Created in partnership with Sotheby's, in a debate that spans the centuries, Peabody Award-winning spoken word performer George the Poet and Booker Prize-winning author Howard Jacobson go head-to-head over which form of cultural expression best resonates now and forever. Does hip-hop and slam poetry speak more to society than historical texts that require background knowledge to be fully understood? Or does the lasting appeal of Shakespeare and other great figures from the canon show that...

Between 1500 and 1866, 12.5 million enslaved Africans were transported by ship from Africa to the Americas as part of the Middle Passage crossing. Some 1.8 million of them died, their bodies thrown into the Atlantic, while the others who survived undertook journeys of misery and terror – chained together, starved, and surrounded by disease, to be sold into slavery and forced to work in brutal, dehumanising conditions. The slave mutinies that took place on these ships were the beginning of a...

Samira Ahmed speaks to the novelist and author of An American Marriage, Tayari Jones. They speak about her life and career from growing up in Atlanta and taking a stand on ethical issues as a child to developing her voice as a writer, the role that children's author Judy Blume played in her life, and being selected for President Barack Obama's summer reading list and Oprah's Book Club. _ Head to intelligencesquared.com see our upcoming events events are coming up. Subscribe to our newsletter...

Black Lives Matter began as a hashtag when Alicia Garza wrote what she calls ‘a love letter to Black people’ on Facebook, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of fatally shooting Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, in 2013. In November 2020 Garza came to Intelligence Squared to recount how she and her co-founders built Black Lives Matter into the most influential movement of recent times. The phrase she coined was chanted by millions of people around the world this year in protests...

The history of Africans in Europe may seem recent – a result of migration in the 20th and 21st centuries – but in her new book, African Europeans, historian Olivette Otele tells a very different story – a story of African presence in Europe that stretches back centuries.  Otele writes of African Europeans through the lives of individuals both ordinary and extraordinary. She has uncovered a forgotten past, one that features the Libya-born Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, a Medici duke believed...

A great reckoning is taking place in the wake of the brutal killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed his death. Companies and organisations are looking afresh at how they can do a better job of combatting institutional bias and racism. Employees are increasingly speaking out about their experiences and calling for change. In this special event recorded on Thursday June 25 2020, Intelligence Squared brought together two leading voices from the arts, Kwame Kwei-Armah, artistic...

For the second installment of our Trailblazers series, Intelligence Squared has partnered with gal-dem to bring together a collection of outstanding women – and their letters – to our stage. If you could offer insight and advice to your younger self, what would you say? Oprah Winfrey, when she was 58, wrote these words to her 19-year-old self: ‘Dear beautiful brown-skinned girl… The truth is, he’s intimidated. You don’t know this, though, because you can see yourself only through his eyes. A...

This event is the first of a series of events produced in partnership with gal-dem, an award-winning media platform that spotlights the creative work of women of colour and non-binary people of colour. You are young and ambitious. You have a vision. But how do you pursue your dream role when no one at the top of your industry looks like you? Women of colour have to navigate a world of work where they are often discriminated against because of their race as well as their gender. Prejudice in...

They are the crimes for which no one has ever made amends. The transatlantic slave trade enslaved between 10 and 12 million Africans. Historians estimate that 15 to 25% of the men and women packed into the slave ships died before they reached the Americas. The only people ever to be compensated? Slave owners and traders, to make up for their lost earnings when slavery ended. Today, generations later, the white majorities in the US and former colonial powers including the UK continue to...

What's the difference between being merely non-racist and being an antiracist? And what will it take to completely uproot racism from our societies, institutions and our own selves? In this episode were were joined by Ibram X. Kendi, the founding director of the Antiracism Research and Policy Center at American University and author of How To Be an Antiracist. He was interviewed by BBC presenter Razia Iqbal.  — Head to intelligencesquared.com see our upcoming events events are coming...

This week we bring you an episode from one of our sister podcasts, How I Found My Voice, where host Samira Ahmed speaks to poet and activist Benjamin Zephaniah. From racist attacks and police brutality to receiving a letter from Bob Marley telling him that Britain needs him, Zephaniah talks about the moments that shaped and inspired his voice. How I Found My Voice is an Intelligence Squared podcast that explores how some of the world's greatest artists and thinkers became such compelling -...

Statues and memorials to famous figures of the past adorn our towns and cities but what should be done when some of these figures have come to be seen by many people as controversial symbols of oppression and discrimination? In Britain, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign hit the headlines when it demanded the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oxford’s Oriel College, of which he was a leading benefactor, because of his colonialism. In the US, violent protests in Charlottesville were...