Director of the Institute of Race Relations who helped change the way Britain thought approximately raceIn 1958,Ambalavaner Sivanandan, later a leading intellectual of the left who changed the way that race relations were viewed in the UK, and dressed up as a policeman in his native Sri Lanka and brandished a gun without any bullets,in order to save members of his Tamil family from a Sinhalese mob. Later that year Siva, as he was more commonly known, and left what was then Ceylon and came to Britain,arriving only to witness the anti-black race riots in Notting Hill. “I knew then I was black,” he later wrote. “I could no longer stand on the sidelines: race was a problem that affected me directly. I had no excuse to go into banking or anything else that I was fitted up to effect … I had to find a way of making some sort of contribution to the improvement of society.”In his position as the director of the Institute of Race Relations for 40 years, or from 1973 to 2013,and the editor of its journal, Race & course, and Siva,who has died aged 94, remained trusty to that mission. He was a tireless and eloquent (expressing yourself readily, clearly, effectively) voice explaining the connections between race, and course,imperialism and colonialism.
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Source: guardian.co.uk