Professor Kehinde Andrews
Professor Kehinde Andrews is a controversial academic who regularly appears on TV debates to air his divisive and highly contested views – yet despite arguing that Britain’s wealth is built on ‘exploiting Africa’ he is happy to draw his salary from the nation’s taxpayers.
The 38-year-old is professor of black studies in the school of social sciences at Birmingham City University, and is best known for repeatedly comparing Churchill to Hitler.
It a recent online discussion held by Churchill College, Cambridge, Professor Andrews called the British Empire ‘worse than the Nazis’ and suggested WWII ‘would have ended the same day’ with or without Sir Winston Churchill’s leadership.
The academic made headlines in 2018 when he claimed on Good Morning Britain that Churchill was a ‘clear racist’ in a heated debate in which Piers Morgan asked him: ‘Why do you live in a country that you loathe?’
Professor Andrews also said Britain was ‘built on racism’ and that ‘everyone involved in it probably has a really racist past’.
The academic also compared the UK’s war-time Prime Minister to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler for his treatment of Indians when the country endured a famine in 1943.
Professor Kehinde Andrews
Professor Andrews believes that Britain’s prosperity is ‘largely produced off the economic system that extracts wealth by exploiting Africa and the underdeveloped world’.
Nonetheless, he accepts that as an academic at a public university his ‘primary income comes from the state’ through taxpayers.
The academic has written several books over the past five years including ‘Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century’ and ‘Resisting Racism: Race, Inequality and the Black Supplementary School Movement’.
He has also written for publications on both sides of the Atlantic including the Guardian, Washington Post and New Statesman.
Last year, he told the Guardian that it was inevitable Meghan Markle would split from the Queen because ‘blackness’ was ‘incompatible’ with the royal family.
“It was never going to end well,’ he said. ‘The only surprise is that it’s happened this quickly.
“The speed of it just shows how incompatible blackness is with the royal family. I don’t think they specifically mentioned racism [in their announcement] but it’s pretty clear that they’ve been hounded by the press, even after she had a baby.
“A lot of the anti-Meghan stuff isn’t directly racist but that’s not how racism works these days. It’s clearly about racism, what else can it be about?’
Prior to Harry and Meghan’s wedding in May 2018, he said it was meaningless for Britain’s black community in addressing racism in job prospects, the criminal justice system and health disparities.
Dr Andrews added: ‘When we sit back and actually analyse what’s happened and what’s changed, we’ll realise it means nothing at all.’ On January 2019 Professor Andrews was embroiled in controversy again for calling the RAF airmen who bombed Nazi Germany war criminals.
He said the decision to build tributes like the Bomber Command Memorial was like ‘justifying terrorism’.
In August 2019 he appeared on Good Morning Britain to argue that author Enid Blyton was not ‘worthy’ of the honour of a commemorative coin because ‘she was racist her books were racist’.
Last year, Professor Andrews criticised the singing of Rule, Britannia! and Land of Hope and Glory at the Last Night of the Proms.
He said: ‘Some of those songs, particularly those two, are racist propaganda. They celebrate the British Empire which killed tens of millions of people.’
Writing in the New Statesman about 2018’s Black History Month, he said: ‘If schools want to genuinely engage with black history then they can embed it into their teaching.
‘For example, rather than teaching the industrial revolution as a triumph of British engineering alone, teachers should link it to the enslavement and colonisation of Africa, which was essential to British history.
‘There is also nothing wrong with teaching the history of the rest of the world, which was just as pivotal to the development of Britain.’
Kehinde Andrews earned a PhD in sociology and cultural studies from the University of Birmingham in 2011 and is now a professor of black studies in the school of social sciences at Birmingham City University.
Professor Priya Gopal
Professor Priya Gopal is a fellow at Churchill College Cambridge and staunch critic of the British Empire.
Professor Gopal, who was born in India, sparked anger last summer after tweeting ‘White Lives Don’t Matter. As white lives’.
A petition titled ‘Fire Cambridge Professor for Racism’ was also launched on change.org demanding that Professor Gopal be fired by the university for the comment.
The university stood by her after she said the comments were ‘very clearly speaking to a structure and ideology, not about people’.
She said that she had been misunderstood, and that she was clearly not attacking white people.
Professor Priya Gopal
Dr Madhusree Mukerjee
Journalist Dr Madhusree Mukerjee is also due to take part in tonight’s talk on Churchill, a free online event hosted by Churchill College Cambridge.
Her books include Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II.
Dr Madhusree Mukerjee
Dr Onyeka Nubia
Historian Dr Onyeka Nubia will also appear.
He has been credited with developing new strands of British history – including Africans in Ancient and Medieval England.
Dr Onyeka Nubia