Indigo Jo on June 20th, 2010

Just over a week ago, the team behind the blog FWD/Forward decided to hold a “blogswarm” dedicated to busting myths about Helen Keller and demonstrating that there was more to her than the “water over the hand” clichés commonly taught in schools (you can find some contributions in the comments to that post). When the […]

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Continue reading about Juneteenth and Helen Keller: fabricating a controversy

Indigo Jo on June 8th, 2010

Student kicked out of class because of her hair product? This article got flagged up on Facebook: an African-American schoolgirl was kicked out of class by a white teacher in Seattle because her hair was “sickening” because of the hair product the girl used. It looks like some people are trying to make a race […]

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Continue reading about When your cosmetics make others ill

Indigo Jo on May 27th, 2010

Black Women are Perceived as a Threat (from Womanist Musings) I wrote about the relationship of Muslims to “white privilege” here last May as part of a carnival organised by Brooke of Rolling Ruminations, and followed it up with a post about how complaints about discrimination by convert Muslims are sometimes met with responses like […]

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Continue reading about What part of this is a privilege?

Indigo Jo on May 24th, 2010

Today’s Guardian had an exclusive story on how South Africa negotiated the purchase of nuclear weapons from Israel in the 1970s, and that there are documents that prove that Israel in fact had the weapons, which they have never confirmed or denied. The paper has three pages (stories here: [1], [2], [3]) on the news […]

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Continue reading about Israel and old South Africa made ready allies

Indigo Jo on January 15th, 2010

Defamation, a documentary researched and presented by the Israeli journalist Yoav Shamir, was part of More4’s True Stories slot and was on Tuesday night. The idea that anti-Semitism was somewhat overhyped and used to muzzle criticism of Israel is not new, but what many people don’t know is how obsessed the media and state in […]

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Continue reading about Defamation: perception and reality of anti-Semitism

Indigo Jo on December 16th, 2009

Today, the British Supreme Court ruled that the policy of the Jews’ Free School (or JFS) of taking converts to Judaism only when they had been through one denomination’s conversion ritual rather than another was racially discriminatory. The problem was that the school accepted that people who could trace their Jewish ancestry through the maternal […]

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Continue reading about Supreme Court bans JFS racial discrimination

Indigo Jo on December 8th, 2009

Rod Liddle has managed to outdo himself this past week, with two shockingly bigoted and ignorant articles on the Spectator’s website the same day. One of them is in support of the ban on minarets which was passed the Sunday before last in Switzerland; the other is a short blast about black crime and black […]

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Continue reading about The Spectator: where arrogant privilege meets bigotry

Indigo Jo on November 30th, 2009

I’ve been asked to offer my opinion on the result of yesterday’s referendum on minarets in Switzerland, perhaps inevitably. I had expected such a law to be passed, contrary to the opinion polls which suggested that it wouldn’t, because a country where a major party can use such openly racist imagery as the “black sheep” […]

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Continue reading about The Swiss minaret law and its implications

Indigo Jo on November 3rd, 2009

New Statesman - There’s nothing to debate about racism Mehdi Hasan, the NS’s senior politics editor, on why racism should be condemned and fought, not indulged and appeased: I recently sat in a radio studio debating with a caller who turned out to be a BNP supporter. “Michael” claimed that I could never be “true […]

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Continue reading about No point debating racists

Indigo Jo on October 19th, 2009

There is a Panorama programme on tonight (BBC1, 8:30pm BST) about two Asian Muslim journalists who spent two months undercover in a Bristol housing estate, and encountered overt racist hostility, including both name-calling (Paki, Taliban etc) and physical assaults, when they left their flat. The abuse came from people of all ages. You can see […]

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Continue reading about Panorama: hate on the estate (updated)

Indigo Jo on October 5th, 2009

So, I’m sure everyone in the UK has heard that Anton du Beke (a BBC presenter and Strictly Come Dancing contestant) told his partner Laila Rouass, after she had applied a fake tan, “you look like a Paki”. This has caused quite a bit of controversy, as you might expect, with some calls for him […]

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Continue reading about He didn’t just call her a Paki

Indigo Jo on September 27th, 2009

BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - File on 4, 22/09/2009 File on 4 investigates the football hooligan racists who have been going around causing trouble in various British cities. They claim to be against “Muslim extremism”, but their chants include phrases distinctly offensive to any Muslims, “extremist” or otherwise, and people who have tried […]

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Continue reading about File on 4 investigates football racists

Indigo Jo on August 24th, 2009

Last week, a South African female runner who won the gold medal by a very clear margin (albeit because of a surge in the last minute or so) in the World Athletics Championships in Berlin had her gender questioned, as she has a rather deep voice and a masculine appearance, despite by all accounts having […]

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Continue reading about If it looks like a bloke …

Indigo Jo on August 1st, 2009

Recently the papers and talk shows have been abuzz about a woman in her thirties who has had thirteen babies, all of whom have been taken away from her — most of them at birth — and put up for adoption. Her early ones suffered severe neglect and some were born with disabilities. Neither she […]

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Continue reading about Sterilisation: it wasn’t just the Nazis

Indigo Jo on July 29th, 2009

Moi Ali on the incompetence of the Equality and Human Rights Commission | Society | The Guardian This appeared on the front page of the Guardian Society supplement today, and was flagged up on the front page of the paper itself. Moi Ali tells how she tried to get help from the Equality and Human […]

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Continue reading about Further evidence of Human Rights Commission incompetence

Indigo Jo on July 23rd, 2009

Perhaps to my discredit, I have not taken a great interest in the workings of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the successor to several official equality commissions set up to monitor various anti-discrimination laws (one for sex, one for race, one for disability, of those I know), but the appointment of Trevor Phillips — […]

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Continue reading about Big Trev’s leadership pushes out equality staff

In the recent discussion on White privilege and the Muslim community, it has been suggested that white converts to Islam who experience both discrimination and difficulty in integrating to their new community have the option of simply taking off their hijabs or robes and shortening their beards somewhat, and all their problems will go away, […]

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Continue reading about White Privilege part 2: if you don’t like the heat …

Indigo Jo on May 16th, 2009
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Continue reading about White privilege and the white convert

Indigo Jo on April 27th, 2009
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Continue reading about Kids are kids

Indigo Jo on March 7th, 2009
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Continue reading about The anti-Semitic holiday destination