Hoods - Construction Blacklist
Thinking Allowed
BBC
4.4 • 997 Ratings
🗓️ 26 October 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Hood: a cultural history of a seemingly neutral garment which has long been associated with violence, from the Executioner to the KKK and inner city gangs. Laurie Taylor talks to the America writer, Alison Kinney, about the material and symbolic meaning of hoods. Also, the blacklisting of employees. Dr Paul Lashmar, Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Sussex, examines a hidden history of discrimination. He's joined by Jack Fawbert, Associate Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, who provides the most contemporary and widespread instance of blacklisting in the UK - an extraordinary corporate crime which led to over 150 current or retired building workers reaching a substantial out of court settlement with the country's eight largest building employers earlier this year. All had been blacklisted for their trade union activities and alleged political views. How did this happen? Producer: Jayne Egerton.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a Thinking Aloud Podcast from the BBC and for more details in our terms of use and much, |
| 0:06.2 | much more about thinking aloud. Go to our website at BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:12.4 | Hello. I've got a friend, I'll call him Steve, who over the years acquired a considerable |
| 0:17.2 | reputation as a television director. Well after successfully completing one particular project |
| 0:22.2 | he took a short break before applying for another job. |
| 0:25.0 | As had always been the case in the past, he expected to be signed up quickly. |
| 0:29.0 | But although he went to interview after interview, he was never successful. |
| 0:32.0 | I will remember his his mounting |
| 0:34.4 | bemusement of these failures. What on earth the matter with me he'd asked |
| 0:39.2 | as he was rejected for increasingly modest positions. |
| 0:47.0 | Well, after 18 months of failure, his puzzlement was turning to despair. It was only then that he'd received a scruffy anonymous note from a well-wisher who told him that he was on a |
| 0:52.0 | blacklist, because someone had circulated a |
| 0:54.3 | warning that he was a drug addict but the warning had got his name wrong had indicted my good friend |
| 1:00.3 | rather than the real culprit a new circular eventually corrected the mistake and |
| 1:04.7 | Steve resumed his career. It's a simple enough showbiz story but one that brought |
| 1:09.3 | home to me the personal trauma induced by suddenly finding for no reason you can discern that your life has hit the buffers. |
| 1:17.0 | Well, earlier today I spoke to someone whose investigative journalism has over the years revealed the existence of a variety of employers |
| 1:24.7 | blacklists that have broken the careers and often the spirits of employees in |
| 1:29.2 | very different sectors of British society. He's Paul Leshmar, now head of journalism at the University of Sussex and I began by asking him to recall the McCarthy era. Well that was in the very early 1950s and you had the Senator Joseph McCarthy whose name has become synonymous with McCarthyism. |
| 1:47.0 | And what he was responsible was, you know, panels that would investigate people in government and in public service and also in the entertainment |
| 1:55.8 | industry. |
| 1:57.2 | And thousands of people were effectively blacklisted by this. |
... |
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