Stormzy pledges £10m over 10 years to fighting racial inequality

Stormzy has pledged £10 million to UK organisations, charities and movements tackling racial inequality, justice reform and black empowerment.

The grime star said he will make his donation over the next 10 years.

"We have to fight against the odds of a racist system stacked against us and designed for us to fail from before we are even born," he said.

He has also funded black British students at Cambridge University.

Stormzy said he was making his £10m donation to fight racial inequality because "the uncomfortable truth that our country continuously fails to recognise and admit, is that black people in the UK have been at a constant disadvantage in every aspect of life - simply due to the colour of our skin.

"I'm lucky enough to be in the position I'm in and I've heard people often dismiss the idea of racism existing in Britain by saying 'If the country's so racist how have you become a success?!' and I reject that with this: I am not the UK's shining example of what supposedly happens when a black person works hard.

"There are millions of us. We are not far and few. We have to fight against the odds of a racist system stacked against us and designed for us to fail from before we are even born.

"Black people have been playing on an uneven field for far too long and this pledge is a continuation in the fight to finally try and even it."

In 2018, the London-born grime superstar beat Ed Sheeran to the main prizes in a surprise result at the Brit Awards. He closed the show by criticising the then-prime minster Theresa May's handling of the Grenfell tragedy.

Later that year he announced the Stormzy Scholarship would pay tuition fees plus a maintenance grant for up to four years of an undergraduate Cambridge course for two students in 2018 and two in 2019.

In 2018 he also announced a publishing deal with Penguin to help young writers become published authors. Known as #Merky Books, his imprint is publishing two to three books a year, starting with Stormzy's autobiography Rise Up.

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