Call to stop civil rights cases follows order putting staff on federal DEI programs on leave as a prelude to shutting programs down

• US politics live – latest updates

The Department of Justice has ordered its civil rights division to halt new cases, further signalling the new administration’s hostility to racial and gender equality since Donald Trump’s return to power.

The decision came amid a blur of frenzied activity across a range of sectors that sent out simultaneous signals of incipient purges and revenge against political opponents, along with a determination to act on radical campaign pledges.

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High court case demands inquiry into 1985 Cradock Four killings and ‘constitutional damages’ worth £7.3m

Lukhanyo Calata’s first memory of his father was the funeral. His mother sobbing, the earth beneath his feet shaking from the number of people gathered at the graveside, and the fear he felt aged three as the red box holding his father, Fort, was lowered into the ground.

Fort Calata was one of four men stopped at a roadblock in June 1985 by security officers. The Cradock Four were beaten, strangled with telephone wire, stabbed and shot to death in one of the most notorious killings of South Africa’s apartheid era .

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London mayor hails performance and culture reforms but inspectorate warns there is still significant work to be done

The Met has been judged to be turning around its extensive failings and has been removed from special measures after more than two years under extra scrutiny.

The decision was announced by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services on Thursday.

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King’s legacy celebrated on a day that likely signals a step backwards in the fight against racism

As Donald Trump was sworn into office for the second time on Martin Luther King Jr Day 2025, both his supporters and those opposing him came out in droves to the US Capitol.

Black individuals and communities were seen around Washington DC honoring King’s legacy on a day that likely signals a step backwards in the fight against racism. Trump, his tech oligarch friends, and followers, new and old, have propagated racist language. Musk okayed the use of racial slurs on X while Mark Zuckerberg recently rolled back on Meta’s DEI policies.

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Tina Shingler was fostered in a white family in North Yorkshire in the 1960s, where her hair was a source of anxiety and stress. Then she wrote a ‘hairmoir’ and now she empowers others to embrace their hair too

Growing up, Tina Shingler didn’t touch her hair like other girls touched theirs. She didn’t preen, stroke or comb – though sometimes she hid pens and cigarettes in it. “I had no respect for it, because no one else had any,” she says.

As a “Barnardo’s child”, Shingler’s hair presented a challenge to her white foster parents, Mary, a housewife, and Jack, a semi-skilled mechanic. She had a happy enough childhood, but every few months was required to kneel in the sitting room in Ripon, North Yorkshire, and rest her head in Mary’s lap to be “shorn”. The language was always animalistic, Shingler says. It was “to bow your head”, and know your hair was “something to be got rid of”.

Tell us: has your life taken a new direction after the age of 60?

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Although greater awareness of prejudice would suggest we are less bigoted than ever, empirical evidence indicates not

• Q&A with Keon West, author of The Science of Racism

Do we still have a problem with racism? If you ask the average person even the most basic question about it – “Does racism still exist?” – half the population will say it doesn’t. According to a recent Guardian poll of British adults, more than half thought ethnic minorities faced less or the same discrimination as White people in most areas of life, such as the news, TV or films , the workplace, access to finance and jobs, and access to university or good schooling. Results in the US are similar. A 2021 Gallup poll revealed that slightly more than half of the White American population believe “racism against Black [people is] widespread in the US”. In the meantime, according to the same poll, slightly less than half of the White American population believe “racism against Whites [is] widespread in the US”. An earlier study (by Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers) showed that a growing number of White Americans believed “reverse racism”, or racism against White people, was the more prevalent form of racial bias.

This kind of division in our society is a massive problem to which those in positions of authority offer no clear answers. Politicians frequently pretend to be experts on a host of issues such as racism – and vaccines, and the climate crisis, and evolution – but they’re not. If they don’t have degrees or past careers in social psychology or climate science or evolutionary biology, then they are no more experts in the topic than you are and are as sharply divided as the rest of us.

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• Video from July 2024 shows Argentina players chanting
• Kick it Out chief writes to Gianni Infantino and Conmebol

Kick It Out has demanded clarity from the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, over what action his organisation is taking over alleged discriminatory chanting involving the Chelsea midfielder Enzo Fernández and other Argentina players.

Fernández, who turns 24 on Friday, posted a video of himself and some of his Argentina teammates singing a derogatory song about French players of African origin in the wake of his side’s Copa América victory last July.

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A vibrant protest movement mobilised online is taking on Kenya’s political elite. Plus, Somalia and Ethiopia rebuild diplomatic bridges

Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week I spoke to our east Africa correspondent, Carlos Mureithi , about Kenya’s year of political protest and how a younger generation is leading the way to a more democratic future, not just for Kenya but Africa as a whole. But first, the weekly roundup.

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Think prejudice is overblown? A social psychologist provides the receipts in this densely informative but highly readable account

It was over schnitzel and mash that my friend’s Bavarian grandparents decided to call me a “black devil”, chuckling all the while. Breaded chicken has since been my madeleine, taking me back to racially charged moments I’ve not known quite how to interpret. Is it really racist if they didn’t mean to be rude? What if they have dementia? And if racism = prejudice + power, was being called a black devil while I choked down some potatoes even that big a deal, given that I felt in no way disempowered in the company of my tiny, elderly hosts?

In his succinct and bingeable book The Science of Racism, professor of social psychology Keon West begins by acknowledging that society doesn’t agree on even the most basic aspects of racism, let alone its finer points. Indeed, roughly half of Britons don’t believe minorities face more discrimination than white people in various areas of life. Yet far from being a set of hazy, unanswerable philosophical questions, many of the unknowns about racism are empirically testable, especially if researchers design clever studies.

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