Gary Younge writes:

As a child my mother used to put on the song Young, Gifted and Black, by Bob and Marcia, put my feet on hers and then dance us both around the living room. “They’re playing our song,” she’d say. It was the early 1970s, she was barely 30 and I was the youngest of three children she was raising alone. Struggling to believe there was a viable future for her children in a country where racism was on the rise and the economy was in the tank, she had seriously considered returning to Barbados. But after a six-week family trip back she decided we’d struggle to keep up academically: at school in England I played; in Barbados we sat in rows and recited times tables. I think this was partly cover for the fact that, after more than a decade of self-reliance and relative anonymity, fitting back into island life would have been difficult. So we danced around the living room, singing ourselves up: imagining a world in which we would thrive, for which we had no evidence, but great expectations.

In my interview for a Guardian Scott Trust bursary to study a postgraduate course in journalism, I was asked what kind of job I would aspire to if I ever got to work at the paper. “A columnist, like Hugo Young,” I said.

“There’s only room for a handful of columnists on a newspaper,” I was told.

“And why shouldn’t one of them be me?” I asked.

From another applicant that question might have come from a sense of entitlement. But it was a genuine inquiry. I was merely articulating the logic that had got me that far: imagining a world in which I might thrive for which I had no evidence. [Continue reading…]