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As a young child, Gamal ‘G’ Turawa was brought up in a white foster family in Kent. He didn’t give much thought to being Black until he moved to London with his biological father, where a Metropolitan Police officer spewed a racist insult at him. Why then did he end up aspiring to become an officer with the same police force? Recounting his life’s story with riveting candour, Turawa explores how a deep-seeded desire ‘to be as white as possible’ led him to a career at the Metropolitan Police, the racism he experienced there and even perpetrated himself as an officer, and how coming out of the closet as a gay man ultimately led him down a path of self-acceptance and self-understanding. Intimately captured by the UK director Cherish Oteka, the documentary The Black Cop: A Villain, a Victim and a Hero is both a troubling account of institutional racism in the UK and, through Turawa, a deeply moving portrait of the complexities of identity.
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Language and linguistics
Closed captions suck. Here’s one artist’s inventive project to make them better
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Thinkers and theories
A rare female scholar of the Roman Empire, Hypatia lived and died as a secular voice
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Architecture
The celebrated architect who took inspiration from sitting, waiting and contemplating
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Anthropology
Why are witchcraft accusations so common across human societies?
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Subcultures
Drop into London’s eclectic skate scene, where newbies and old-timers find community
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Technology and the self
A deepfake porn victim confronts the pain of having her likeness stolen and vandalised
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Wellbeing
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Rituals and celebrations
A whale hunt is an act of prayer for an Inuit community north of the Arctic Circle
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Music
The peculiar beauty of a song caught between composition and improvisation
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