Cremé Project Podcast

Professor Gus John is the former Director of Education for Hackney and a veteran campaigner, who has been in the struggle for race equality for over 50 years. In this special episode for Black History Month Professor John reflects on his life of activism and takes the long view of the history of race relations in Britain, the state of the education system and relations with the police, bringing us to the present day with the cases of Chris Kaba and Child Q.

Yvette Williams has lived in North Kensington for over 30 years, previously having worked with the Mangrove Community Association and has served as a Trustee for the Tabernacle Community Centre. Both Yvette and her daughter witnessed the fire at Grenfell Tower, after being alerted by a family friend who was evacuated from one of the walkways. After that tragic day in 2017, she became one of the founders of Justice4Grenfell (J4G) a community-led organisation, focused on obtaining justice for the bereaved families, and survivors.
In this episode we discuss the history of race relations in West London and the wider socio-economic conditions that led up to the Grenfell fire.

Qureshi is the CEO of the Migrants’ Rights Network – a charity that works alongside migrants in their fight for rights and justice.  

In this interview, as well as the work of MRN we discuss attempts to separate race from migration, Priti Patel and her Rwanda Plan and how the Ukrainian refugee crisis has exposed the double standards of the UK immigration policy.

No podcast series discussing racism would be complete if it did not touch on anti-Semitism.
This episode's guest is Dr Edie Friedman - Executive Director of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality (JCORE).  
Edie was born in Chicago. A student in the 1960s, she was heavily influenced by the civil rights and peace movements.
She came in to England to study in Leeds and subsequently worked for Oxfam and the Community Relations Council in Ealing, west London.
She founded the Jewish Council for Racial Equality in 1976.
In this episode we discuss her lifetime of activism, anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and the controversial comments about the Holocaust from Whoopi Goldberg.

In this episode I speak to Tebussum Rashid the Deputy Chief Executive at the Black Training Enterprise Group (aka BTEG).

Tebs has over 25 years' experience of working in the charity and voluntary sector, helping create and develop new organisations and projects. But it was a tough climb to get to where she is today, being the eldest daughter in a Muslim family, having to overcome, not just the low expectations of her teachers, but also of her family and community.

Tebs successfully negotiated her way around those barriers, and today, as well as being the Deputy Chief Exec at BTEG, she also runs her own training company – Sukoon Ltd - through which she delivers a diverse range of courses and facilitates strategic planning away days.

In this episode we discuss her life of intersectionality fighting sexism, racism and islamophobia and her lifetime struggling as a Muslim woman to define her own destiny.

Missed penalties by three Black England players in the final of the Euros, brought the perennial issue of racism in football to the fore again in 2021.  From the monkey chats and bananas on the pitch that were a regular feature in the 1970s and 80’s, to the on-line abuse suffered by today’s players, it’s a problem that has never gone away.

In this episode, I speak to the former head of Kick It Out Piara Powar.  We discuss British-Asian identity, being politically ‘Black’, fighting racism in football and the reasons for the lack of Asian players.

Patrick Vernon OBE is social commentator and political activist. He runs his own social enterprise promoting the history of diverse communities, and is founder of Every Generation and the "100 Great Black Britons" campaign. 

Patrick led a successful campaign for 22nd of  June to be recognised annually as Windrush Day,  which was officially backed by the British government in 2018.  

But as well as celebrating the contribution of the Windrush generation of migrants from the Caribbean, more recently he has been fighting for compensation for the victims of the Windrush Scandal.

August 2021 sees the 10th anniversary of the police shooting of Mark Duggan on the streets of Tottenham and the nationwide riots that followed.

But what is it about Tottenham? Over the last four decades, more than any other area of Britain more than St Pauls in Bristol, more than Toxteth in Liverpool, more even than Hackney or Notting Hill or Brixton in London, Tottenham has become synonymous with violent clashes between the police and the Black community - violent clashes that often spill out onto the rest of the country.

And community activist Stafford Scott has been there through all of them. As such he is a living part of Black British history.

So we are honoured to have him join us as our guest.

In this episode he takes us through the history of Tottenham and their struggles with the Met Police, from the Broadwater Farm Riots in 1985, to the shooting of Mark Duggan in 2011, to the tasering of his own brother in 2020.

CRÈME is an acronym – it stands for Communicating the Race Equality Message Effectively.

In each episode we will be interviewing a representative of one of the organisations fighting for racial equality in Britain. But this will not be just a dry discussion on policy – this is about the people behind the campaigning, and the experiences that shaped them.