100 Quotes by David Olusoga

I finally got to watch 'Roots' in my mid-teens, on a video rental. Slowly and meticulously Roots fed its black characters through the mincing machine of American slavery. People with names, hopes and family connections were destroyed and dehumanised before my eyes.

When black Britons draw parallels between their experiences and those of African Americans, they are not suggesting that those experiences are identical.

When I was a child, growing up on a council estate in the northeast of England, I imbibed enough of the background racial tensions of the late 1970s and 1980s to feel profoundly unwelcome in Britain.

Excusing or downplaying British racism with comparisons to the US is a bad habit with a long history.

Not only does the UK have the highest levels of regional inequality among the major economies, the imbalance is widening, not narrowing.

While everyone knows that London is both big and overprivileged when it comes to spending, the scale of its dominance is poorly understood. London is not just the biggest city in the UK, it is the biggest city in western Europe. It is also the richest region.

When the banks crashed the global economy in 2007-08, it was they who received a bailout while the rest of us got austerity.

Democratically elected governments meekly requesting giant corporations to pay pitifully low levels of tax on their enormous profits is not a good look.

Donald Trump did not cause America's democratic crisis of faith, he rode to power on it. Once in control, he and other populists discovered their room for manoeuvre was expanded by the same disillusionment that helped them into office.