All posts tagged: Kenan

What a teacher in hiding can tell us about our failure to tackle intolerance | Kenan Malik

What a teacher in hiding can tell us about our failure to tackle intolerance | Kenan Malik

Three years ago, on 25 March 2021, a teacher from Batley Grammar School (BGS) in West Yorkshire was forced into hiding after a religious studies class he gave led to protests from Muslim parents and to death threats. Today, that incident has been largely forgotten. Except by the teacher. He can’t forget it because, extraordinarily, he and his family are still in hiding. Equally extraordinarily, little is said about this. The debate about the events at BGS, like many about Islam, blasphemy and offence, has been framed by two polarised arguments. Many on the reactionary right (and not just the reactionary right) view such confrontations as the unacceptable price of mass immigration and the inevitable product of a Muslim presence in western societies. Many liberals and radicals, on the other hand, think it morally wrong to cause offence, believing that for diverse societies to function, there is a need to self-censor so as not to disrespect different cultures and beliefs. Neither argument bears much scrutiny. The most comprehensive account of the events at BGS comes in a review published …

Kenan Thompson Urges Nickelodeon to “Investigate More” Abuse Claims After ‘Quiet on Set’

Kenan Thompson Urges Nickelodeon to “Investigate More” Abuse Claims After ‘Quiet on Set’

After coming of age on the sets of All That and its spin-off series Kenan & Kel in the 1990s, Kenan Thompson is speaking out about Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, an Investigation Discovery docuseries that details alleged abuse and wrongdoing at kids network Nickelodeon. “It’s tough. It’s a tough subject, you know?” Thompson said on Wednesday’s episode of Tamron Hall. “It’s tough for me because I can’t really speak on things that I never witnessed, you know what I’m saying? Because all these things happened after I left, basically.” Former network creator Dan Schneider, who exited Nickelodeon in 2018 amid toxicity allegations, is frequently accused of fostering an unsafe work environment at the network in the docuseries. Thompson attempted to distance himself from Schneider while addressing the project. “Dan wasn’t really on Kenan & Kel like that,” he explained. “I mean, he got a ‘created by’ credit, but it was a different showrunner, so our worlds weren’t really overly overlapping like that—outside of *All That—*necessarily. And then all of that …

Kenan Thompson speaks out on Dan Schneider allegations: ‘Investigate more’

Kenan Thompson speaks out on Dan Schneider allegations: ‘Investigate more’

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Nickelodeon star Kenan Thompson has spoken out about the recent accusations made against producer Dan Schneider. Released earlier this month in the US, the documentary Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV sees former Drake and Josh star Drake Bell come forward with allegations of sexual abuse, which he says he suffered aged 15. In it, Bell – who appeared on the network in several shows in the Noughties – alleged that he was a victim of abuse at the hands of Brian Peck, who worked as a dialogue coach on Nickelodeon’s All That and The Amanda Show. The programme also included allegations against former Nickelodeon executive producer Dan Schneider, who left the network in 2018 following a ViacomCBS investigation that deemed he committed verbal abuse on set, but found no evidence of sexual misconduct. He has since spoken out about the claims made in the …

What a legendary historian tells us about the contempt for today’s working class | Kenan Malik

What a legendary historian tells us about the contempt for today’s working class | Kenan Malik

It is not often that, as a teenager, you get captured by a 900-page tome (unless it has “Harry Potter” in the title). Even less when it is a dense book of history, telling in meticulous detail stories of 18th-century weavers and colliers, shoemakers and shipwrights. Yet I can even now picture myself first stumbling across EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class in a bookshop. I had no idea about its cultural significance or its place in historiographic debates. I would not have known what “historiography” meant, or even that such a thing existed. But I can still sense the thrill in opening the book and reading in the first paragraph: “The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.” I did not know it was possible to write about history in that way. I still have that old, battered, pencil-marked Pelican edition with George Walker’s engraving of a Yorkshire miner on the cover; a book into which I continue to dip, …

Amid class prejudice and sensitivities over race, Rochdale’s abused girls were failed | Kenan Malik

Amid class prejudice and sensitivities over race, Rochdale’s abused girls were failed | Kenan Malik

‘Child 44” was raped by many men over a long period of time, eventually forced to have an abortion, aged 13. None of her abusers was charged with rape against her; many were not even interviewed. After the termination, the Greater Manchester Police (GMP) seized possession of the foetus without her knowledge, let alone consent, leaving it forgotten in a freezer until spotted during “a routine property review”. “Child 37” was 13. She told the police that she had been “in the park with another child and met four Asian men”, two of whom had raped her. Because she was reluctant to undergo a medical or give a video interview, the police recorded the crime as requiring “no further action”. Two distressing stories out of dozens from a report on grooming gangs in Rochdale published last week. It is the latest in a series of excoriating accounts of official attitudes to child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rotherham, Telford, Oxford and many other towns, each one as tormenting to read as the next. The Rochdale report …

Claudine Gay’s ousting reveals that the messenger is still an easier target than the message | Kenan Malik

Claudine Gay’s ousting reveals that the messenger is still an easier target than the message | Kenan Malik

For some, she is the wretched epitome of the liberal elite; for others, the victim of a “racist mob”. She herself condemns her critics for having “recycled tired racial stereotypes”. As an illustration of the way that culture wars warp political judgment and push people into tribal corners, the case of Claudine Gay may be Exhibit 1. Gay, who became Harvard University’s first black president in July, was forced last week to resign, the culmination of a bitter controversy at the heart of which are tussles over some of the most polarising issues of the day: racism, antisemitism, plagiarism, free speech and diversity. The controversy began after the Hamas attack of 7 October. Harvard student groups, led by the university’s Palestine Solidarity Committee, published a statement holding Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”, provoking outrage and criticism of university authorities for not responding. Gay, and presidents of two other colleges, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Pennsylvania, were summoned to Washington to face a Congressional interrogation led by rightwing Republican Elise Stefanik. It turned …

The conflict between history and memory lies at the heart of today’s cultural divides | Kenan Malik

The conflict between history and memory lies at the heart of today’s cultural divides | Kenan Malik

The difference between the study of history and the construction of public memory, the American historian Arno Mayer observed, is that “whereas the voice of memory is univocal and uncontested, that of history is polyphonic and open to debate”. Memory, he added, “tends to rigidify over time, while history calls for revision”. When Mayer died earlier this month, his death was barely marked in the media. Yet, in an age in which the clash between history and memory lies at the heart of much political conflict, from culture war debates over statues and slavery to the confrontation between the origin stories of Jews and Palestinians, Mayer’s work remains indispensable in making sense not just of where we are, but also of how we got here. Mayer was born in Luxembourg in 1926 into a Jewish family. Forced to flee the Nazis in 1940, the Mayers eventually found refuge in America. After enlisting in the army, Mayer studied history and settled into academic life, teaching for nearly three decades at Princeton until his retirement in 1993. …

A culture of greed, riddled with inequality. Global football is a mirror of our age | Kenan Malik

A culture of greed, riddled with inequality. Global football is a mirror of our age | Kenan Malik

Nadine Dorries or Jacob Rees-Mogg? Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk? Uefa or the European Super League? Yes, sometimes life seems like a succession of Hobson’s choices. Last week the European court of justice (ECJ) ruled that Uefa, which oversees European football, and the game’s global body, Fifa, acted unlawfully in threatening sanctions against players and clubs that joined the European Super League (ESL) in 2021. In April of that year, 12 of Europe’s biggest clubs announced the creation of the ESL, a lucrative new competition to rival Uefa’s Champions League, promising clubs even more riches but also freedom from the possibilities of relegation, thereby making those riches permanent. Six English clubs were part of the original ESL cohort – Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Spurs. Within days, a huge backlash from fans, national governments and existing football organisations, forced all but three to pull out. The three remaining clubs – Barcelona and Real Madrid from Spain’s La Liga and Italy’s Juventus – brought a court case against Uefa and Fifa. Last week …

The Reith lectures miss the point. Politics fails when it avoids the issue of class | Kenan Malik

‘Solidarity has to come through class.” So insisted Rollie, a member of the audience in the latest of the Reith lectures, given this year by political scientist Ben Ansell, professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford, His four Reith lectures, entitled “Our Democratic Future”, explore, respectively, issues of democracy, security, solidarity – last week’s subject – and prosperity, the final lecture this week. Ansell’s themes grapple with many of the most important political ailments that confront us today. At a time when there are demands for more technocratic solutions that place many social and economic issues outside of political contestation, or for more authoritarian forms of rule, his insistence on “the fundamental centrality of politics to achieving our collective goals” is welcome. But the lectures also feel at times as if they are sliding past the difficult issues. Rollie’s intervention hints at what is missing in the discussion. Ansell’s talks broadly follow the outlines of his book Why Politics Fails, published earlier this year, at the heart of which is the claim that politics fails …

The west’s dumping of migrants on poor countries is a grisly echo of penal transportation | Kenan Malik

Imagine that Britain signs a treaty with France agreeing to take its unwanted migrants for cash payment; that France suggests sending lawyers to this country to ensure the British courts treat deportees properly; and that the French national assembly passes a law declaring Britain to be a safe country for its cast-off migrants. What do we suppose would be the response of the Rishi Sunaks and James Cleverlys of this world (not to mention the Suella Bravermans, Robert Jenricks and Matthew Goodwins)? There would (rightly) be spitting fury. There would be outraged talk about the loss of British sovereignty and choleric questioning of why France could not deal with its own problems rather than dump them on Britain. One does not have to imagine such a scenario. It’s already happening, except that, in the real storyline, Britain is playing the role of France and Rwanda that of the UK. And there’s the irony: Britain, like other advanced nations, insists that too great an inflow of migrants and asylum seekers is threatening its sovereignty and shredding …