Race & Inequality Across the Pond with Inaya Folarin Iman

Conversations With Coleman | Members Exclusive

My guest today is Inaya Folarin Iman. Inaya is the founder of The Equiano Project, a British organization dedicated to promoting free speech, common humanity, and universalism. She recently organized a conference called "Towards the Common Good" hosted at Cambridge, where John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and yours truly, spoke along with a host of British thinkers who are fighting in the same trenches that people like John, Glenn, Thomas and myself are. Inaya is one of the major people fighting this fight in the UK. She also ran for Parliament as part of the Brexit party in 2019 and has written for many outlets in the UK including The Telegraph, Spiked and Unheard.

In this episode, we discuss Inaya's background growing up in a working-class immigrant family. We talk about the influence of Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd moment in the UK. We discuss the similarities and differences between the US and the UK with regard to race relations. We talk about the contents of Boris Johnson's commission on race and how that report was misportrayed in the media. We also talk about the tragic cases of Sasha Johnson (a Brit) and Jasmine Barnes (an American), both of whom call into question which Black lives matter, and which Black lives don't.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.