Race and ethnicity

EXCLUSIVE: BET+ has boarded buzzy upcoming UK couples series In Love & Toxic: Blue Therapy .

The deal gives the Black culture streamer U.S. rights to the show, which debuts on E4 in the UK on October 5 and comes from Luti Media and Trend Cntrl.

Distributor All3Media International has also struck a continent-wide deal with Prime Video Africa for the show in which is based on the viral YouTube series Blue Therapy.

That series launched in 2021 and averaged over two million views per episode across 15 territories, including the UK, U.S. and South Africa. It was named “the most explosive show of the year” in one of several glowing reviews before E4, Channel 4’s younger skewing sibling net, ordered a full TV series adaptation.

The new show will explore the complex modern relationships of five young, diverse and aspirational couples from a a luxurious, idyllic country house where they meet with relationship coaches to discuss conflicts in their partnerships surrounding topics including race and interracial relationships, class, children, careers and gender role expectations.

The order is part of Channel 4 and Motion Content Group’s Diverse Indies Fund, to boost commissions from small- and medium-sized, ethnically diverse-led production companies. Luti Media will produce with Trend Centrl and Motion Group. All3Media International is selling the tape and also handles format rights.

Luti Fagbenle, Executive Producer said “ In Love & Toxic: Blue Therapy represents everything Luti Media is – bold, aspirational and innovative. The original Blue Therapy YouTube series was a global online sensation and demonstrated the international appeal of stories from black British culture. Now, through our partnership with All3Media International I am thrilled that this bigger and bolder version of Blue Therapy is will reached audiences around the world through major platforms in BET and Prime Video.”

Rachel Job, SVP Non-Scripted Content at All3Media International, added: “Addictive, glamorous and thought-provoking, In Love & Toxic: Blue Therapy is set to become a global television obsession.”

I’ll never forget the heat, the sounds and the smells of my first trip to visit family in Ghana at the age of 11. The sun was so bright it hurt my eyes.

My elder brother and I were walking through the outskirts of the African country’s second city, Kumasi. The paved road came to a sudden halt, replaced by a dirt track with deep ditches on either side, both filled with effluent.

The local children were playing on a stinking rubbish heap and I remember my brother pointing at a man in a pristine white suit, wondering how on earth he kept it so clean in such a filthy place.

One of the local kids shouted at us: ‘Go back where you came from!’

With those words, it suddenly became clear to me where my home really was.

When my parents came to Britain from Ghana, they made a positive decision to embrace everything British. My upbringing in Essex was one of white sliced Mother’s Pride, fish-and-chips and ketchup on everything.

I wished in that moment I could go home to the green fields, tarmac streets and cooler air of England.

When I heard Suella Braverman’s speech this week at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, this memory came flooding back.

The Home Secretary warned that uncontrolled immigration, inadequate integration and the failed, misguided dogma of multiculturalism has proved to be a toxic combination for many European countries.

‘Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate,’ she added. ‘It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it.’

Unsurprisingly, her speech has sparked fury among the usual suspects – the liberal Lefties for whom ‘multiculturalism’ has long been a fashionable creed.

Mrs Braverman has been accused of ‘dogwhistle’ racism by those who point out that her parents were ethic Indian immigrants from Mauritius and Kenya and that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s parents also came to this country from East Africa. Surely, they say, both their life stories are triumphs of multicultural Britain.

This ill-informed opprobrium shows just how little the champions of multiculturalism understand of the cause they promote.

Yes, Britain is multicultural, as anyone who walks round with their eyes open can see. But ‘multiculturalism’ is a different thing altogether.

It’s a philosophy of allowing – even encouraging – different ethnic groups to live separately in our towns and cities. It encourages the growth of monocultural areas over integration – and it is profoundly dangerous.

Yes, Suella Braverman’s and Rishi Sunak’s parents came here from other countries, but like my mum and dad they didn’t want their new lives to be corralled in smaller versions of where they came from.

I’m sure my parents – and the Home Secretary and Rishi Sunak’s parents – would have wanted no part in multiculturalism. They engaged with British society on its terms, they soaked up British traditions and lived British lifestyles. They encouraged their children to study hard, work hard and succeed.

All our stories are the very antithesis of multiculturalism, which for nearly 50 years has dictated that immigrant communities should be supported in maintaining their own culture and identities.

The creeping, insidious result of all this has been that Britishness has become a dirty word.

Our country is a patchwork of monocultural pockets where often English is not the first language, where mainstream education and assimilation is not deemed important and where the dominant values can be those of a place many thousands of miles away.

Not only, as Braverman said, is this imperilling the ‘cultural institutions of the West’, it has been a corrosive influence on the peace of our nation – and other European countries.

For perhaps one of the gravest dangers to multi-ethnic harmony is not white racism, though of course that is utterly abhorrent, but imported grievances that fuel tensions between isolated minority communities.

This is what we saw in last year’s large-scale public disorder in Leicester, primarily between Hindu and Muslim youths.

Only two weeks ago race-based tribalism reared its ugly head in the South-east London district of Peckham after a physical altercation between a British Asian shopkeeper and a black woman he accused of theft. There were angry demonstrations outside the shop and racist graffiti such as ‘go to hell Patel’ was scrawled on the building. The shopkeeper is still in hiding.

Meanwhile a string of post-industrial midlands and northern English towns and cities continue to struggle with the consequences of ethnic and religious segregation – from Leicester and Birmingham to Blackburn in Lancashire and Dewsbury in Yorkshire.

Yet it wasn’t always like this. The first wave of immigrants to this country from the Indian sub-continent were, like my parents, anxious to enjoy British life to the full.

Most wore Western clothes, they celebrated Christmas and Easter alongside their own religious festivals and were keen for their children to learn English and pursue professional careers.

This is exactly the model of immigration and integration that Suella Braverman is promoting, suggesting people who come to live here should ’embrace and respect this country’ just as her parents and my parents did.

But from my own experience, I’d suggest that slowing the rate of immigration into this country is a crucial factor, too.

When I was growing up, there were hardly any other black children in my school. Sometimes when I’d go to my friends’ houses, I’d be the first black person their parents had ever met.

I’ve no doubt that some of them might have been knee-jerk racists. I can remember being told more than once that I was ‘all right for a black person’.

But the families I’m still friendly with to this day saw that little Nana was no different from their own daughters. We spoke with the same accent, liked the same things and loved ketchup on our chips. They saw the person, not the skin colour.

But that becomes difficult when Britain has seen such unprecedented levels of migration – levels that threaten to change the fabric of our nation.

A lot of fuss has rightly been made about the more than 45,000 people who crossed the Channel in small boats last year, but their numbers are dwarfed by the same year’s figure of net legal migration of 606,000 people.

It’s almost impossible to integrate so many people from different cultures into a country in a short period of time.

And with the lack of any meaningful plan to encourage this to happen – and no legal requirement for local authorities and other public bodies such as schools and NHS trusts to publish their own strategies for doing so, these newcomers will inevitably gravitate towards their own communities in the inner cities.

So the real question for all these champions of multiculturalism, as well as for a Government that seems happy to allow mass immigration, is this: where do you want British immigrants to consider home?

Despite being humiliatingly excommunicated from the Black Lives Matter movement, activist Shaun King is doggedly continuing his progressive journalism, with a recent piece claiming that the festivities of Christmas and Easter are used as “tools of white supremacy.”

In an article for New York Daily News, King describes any attempts to depict Jesus as anything other than “the look of a Syrian refugee” as “nefarious.” “A white, Eurocentric Jesus may be convenient for millions,” continues King,  “but he is a lie designed to maintain the very systems of government and religious oppression that the biblical Jesus actually spoke out against.”

King is clearly not feeling the Christmas cheer. “Side by side with Easter” writes King, “It’s also the time when we’re most likely to see depictions of Jesus used as tools of white supremacy.”

King, who is still surrounded by questions regarding his true race as a result of investigations carried out by Breitbart , and who is still known to charge $7500 for speeches about race and gender, wrote that when Jesus is portrayed as a “Scandinavian sailor,” rather than a “Syrian refugee,” it’s in order to advance the “Anglo-Saxon, white supremacist agenda.”

The piece continues with a description of the historical Jesus, claiming that he looked more like “Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian refugee whose body washed ashore and became a symbol of the migrant crisis, than a blond-haired boy.”

He concludes the piece by with a typical appeal to victimhood. “I have a hunch that the truly ethnic Jesus would have a pretty hard time around here nowadays,” King writes.

King’s attempt to racialize a figure of unity for billions is typical of Black Lives Matter. King takes the opposite approach of another King, Martin Luther King Jr, who encouraged us to see past race rather than shoehorn it into every facet of culture.

It’s clear that Shaun King would hate us to think Jesus was white. I wonder who else he’d hate us to think was white?

New guidance from the Biden administration on Monday urges colleges to use a range of strategies to promote racial diversity on campus after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in admissions.

Colleges can focus their recruiting in high minority areas, for example, and take steps to retain students of color who are already on campus, including by offering affinity clubs geared toward students of a certain race. Colleges can also consider how an applicant’s race has shaped personal experience, as detailed in students’ application essays or letters of recommendation, according to the new guidance.

It also encourages them to consider ending policies known to stint racial diversity, including preferences for legacy students and the children of donors.

“Ensuring access to higher education for students from different backgrounds is one of the most powerful tools we have to prepare graduates to lead an increasingly diverse nation and make real our country’s promise of opportunity for all,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

The guidance, from the Justice and Education departments, arrives as colleges across the nation attempt to navigate a new era of admissions without the use of affirmative action. Schools are working to promote racial diversity without provoking legal action from affirmative action opponents.

Students for Fair Admission, the group that brought the issue to the Supreme Court through lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, sent a letter to 150 universities in July saying they must “take immediate steps to eliminate the use of race as a factor in admissions.”

In its guidance, the Biden administration offers a range of policies colleges can use “to achieve a student body that is diverse across a range of factors, including race and ethnicity.”

It also offers clarity on how colleges can consider race in the context of an applicant’s individual experience. The court’s decision bars colleges from considering race as a factor in and of itself, but nothing prohibits colleges from considering “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life,” the court wrote.

How to approach that line without crossing it has been a challenge for colleges as they rework admissions systems before a new wave of applications begin arriving in the fall.

The guidance offers examples of how colleges can “provide opportunities to assess how applicants’ individual backgrounds and attributes — including those related to their race.”

“A university could consider an applicant’s explanation about what it means to him to be the first Black violinist in his city’s youth orchestra or an applicant’s account of overcoming prejudice when she transferred to a rural high school where she was the only student of South Asian descent,” according to the guidance.

Schools can also consider a letter of recommendation describing how a student “conquered her feelings of isolation as a Latina student at an overwhelmingly white high school to join the debate team,” it says.

Students should feel comfortable to share “their whole selves” in the application process, the administration said. Previously, many students had expressed confusion about whether the court’s decision blocked them from discussing their race in essays and interviews.

The administration clarified that colleges don’t need to ignore race as they choose where to focus their recruiting efforts. The court’s decision doesn’t forbid schools from targeting recruiting efforts toward schools that predominately serve students of color or low-income students, it says.

Countering a directive from Students for Fair Admissions, the new guidance says colleges can legally collect data about the race of students and applicants, as long as it doesn’t influence admissions decisions.

Echoing previous comments from President Joe Biden , the guidance urges colleges to rethink policies that tend to favor white, wealthy applicants. “Nothing in the decision prevents an institution from determining whether preferences for legacy students or children of donors, for example, run counter to efforts to promote equal opportunities for all students,” the guidance said.

At the same time, the Justice and Education departments warned that they’re ready to investigate if schools fail to provide equal access to students of all races, adding that the administration “will vigorously enforce civil rights protections.”

The guidance arrives as colleges work to avoid the type of diversity decline that has been seen in some states that previously ended affirmative action, including in California and Michigan. Selective colleges in those states saw sharp decreases in minority student enrollment, and some have struggled for decades to recover.

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