News

Students from the National Union of Black Students Campaign organised a demonstration where they whitened up their faces to demonstrate the opposition to the sacking of one of the UK few black Professors, Dr Nathaniel Coleman teaching at University College London.

At a recent UCL open day for new student and parents, NUS Black Students organised a ‘whitening up’ protest, borrowing from the creative theme that underpinned our recent and massively successful OBV election campaign.

Forty years ago, and it’s the day of the men’s Wimbledon final. I had been following the tournament, not as a great tennis fan but because, despite his best years being behind him, Arthur Ashe had overturned the odds to reach the final.

Not enough of us are raising our concerns about the disproportionate and increasing numbers of black men and other vulnerable groups within the prison system in a unified way. The figures are staggering - the ethnic minority prison population has doubled in a decade, a quarter of the people in prison now come from an ethnic minority community and Muslims make up 12% of the prison population.

Among Twitter’s 2,910 employees in the United States, only 49 are African American.  Figures released yesterday from the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) report show that black employees account for only 1.7% of the US-based company’s workforce despite the fact that black adults are among the greatest users of the social media site.

On a hot sticky evening at Draper House, South London the two men fighting it out for the leadership of the Liberal Democrat party - Tim Farron and Norman Lamb - had their most difficult, yet most inspiring hustings event to date in front of a largely BME audience.

As the contenders slugged it out, their biggest challenge was not necessarily from each other, but rather from the audience and the issues that were raised around race inequality.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/opinion/paul-krugman-greece-over-the-b...  

Civic Leadership Programme

The Civic Leadership Programme is designed to help more people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds get active in civic and political life.

The Civic Leadership Programme is a partnership between Lewisham Council and Operation Black Vote.

The programme

The programme looks at six different areas of public life:

education – school governors

health – health board of Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust

Today, Katie, the second of our two new US interns (in their first week with OBV) tells the story of the controversial, and at times divisive flag from U.S history.

One of our new US interns Alexandra Fox (Alex) started today, and has hit the ground running by writing this short opinion piece about her changing feeling about US politics as a UK visiting student. 

As a native of California who goes to school in New England, I often feel disassociated from the news that preoccupies the South.  I don’t share the culture that waves the Confederate Flag.  I hardly know anyone who owns a gun.  But that also doesn’t mean racism only exists in The South.  

The Liberal Democrats have invited Simon Woolley, Co-Founder and Director of Operation Black Vote, to chair a Leadership Hustings on tackling race inequality. The event has been organised by  the Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats-EMLD.

Both leadership candidates, Norman Lamb and Tim Farron, will be present at the event, tomorrow Tuesday 30 June at Draper Hall, Newington Butts, London, SE1 6SF.  Nearest tube station and bus stops, Elephant and Castle.