Session on wednesday morning here in washington and thats going to be about 12 hours or so after the House Intelligence Committee actually decides to revote to send the rural results of its 2 week long public hearings to the Judiciary Committee now there is this deadline at 22. 00 g. M. T. On friday where the president s legal team will need to tell the house Judiciary Committee if theyre going to be taking part in hearings that the Judiciary Committee will be convening not tomorrow on monday here in washington but starting a week from monday and that is another opportunity which House Democrats say will give the president the opportunity to tell his side to bring in witnesses to present evidence as this inquiry continues but it is widely expected here in washington that the white house will once again wait until late on friday to say that theyre not going to participate because at least from a political standpoint they are now making the argument that the entire process is fraudulent and that this is nothing more than the democrats trying to undermine the president s efforts at being reelected in 2022 other news in Iraqs Parliament has accepted the resignation of Prime Minister. And follows weeks of violent antigovernment protests which have left more than 400 people dead he will stay on to lead the caretaker government but attention now turns to just who will replace him. I know what i want a homeland i want fair rule my heart is heavy you politicians are all thieves and you need to be rooted out that the current Prime Minister resigned the parliament should resign and the party should get out we dont want any of them. Now with our demands was simple we will take changes and reforms at 1st but now weve discovered fake faces and we dont want any of them we want to change the entire constitution and the World Health Organization has raised concerns over the deepening violence in eastern democratic republic of congo it says the fighting in the area has limited Health Workers progress in containing the ebola outbreak. Prime minister Joseph Muscat says he will stand down in january after growing calls for him to resign this is over his governments handling of the murder of journalist definitely. 2 years ago president. I will write to the president of the labor party so that the process for a new leader is sit for january 12th 2020 on that day i will resign is the leader of the labor party in the days after i will resign as Prime Minister. Just a few of the stories australias foreign minister says china is subjecting one of its citizens to daily interrogations including whilst being shackled prodemocracy writes a young join has been detained in china since january accused of spying. A local official in albania has resigned of the comments she made about these death toll from last weeks deadly earthquake the mayor of the city of jurist sparked outrage when she said she was quote satisfied only 50 people died in the quake tourists is one of the hardest hit areas the 6. 00 magnitude quake killed at least 51. 00 people and left 2500. 00 homeless and thousands of protesters known as sardines have rallied in milan against the far right league party in the saudi movements become a symbol of resistance to the partys controversial leader matteo so really it started as a response to the growing strength in the north of the country of the right Wing Coalition led by billy those are your headlines studio b. Unscripted starts right now. You cant really make a record racial this was something monumentally horrific as slavery a thing under natural and we connect on our collective anger a lot of the time what it what it actually do for you is just rock. My name still isnt punk you can call me george the poet something happens over the mediterranean you go from being someones child to an immigrant im a london based spoken word artist roots in uganda. Im free im but the problem i 1st started at cambridge i want all black faces and. Im a lecturer a historian and cultural commentator i was born in india i live and work in the united kingdom. I was intrigued because how often do you get to share ideas solve problems and have a conversation with someone who knows so much about resistance and colonial power. Because i was curious he comes from a different background he has different experiences but i think all roads will cross like our stories and all identities i won this game to. Pass. Thank you so recently weve seen a lot of western universities reflecting on their possible involvement or heritage linked to Transatlantic Slave Trade your institution Cambridge University obviously the same university that i attended yeah i read some interesting tweets from you regarding the universities and. Investigating its own links to yeah every can you. Yeah i raised a few questions on one more stat it was presented as exploring if cambridge and whether and in what ways cambridge has benefited from the slave trade the point is that there is no Major Institution in britain whether its banks or financial houses or the or markets. That have not benefited from the immense Wealth Creation that slavery lets too so its not a question of if but in what ways the point is that slavery lets to benefits across societies and they were networked benefits right so if you had railways that were built in part on slave wealth generated from slavery and those railways came to your town you benefited from slavery if your students and cambridge catered for instance to any young men came from landed wealth people who had plantations an empty gold jamaica and they were paying fees to you you benefited from slavery is so i think we have to understand that its a very complex picture of benefits and also one of the thing you cant really make of reparations for something as monumentally horrific as slavery and you cant actually bring back the generations who died and were maimed and lived as chattel what you can do is stalk knowledge that it has led to the impoverishment of subsequent generations and that you can make up some uk knowledge in a financial form of the damage that was done you can actually pay back what was taken this is one of the biggest frustrations around this we often see were relations being left of the discussion whether on the political front. Economic otherwise how do you build the. Energy or the momentum. Tie all these conversations together i think there are complex conversations to be had certainly about who gets read. Peroration zone in what form those reparations are paid out leads taken by some caribbean countries to say actually you know you need to acknowledge that the poverty in the immiseration that we have inherited can be traced back through the the the centuries of empire and slavery we need to make the connections repeatedly between the present and the past in ways in which the past lives on in the present to generate that energy a thing can agree more so slavery has had consequences obviously for the caribbean countries and for parts of africa but it also has an afterlife in black british communities what do you think the kind of more consequences for immigrant communities in britain for 2nd generation 3rd generation black british young people is today i think the legacy is twofold so on the one hand you have the deep sense of displacement statelessness especially being. 2nd generation in a country that your parents may not have been received well in theres that displacement theres a sense of. Not quite belonging and not really having a measure of way your story starts and what direction you should be aspiring. To progress in yeah thats thats one half of the tragedy the other half is the miseducation of the masses on this a lot of people are literate in history and it creates the tensions this conversation is nonexistent in some of the places that need to happen more yeah why do you think that is i mean on the one hand theres miseducation as in the educational system is not acknowledging the force of things like slavery any muriel is i mean i mean i was not very much teaching my students dont come with much knowledge of it do you think that the memory off off off these historical process is dying out in communities as well so this is hard to gauge you know but what i sense the older i get and the ugly the conversation around xenophobia in this country turns what i sense is that there is a a lot of pride around empire around imperial exploits around the colonial project theres a sense of. The white mans burden still having some legitimacy and winning gains in terms of spreading knowledge and technology and so on and so forth that has gone unaddressed and unpacked for a long time so it becomes further entrenched when its passed on from generation to the young black british young people asian young people do they have any understanding of the ways in which their lives theyre shaped by their heritage of slavery and empire yeah i think the Caribbean Community that the when russia generation of 50006. He did a very good job in in cork in some sort of cultural understanding the saturday schools at the west Indian Community was very successful and set up throughout the eightys but as we know economic pressures and social. Attacks on the different fronts really made it hard for the Caribbean Community to maintain that sense of education so i i see that thats dissing disintegrated a little when it comes to my generation and it makes it hard but there is some awareness what ive found tragic is especially when you look at young people that are now for 3rd and 4th generation becoming further and further distant from the information that will give them some sort of sense of where theyre coming from what youre left with this is is a shame which i grappled with for a long time and i still do yeah this feeling of having to explain why we are in the situation that we are. In on a personal level feeling that your double your own more responsible and representing you know that the potential of your people will correct in the mistakes that are attributed to your people are yeah so in a sense we have to become cost audience of these other history communities have to grab them back and remember. For the immigrant there is no government that you are priority to you know youre not in the homeland and over here you have a government that is you know for the majority here that is reacting to your presence but is not versed in who you are right has no record of your achievement of your family so you really need to take some initiative in protecting and honoring your story yeah he said immigrant communities are not particularly anybodys priority but there is the language of diversity and inclusive its the way by were allowed to place. At the tables are a handful of us are allowed to teach at elite universities or be part of elite institutions i know that youve done some work with members off the British Royal family and theres been a lot of discussion about the fact that there is a a non white member now off the British Royal family so im just wondering whether you have thoughts about the a guest the controversial question of race and the royal family and the whole question of diversity can you diversify an institution like the royal family were not seeing. A diversifying project were seeing generational changes so prince harry is the 1st person in his. Position of his time that you know represents the monarchy in the 21st century and what his marriage to make a mark or represents is is. His love is free free choice yes its a bit weird for me trying to. Square my lets say working class black british sensibilities with my ugandan heritage because the monarchy is very important to my parents to my kingdom so we understand the idea of a shared heritage or a shared identity in what that you know that family as a symbol i may not necessarily. Have grown up you know in in the folds of that passion being out here but i respect it i do i know it means to people and i love people. Is a multifaceted question i dont know what your thoughts certainly to somebody off of indian descent the the. Empire was tied up with the fact of victoria being empress of india and the British Royal family is another British Institution which will have benefited from both slavery and empire so there is a question of for instance when we know that famous black poets have refused the honor of the o. B. E. The order of the British Empire we know that other. Black achievers have accepted it but its not uncontroversial what does it mean for people who descend from formally colonized peoples to carry the empire as an initial after their name there is that whole question of what should all relationship to the institution be should we accept you know the order of the British Empire this is so complicated for me i mean specifically. Coming from a family that is very close with the ugandan money so my grandfather was the 1st attorney general of our kingdom and went into exile with the king over here we know that the brand of colonialism that the british practiced in africa was one of the friending the chieftains and the leaders of the region and reaping the benefits of the land within the context of that relationship but at the same time it means a lot to a lot of people you know to have these affiliations and connections and i suppose that there is a question for individuals from. Minority ethnic backgrounds especially those that were on the colonial rule a question of strategy long term what do you what do you want a degree of assimilation do you want to forward in this country do you want to. Continue to build on the trauma of the past or are we just saying were ripping up the status quo and were currently figuring out because most of us dont actually have the game plan me oh yeah in your book insurgent empire you talk about resistance to colonialism played out in different contexts. What do you believe is the legacy of that resistance the book sets out to do 2 things in relation to the story the 1st is to park the mainstream british mythology is that when freedom from slavery and from empire came along it was because it was gifted by britain to go and slave and the king. So it sets out to. Question that and it points out that slaves rebelled all the time so its really important to put that back in the narrative but the 2nd aspect of the book is just as important that the resistance of slaves was heard back in britain and it helped create a tradition of criticising slavery and empire back in britain we often think of abolition as just some very nice white guys who decided that it was a very bad thing and were going to have you know free the slaves but actually if you if you look at the written works left behind by abolitionists many of them are really aware that the plantations are in from then on that slaves are rebelling that the colonized are rebelling the indentured are rebelling and so what im saying is that that we need to recover the stories of resistance not just the stories of empire and slave man both in other parts of the world but also from within britain theres a theres a minority dissidents tradition and britain which says not in our name you cant enslave and colonized people in our name and that story has been completely marginalized by mainstream history and our part of the conversation about bringing back all those stories i mean these histories have to be recovered and young white britons have to be reminded that their ancestors wont only just colonists and enslave us but that they also resisted and questions their government and those who claim to represent them. But it strikes me that there might be questions our audience wishes to ask of us or perhaps we should turn to them now please. My questions about the kaunas in the university and whether or not you think that itll be effective not just making voices heard that do not conform to the norms of academics p. But also in considering the valid forms of the production of knowledge its not just about diversifying bringing in a range of voices that is important in its own right but i always explain to my students that the colonisation is about understanding what we know why we know and also what we dont know and also recognizing that the knowledge traditions which are being claimed as european are not only european they have often drawn on the traditions of africa asia and beyond so we need to understand that the knowledge is which are not presented as being kind of great european thought have multiple lines drawing on other parts of the world and that these history is also need to be restored to their place of honor i mean decolonization is often presented as oh this is against you know why people its not its about saying that the world is diverse and knowledge has been produced across different parts of the globe we need to honor the fact that europe often drew on other traditions in order to produce its knowledge my question is do you think that there is an ascendant orthodoxy on the political left that is weaponize ing identity politics to breed competitive victimhood. And tribalism in a way that undermines Martin Luther kings dream that we would be judged by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin whatever. Strand of identity one gives primacy to thank you great question i think is happening on both. The left and the road to characterize it as either playing into it. We see that these kind of identity politics. Play up in times of economic downturn or you know in tandem with cycles of. Big changes as we see in. Western europe and other parts of the world when the political rhetoric becomes increasingly polarized and divisive i see it as a dialectic and something that dialogue respectful dialogue Contact People being in close proximity with one another can begin to address and break down its like its something awful i think a false narrative everybody has an identity everybody is political in one sense or the other so identity politics is with us the difference is whether it is recognized as identity politics or whether it is not so the white majority has an identity and it has a politics so it is often wimmin or black people who are accused of