Created in partnership with Sotheby's, in a debate that spans the centuries, Peabody Award-winning spoken word performer George the Poet and Booker Prize-winning author Howard Jacobson go head-to-head over which form of cultural expression best resonates now and forever. Does hip-hop and slam poetry speak more to society than historical texts that require background knowledge to be fully understood? Or does the lasting appeal of Shakespeare and other great figures from the canon show that some works have a universal value that stands the test of time?

This event was recorded on the 9th of June 2022, at Sotheby's in London and produced by Executive Producer Hannah Kaye and Audience Development Producer Yosola Olorunshola

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Between 1500 and 1866, 12.5 million enslaved Africans were transported by ship from Africa to the Americas as part of the Middle Passage crossing. Some 1.8 million of them died, their bodies thrown into the Atlantic, while the others who survived undertook journeys of misery and terror – chained together, starved, and surrounded by disease, to be sold into slavery and forced to work in brutal, dehumanising conditions. The slave mutinies that took place on these ships were the beginning of a long history of Black resistance.

In February 2022, the World Monuments Fund in partnership with Intelligence Squared brought together a panel of experts to explore key sites in Black history and illustrate the pivotal role heritage can play in teaching us about underrepresented narratives from the past.

We began our journey by examining buildings connected to slavery across Africa and the Caribbean, focusing on the ports, trading posts, and slave forts that were the starting points of the transatlantic slave trade. Moving forward in time we then discussed the struggle for emancipation, highlighting lesser known sites where newly freed slaves took refuge. Our trajectory ended with the landmark places in Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma and across the Black Belt in the U.S. that stood at the heart of the civil rights movement. These include churches and a barber shop where historic meetings took place between representatives of the Black and white populations of Montgomery in the beginning of the civil rights era.

Our panel unlocked the stories associated with these historic buildings and their importance in ensuring that the long struggle for racial equality is never forgotten.

CHAIR: 

Yassmin Abdel-Magied - Writer and broadcaster

Panel:

Alberta Whittle - Barbadian-Scottish artist, researcher, and curator

Bonnie Greer OBE - Playwright, author, broadcaster and former Deputy Chair, British Museum

John Darlington - Executive Director at WMF Britain

David Harewood MBE - Actor, director, author, and activist

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Samira Ahmed speaks to the novelist and author of An American Marriage, Tayari Jones. They speak about her life and career from growing up in Atlanta and taking a stand on ethical issues as a child to developing her voice as a writer, the role that children's author Judy Blume played in her life, and being selected for President Barack Obama's summer reading list and Oprah's Book Club.

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Black Lives Matter began as a hashtag when Alicia Garza wrote what she calls ‘a love letter to Black people’ on Facebook, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of fatally shooting Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, in 2013.

In November 2020 Garza came to Intelligence Squared to recount how she and her co-founders built Black Lives Matter into the most influential movement of recent times. The phrase she coined was chanted by millions of people around the world this year in protests against the brutal killing in May of George Floyd by a police officer. But, as she pointed out, hashtags don’t build movements, people do. The work was done not through celebrity influencers or a (usually male) leader swooping down from on high, but by people at the grass roots knocking on doors, building a base, and acting collaboratively to fight the persistent message that Black lives are of less value than white lives.

Drawing on the themes of her new book, The Purpose of Power: How to Build Movements for the 21st Century, Garza set out her commitment to bring real change to those whose economic opportunities have been blighted by racism. She explained how these goals will ultimately be achieved not through protest alone but by ensuring that Black people have power in their lives and in politics. And she asked us to think about our privileges and prejudices and consider how we can all contribute to the change we want to see in the world.

Our chair was writer and broadcaster Yassmin Abdel-Magied.

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The history of Africans in Europe may seem recent – a result of migration in the 20th and 21st centuries – but in her new book, African Europeans, historian Olivette Otele tells a very different story – a story of African presence in Europe that stretches back centuries. 

Otele writes of African Europeans through the lives of individuals both ordinary and extraordinary. She has uncovered a forgotten past, one that features the Libya-born Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, a Medici duke believed to have been born to a free African woman and enslaved Africans living in Europe during the Renaissance. By exploring a history that has long been overlooked, she sheds light on questions very much alive today: What can movements like Black Lives Matter learn from the long history of Black activism in the UK and Europe? Why are Black Britons such as the Windrush generation often treated as if they aren’t full British citizens? And how can remembering the silenced narratives of our past help us understand the present and lead to a better future? 

On November 23 2020, Otele will came to Intelligence Squared to reveal this untold story of European and African history. She was in conversation with author and BBC Radio 4 presenter Kavita Puri.

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A great reckoning is taking place in the wake of the brutal killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed his death. Companies and organisations are looking afresh at how they can do a better job of combatting institutional bias and racism. Employees are increasingly speaking out about their experiences and calling for change.

In this special event recorded on Thursday June 25 2020, Intelligence Squared brought together two leading voices from the arts, Kwame Kwei-Armah, artistic director of the Young Vic, and Idris Elba, star of The Wire and Luther, to discuss what should happen and is likely to happen in the world of culture as we move forward. Given all the promises made and broken over the years, will things be different this time? Will there be deep structural change so that we see more Black and Brown people – not just on the stage or screen – but in positions of real power and decision-making? And once lessons have been learned, what do people actually need to do?

Our chair for the evening was writer and broadcaster Yassmin Abdel-Magied.

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For the second installment of our Trailblazers series, Intelligence Squared has partnered with gal-dem to bring together a collection of outstanding women – and their letters – to our stage.

If you could offer insight and advice to your younger self, what would you say? Oprah Winfrey, when she was 58, wrote these words to her 19-year-old self:

‘Dear beautiful brown-skinned girl… The truth is, he’s intimidated. You don’t know this, though, because you can see yourself only through his eyes. A lesson you will have to learn again and again: to see yourself with your own eyes, to love yourself from your own heart’.

Maya Angelou, at the age of 85, had this advice for her 15-year old self:

‘Find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less’.

Advice like that has both universal resonance and specific relevance to women of colour. Most people have fallen in love, discovered the power of art and wondered whether they have the capacity to achieve great things. But women of colour have to contend with unique experiences. Many feel the sting of erasure when they are young – not seeing themselves in literature, on TV or occupying positions of power. Growing up can be lonely and even more so if you feel left out of predominantly white or male spaces. Perhaps reading a letter by someone with shared experiences would help you to feel less alone in your struggle and more at home in your joy.

In the second installment of our Trailblazers series, Intelligence Squared has partnered with gal-dem to bring together a collection of outstanding women – and their letters – to our stage. They range from playwright Bonnie Greer and writer Afua Hirsch to footballer Eni Aluko and comedian Shappi Khorsandi. The event will be chaired by BBC Radio 1 presenter Clara Amfo.

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This event is the first of a series of events produced in partnership with gal-dem, an award-winning media platform that spotlights the creative work of women of colour and non-binary people of colour.

You are young and ambitious. You have a vision. But how do you pursue your dream role when no one at the top of your industry looks like you?

Women of colour have to navigate a world of work where they are often discriminated against because of their race as well as their gender. Prejudice in recruitment, opportunities for promotion, pay gaps, microaggressions – the list goes on. Moments that seemed like major turning points can fizzle out: Diane Abbott made history when she became the first black woman elected to Parliament in 1987 but it wasn’t until 2010 that Britain elected its first female Asian MPs. Halle Berry became the first black woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress in 2001 but since then we’ve seen 18 white actresses in a row pick up the award. Gender diversity in FTSE 100 companies is improving but today, out of the six female CEOs, not one is a woman of colour.

Still, it’s not all bad news. Despite the challenges, women of colour are increasingly making their way to the top and carving out a new ‘normal’ for younger generations. To celebrate their success and share how they got there, Intelligence Squared and gal-dem are partnering to bring together pioneers from the worlds of media, politics and culture.

Our panel includes Diane Abbott, Shadow Home Secretary and the UK’s first black female MP; Mishal Husain, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme; Corinne Bailey Rae, award-winning singer-songwriter, Yomi Adegoke, co-author of Slay in Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible, and Bernardine Evaristo, an author shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize with her novel Girl, Woman, Other. The conversation will be chaired by journalist and political activist Ash Sarkar.

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They are the crimes for which no one has ever made amends. The transatlantic slave trade enslaved between 10 and 12 million Africans. Historians estimate that 15 to 25% of the men and women packed into the slave ships died before they reached the Americas. The only people ever to be compensated? Slave owners and traders, to make up for their lost earnings when slavery ended. Today, generations later, the white majorities in the US and former colonial powers including the UK continue to benefit from the wealth generated by slavery. The descendants of enslaved Africans continue to suffer poverty and prejudice. Millions still face discrimination and limited access to education and jobs. Some say that only a broad programme of reparations – not just financial compensation, but acknowledgement of the crimes committed and the lasting damage caused – can begin to make up for the atrocity of slavery and bring an end to the systemic injustice millions of people still face.

That would be a disaster, critics of reparations say. The whole idea is flawed. These were crimes committed by and to people long since gone. The costs would cripple economies and hurt the people reparations would supposedly help. Tensions between community groups would only worsen and some on the Right would use reparations as a rallying point to criticise already vulnerable and economically weak minority groups and countries. And good luck finding consensus on constructing a system to decide who gets what; no one would be happy and social tensions would only worsen. Instead of looking backwards, we should all focus on fighting racism now. We have enough pressing problems with discrimination in 2019. Let’s not make them worse by opening old wounds.

CHAIR: Emma Dabiri - Social historian and presenter

SPEAKERS FOR THE MOTION: Kehinde Andrews - Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University and author of The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World and Esther Stanford-Xosei - Reparations activist and lawyer

AGAINST THE MOTION: Katharine Birbalsingh - Headmistress and co-founder of Michaela Community School in London and Tony Sewell - Educational consultant and CEO of the charity Generating Genius

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What's the difference between being merely non-racist and being an antiracist? And what will it take to completely uproot racism from our societies, institutions and our own selves? In this episode were were joined by Ibram X. Kendi, the founding director of the Antiracism Research and Policy Center at American University and author of How To Be an Antiracist. He was interviewed by BBC presenter Razia Iqbal. 

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