French singer dedicates top prizes at Les Flammes ‘to all the blacks’ after backlash over rumoured Paris show

The French pop star Aya Nakamura has won three big prizes at France’s Les Flammes awards for rap, R&B and pop, and she thanked fans for their support after a racist row over rumours she would sing at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony.

“I’m very honoured because being a black artist and coming from the banlieue is very difficult,” Nakamura told the ceremony, which she opened with a medley of her songs. She dedicated her awards – female artist of the year, pop album of the year, and international star of the year – “to all the blacks”.

Organising is a kind of alchemy: it turns alienation into connection, despair into dedication, and oppression into strength. By Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix

The Clash are the touchstone for a story that stretches back to the 50s, told in interviews with many campaigning rockers

There’s no better time than now for a documentary on popular music’s role in the fight against racism and fascism. And in true punk spirit, this lo-fi indie packs in a lot of history and righteous passion for not much budget – even if, to be brutally honest, its core narrative is a very minor part of that history, centred on a bunch of ageing Clash fans.

The Clash are very much the touchstone here. Motivated by musicians such as Eric Clapton echoing the National Front’s racist and anti-immigrant sentiments, Joe Strummer and co became key players in the Rock Against Racism movement in the late 70s, alongside acts including Steel Pulse, Tom Robinson and Aswad. (The 2020 doc White Riot lays out the story in more detail.) While some punk bands, such as the Sex Pistols, flirted with Nazi imagery, the Clash drew a line in the sand and stood against fascism and racism, as various musicians, writers and commentators from back in the day point out.

Britain’s first black female MP faced hostility from the media and political establishment from the start. Nearly 40 years on, she is still not giving up

Six weeks ago, the Conservatives’ biggest donor, Frank Hester, was revealed by the Guardian to have spoken at a meeting of his healthcare company, the Phoenix Partnership, about one of Britain’s longest-serving and most pioneering MPs. “You see Diane Abbott on the TV and … you just want to hate all black women,” Hester said. “I think she should be shot.”

The meeting had taken place in 2019, when Abbott was Labour’s shadow home secretary. As a lifelong defender of civil liberties, a radical leftwinger and a close ally of the then party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, Abbott was notably different from previous holders of the role. But there was an anger and viciousness to Hester’s remarks, which are being investigated by the police, and also a limit to the Labour support for her that they prompted, which was very striking.

William Brock, 81, who is white, was arrested after he fatally shot Lo-Letha Hall, 61, outside his home in South Charleston, Ohio

An Ohio man was charged with murder after shooting a Black ride-share driver in an unprovoked attack, following the most recent string of cases of Black Americans being shot while doing mundane things.

William Brock, 81, who is white, was arrested after he fatally shot Lo-Letha Hall, 61, outside his home in South Charleston, Ohio, about an hour outside of Dayton, NBC News reported .

I quit when it sank in that pushing back at my routine embassy job felt less like resistance than complicity

When I began working as a consular officer at the US embassy in Ankara, Turkey, I was at the beginning of what was supposed to be a 20-year diplomatic career. Maybe I didn’t love all of US foreign policy, but in my routine visa assignment I was deeply committed to treating everybody I interviewed fairly and playing my part in facilitating the American immigrant dream. Then, on 27 June 2017, Donald Trump issued orders to begin implementing the “Muslim ban” . My routine job had suddenly become deeply morally fraught and instead of blandly facilitating the American dream, I was denying it to people based on their faith.

My first instinct was to draft a resignation letter, but I didn’t immediately send it because it felt at the time like I was part of a nigh-unanimous institutional rejection of an illiberal policy. More than 1,000 US diplomats put their signatures on an internal dissent cable against the Muslim ban when it was proclaimed. My boss hated the ban, my boss’ boss hated the ban, and the dozens of US ambassadors summoned to the foreign ministries of Muslim-majority countries to explain the policy tried to disown it as much as they possibly could. When I pushed back as much as I could, I did so with the full support of my bosses and colleagues. But, and this is the most important part, we always did so within the regulations.

Josef Burton is a former US diplomat who served in Turkey, India and Washington DC

When Joy and Jo Banner founded the Descendants Project in 2020, they didn’t expect to be defending their hometown first

When twin sisters Joy and Jo Banner founded their non-profit, the Descendants Project, in 2020, their goal was to protect the Black-founded “freetowns” in Louisiana’s river parishes. Like the Banners’ hometown of Wallace, many of the Black communities that abut the lower Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans were founded after emancipation by people who’d once been enslaved.

Today, decades of disinvestment have left freetowns vulnerable to predatory development, land theft and industrialization. The Banners hoped to reverse those trends. Yet within weeks of creating their organization, their purpose shifted dramatically. Instead of supporting other Black communities, the twins found themselves fighting for their own hometown’s survival. Wallace, population 1,240, was facing an existential threat in the form of the proposed construction of a gargantuan grain-export terminal, the latest in an onslaught of industrial growth along the lower Mississippi River. The terminal would “drain us of all of our resources and all of our quality of life”, Joy said. “The overall goal is to run all of us out.”

In 1999, the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho was attacked in a campaign of violence by a self-confessed racist and homophobe. It completely changed the course of my life

On Saturday 17 April 1999, a bomb exploded in Brixton market in south London, injuring 48 people, including a 23-month-old child. Newspapers showed an X-ray of the toddler’s head with a nail embedded in the skull. Immediately, people knew that someone wanted to kill in an area that had a large Black community.

This was the first of three nailbombs that were planted in the capital targeting minorities. The following weekend, a second bomb exploded in the Bangladeshi area of Brick Lane. Thirteen people were injured ; it might have been more if a passerby hadn’t spotted a suspicious bag and put it in the boot of his car, dampening the blast.

A candid documentary tells how a generation of activists from Asian communities confronted prejudice

I can still remember the chill I felt on first hearing of the murders of Parveen Khan and her three young children, Aqsa, Kamran and Imran. It was July 1981. In the middle of the night, someone had poured petrol through the letter box of their house in Walthamstow, north-east London, and set it alight. The only person to escape the inferno was Parveen’s husband, Yunus, who had jumped from an upstairs window, his injuries leaving him hospitalised for several weeks.

The perpetrators were never caught. Don Gibson was one of the investigating officers. Now, as then, he insists the arsonist was most likely Yunus Khan himself. For this to be true, observes Pete Hope, a firefighter who attended the scene, Khan must have gone out of the house, poured petrol through the letter box, come inside, set the petrol ablaze, gone upstairs, waited until the fire made escape almost impossible and then thrown himself out of a window.