What it is like for a black student to go to Cambridge

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Campus Life, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2018-06-22 16:55Z by Steven

What it is like for a black student to go to Cambridge

The Financial Times
2018-05-30

Rianna Croxford


Rianna Croxford

Trailblazer discovers confidence sought by top universities can be learned

I am the first in my family to go to university and faced a lot of the obstacles students of colour encounter when aiming for Oxford and Cambridge.

Educated at state school, I graduated from Cambridge last year as one of only seven women of mixed white and black heritage in my year of 3,371 undergraduates.

As one of the first black students to read English at Trinity Hall college, I had to deal with different degrees of racism day to day, as well as cultural challenges that my background had not prepared me for.

I want to help make it easier for other students like myself to enter elite institutions that can offer a fast track to a successful career…

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Diversity and cohesion in Britain’s most mixed community

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2015-10-20 18:44Z by Steven

Diversity and cohesion in Britain’s most mixed community

Financial Times
2015-10-14

John McDermott

At the Barking Road Community Centre in Plaistow, dancers sway and twirl to calypso beats. If the music hints at the centre’s past as an Afro-Caribbean club, the mix of elderly boppers suggest how the composition of this pocket of east London is changing. As well as women with Nigerian and Jamaican heritage, there are those with roots in India, Pakistan, Colombia, Poland and the Philippines. They show why Plaistow is the clearest example of what researchers describe as London’s “super-diversity”.

“If London is the most diverse city in the world, and Plaistow is the most diverse part of the city, Plaistow might be the most diverse place in the world,” says Forhad Hussain, a local councillor. When Hussain came to the area in 1983 with his Bangladeshi-born parents, this part of the city was mostly white and working-class, home to dockers and their families who had stayed put as Plaistow was rebuilt after the devastation wrought by the Blitz…

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