Sunday, October 28, 2007

Tourist jailed 'for being black'

A man wrongly accused of being an illegal immigrant may have been singled out just for being black, an Equality Commission spokeswoman has said.
Frank Kakopa has been paid £7,500 after the Immigration Service wrongly held him in prison for two days.

Mr Kakopa, originally from Zimbabwe, was on a short break with his wife and young children in 2005, when he was stopped at Belfast City Airport.

He had proof he lived in England but was still strip-searched and jailed.

Friday, October 26, 2007

Bringing it home


Kwame Kwei-Armah
Published 25 October 2007 (New Statesman)

The debate over the exodus of Britain's black actors has finally begun. Now it is time to start talking about solutions

On 15 October at the Screen Nation Awards - dubbed the "black Baftas" - the founder of the awards, the distinguished Ghanaian producer Charles Thompson, bemoaned what he called a "talent drain of British actors running off to the States". I was both saddened and pleased by his comment: saddened because, as a black British actor and playwright, I know how serious the problem is, and pleased because, at last, people are actually starting to talk about it.
The overwhelming majority of black actors of my generation have found that their only hope of a career lies in America (an old maxim states that "in Britain, white actors have careers and black actors have jobs"). Rather than passing on tips about auditions, my contemporaries exchange advice about the "01 visa", the document that "provides admission into the United States of persons with . . . extraordinary achievement in motion picture and television production". I once read a very interesting comment referring to the former US general and later secretary of state Colin Powell. "It is his good fortune that they [his Jamaican-born parents] took the New York rather than the Southampton boat. If they had, he might have made sergeant." That sentiment increasingly appears to apply to the television and film industries, too.

I urge you to read this

'I spend my days preparing for life, not for death'
Laura Smith
Thursday October 25, 2007

SCI Greene County Prison on the outskirts of Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, sits low in the rural landscape so that it's easy from the restaurants and petrol stations on the main road to miss the barbed wire coiled in endless circles. Inside, the plush leather chairs that squat on shiny floors make it feel more like a private hospital than a maximum security institution. But the black men in prison jumpsuits cleaning the floor, eyes downcast, dispel any such illusions. Signs spell out the rules: no hoods, no unauthorised persons, only $20 in cash allowed.

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More on the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal campaign
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