Blog post by Diditi Mitra, Brookdale Community College, USA

As I explore in my Identities article, ‘The socioeconomics of Sikh American identity’, semi structured interviews conducted with immigrant Sikh taxi drivers in New York City and with immigrant Sikh families show that socioeconomic differences are impactful in shaping the experiences and identities of non-white immigrants of the Sikh religious faith. The respondents of these interviews converged and diverged on their lived experiences and subsequently in terms of making meaning of themselves. While all the respondents converged on their encounter with racism, the specific form of those racist encounters was shaped by socioeconomic status.
 
The spaces occupied by the professional informants were typically suffused with colourblind racial ideology, making it challenging to identify it as such and as a matter of fact casting doubt on the professional respondents’ assessment of those encounters as racist. The taxi drivers, in contrast, reported routine and blatant experiences of racism from passengers, law enforcement and the taxi court judges. In my view, it was possible to remove the mask of liberalism, that usually conceals overt expressions of racism in professional workplaces, in dealings with non-white immigrant cab drivers whose work and social status ranked low in the social order. 

Blog post by Karim Murji, University of West London, UK

My Identities article, ‘The BBC, public intellectuals, and the making of Five Views of Multiracial Britain’, centres on a series of five television programmes made by the BBC in 1978 and subsequently published as a slim booklet by the Commission for Racial Equality. This is a piece of media and socio-political history though re-viewing it in light of  recent events reveals  some notable contrasts about public intellectuals and the media/the BBC then and now.
 
In August 2024 widespread rioting took place in towns and cities, largely in England though there were also some in Northern Ireland and in Wales. Some of the locations were Aldershot, Birmingham, Blackburn, Blackpool, Bolton, Bristol, Darlington, Hartlepool, High Wycombe, Hull, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Nottingham, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Preston, Rotherham, Southport, Stoke-on-Trent, Sunderland, Tamworth and Weymouth.