Black Foot on the Backfoot?
Darcus Howe
Thursday 22nd April 2010 at 19.30
The Kuumba Imani Millennium Centre,
34-36 Princes Road
Liverpool L8 1TH
Tickets: £8 & £5 concessions, available from the Philharmonic Hall Box Office
Tel: 0151 709 3789
Online booking click here
The event will be BSL signed and the venue is fully accessible.
Race is back on the agenda with a vengeance. Darcus Howe, appearing as part of Writing on the Wall’s ‘Rebel Rants’, will argue that despite gains made following the inner city uprisings of the 1980’s and the publication of the Macpherson Report, in many ways Britain has changed for the worse for black communities.
To support his position Darcus charts the return of police stop and search tactics, the drift of young black men into violence, increasing hostility towards immigrants and Muslims, and the establishment’s accommodation of the fascist BNP party.
Since arriving in London at the age of 18 from Trinidad and Tobago and becoming a member of the British Black Panther Movement, Darcus Howe has been one of Britain’s most prominent race campaigners.
He was editor of the magazine Race Today and organiser of the 20,000 strong 1981 Black People’s March, called in response to official neglect and inefficient policing of the investigation of the New Cross Fire in which 13 black teenagers died.
Best known for his Channel 4 series ‘Devil’s Advocate’, Darcus is a journalist who regularly contributes to the New Statesman, and a broadcaster whose programmes include Channel 4’s television series Black on Black, Bandung File, and White Tribe; a look at modern day Britain and its loss of ‘Englishness’.
In October 2005 Howe presented a Channel 4 documentary, Son of Mine, which focused on his troubled relationship with his 20-year-old son Amiri. His most recent film, What’s Killing Darcus Howe?, is an attempt to raise awareness of prostate cancer among black men, which for him is part of the wider campaign to achieve racial equality.
In this Rebel Rant Darcus Howe challenges us to confront issues of race in Britain today, and explore ways in which all communities can flourish.