Eskimo Avenue: Pejorative Arctic ethnonyms as the final frontier of racism?

Kenn Nakata Steffensen   At the recent Media for All Conference in London I came across a stall marketing a new division of the subtitling company Broadcast Text International. The rather unfortunate name they have chosen is Eskimo Avenue. It could not have been named Paki Street or Nigger Lane, but it seems that Eskimo [...]

Michael Mumisa takes aim at Satoshi Kanazawa and shoots himself in the foot

Kenn Nakata Steffensen Today is the first time I have come across the works of Sheikh Michael Mumisa of Cambridge and Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics. One is a South African Quranic scholar and Ph.D. candidate in literature, the other a Japanese evolutionary psychologist and reader in management. Both are of [...]

BECTU, the BBC and the BNP: Three acronyms and a political dilemma

Kenn Nakata Steffensen I am a member of the Broadcast, Entertainment, Communication and Theatre Union, BECTU. Like most people in this country BECTU understandably finds the BNP’s views abhorrent. Its policy of denying the party airtime is more difficult to understand, as it seems to contradict the union’s values as a democratic organisation committed to [...]