The crimes committed in the UK have become more serious, and the criminals even younger. It is not just a baseball bat or a knife any more, you are hearing about bullets found here, or a gun used, whether it is a blank or the real thing.

So what is being done for our young Blacks in Britain? We have to regain their respect and confidence. It is also important that we get across to them at an early age, and direct them away from a life of crime. Modern youths are more concerned with what’s on the outside and not what’s inside: the Bling Bling culture. This may give you “nuff respect” on the street but mostly is not currency or a passport to success in the real world.

Everyone keeps saying “education is the key” but if the young people today have to “fit in” to the way society thinks they are supposed to do, we are on a continuous circle. For instance certain body language means different things in different cultures, than they may do in the British sense. Yet, to a teacher these codes may be interpreted as “anti-social” or “aggressive,” thereby leading that child to be considered for exclusion.

“When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.”
Carter G. Woodson

All said and done young adults can use the trend of focus groups that are based on self esteem projects, but aren’t we forgetting one basic criterion here! If these young adults saw that they where part of the system too and that they weren’t the cause of the problems, it would undoubtedly improve their self esteem and make a real difference to their lives. But, we know it all comes down to wiping out institutional racism…

“The events, which transpired five thousand years ago; five years ago or five minutes ago, have determined what will happen five minutes from now; five years from now or five thousand years from now. All history is a current event.” (John Henrik Clarke)

Lack of prospects not only leads to disillusionment, it can also lead to crime. The government knows it has a great deal to do to recapture the hearts and minds of disillusioned youth. More than a quarter of a century after the introduction of the race relations act, significant differences between ethnic groups in the workplace are still widespread. According to recent research, Black and Asian ethnic minority workers have lower pay than their white counterparts, are more likely to be unemployed, and are less likely to be found in the higher ranks of management. This will continue until Britain makes all people feel they have a stake in society, regardless of race, colour or creed.

It is worth remembering the words from an African proverb: “If we stand tall it is because we stand on the backs of those who came before us.”

“It has been long known for years that the British Education system is failing Black children.”
Ken Livingstone Mayor of London.

These words resonated in my mind as I returned from the “Reaching for the Stars” the third conference for [url=http://www.london.gov.uk/mayor/education/lsbc/index.jsp]London Schools and the Blackchild[/url] held at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference in London on Saturday, September 11, 2004.

These facts are nothing new to us here on BlackMag! White teachers’ perceptions have to dramatically change and more Black teachers are needed for it to change in any way. Education should be a right regardless of race.

The reality is that the system is failing all Black children but we are seeing a concerning trait in the statistics: African Caribbean children are underachieving in the system and more importantly Black boys. Three years on from the first conference and what have we seen? A pilot scheme targeting specifically Black children in eighteen schools in the UK. We already know our children can achieve under the right circumstances!

Diane Abbot (MP), Trevor Philips (CRE), Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London), all backed up their research figures with good practice ideals at the conference. Even [url=http://www.100bmol.org.uk" class="style1]100 Black Men of London[/url] supported self esteem and self identity. Stephen Twigg (MP) agreed it was a growing concern.

It is not just one factor that effects our children it is an accumulation of barriers and there is not one simply answer to change this.

Lee Jasper (Policy Advisor) and Kwame Kwei Armah (Playwright and Actor) fired up the audience with words and quotes form past activists. But, lip service isn’t the answer and action from the government and others in the education sector is what is needed.

The most inspirational part of the day for me was seeing two young achievers being recognised for the high academic achievements in their recent GCSE results.

It is going to be interesting to see what developments will be seized and followed up on in the coming months. One thing I do know: we owe it to our children not to let them down.

Like many modern students, Charles Darwin exceeded only in subjects that intrigued him.

Although his father was a physician, Darwin was uninterested in medicine and he was unable to stand the sight of surgery. He did eventually obtain a degree in theology from Cambridge University, although theology too was of minor interest to him. What Darwin really liked to do was to tramp over hills, observing plants and animals, collecting new specimens, scrutinizing their structures, and categorizing his findings.

In 1831, when Darwin was only 22 years old, the British government sent Her Majesty^Òs Ship Beagle on a 5 year expedition that would take them first along the coastline of South America and then onward around the world. As was common on such expeditions, the Beagle would carry along a naturalist to observe and collect geological and biological specimens encountered along the route. Thanks to the recommendation of one of Darwin^Òs previous college professors, he was offered the position of naturalist aboard the Beagle.

The Beagle sailed to South America, making many stops along the coast. Here Darwin observed the plants and animals of the tropics and was stunned by the diversity of species compared with Europe.

Perhaps the most significant stopover of the voyage was the month spent in the Galapagos Islands off of the northwestern coast of South America. It was here that Darwin found huge populations of tortoises; and he found that different islands were home to distinctively different types of tortoises. He then found that on islands without tortoises, pricky pear cactus plants grew with their juicy pads and fruits spread out over the ground.

And on islands that had hourdes of tortoises, the prickly pears grew substantially thick, tall trunks, bearing the fleshy pads and fruits high above the reach of the tough mouthed tortoises. He then wondered if the differences in these organisms could have arisen after they became isolated from one another on seperate islands.

The Species

In 1836, Darwin returned to England after the 5 years with the expedition. He became established as one of the foremost naturalist of his time. But constantly gnawing at his mind was the problem of the origin of the species.

Darwin sought to prove his ideal of evolution with simple examples. The various breeds of dogs provided a striking example of what Darwin sought to prove. Dogs descended from wolves, and even today the two will readily cross-breed. With rare exceptions, however, few modern dogs actually resemble wolves. Some breeds, such as the Chihuahua and the Great Dane, are so different from one another that they would be considered seperate species in the wild. If humans could cross-breed such radically different dogs in only a few hundred years, Darwin reasoned that nature could produce the same spectrum of living organisms given the hundreds of millions of years that she had been allowed.

Darwin also maintained that seperate species evolve as a result of the principles of natural selection, or survival of the fittest. He knew that many more members of a species are born than can possibly survive. He also postulated that strong positive genes would be bred and rebred into each new generation of animals. Darwin, contrary to popular belief, never said that human beings evolved from apes. He said that all life began as a primordial soup, with molecules acting on each other. So from the first single celled organism all life came. One single organism, when acted on by several different molecules could give rise to many different species of animals. It is in this way that he stated that Ape and man were similar..each having a similar life^Òs beginning.

Darwin^Òs theories caused the people of the time to begin to question where it was that they actually came from. His response was the book On the Origin of Species. In it he addressed the concerns of the people. He said “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing in the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms….have all been produced by laws acting around us.

These laws, taken in the highest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance and Variability…; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and Extinction of less-improved forms…

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one, and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixded laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

You think you know “Cool Britannia” do you? But how much do you [i]really[/i] know? Here are some facts…

1. There are more than 140,000 racial attacks in the UK each year.
2. London’s children speak more than 130 languages.
3. There are over 1,000 mosques in Britain and 15,000 Muslim doctors.
4. Presently, five out of 514 circuit court judges are black, compared with three out of 480 in 1992.
5. There were 1,306 ethnic minority officers in a police force of 122,265, a percentage of 1.06. This rose in 1985 to 2,223 out of 127,222 in 1995.
6. The most strikingly upwardly mobile ethnic group are the Chinese, of whom 13 per cent are in professional jobs, compared with five per cent in the white population.
7. King Henry VII and VIII employed a black trumpeter known as John Blanke (White). He earned 8d a day in November 1507.
8. Research by Manchester University finds that Britain’s ethnic minority population is unlikely to rise above 10 per cent of the whole.
9. 53 per cent of the current black Caribbean community were born in the UK and 67,000 people described themselves as ‘Black British’.
10. Racial discrimination is rife within the British criminal justice system. The higher echelons of the judiciary, police and the probation service remain white, and black people are more likely to be stopped and searched.
11. Africans were in Britain before the English arrived. They served in the Roman army which occupied southern Britain for 350 years. In AD 210 Libyan-born Septimius Severus, Emperor of Rome, arrived to inspect Hadrian’s Wall where a unit of Ethiopians was stationed at Aballava (now Burgh-by-Sands) near Carlisle.
12. Ethnic minority groups suffer higher rates of unemployment according to [url=http://www.statistics.gov.uk]UK National Statistics[/url] as at Spring 2002. Specific number of those working in (brackets) and a selective breakdown shows:- Bangladeshis are the hardest hit at 24% (58,000)
    Black Africans 14.6% (189,000)
    Other Etnic Group 12.3% (157,000)
    Pakistanis 12.2% (196,000)
    Black Caribbeans 11.4% (264,000)
    Indians 6.2% (469,000)
    Chinese Too small for reliable estimate but higher than Whites (90,000)
    Whites at 4.7% (26,696,000)
    This is despite the fact that Chinese and Black African populations have a higher average level of educational attain than the white population.
13. As at April 2001 there were 58,789,194 people living in the UK comprising the following:-

    Whites 54,153,898 (92%)
    Mixed 677,117 (1%)
    Indian 1,053,411 (1.79%)
    Pakistani 747,285 (1.27%)
    Bangladeshi 283,063 (0.48%)
    Other Asian 247,664 (0.42%)
    Black Caribbean 565,876 (0.96%)
    Black African 485,277 (0.82%)
    Black Other 97,585 (0.16%)
    Chinese 247,403 (0.42%)
    Other 230,615 (0.39%)

    A total of only 7.9% of the UK population are from an ethnic background with Indians making up the largest ethnic group, followed by Pakistanis, Mixed ethnic backgrounds, Black Caribbeans, Black Africans and Bangladeshis. [SOURCE: UK National Statistics Office, 2001

14. Queen Elizabeth I berated the buccaneer John Hawkyns for trafficking in black slaves in 1563. She described it as 'detestable and would call down the Vengeance of Heaven upon the Undertakers'.
15. In 1952 US restriction on West Indian migrants caused Caribbean Immigration to the UK to rise from 1,000 per year to 34,000 in 1962, stabilising at 7,000 per year in the late '60s.
16. The first political leader of Britain's black community was Olaudah Equiano from Eastern Nigeria, who arrived here in 1757, aged 12.
17. The Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, whose reputation rivalled Florence Nightingale's after the Crimean War, was "cheered and chaired...by adorning soldiers".
18. The first Asian to engage in politics was the poet, philosopher, reformer and journalist Raja Rammohan Roy. Between 1830-1833 Roy submitted "the first authentic statement of Indian views" to the Parliamentary Committee on Indian Affairs.
19. The first Asian to be elected to the House of Commons was Dadabhai Naoroji who as Liberal MP for Central Finsbury in 1892.
20. The first African students' union was founded in 1917.
21. The remains of a young African girl were found in a burial dated c1000 at North Elmham, Norfolk.
22. In 1995 [url=http://www.yush.com]YUSH Ponline[/url] became the first website in the UK with articles and content of interest to Black people. At the time it was also heralded in the mainstream media as Britain’s first Black website…
23. In the North and Scotland just over 1.3 per cent of the population are from ethnic minorities; 8.2 in the West Midlands; 4.8 in the East Midlands; 4.4 in Yorkshire; 1.5 in Wales; while 1 in 10 people in the South-East have African, Caribbean or Asian origins.
24. There are only 891,000 people (or 1.6%) of African-Caribbean descent in the country out of a total population of 54,889,000.
25. First effective black pressure group, the League of Coloured Peoples, was founded by Dr. Harold Arundel Moody in 1931. Stella Thomas, another member, became the first black woman to be called to the Bar in 1933.
26. The London town of Brixton, popularly conceived as a totally black, inner-city area, actually comprise Whites 62.20 % and blacks 42.23. 

Are you an “article” or “bonafide” Rasta or just a culturally keyed someone who wants to know about the various African tribes? Start here…

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