Being Brown: Sonia Sotomayor and the Latino Question tells the story of the country’s first Latina Supreme Court Associate Justice’s rise to the pinnacle of American public life at a moment of profound demographic and political transformation. And because black students are less likely to gain a high degree than their white counterparts – 57% of black students get a 2:1 or first degree at undergraduate level compared with 81% of white students – this rules out postgraduate study for many. Take, for instance, a 1965 article entitled “Life would be harder for all of us without coloured labour”, published at a time when 30 per cent of student nurses and midwives were Commonwealth migrants. Similarly, Clement Atlee, the Labour prime minister who oversaw the formation of the NHS, was a staunch defender of the Commonwealth, as he expounded in his 1960 Chichele Lectures at Oxford University, entitled “Empire into Commonwealth”. But even so, how bizarre it was to think of our team, actively recruited from the Global South to fill employment gaps, being asked to stare into the eyes of brown patients and force them to prove that they deserve the care we were providing, even if they were from the same country of origin!

In 2005, he was chosen by the Royal College of General Practitioners to deliver the annual William Pickles lecture, and he chose to give a searing critique of the inimical atmosphere he and thousands of other South Asian doctors faced when arriving in the UK. Institute programs to eliminate profiling, and stop national data collection programs on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, and gender. Neil Singh’s grandfather Naveen with two other doctors in 1946, shortly after graduating from the Prince of Wales Medical College in Patna, in colonial India.

To find out what it was like for my parents to face such a racial hierarchy, we must hear the voices of other doctors of their generation who made similar journeys at the same time. He is the author of four books including Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and the New York Times bestsellers How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, co-authored with Jason Reynolds. The exponential expansion of mass surveillance since 9/11 has also intensified the criminalization of marginalized and racialized groups, from Muslims and Arabs to Latinx immigrant communities to Black and Indigenous organizers, and has increasingly targeted protest movements such as Black Lives Matter and the movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Meanwhile, SWAT teams, which derive tactics and equipment from the military, are disproportionately used against Black and Latinx people in raids like the one that killed 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones in Detroit, Michigan in 2010. The 1858 Cyclopaedia of India and of eastern and southern Asia [11] notes that Keane was dividing the "brown people" into quaternion: a western branch that he termed the Malay, a north-western group that he termed the Micronesian, and the peoples of the eastern archipelagos that he termed the Maori and the Polynesian. We talk about racial disparities, policy, and equality, but we really focus on How to Be an Antiracist, which is a groundbreaking approach to understanding uprooting racism and inequality in our society and in ourselves. We health workers of colour were essentially asked to racially profile migrants, knowing full well that we were on the fortunate side of some concocted line drawn between the highly skilled and those deemed just dead weight. He is the author of The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory and the coeditor, with Felice Picano, of Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing.In its place, they set up their own medical schools, staffed by and serving white British colonialists, and modelled closely on the British medical system.

She grew up in the ‘deep’ south, I grew up in the *deeper* south in Southern Alabama on a pig farm in a house with no insulation, no running water, an out house in the back, and a well on the side. It took me years to find spaces where I could exhale and speak my truths about racism freely, and I want my kids to grow up with those spaces built into their social scaffolding as early as possible. BB: I want to get into… I want to talk a lot about How to Be an Antiracist, your book that I think is life changing.

Recently, Theresa May relaxed visa rules only for NHS migrants, and there are specific schemes to recruit GPs from overseas to fill vacancies. I wanted to be in spaces where I didn’t feel hypervigilant, where that sense of uneasiness could abate a little. I wish someone had understood and validated both my fear and my desire to emulate whiteness—and I also wish that I had had the social safety of other options besides blending in or being an outcast.

Furthermore, some Americans of Southeast Asian or South Asian descent have used the terms "Brown Asian" or "Brown South Asian" to distinguish themselves from East Asian Americans, who are what the term "Asian American" usually refers to in the United States. Since April 2015, non-EU patients without a visa have been charged in hospitals at 150 per cent of the cost of the care they receive, even if they are NHS staff, contrary to Aneurin Bevan’s vision of a system providing for anyone in the country regardless of migration status. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves.But every health worker of colour has their own family story to tell, and to hear them all would challenge our assumptions about what, if anything, makes Britain great.