Yesterday on Ujima: Jamaica, Housing & Racism in Education

Not much literary stuff on the show yesterday, but some great content all the same.

Paulette was back from her trip to Jamaica. We spent the first half hour talking about that. With us in the studio was Auntie Pearl from the local Caribbean cricket club, who is also Jamaican. We may have talked about pirates for a while.

In the second half hour Judeline and I interviewed Tony Crofts who runs an organization looking to buy up empty office space and turn it into affordable housing. This isn’t anything to do with the situation at The Fleece which we highlighted last week. Tony’s organization is very responsible, and is in fact looking to take the place of council housing, which has more or less disappeared in the UK. To give you some idea of the problem, I note that the average UK home costs around 11 times the average annual salary (compared to about 3x when I stared work), and that average rents are above what you can afford on an average salary.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

For the second hour I handed the mic over to Paulette who did a wonderful piece on racism in Bristol schools. One of her studio guests had been very badly treated by one school and ended up taking them to an employment tribunal, as a result of which the school was (quite rightly) deemed institutionally racist.

You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

My playlist for the show was:

  • Montego Bay – Amazulu
  • Don’t Stop (Funkin’ for Jamaica) – Mariah Carey featuring Mystikal
  • Burning Down the House – Talking Heads
  • Build – The Housemartins
  • Another Brick in the wall, Part II – Pink Floyd
  • Maggie May – Rod Stewart
  • Baggy Trousers – Madness
  • My Old School – Steely Dan

I did try to find songs that had something positive to say about schools, honest.