A Quote by David Olusoga

Excusing or downplaying British racism with comparisons to the US is a bad habit with a long history.

David Olusoga

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Bad Bad Habit British Comparisons Habit History Long Long History Racism Us

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David Olusoga
British - Historian

The refusal to accept that the black presence in Britain has a long and deep history is not just a symptom of racism, it is a form of racism. It is part of a rearguard and increasingly unsustainable defence of a fantasy monochrome version of British history.

David Olusoga

If you sit down with British officers or British senior NCOs, they understand the sweep of history. They know the history of British forces not just in Afghanistan but the history of British successful counter-insurgencies - Northern Ireland, Malaysia.

Stanley A. McChrystal

Labour has a complex history with racism and internationalism. Political education about antisemitism and all forms of racism can help us reckon with that history, and ensure a socialist politics based on real equality becomes the common sense across the party.

Clive Lewis

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Quibbling over the definition of genocide does nothing but help obscure the long history of vicious racism and undeniable suffering of Indigenous people in this country. It's bad enough whatever you want to call it.

Neil Macdonald

The habit of a midwinter festivity had come by the dawn of history (and probably very long before) to seem a natural one to the British, and not one to be eradicated by changes of political or religious fashion. ... It was general custom in pagan Europe to decorate spaces with greenery and flowers for festivals, attested wherever records have survived.

Ronald Hutton

Part of the problem about authenticity is that virtues aren't the only things that are habit forming: the more someone behaves in a way that is damaging to self or to others, the more "natural" it will both seem and actually be. Spontaneity, left to itself, can begin by excusing bad behavior and end by congratulating vice.

N. T. Wright

How people keep correcting us when we are young! There is always some bad habit or other they tell us we ought to get over. Yet most bad habits are tools to help us through life.

Jack Nicklaus

There's a difference between racism and "I don't know any better. I'm clueless." Racism is like, "I'm trying to make you feel bad." That's racism.

Chris Rock

You cannot appease fascism by meeting it in the middle; you cannot beat racism by indulging or excusing it.

Mehdi Hasan

Critical Race Theory offers of discrimination frameworks as ways of understanding and eradicating racism. The focus on "discrimination" as the way to understand racism in the US has meant that racism is considered a question of discriminatory intentions - whether or not somebody intentionally left someone out or did something harmful because of their biased feelings about a person's race. This focus on individual racists with bad ideas hides the reality that racism exists wherever conditions of racialized maldistribution exist.

Dean Spade

Because of the long, long history of British shipping, immigration, trade, empire, missionaries, you can have a better shot at telling a worldwide story in the British Museum's collection than any other. Britain has been more connected with the rest of the world than any other country, for longer.

Neil MacGregor

British women's history was never confined to the British mainland; and contesting the narrative around enfranchisement shows us that rights were not bestowed by the state, but extracted from it by force.

Ash Sarkar

Politicians have been downplaying the importance of history as a subject in our schools but, if they had bothered to have a better grasp of history themselves, they might have avoided costly wars. Instead they act like children. The only time that they think matters is their own.

Tony Robinson

Let's turn British inventions into British industries, British factories and British jobs. Let them make pounds for us, not dollars marks or yen for others.

John Major

What we're seeing is a backlash against any attempt, whether from the world of scholarship or popular culture, to paint non-white people back into the British past. Those of us who write about this history have long been familiar with this.

David Olusoga

A Quote by David Olusoga

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