This is the question asked in an article in today's Independent by Abbinata Makoni. It begins:
"Almost every elder I know has uttered a version of the sentence: 'Jobs like those are not for people like us,' as if we’d all been conditioned to think we were only meant to go down one rigid path while others excelled and prevailed in all sorts of avenues. It wasn’t until I was 15 that it finally clicked that, unfortunately, we have been taught to think like that, because that’s exactly how racial inequality works in society." One of those avenues is academia, yet as recently as 2011 of over 14,000 university professors in the UK, only 50 were black. Another legacy issue. Read the full article here.

Anthony Brown, a paralegal in Manchester, established the Windrush Crusade last year to provide assistance to Manchester’s Caribbean diaspora caught up in the immigration debacle. The Crusade has now joined forces with UK-wide BME Lawyers 4 Justice in a bid to demand that the government put an immediate halt on deportation flights. They are planning a day of action on June 22. It is hoped that a coordinated plan of action can be devised which will see protests happening in major cities including, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and London. Read more here.

Manchester is gearing up for the two-hundredth anniversary of the 'Peterloo Massacre' on August 16. This article by John Harris from the Guardian (itself birthed from the massacre) explains some of the significance, not just at the time, but for today. Like colonial slavery, this event has also been neglected in school history lessons, and also carries forward a massive legacy, both for Manchester and for the working classes in Britain. EP Thompson in his classic The Making of the English Working Class wrote of Peterloo that it, “was without question a formative experience in British political and social history.” Harris comments: "Thompson saw 1819’s carnage originating in 'the panic of class hatred' and an ingrained belief that any working class crowd was always only a breath away from turning into the mob – something that has regularly surfaced long into the democratic age: witness Orgreave or Hillsborough." Read the full article here.

Many events and activities are being organised to celebrate or commemorate (depending on your point of view) Peterloo. These will include a special service at Manchester Cathedral at 2pm on Sunday July 7 (more details to follow soon). This website will be a good starting point to keep track of what will be happening over the summer.

“I think there is an issue that we, there is an elephant in the room. Right. And the elephant in the room, is the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism which no one ever wants to talk about despite the fact that it was one of the most significant and horrifying points in history probably in the entire existence of human beings. Whereby you had like for, for 400 years, people living in indentured slavery. I don’t even know, I can’t even imagine what it is like to be born into slavery and be tortured on a day to day basis.

When those people who were given freedom, or civil rights in the 60’s, between 64 – 68, it is very, very recent history. And unfortunately for some reason none of those people were ever compensated in any way whatsoever. In fact what happened was the governments, even in the United Kingdom actually compensated the slave owners as opposed to the people who were enslaved. And the problem with that was that we didn’t actually deal with any of the psychological trauma, not just to people of colour but also to Caucasian and White people who lived through that, who might have participated in it and who might have not actually believed in it.

None of that is being discussed.  We don’t discuss it in our education system. We have things like Black History month which are like thrown on at the end, which should be part of our curriculum so that all of us understand this is what happened in history; this is why these people are here. And I really feel that that would reduce the amount of xenophobia.

And I just want to say, actually funnily enough, for example, when those payouts were given, one of those gentlemen was actually an MP that I was reading about.  And there’s are a number of different people. You are talking about figures of like 65 million in today’s money; you are talking about figures like 83 million that were paid out to replace say 15,000 slaves.

And what you also have to understand is that capitalism as we know it is built on the back of slavery. Because pre-slavery in the 17th century things like banking really only existed in London.  It didn’t really exist outside of that. It was actually invented for merchants and for traders because they needed to borrow to be able to go and exploit human labour. And many of the banks that we use today, whether it is Barclays, or its Lloyds, or it is Chase - they are still benefitting, many families whether the like it or not are living are living off the proceeds of crime essentially.
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So the reason I mention this is because I don’t believe that human beings in their nature are born to be bad people or are born to be horrible people. I think that a lot of the time the fact that the governments and the people that control us to a certain extent, have chosen to kind of operate this collective amnesia and not educate us properly on what has happened, how it’s happened and how it’s affected people has actually led to this vilification of people of colour which we still live with till this day.”