Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by the award-winning author, broadcaster, professor of sociology. Gary Young,

he is a professor currently at the University of Manchester.

He served for several decades as a columnist at The Guardian.

His new book dispatches from the diaspora, from Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter, collects his reporting and essays from a 30-year period.

His writing has been called by the route, chilling, urgent, and profound, which it definitely

is. Dispatches from the Diaspora is available from our books.

Gary Young, thank you so much for joining us on current affairs today.

Thanks for having me, Nathan. So your book covers, because it collects your reporting from a long

period of time that you served at The Guardian, it covers many, many different topics. You know,

you talk to everyone from via Angelo to Angela Davis, Nelson Medella, you know, you've visited Chicago and New Orleans and Barbados.

And so I thought where we could maybe start in organizing this conversation is, you know, in compiling this book,

you had to look back over what you had written during this period.

And you had to sort of figure out what the themes were and organize your own

writing. So as you looked back on your body of work, what are some of the themes that have come

out of it over the years? Well, I guess there are two main ones. The first is love in a range of

ways, and I mean in the broadest possible sense,

but if you look at Mandela, Obama on election night,

the Mandela in 2008,

the first Mandela election moments in Britain

after the Macpherson report,

which the equivalent would be something like the Kana report in the US after the Macpherson report, which the equivalent would be something like the Kana report in US after the

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