King's College London

‘Race across the Channel’ is an AiR project addressing resistance to antiracism from a France-UK transnational perspective, funded by King's College London AHRC Impact Acceleration. More specifically, it aims to identify and challenge the discursive strategies used by media and political elites in France and the UK to counter antiracist scholarship and activism. These are strategies of denial (‘racism is not as bad as you claim’, ‘it is a thing of the past’, ‘it is more prevalent in the US’), of inverting the charge of racism (‘you are the true racists’, ‘why don’t you care about anti-white racism?’) and outright demonisation (‘your politics are divisive’, ‘you are radical’, ‘you help global jihadism’, ‘you are separatists’). The PI and the activists have respectively analysed and countered these strategies , and are conscious that a potentially fruitful comparative perspective on the UK and France is currently lacking. This is the gap the project aims to address.

Kiffe ta race podcast

Rokhaya Diallo and Grace Ly are French antiracist activists and journalists. They co-produce a popular podcast entitled Kiffe ta race (‘pardon my race’). The 100 episodes of the podcast have been listened to a total of 4 million times, with an average of 80K monthly listeners. The show has also been nominated in 2019 and 2020 for the Paris Podcast Festival Prize.

Through interview-style engagement with race scholars and activists, the Kiffe ta race podcast offers reflections on various aspects of the regime of racial disadvantage existing in France. They particularly highlight the tangible consequences of elitist media discourse and state practice in erasing, minimising or denying the experiences of racial minorities. As this directly relates to the PI’s new collaborative research project on racism denial (in development within KRRN), it is hoped that the ‘Race across the Channel’ scheme will be expanded into the impact component of that project.