Matter is the extent to which they matter. Can you just steal stuff from some people, take it, steal people, actually, or countries or resources? Just take it and never reinvest. Never give back, never return. So whether one calls it reparations or something else, there needs to be a reckoning with this historical injustice. And there hasn't been.
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00:47:02
Professor Desmond King FBA: Gary, thank you very much again for giving up your time to talk to us and to answer these questions, which no doubt were irritating at times, but your answers were extremely illuminating and interesting. Thank you very much indeed. And to the wider audience, just to remind you that this is the first in a series of events under the label of SHAPE of the British Academy. And for details of them, of other eminent interviewees coming up, please do look at the website. Thank you very much.
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00:47:39
Professor Gary Younge FBA (Hon): Thank you.
In the Leaders in SHAPE series, meet the most influential figures shaping the fields of social sciences, humanities and the arts for a conversation about their lives and careers. A video is made available on YouTube following the event.
If you have any questions about this talk, please email [email protected].
