Latest news with #GaryYounge
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Gary Younge on being pigeonholed as a black journalist
'We have people who can write about this,' the journalist Gary Younge remembers an editor once telling him about a column he had written on Bosnia. 'Can you add an ethnic sensibility to this?' For Younge, being one of the few black columnists in the British press has not been easy; rather, it has been a constant struggle, he explains, to avoid being pigeonholed as a journalist only ever interested in race. A struggle, he tells Helen Pidd, that would have been easier if he hadn't also been very interested in race as well. Reflecting on a 30-year career in journalism – including nearly 27 at The Guardian – Younge has just published Pigeonholed: Creative Freedom as an Act of Resistance, a book exploring the pressures on writers from under-represented groups.
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The multicultural effort to defeat fascism
Regarding Gary Younge's article (Millions of the black and brown people who fought for Europe's freedom didn't get a VE Day, 8 May), it is refreshing to read about what actually happened at the end of the second world war. But I do resist strongly the framing of the millions of colonised people in the British empire as having 'fought for the allies'. They were the allies. These people, including my late father, were subjects of the British empire, just like any soldier from Liverpool or an Auxiliary Territorial Service recruit from Maidenhead. They were trained as the British army and they fought and died, or survived, just like those from Scotland or Wales. Many British people don't want to hear that millions of the grandparents and parents of those 'foreigners' living here were born and lived under the same rule as any Bristol or Birmingham council estate, but that was the case. The far-right 'othering' of people is a result of a deliberate and hateful ideology aimed at seizing power. The words we use matter. The soldiers and service personnel that Younge is talking about were British subjects and Britain was a complex, global, multicultural empire – not a white bastion of democratic resistance that fought alone from the shores of VertannesChurchdown, Gloucestershire • I read with interest that about 2.5 million personnel from the Indian subcontinent fought during the second world war. They are perhaps not the only forgotten ones. My mother was in India when war broke out. She joined the Women's Royal Army Corps (WRAC) in India and served throughout the duration, ending up with the rank of captain. Her last days would have been made easier if her service had been acknowledged. On inquiring whether extra pension rights (she had a very small state widow's pension) as a former servicewoman were hers to claim, she was told no records were available for WRAC in India. End of story. And a very shabby end to the story. Quite apart from the financial side, it was as if her service to the nation had simply never Blazy-O'ReillyVilleneuve-la-Comptal, Aude, France
