The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence 9781350225480, 9781786993809

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A B OU T TH E C O N T R I B UT O R S

Muna Abdi is a poet and activist scholar. Osop Abdi Ali is a humanitarian worker with a leading refugee agency in Nairobi Kenya, and aspiring writer. Amal Ali is a senior lecturer in law at the University of Lincoln. Her research interests are in intersectionality and women’s rights within the broader field of law, gender and religion. Kehinde Andrews is an associate professor in sociology at Birmingham City University. He is director of the Centre for Critical Social Research, founder of the Organisation of Black Unity, and co-chair of the Black Studies Association. Jason Arday is a senior lecturer in education at the University of Roehampton, School of Education, a Visiting Research Fellow at the Ohio State University in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and a Trustee of the Runnymede Trust. His research focuses on race, education and social justice. Adekonyinsola Aromolaran completed a Bachelor’s degree in global health at Queen Mary University of London, studying topics such as racial injustice, health inequalities and economic policy. She is now currently studying medicine at the University of Southampton. Layla Brown-Vincent is a postdoctoral fellow in Africana studies and the Griot Institute for Africana Studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. Her research examines twenty-first-century pan-African feminisms and activism in the United States and Venezuela. Layla is a member of the All African People’s Party – GC and works with various black organisations across the US south. Derrais (d.a.) Carter is an educator, creative, and lover of Black people. He is also a member of the Queering Slavery Working Group.

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Sadia Habib has taught Key Stages 3, 4 and 5 in Manchester and London. She has completed a PhD in education at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Learning and Teaching British Values: Policies and Perspectives on British Identities (2018). Maryam Jameela is a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield. Her work examines British government policy in relation to cultural media representations of South Asian Muslim women in the West. She tweets as @yammatron. Carl E. James is a professor in the Faculty of Education and the Graduate Program in Sociology at York University, Toronto. His areas of focus include the educational opportunities, experiences and life trajectories of racialised people, particularly black Canadians. Currently, he holds the Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community and Diaspora and is the Affirmative Action, Equity and Inclusivity Officer at the university. He is also Education Advisor to the Minister of Education and Premier of Ontario. Viji Kuppan is a doctoral research student at the Centre for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion of Leeds Beckett University. His activism, scholarship and teaching is primarily concerned with sport, leisure and popular culture, where he interrogates these formations through the structures of race, disability, gender and their entanglements. Keguro Macharia is from Nairobi. He blogs at gukira.wordpress.com and tweets as @keguro. China Mills researches and teaches in the area of global mental health and critical psychology. She has published widely, including the book Decolonizing Global Mental Health (2014), as well as various papers and book chapters on psychopolitics and the coloniality of the psy-disciplines. China is a discipline hopper, whose current research looks at the quantification and digitisation of mental health; and the psychopolitics of suicide linked to austerity. China is a lecturer in the School of Education, University of Sheffield, UK; and a member of the editorial collective for Asylum magazine. Adrienne Milner is a lecturer in the Centre for Primary Care and Public Health at Queen Mary University of London. Her research addresses

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issues of health equity in terms of race and ethnicity and sex and gender in political and sports contexts. She is co-author with Prof. Jomills Henry Braddock II of the monograph, Sex Segregation in Sports: Why Separate Is Not Equal and co-editor with Prof. Braddock of the collection, Women in Sports: Breaking Barriers, Facing Obstacles. Sai Murray is a writer, spoken word artist, graphic designer of Bajan/ Afrikan/English heritage. His first poetry collection Ad-liberation, was published in 2013. He was lead writer on Virtual Migrants 2015 touring production, Continent Chop Chop; is a poet facilitator on Voices that Shake!; board member of Remember Oluwale; a trustee of The Racial Justice Network and a co-ordinating member of PARCOE (Pan Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe). Wambui Mwangi lives in Nairobi. She is a post-colonial theorist, political scientist, photographer and writer. Patricia Noxolo is a senior lecturer in human geography at the University of Birmingham. Her work brings together insights from development geography, postcolonial geography, cultural geography, literary studies and security studies: she seeks to understand how people in the Caribbean and its diaspora, as well as in the UK, theorise their relationships with space and place. Recent publications include: Fleshy Textualities: Laughter in Caribbean Literature (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming); ‘Decolonial Theory in a Time of the Re-colonisation of UK Research’, in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2017); ‘A Shape Which Represents an Eternity of Riddles: Fractals and Scale in the Work of Wilson Harris’, Cultural Geographies (2016). Kadian Pow is a Jamaican-American ex-pat conducting PhD research at Birmingham City University. Her dissertation focuses on black women, US television and social media discourse. She is also the owner of Bourn Beautiful Naturals, a boutique natural hair and skincare line of products created for black women. Leon Sealey-Huggins works on the social and political relations of climate change, with a particular focus on the Caribbean region. Leon considers the sociology and politics of climate change in the Caribbean, investigating what climate justice means in the context of global

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historical, and present, inequalities. Leon is keen to explore opportunities for the pursuit of climate justice via grassroots and social movements initiatives. Christina Sharpe is a professor at York University, Toronto in the Department of Humanities. She is the author of two books, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) (named by The Guardian and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/ Wright Legacy Award) and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010). She is currently completing the critical introduction to the Collected Poems of Dionne Brand (1982–2010) to be published by Duke University Press and is working on a monograph, Black. Still. Life. Tony Talburt is a lecturer in the Centre for African and International Studies, University of Cape Coast, Ghana, and has over twenty-five years’ teaching experience in both higher and further education institutions in Ghana, Jamaica and the UK. His main research interests centre on African and Caribbean political history as well as international politics and development. His is the author of: Rum, Rivalry and Resistance: Fighting for the Caribbean Spirit (2010); Andrew Watson: The World’s First Black Football Superstar (2016), and co-editor of Fight for Freedom: Black Resistance and Identity (2017). Sam Tecle is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at York University, Toronto. His areas of focus include: black and diaspora studies, urban studies and sociology of education. His dissertation, entitled ‘Black Grammars: On Difference and Belonging’ focuses on the experiences and perspectives relating to blackness and black identification of East African diasporas across the UK, Canada and the US. Sam is also a co-chair of York University’s Black Graduate Students Collective (BGSC), which works towards bettering the experiences of black graduate students at York University. Moussa Traoré is a senior lecturer in the Department of English of the University of Cape Coast in Ghana. He holds a PhD in world literature from Illinois State University. He recently co-edited a book titled Fight for Freedom: Black Resistance and Identity (2017).

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George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University. He is the author, editor, and co-editor of over 20 books. He is known for his influential essays and interviews in The New York Times’ philosophy column, The Stone. Yancy’s three most recent books are the second (and expanded) edition of Black Bodies, White Gazes (2017), On Race: 34 Conversations in a Time of Crisis (2017) and his new authored book, Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America (2018).

F ORE W ORD : T H E H E A T A N D T H E B UR DENS OF TH E D AY 1

Christina Sharpe

in our induced days and our wingless days, my every waking was incarcerated, each square metre of air so toxic with violence the atmospheres were breathless there, the bronchial trees were ligatured with carbons some damage I had expected, but no one expects the violence of glances, of offices, of walkways and train stations, of bathroom mirrors especially, the vicious telephones, the coarseness of daylight, the brusque decisions of air, the casual homicides of dresses what brutal hours, what brutal days, do not say, oh find the good in it, do not say, there was virtue; there was no virtue, not even in me … let us begin from there, … (Ossuary 1. Dionne Brand, Ossuaries, 2010)2

The tercets from Dionne Brand’s long poem Ossuaries (2010) that form the epigraph to this Foreword take a measure of our long time – ‘what brutal hours, what brutal days’ – and place the reader in the midst of momentous violence and struggle. The poem establishes that as the space, the here, from which we must begin, without illusion. We begin there, in the midst of brutality – quotidian, spectacular, cellular, organised and ongoing – against Black and Blackened people everywhere in the world.

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The Fire Now: Anti-racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence takes stock of such a present, our present, and insists that we reckon with, but not reconcile ourselves to it. Edited by Beth Kamunge, Remi JosephSalisbury and Azeezat Johnson, the here and the now, of The Fire Now are not singular. Here is the ‘past that is not yet past’; this past or these pasts are dispersed across multiple physical geographies – Kenya, Canada, the US, the UK, academic institutions, activist, organising and meeting spaces. Each space in and from which the writers collected here work is, ‘connect[ed to] anti-racisms across disciplinary and national boundaries’ (Kamunge, Joseph-Salisbury and Johnson: Introduction, this volume). The editors write, ‘This book is born out of our sense that we (as antiracist scholars and activists) must bear witness to these times of explicit racial violence: we must work towards changing our fates within the fire now’. We must change our fates. The fire is now: Brexit, Trump, Kenyan ethnonationalisms, deportation flights, ‘Punish a Muslim Day’, the British government’s purposeful destruction of documents of the Windrush generation and then their pursuit of deportation, Go Home vans, the horrific Grenfell fire, drownings in the Mediterranean Sea, Black people detained, murdered in stores, in churches, while praying, walking, standing, shopping, talking on the phone, getting lost. Black life, as Rinaldo Walcott (forthcoming) tells us, is interdicted at every level. This set of prohibitions and catastrophes are just some of the violences by which we understand ourselves to be in the fire, now. The Fire Now is an ambitious project that recognises that scholarship must take a role in our liberation. The editors and contributors recognise what Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others have told us about the role of the university in the production and maintenance of ‘our narratively condemned status’ (Wynter, 1994); they recognise the stakes of inaction in the face of the overlapping and discontinuous presents that we inhabit. In recognising this, many of the contributors, then, refuse certain academic conventions of form. They know that disciplinary, geographical and other such rubrics are largely insufficient to the task of thinking anew and addressing the global attacks on Black peoples. It therefore, seems to me, particularly important that the authors attend to thinking outside standard essay form. They note that the ongoing processes and work of organising, caretaking and teaching that Black intellectuals undertake must generate forms of articulation that emerge from that work and practice. Fragments, emails, transcriptions of conversations, notes, constitute intellectual production and practices; are all practices for our lives. And, while the role

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of anti-racist scholarship in Black life is at the centre of the title and the book, Black scholarship often appears here in the form of Black Study. As Derrais Carter writes in ‘Black Study’, thinking with Wilderson, Spillers, Gumbs, Hartman, Moten and others, ‘We are writing against our demise. We are thinking, writing, and being anew. Black folk have been living experiments in freedom. This, we should take seriously. The ways that we enact freedom, the ways that we realise our freedom dreams, requires experimentation’ (Carter: Chapter 4, this volume).3 Which is to say, the work that we, Black people, have done and must do is to imagine and make grace. As Baby Suggs in Toni Morrison’s Beloved says to those Black people gathered in the Clearing, the formerly enslaved and putatively born-free, ‘the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it’ (Morrison, 2004: 103). The essays collected here imagine and perform grace – they imagine and inhabit possibility. Imagination is central to the work of the antiracist writer, thinker and teacher. It has always been. So is bearing witness to one’s times. Bearing witness to ‘racisms’ dynamism, it’s ever mutating forms’, bearing witness to enforced precarity, the financialisation of our present and then, in whatever form, committing to ending the ways that antiblack, settler colonial and plantation logics structure our everyday lives. At its best, when it is working on the urgent project of liberation, antiracist scholarship seeks to open up new spaces for Black life. This timely collection is in the mode of other writing and other collections that were called into being by writers and thinkers who also found themselves fashioning a response in critical times: from the work of Pan Africanists like Walter Rodney, Claudia Jones and George Padmore to the work of Black feminists like Akasha (Gloria) T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott and Barbara Smith who, in 1982, published the collection All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. Most obviously, the collection takes its title from James Baldwin’s urgent The Fire Next Time (1963) and The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race (2016) edited by Jesmyn Ward. But, in the title and the essays I also hear echoes of Michelle Cliff’s wrestling with colour, class, white supremacist logics and antiblackness in ‘If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire’. Each of the writers and texts assembled here confront a sense of urgency and also a knowledge of possibility. ‘What unites the chapters is a commitment to bearing witness for social change’ (Kamunge, Joseph-

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Salisbury and Johnson: Introduction, this volume). They are united in the urgency and the possibility that are also to be found in generations of Black people who thought and made a way out (of no way) – for Black communities. This book is in the tradition of those Black people who held themselves to account as they did the work of articulating Black freedom, from the places where they found themselves, whether that was inside or outside the academy. The Fire Now charts some of the unlivable worlds that are being imagined and materialised, and in doing so insists on the necessity of imaginative and material practices that refuse those worlds and insist livable ones into being. The fire is now. How do we survive it? *** The editors write: ‘The Fire Now is above all a call for further conversations and dialogues that push us to care for more, and be better for all of us’ (Joseph-Salisbury, Johnson and Kamunge: Chapter 23, this volume). All of this is the ground from which we work and act. The sense of urgency at the time of this writing is real and it has not been diminished. It subtends the questions: How are we to practise care; how are we to attend to each other in these overlapping and discontinuous geographies and presents in accountable and meaningful ways? The Fire Now is written in the recognition that contesting antiblackness in all of its forms necessitates a global approach. The ways that we are made precarious are not the same, but they do bear relation to each other. And rather than collapse them into each other, we might, as Keguro Macharia writes in ‘Domesticating Trump’, ‘Instead, … try to create ways to think about blackness and ethnicity as products of colonial modernity across different geohistories. To work with our differences, across geohistories, to pursue freedom’ (Macharia: Chapter 16, this volume). It is within the ongoing daily production of antiblackness and it is within this framework and in contest of it that this important work arises. The Fire Now is a collective plotting and thinking of the conditions for and the what must be done to make liberation appear; a plotting, performing and imagining of practices of liberation. At the end of Charles Chesnutt’s 1898 novel The Marrow of Tradition – a novel that fictionalises the 1895 white insurrection in Wilmington, North Carolina that replaced the elected multiracial government, drove out all but two of the town’s Black residents, and killed hundreds more – the narrator tells us that,

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‘There’s time enough, but none to spare’ (Chesnutt, 2012: 150). The Fire Now tells us this and it performs and encourages collective witness, collective imagining and collective work in the midst of ‘relentless assault’. This urgent and necessary book locates us in the desire for freedom and in collaboration as an ethic and a practice of care for Black life. Notes

1 The title for this ‘Foreword’ is borrowed from a conversation that took place between Professors Nellie Y. McKay and Francis Smith Foster. The phrase the ‘heat and the burdens of the day’ appears in a piece in which Foster details a public conversation between herself and Nellie Y. McKay in which they recount the course of a long collaborative friendship and the overburdening of Black women in the academy. They want to encourage more collaborative work toward changing the university and saving their/our lives against isolation and exhaustion. McKay says: ‘But … it struck me that …

without thinking too deeply, [we can] come up with different lists of several other women colleagues, and a man here and there, with whom we have similarly shared both the heat and the burdens of the day’ (Moody, 2006: 8). 2 Dionne Brand (2010). Ossuaries. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Reproduced with permission of the author. 3 For Fred Moten, for instance, Black Study does not, or does not only, happen in the university. The university, in fact, may inhibit its occurrence. Black Study happens, its knowledges are made, when we gather with others.

References Brand, D. (2010). Ossuaries. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Chesnutt, C. (2012). The Marrow of Tradition (Norton Critical Editions). New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Moody, J. (2006). Nellie McKay: A Memorial. African American Review, 40(1). Morrison, T. (2004). Beloved. New York: Vintage.

Walcott, R. (forthcoming). The Long Emancipation: Moving toward Freedom. Wynter, S. (1994). ‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues. Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century, ‘Knowledge on Trial’, 1 (1): 42–73.

CH AN GI N G O UR F A T E I N TH E F IR E NO W

Beth Kamunge, Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Azeezat Johnson

And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that have never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate … For the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion – and the value placed on the colour of the skin is always and forever a delusion. (Baldwin, 1964: 104)1

The UK government’s quest to make Britain – in the words of Theresa May – an increasingly ‘hostile environment’ (Lewis et al., 2017); Donald Trump’s Muslim bans and continuous silence in the face of public white supremacist movements; inhumane immigration policies and detention centres; racist criminal (in)justice systems; these are just some of the marks of the virulent explicit racial violence that characterise contemporary societies. This book is born out of our sense that we (as anti-racist scholars and activists) must bear witness to these times of explicit racial violence: we must work towards changing our fates within the fire now. In this introduction, we as editors reflect upon the urgency that brought this book into existence. This sets up the themes that, collectively, we were keen to explore throughout the book. As we do so, we connect anti-racisms across disciplinary and national boundaries. By foregrounding these times of explicit racial violence as a continuation of that which came before (Burnett, 2017), this book takes up Christina Sharpe’s framing of the ‘past which is not past’ (2016: 62). These living histories inform our understandings of the blazes that surround, and are a part of, us. Living in the wake means living the history and present of terror, from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday Black existence;

2 | CHANGING OUR FATE IN THE FIRE NOW living the historically and geographically dis/continuous but always present and endlessly reinvigorated brutality in, and on, our bodies while even as that terror is visited on our bodies, the realities of that terror are erased. (Sharpe, 2016: 15)

The Fire Now allows us to expose these terrorising and terrifying realities: this is a reflexive study of racism’s dynamism, its ever mutating forms. The rise of Trump and the Brexit referendum are symbolic of our entry into an epoch that is both a continuation of, and characteristically different from, that which came before. This is about taking stock and bearing witness to the racial conditions in which we find ourselves. In so doing, we bring together a range of scholars/activists who share our sense of urgency, and our desire to speak back. We hope that the reader sees this collection as a handbook for those undertaking (or thinking about undertaking) anti-racist work in urgently racist times. In The Fire Next Time – the book from which this work is inspired – James Baldwin wrote with his nephew front and centre. Similarly, this is a personal book, written to and for those we love – many of whom are outside academia’s privileged walls. It is because of this that we begin this book by addressing the role of academia in (re)producing white supremacy: as academics connected to wider communities, we write consciously of these institutions and our institutional privilege. We write to make sense of this moment as the speed at which these unrelenting, traumatising events are unfolding has been breath-taking, requiring new frameworks that seem constantly behind current events. We write to try to put a finger on ideas which are ‘nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt’ (Lorde, 1984: 36). We write because we are simultaneously afraid, tired and angry. This writing is also shaped by the different ways the fire now reflects the urgency of this particular moment. We write from the ashes and embers of Grenfell Tower, where fire so quickly engulfed so many of our working-class siblings in the UK. We write knowing that those deaths were a predictable and foreseeable consequence of a society that devalues Black, Brown and working-class bodies. While a £10 million ‘regeneration’ project sought to superficially clad over the visible inequity manifest in the tower’s structure, we know it was that very cladding – erected to aesthetically please (or not disturb) the occupants of nearby luxury flats – that saw those flames rise so quickly (BakerJordan, 2017). We write knowing the fire was not random: it is but

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symptomatic of much larger fires, and a warning of fires to come. We think through this elemental fire as we see our people battle for clean water in Flint and Standing Rock, and as we watch, heart-broken, by the ever-increasing climate disasters killing People of Colour across the globe. We foreground the fires that have left so many of our countries torn apart by neo-imperialist wars, and the fiery right-wing rhetoric that continues to terrorise and silence so many of us within our daily lives. Yet we also hold onto a fire that is cleansing, that comes from speaking up and out against the violence that surrounds us. We write The Fire Now because we recognise that our silence will not save us (Lorde, 1984: 41), and that our anger has its uses. We write with fire. This project emerged through the process of wrapping up the Critical Race and Ethnicities Network (CREN). As editors, we are three Black academics at different, somewhat precarious stages, of our careers. In 2014, we set up CREN because of what we saw as a stark absence of intersectional anti-racist conversations in our various institutions. We did not believe these absences to be a neutral state of being. Rather we felt that they reflected the systemic and sustained suppression of thought by People of Colour generally and Black women specifically (e.g. see Collins, 1991; 2000). It is within the context of CREN that we began to think more carefully about our roles as witnesses. What does it mean for us as academics/activists to witness? What is it that we are witnessing, for whom and for what purpose? These questions became even more urgent after various events suggested that we live in times marked by explicit as well as implied violence. It is from this standpoint that this book is assembled. Through their chapters, we asked the collection’s authors to consider the particular urgency of the issues they raise. This is a difficult question, and needs to be recognised as such. Specifically, we recognise how uncertainty is part of the urgency: between us writing these words and you reading them, things have already shifted significantly. In other words, when discussing anti-racism within the quickly mutating context of white supremacy, we need to develop analytics that can address the many unknown unknowns. Hence, for a number of authors, as per our own vision, giving ‘definitive answers’ is not the aim. However, our uncertainty and urgency in talking about these issues goes hand in hand with the ways that we continue to be ‘forced to witness firsthand … wilful ignorance about the impact of

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race and racism’ (hooks, 1996: 17). In an age of ‘alternative facts’, ‘fake news’ and distortions of the concept of ‘free speech’, confronting ‘the refusal to acknowledge accountability for racist conditions past and present’ (hooks, 1996: 17) could not be any more urgent. The urgency of thinking about these issues is far-reaching. Whilst we include scholars from the UK and the US, we are also purposeful in centring voices from outside these contexts generally, and beyond the West particularly. However, it is important to recognise how this book stems from a desire to respond to the rise in fascism across the West, overlooking the upsurge in fiery right-wing politics and oppression outside of the West. To truly discuss the fire now we must move beyond an understanding of white supremacy as solely located within the Western hemisphere. We know that, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr, ‘injustice anywhere, is a threat to justice everywhere’. We know too, that the impacts of Trump and Brexit reach far beyond the US and the UK and the socio-political conditions that gave rise to Trump and Brexit are not confined within UK and US shores. As one of the authors in this collection – Keguro Macharia – reminds us, we must: push against the idea that it’s self-evident why authors writing from and about the U.S. and the U.K. should be addressing Trump while authors not writing from or about those spaces should justify why they are writing … We are, after all, still in the age – and grip – of U.S. empire. And it might be useful to think about how the U.S.’s status as [a] global power means that all those outside of North America are forced to pay attention to Trump and the U.S. (Macharia, 2017 personal communication shared with permission)

It is here, in thinking about the politics of spatiality (Dotson, 2013), that we see various privileges come to the fore. Without minimising the pain and trauma facing People of Colour in the West, we also need to realise that this pain and trauma often does not go unseen by People of Colour in other geo-political contexts. For those of us that are siblings outside the West, we say the names, retweet and amplify the hashtags, and march the streets, but this is often unreciprocated. As editors, we were intentional about speaking across difference and including as many voices as possible, particularly the voices that are assumed to be marginal to these conversations.

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We must recognise that there is a privilege in even being able to write, or having the headspace to do so. Not only does writing in the context of a blazing fire require a room of one’s own, and the ability to (calmly) sit and write as the fires blaze – it also requires a lot of invisible labour putting out other fires, whether that political labour is enacted by the people cooking or washing up (Hayes-Conroy and HayesConroy, 2008), opening their homes to those on the run, burping the babies, or the labour of needing to deal with other ‘more pressing’ physical, mental and emotional conditions. This is an observation of the mundane, but one that bears repeating, as it is often the sort of labour that falls on working-class Women of Colour, who then end up being unable to contribute to collections such as these; but also because as the People of Colour most marginalised (both spatially and identity-wise) are putting out other fires, questions of disability, mental health, food and Queer politics fall by the way-side whilst the most ‘masculine-presenting’ and ‘respectable’ forms of activism are the narratives that get centred. What does it mean then for us to have put together a book on anti-racist scholarship, and not have trans voices represented; to know that many of our siblings are locked up in punitive penitentiary systems and yet not speak of prison abolition; to not have explicit discussions about food – especially considering the majority of those who are facing systemic hunger and environmental racism are working-class People of Colour; or to have few pieces that speak explicitly to various forms of able-ism and the multiple voices that exist outside the Western hemisphere? These are limitations that we feel keenly, and we hope that those coming after us can speak more explicitly to these and other urgent questions. As Carter (2016) would remind us, ‘the ellipses of our work are always implied’. As an interdisciplinary, international collection, the chapters represent a diversity of approaches and viewpoints, and reflect a vast range of positionalities. As editors, each with our own experiences and positionalities, we have pushed and challenged each other. Our continuous dialoguing, characterised by love and friendship, has encouraged an ongoing process of reflexivity that has seen not only the refinement of our own work, but of this edited collection. What unites the chapters is a commitment to bearing witness for social change. The collection’s diversity is in many ways reflected by the myriad terminologies used throughout the book. This perhaps reflects the fluidity of studies of racism and anti-racism. Rather than agreeing

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on standard terminologies throughout – an endeavour that would likely prove near impossible – we simply recognise and celebrate the vast range of approaches. Whilst the chapters intersect and interact in so many ways (and certainly across the four parts), the book is structured into four parts, as we outline below. Reflecting our sense that anti-racist work must begin where we are, Part I focuses on ‘Transforming Academia’. In so doing, it returns to some of the themes raised above: what does it mean to simultaneously witness epistemic oppression (Dotson, 2016), wilful ignorance (Lorde, 1984), and the sorts of solidarities that ‘grow stronger in a context of productive critical exchange and confrontation’ (hooks, 1990: 6)? Aptly opening Part I, Muna Abdi provokes due consideration of the racial and racist politics that frame writing: who gets to write, and what histories shape those writings? Azeezat Johnson follows with an intervention that encourages us to consider what it means to act as academic witnesses within and beyond academia. In so doing, she argues, we must grapple with the apparent contradictions that emerge as we attempt to disrupt racial violence from spaces of racial violence. Further explicating this apparent contradiction, Jason Arday considers how racial micro-aggressions shape academic institutions, and impact upon the experiences of Black academics. Once we’ve identified the functioning of racist logics within academic institutions, we look to address the transformative potential of academia. Namely, Derrais Carter’s chapter considers how the very structure of our writing can comply to, or subvert white supremacy, before Remi Joseph-Salisbury urges us to confront our duties as academics and activists. In so doing, both Remi and Derrais point to some tangible ways to move forward. Taking heed of Black feminist teachings, Part II is underpinned by a sense that if anti-racist struggle is not intersectional, it is entirely inadequate, and can even be dangerous. Sai Murray opens Part II, titled ‘Intersectional Identities, Intersectional Struggles’ by troubling identity monitoring categories in order to articulate the multiplicity of identities. Viji Kuppan then brings disabled bodies of colour into focus, as he urges us to understand the ways in which white supremacy and ableism intersect. In Amal Ali’s chapter, as we consider face veiling and Islamophobia, we are compelled to return to the judicial space from which the concept of intersectionality emerged. Ali’s argument exposes the increasing restrictions placed upon Islamic manifestations of religious belief: we must recognise how this happens at the

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intersections of race, gender and religion. Following Ali, Adrienne Milner and Adekonyinsola Aromolaran look to the 2017 Women’s March and how Women of Colour continue to be excluded from interventions that they were a part of creating: activist movements must take intersectionality seriously, they argue. In the final chapter of Part II, Leon Sealey-Huggins shows how the climate crisis cannot be examined without recognising the ways in which ‘the climate crisis is a racist crisis’. Fights for climate justice, therefore, must be anti-racist struggles for climate justice. Where Part II considers the connections between identities and struggles, Part III – ‘Lessons from History, Connections across Spaces’ – focuses on connections across spaces, and the connections to histories from which we must learn. Kehinde Andrews opens Part III: drawing important lessons from Malcolm X, he urges contemporary activists and scholars not to be so distracted by Trump and Brexit that we lose sight of the larger picture of systemic racism. From here, Layla Brown-Vincent challenges the idea that Trump represents something new or unique: for many Black people, Trump is but the latest iteration of US racisms. Brown-Vincent encourages us to draw inspiration from the anti-racist movements burgeoning across the US. Moussa Traoré shows how contemporary anti-racist actions are a continuation of earlier struggles. We must embody the resistance of those who have fought before us, he argues. In order to inform contemporary struggles, Tony Talburt draws out and offers important lessons from Pan-African resistance. Sam Tecle and Carl James encourage Canadians not to be so distracted by Trump that they become complacent to the racism that lurks beneath the thin veneer of Canada’s multicultural oasis rhetoric. Keguro Macharia’s intervention shows how Trump-like politics are evident in Kenya, through both sexism and racism. Macharia urges Kenyans to see anti-Black racism not just as a US affair, but as an important domestic issue. Part IV – ‘Understanding and Reframing Oppression’ – recognises that we must take stock of, but also speak back to, the white supremacist conditions we face. The part opens with a dialogue between three Black Kenyan women, Beth Kamunge, Wambui Mwangi and Osop Abdi Ali. Through their dialogue, the authors consider ‘what it actually means, and takes, to write in the midst of relentless assault’. From here Maryam Jameela examines the ways in which trauma is racialised and whose trauma is therefore seen as legitimate. For Jameela, there

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is much to do if People of Colour, and particularly Muslim Women of Colour, are to have their traumas recognised. Following Jameela, Sadia Habib suggests that British schools must act in response to explicit racisms that have proliferated in the aftermath of Trump and the Brexit vote. For Habib, the proliferation of racisms mean that critical pedagogues must challenge the de-racialised (and simultaneously hyper-racialised) policies on British values. Like Habib, China Mills problematises the notion of ‘Fundamental British Values’, and demonstrates the impact of imperialist racism on mental health. For Mills, the focus on ‘Fundamental British Values’ acts only to privilege and protect whiteness. Although this assists in nuancing our understanding of white supremacy, the following chapters focus on a de-centring of exclusionary and oppressive practices in different ways. Kadian Pow looks to how Black feminism can and does enable a sense of radical beingness through one’s Blackness: being exactly who you are, unapologetically. Through Patricia Noxolo’s chapter, we examine the complexity in the ubiquitous through our laughter and embodied experiences which re-make places that are increasingly imagined in exclusionary ways. We began by talking about this as a book written to those we love. And so, we end the book (but not the discussion) with a letter that centres our loved ones in the fire with us, with all the tenderness and love that we feel for them. The sort of letter that is begun five times. And torn up five times (Baldwin, 1964). The political is personal – filled with faces, names, stories, laughter and the tears shed invisibly that no hand can wipe away (Baldwin, 1964). Not all of us make it out of the fire. This is not a cute metaphor. So, may this book be one more way through which you, our loves, are spared, and perhaps, survive. Note 1 Excerpted from The Fire Next Time c 1962, 1963 by James Baldwin. Copyright renewed. Published by Penguin Books and

Vintage Books. Used by arrangement with the James Baldwin Estate.

References Baker-Jordan, S. (2017). Racism and Classism Killed the Residents of Grenfell Tower. Available at: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ skylar-bakerjordan/grenfell-

fire_b_17104044.html (Accessed 13 November 2017). Baldwin, J. (1964). The Fire Next Time. London: Penguin (originally published 1963).

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Burnett, J. (2017). Racial Violence and the Brexit State. Race and Class, 58(4), 85–97. Carter, D. (2016). Bound: On the Queerness of Blackness. Paper presented at the Critical Race and Ethnicities Network’s ‘Multiple Oppressions in the Curriculum’ Symposium. Collins, P. H. (1991). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Collins, P. H. (2000). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Dotson, K. (2013). Knowing in Space: Three Lessons from Black Women’s Social Theory. Labrys. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers. cfm?abstract_id=2270343 (Accessed 15 November 2017). Dotson, K. (2016). Between Rocks and Hard Places: Introducing Black Feminist Professional Philosophy. The Black Scholar, 46(2), 46–56. Hayes-Conroy, A. and Hayes-Conroy, J.

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(2008). Taking Back Taste: Feminism, Food and Visceral Politics. Gender, Place and Culture, 15(5), 461–473. hooks, b. (1990). Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press. hooks, b. (1996). Killing Rage: Ending Racism. London: Penguin. Lewis, H., Waite, L. and Hodkinson, S. (2017). ‘Hostile’ UK Immigration Policy and Asylum Seekers’ Susceptibility to Forced Labour. In Francesco Vecchio and Alison Gerard (eds), Entrapping Asylum Seekers. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 187–215. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press. Macharia, K. (2017). Personal email communication to Joseph-Salisbury, R., Johnson, A., Kamunge, B. (Shared with permission). Sharpe, C. E. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

1 | I AM N OT A W R I T E R

Muna Abdi

My tangled thoughts creep in silence, Quietly contemplating what ought to be, And I wake to see this world through different eyes, Telling the story of each morning’s light, But, I am not a writer. I breathe heavy at the thought of staining the page, Stuttering through stages of hope and rage, Pieces of me captured on a stage, Exposed and elated by this coming of age, But, I am not a writer. These euphoric moments of holding a pen, Are followed by shudders and shards, Like shattered glass we can never be whole, Like gaps between words we can never be told. I, I am not a writer. Our histories were stolen, Our languages lost, The earth was our canvas, Our blood was the art, And we have not forgotten, We carry this pain, Our lives have been written with the blood of those slayed, So I am not a writer. This pen is a symbol, Not of words but of wars, Of pain we have lived through, Pain you adore. Our histories made romantic, Our psyche enigmatic, Our stories told by you,

14 | TRANSFORMING ACADEMIA Are chilling and yet static, I am not a writer. And yet, I read your words as you continue to write me, Hold me in ivory spaces only few can reach, And I have been taught your theories of me, Read tales of my toils, As you pierced through my heart and used my blood as ink, Every movement of that poisoned pen, caused me to ache. You have been the writer, and you have held the words. But your pen cannot carry the weight of all that I hold, You cannot know the stories I have yet to tell. Why must I breathe underwater? Pushed down by the lead pens that continue to write me, Why must I close my eyes to love myself? Knowing that I can build with words that were once broken, Knowing that I can teach myself to love again. Some write because they cannot speak, Caged by language or bricks, But I write to write myself anew, To see words on a page, not as stains but of starts, I write to be hopeful, Piecing together shattered glass, to find the stories in the cracks, I write, not to make myself whole, but to write myself home. I write … but I am not a writer.

2 | AN AC AD E M I C W I T N E S S : W H I TE SU P RE M AC Y W I T H I N A N D B E YO N D A C AD E M I A

Azeezat Johnson

This chapter unpacks what it means for anti-racist scholars to act as witnesses against racial violence. I write this intervention as a disabled Black Muslim woman in Britain who is troubled and terrified by the violence perpetuated by the British state (at ‘home’ and abroad) against disabled, Black and Muslim communities. However, this intervention is written in specific relation to my work as a Black feminist academic: it is because of this academic role that I have been deeply concerned by the contradictions that occur when attempting to develop research that disrupts racial violence whilst working within and for academic institutions that reproduce racial violence. These contradictions have taken on a particular urgency following the results of the Brexit referendum. It was in this moment that I recall seeing myself and others deciding that we can no longer afford to privilege white innocence over the damage white supremacy causes to racialised communities. In this moment, many of us decided that we must be frank about the functioning of white supremacy and its logics of ‘taking back our country’ that led people to vote in favour of a platform that privileged these blatantly racist terms. Up until then, the myth of racial progress and things not being ‘that bad’ were continuously recycled. Even as I rejected those myths, I was also shaped by them: my positioning within the West allowed a distance from the Black and Brown bodies (and places) that see and experience these systems of violence regularly (see Sealey-Huggins in this collection for a discussion of how this is perpetuated through environmental racism). For me, this was a moment where the niceties that frame white supremacy in this heart of the falling British Empire were completely exposed: there was (and is) a need to take a stand, and to make it clear where one’s allegiances lie. As James Baldwin said, ‘I know what I’ve seen and what I’ve seen makes me know I have to say, I know’ (cited in Lester, 1984).

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The work that I want to be doing (and that I see so many people I admire doing) is to speak up in a world that is violently shaped by white supremacy. After watching and reading James Baldwin, I started to think about what it meant for Baldwin to call himself a witness. For him, and to me, witnessing means testifying against the ways in which whiteness is neutralised and protected, and the ways in which darker-skinned bodies are Othered, objectified and killed. It means aligning one’s work and practice to unequivocally challenge the logics of racial violence wherever we see it perpetuate itself. Given the contexts within which this chapter is being written, it is important to recognise that there is so much of this violence that shapes our societies: from the mass murdering of people abroad under the banner of ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’, to the bombings perpetuated on British soil, to the vicious regressive policies aimed at harassing ‘aliens’ within Britain (Hussain and Bagguley, 2012; Sian, 2015). Faced with these horrors, there is a particular importance of saying ‘I know’ even as the costs of speaking up become steeper and steeper. I also recognise that the costs for those of us who see ourselves as critical academics, academic activists, academic witnesses, etc. are unevenly spread. As I was writing this chapter, I attended a roundtable where people were discussing what it means to engage in ‘radical’ teaching practices: I was immediately reminded of how such a term is accessible to specific (predominantly white) bodies, and dangerous in bodies racialised as The Muslim Other. Yet even as I am aware of the costs attached to speaking up, I think of Audre Lorde’s (1984: 41) words: at the end of the day, ‘my silence will not protect me’. And ‘your silence will not protect you’. It is within this context that I question what it means to be a Black feminist, and to see myself as an academic doing the needed work of speaking up and saying ‘I know’. What does it mean to stand as an academic witness against the function of white supremacy within and beyond the walls of the academy? This is a question that needs to be addressed across different scales, but I will be focusing on the individual and the institutional. Specifically, I am thinking of academia as an institution, and individual academics who (to varying degrees) perpetuate these institutions. I am interested in understanding what it means for us to expose the whiteness that is embedded in these institutions, and also expose how we as individuals

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perpetuate white supremacy. This is part of a wider conversation that pushes against the function of whiteness within the walls of academia: I am interested in carrying these conversations forward in light of the successes and rise of far-right movements (and sentiments) across Europe and North America (Chakelian, 2017; Sheehy, 2017). To do this, I have structured this chapter as follows: first, in particular relation to Brexit and Trump, I expand on the connections between academia and white supremacy. Second, I turn to understanding how the neutrality of whiteness is perpetuated through academic institutions. Finally, I use Black feminism to think about how to de-centre academic institutions as the site of legitimate knowledge production. These sections are designed to help me articulate what it means to be an academic witness that exposes how academia has been complicit in the functioning of white supremacy. Academia and White Supremacy: Contextualising Brexit and Trump A few days after Brexit, I had a conversation with a white ‘critical’ academic that highlighted the concerns I unpack in this chapter. He expressed such surprise and sadness about the Brexit vote and the openly racist sentiment that surrounded it (Johnson, 2016); yet he was shocked by the connections I made to white supremacy and academia, as he had apparently never noticed the way whiteness was normalised within our department. I have seen so many panels and group discussions with all white academics talking about how we must take a stand or speak truth to power, with no discussion of how these institutions (and the bodies normalised within them) are deeply implicated in the functioning of that power. As I began to think through the academy’s role in legitimising specific forms of knowledge production, a tweet by Crystal Fleming (following Trump’s election) stuck in my mind. Professor Fleming (@alwaystheself) Academics: ‘How did we get here? What did we do wrong?’ Also Academics: ‘I’ve never written anything of substance about white supremacy.’ 6:16 pm, 21 Nov 2016

Within this tweet, there is a reflection on the surprise that academics within predominantly white educational spaces are evincing about the function of white supremacy, despite the number of anti-racist

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scholars who have continuously insisted that it is not far beneath the surface (e.g. Collins, 1990; Kobayashi, 2006; Liu, 2006; Mahtani, 2004; Nayak and Jeffrey, 2011). Beyond this, Fleming speaks of a frustration that many anti-racist scholars feel about academics being unable or unwilling to reflect on how racial inequality is embedded in academic spaces. When we discuss racism ‘out there’ or ‘in the field’ without reflecting on how racial inequalities structure relations ‘in here’ (Johnson and Joseph-Salisbury, 2018), we continue to silence the function of whiteness within these institutions. Despite my use of both whiteness and white supremacy throughout this chapter, white supremacy is understood as the context within which whiteness can remain a neutralised and privileged racial positioning. However, it is the function of whiteness within academia, and specifically geography (as the discipline that I have most recently studied and worked within), that I focus on. To quote Thomas, In [whiteness’] construction against all other differences, it had to achieve a ‘super-naturalness’, to the point that it becomes invisible, so that all other differences stand out against it. It becomes the backdrop of nature itself, the omnipotent position of the gaze. As such geography is deeply embedded with ‘whiteness’. … It is one of the disciplines that Europeans used to discover and define others and their worlds. (cited in Kobayashi and Peake, 2000: 393–394)

This is an issue that has been discussed extensively in relation to UK and North American geography departments (Dikeç, 2010; Kobayashi, 2006; Liu, 2006; Mahtani, 2004; 2006; Noxolo, 2009; Sanders, 2006). This is not limited to geography, but a characteristic of the many disciplines ‘that Europeans used to discover and define others and their worlds’. Within the UK, the way whiteness ‘becomes the backdrop of nature itself’ has to be discussed alongside the underrepresentation of racialised minorities within academic institutions seen through #WhyIsntMyProfessorBlack (also see Adams, 2017; Equality Challenge Unit, 2015; Noxolo et al., 2008). This underrepresentation speaks to an inability to connect theorisations around race to anti-racist institutional practices (Nayak and Jeffrey, 2011). Especially now, when academics should be answering the call to critique the far-right movements within and beyond the West, we need to consider how the success of these movements is (in part) reliant on the same histories of racial violence perpetuated (and constructed)

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through academic institutions. It is important to challenge any assumption that these histories are a thing of the past, and instead expose how histories of Empire are reinvigorated in different ways (see Joseph-Salisbury in this collection). One example of these imperial histories can be seen through the distance assumed between the (majority white and middle-class) academic knower and the (majority non-white and working-class) academic known. Through this distance, the academic ‘knower’ is able to position themselves as separate and above the ‘field’ that is being studied. The academic knower ‘becomes the backdrop of nature itself, the omnipotent position of the gaze’. This objectifies those bodies that are positioned as outside the role of The Academic. This is particularly pernicious given the overrepresentation of white bodies within academia: there has to be a sustained critique of the way such knowledge is created through the neutrality of whiteness. Critiquing Whiteness in Academia To exemplify this critique of whiteness, I look to Mohanram (1999) and Puwar’s (2004: 45) reading of Lévi-Strauss. Whilst working in the New York Public Library, Lévi-Strauss was ‘thrown by the sight of a feathered Indian with a Parker pen’. What he sees before his eyes is ‘odd’ for Lévi-Strauss because, for him, the specialist, the image before him does not fit the ‘authentic’ image of an Indian. As Chow says, ‘what confronts the Western scholar is the discomforting fact that the natives are no longer staying in their frames’. (Puwar, 2004: 45)

In this scenario, the function of whiteness in academia is apparent: Lévi-Strauss’s whiteness is both neutralised and understood to grant him unquestioned access to these spaces of knowledge development. The neutrality of whiteness enables racial inequalities (and specifically the objectification of racialised Others) to be perpetuated in the most mundane of ways through the bodies legitimised or racialised within academic spaces.1 This process of legitimising speaks to epistemic violence (Dotson, 2011); this reflects how violence is perpetuated through masking and erasing the function of white supremacy within and beyond the academy (Johnson and Joseph-Salisbury, 2018). It is not just LéviStrauss’s work that illustrates this positioning of whiteness as neutral:

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it is perpetuated through the use and re-use of his work with little critique of the function of whiteness both within his work initially and in the centring of his work as key academic texts now. In marginalising these conversations about whiteness, Mahtani (2014: 360) argues that ‘the discipline discursively ignores, legitimises and sustains the kinds of hierarchies that inevitably leads to racial violence’. It is also important to point to the epistemic violence that is perpetuated as we are repeatedly asked to describe and point to racial violence within academia. This is part of a wilful ignorance to the function of white supremacy within and beyond academia. After all, these conversations are not new (Noxolo, 2009): I have been reading similar articles about the function of racism within the academy since Du Bois (2007[1903]: 7) spoke of the polite silences present alongside the question ‘How does it feel to be a problem?’ Audre Lorde (1996[1980]: 164) addresses the ‘historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread’. Les Back points to the inability to conceive of the function of racism within academia: For many academics the face of racism is that of the moral degenerate, the hateful bigot. So it is unthinkable that such an ugly word could be directed at a genteel, educated and liberal don such as themselves. (Back, 2004: 2)

Despite these conversations, racialised academics are still few and far between within UK and North American geography departments. Reading lists are still filled with predominantly white scholars. Racial micro-aggressions regularly remind academics of colour that they are positioned as out of place (Johnson and Joseph-Salisbury, 2018; Tate, 2016). Racialised academics are called upon to repeatedly discuss the neutrality of whiteness in academia with little to no institutional change. This highlights an inability to recognise racialised academics as making knowledgeable statements requiring us to transform how knowledge is produced within these institutions. It speaks to a wilful ignorance (or lack of interest) in addressing the violence perpetuated through these racial hierarchies. [Many] academics believe that ‘one day these things might change but right now these are the rules’. Thus, despite long discussions about the need to alter British geography’s relations with geographies in other places, we seem to be unable to make the wholesale changes required

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towards this. And we are truly sorry but the terms of inclusion into British geographic debates cannot really be changed. Only people whose ability can be calibrated on ‘our’ scale can be let in. … [Right] now, it is they who will have to change to fit the rules. (Noxolo et al., 2008: 156)

It is this inability to shift geography’s relations to other producers of knowledge that I am particularly concerned with in light of current political contexts. How can we begin to produce knowledge that critiques the function of white supremacy ‘out there’ if we use analytical tools that have been uncritically fashioned by and for the same system ‘in here’? How could we develop knowledge that actually responds to and disrupts the racial violence that has become so commonplace? Black Feminism and Dialogue This is where I think through the different spaces of knowledge production that Black academics have drawn from to develop critical knowledges about our existence (Collins, 1990; hooks, 1989; 1995; Noxolo, 1999; Yancy, 2008). It is fitting that this chapter used a tweet to address discussions of white supremacy in academia, given the wide array of Black feminists who use Twitter to offer incisive critiques of racial inequalities (also see Macharia in this collection for a note on tweets as part of their methodology). It is through engaging with these spaces of knowledge production that academia can push against the tendency to view itself as the only site wherein knowledge can/should be produced about society. Focusing on alternative spaces of knowledge production requires new tools for understanding these spaces as key sites of critical learning. For me, this includes returning to conversations with my mother, sisters, aunts and grandmothers in kitchens and living rooms, as we share different experiences of negotiating our lives. Our lives and connections are not racialised ‘data’ that researchers can or should raise to the standard of superior theoretical ‘knowledge’. This includes questioning researchers that are positioned as white, and racialised academics that maintain elitist divisions between themselves and ‘local’ communities of colour: we need to criticise and upturn any logics that perpetuate the objectification of racialised bodies for knowledge produced within these institutions. This is part of a deeper recognition of how different voices are developed through these different spaces of knowledge production

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de-centring the knowledge produced through academic institutions, we would also be able to develop dialogues with knowledge produced outside of academic institutions. Dialoguing includes being able to hear and respect knowledge claims that are structured in vastly different ways, and developed from vastly different spaces. I am emphasising a dialogue that situates the academic as just one amongst a diversity of voices. However, this links to my concern with the latest wave of research claiming co-production as a method for redressing power inequalities. Within some of this work, the inequalities that construct majority white middle-class academic knowers and majority non-white working-class researched objects are not discussed. The whiteness of academic institutions (and the structural racism that this speaks to) remains neutralised (e.g. Cahill and Torre, 2007). In these situations, ‘dialogue’ or ‘co-production’ can be used to mask the need to redress structural inequalities. This brings me back to the question of the Academic witness with which I began: there needs to be recognition of the limitations of academia in order to learn from voices that have been systematically silenced within academic institutions. Without reflecting on the traditions that birthed these disciplines, we inevitably perpetuate the racial inequalities that we are seeking to analyse. It is within this context that I see work within academic institutions potentially addressing racial inequalities. Academic knowledge created about what happens ‘out there’ is grounded in the relations that construct experiences ‘in here’. One cannot be understood without the context of the other. Moving Forward Noxolo, Raghuram and Madge argue that there is a paradox entwined in geography’s future: it is this ‘paradoxical struggle to be a global discipline, while at the same time consistently denying the voices that make it global’ that we must attend to (Noxolo et al., 2008: 148). I offer this chapter and its discussion of alternative spaces of knowledge production as a part of this conversation within geography specifically, but also academic institutions that increasingly bill themselves as ‘global’ or ‘international’ more broadly. Through situating academia as one amongst many different spaces of knowledge production, I critique the historical traditions that have constructed knowledge produced within the academy. By engaging with other spaces of knowledge production critically, Collins argues:

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Alternative epistemologies challenge all certified knowledge and open up the question of whether what has been taken to be true can stand the test of alternative ways of validating truth. (Collins, 2000: 271)

This is not to say that I hold out much hope for some kind of transformation of these institutions: I don’t. But I see the functioning of whiteness within this institution as produced and producing white supremacy beyond this institution. This means that we as individuals need to make decisions on how to manoeuvre within such institutions, particularly for those of us who experience racism. For white academics, this would include exploring how one’s whiteness produces a positioning of privilege and comfort within this institution (although this varies depending on which white body is occupying this role). However, this needs to be addressed as a structural and ongoing violence rather than an issue to do with ‘reflexivity’ or ‘identity politics’. I am interested in continuing conversations on how to expose the different functions of whiteness within our roles as academics. This is the point that I would like to end on: for the academic witness, academia is understood and written about as an institution that is deeply implicated in the functioning of white supremacy. I (somewhat) jokingly tell people that post-Brexit, Azeezat 2.0 is a lot franker about the function of whiteness to white people (summed up by my 2017 motto: Try Me). But there is some truth to this ‘honest’ version of Azeezat: part of addressing the way inequalities perpetuate themselves includes letting go of the myth that there is any corner of these institutions that isn’t deeply implicated in whiteness. Exposing how whiteness works within these institutions needs to be seen as part of the broader function of white supremacy. If, as an academic witness, our allegiances lie with those that suffer under systems of racial violence, we must be ready to testify against these systems continuously, and particularly when they benefit us personally, socially and financially. Thus, the question that begins further discussions must be: where do our allegiances actually lie? Note 1 In February 2017, a Black student at the University of Oxford was presumed to be a criminal roaming the university, prompting the college to send a university-wide email urging students to be vigilant in the face of this unknown

trespasser (Turner and Asl, 2017). This illustrates the way Black male bodies are intelligible as trespassers as opposed to knowledge producers within academic institutions (Yancy, 2008).

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References Adams, R. (2017). British Universities Employ No Black Academics in Top Roles, Figures Show. The Guardian, 19 January 2017. Available at: www. theguardian.com/education/2017/ jan/19/british-universities-employno-black-academics-in-top-rolesfigures-show?CMP=Share_iOSApp_ Other (Accessed 25 January 2017). Back, L. (2004). Ivory Towers? The Academy and Racism. In Ian Law, Deborah Phillips and Laura Turney (eds), Institutional Racism in Higher Education. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 1–6. Cahill, C. and Torre, M. E. (2007). Beyond the Journal Article: Representations, Audience, and the Presentation of Participatory Action Research. In Sara Kindon, Rachel Pain and Mike Kesby (eds), Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation and Place. Oxon: Routledge, 196–205. Chakelian, A. (2017). Rise of the Nationalists: A Guide to Europe’s Far-right Parties. New Statesman, 8 March 2017. Available at: www. newstatesman.com/world/ europe/2017/03/rise-nationalistsguide-europe-s-far-right-parties (Accessed 21 September 2017). Collins, P. H. (1990). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London: Routledge. Collins, P. H. (2000). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Dikeç, M. (2010). Colonial Minds, Postcolonial Places. Antipode, 42(4), 801–805. Dotson, K. (2011). Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing. Hypatia, 26(2), 236–257.

Du Bois, W. E. B. (2007) [1903]. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Oxford University Press. Equality Challenge Unit (2015). Equality in Higher Education: Statistical Report 2015, Part 1: Staff. London: Equality Challenge Unit. Available at: www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/ equality-higher-education-statisticalreport-2015/ (Accessed 12 January 2017). hooks, b. (1989). Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston, MA: South End Press. hooks, b. (1995). Killing Rage: Ending Racism. London: Penguin Books. Hussain, Y. and Bagguley, P. (2012). Securitized Citizens: Islamophobia, Racism and the 7/7 London Bombings. The Sociological Review, 60(4), 715–734. Johnson, A. (2016). Brexit Is a Painful Reminder of Why Britain Must Fight for Black Lives Matter. Fusion, 25 June 2016. Available at: fusion.kinja. com/brexit-is-a-painful-reminder-ofwhy-britain-must-fight-1793857817 (Accessed 13 June 2017). Johnson, A. and Joseph-Salisbury, R. (2018). ‘Are You Supposed To Be in Here?’ Racial Microaggressions and Knowledge Production in Higher Education. In Jason Arday and Heidi Mirza (eds), Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy. Palgrave, forthcoming. Kobayashi, A. (2006). Why Women of Colour in Geography? Gender, Place & Culture, 13(1), 33–38. Kobayashi, A. and Peake, L. (2000). Racism out of Place: Thoughts on Whiteness and an Antiracist Geography in the New Millennium. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90(2), 392–403.

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Lester, J. (1984). James Baldwin: Reflections of a Maverick. New York Times Book Review, 27 May 1984. Available at: www.nytimes.com/ books/98/03/29/specials/baldwinreflections.html (Accessed 5 June 2017). Liu, L. Y. (2006). On Being ‘Hen’s Teeth’: Interdisciplinary Practices for Women of Color in Geography. Gender, Place & Culture, 13(1), 39–48. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, CA: The Crossing Press. Lorde, A. (1996) [1980]. Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference. In The Audre Lorde Compendium: Essays, Speeches and Journals. London: Pandora, 162–171. Mahtani, M. (2004). Mapping Race and Gender in the Academy: The Experiences of Women of Colour Faculty and Graduate Students in Britain, the US and Canada. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 28(1), 91–99. Mahtani, M. (2006). Challenging the Ivory Tower: Proposing Anti-racist Geographies within the Academy. Gender, Place & Culture, 13(1), 21–25. Mahtani, M. (2014). Toxic Geographies: Absences in Critical Race Thought and Practice in Social and Cultural Geography. Social & Cultural Geography, 15(4), 359–367. Mohanram, R. (1999). Black Body: Women, Colonialism, and Space. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Nayak, A. and Jeffrey, A. (2011). Geographical Thought: An Introduction to Ideas in Human Geography. Essex: Pearson Education. Noxolo, P. (1999). ‘Dancing a Yard, Dancing Abrard’: Race, Space and Time in British Developmental Discourses. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Nottingham Trent University.

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Noxolo, P. (2009). ‘My Paper, My Paper’: Reflections on the Embodied Production of Postcolonial Geographical Responsibility in Academic Writing. Geoforum, 40(1), 55–65. Noxolo, P., Raghuram, P. and Madge, C. (2008). ‘Geography Is Pregnant’ and ‘Geography’s Milk Is Flowing’: Metaphors for a Postcolonial Discipline? Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26(1), 146–168. Puwar, N. (2004). Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Oxford: Berg. Sanders, R. (2006). Social Justice and Women of Color in Geography: Philosophical Musings, Trying Again. Gender, Place & Culture, 13(1), 49–55. Sheehy, A. (2017). The Rise of the Far Right. Harvard Political Review, 11 February 2017. Available at: http:// harvardpolitics.com/world/rise-offar-right/ (Accessed 21 September 2017). Sian, K. (2015). Spies, Surveillance and Stakeouts: Monitoring Muslim Moves in British State Schools. Race Ethnicity and Education, 18(2), 183–201. Tate, S. A. (2016). ‘I Can’t Quite Put My Finger on It’: Racism’s Touch. Ethnicities, 16(1), 68–85. Turner, C. and Asl, N. (2017). Oxford University Embroiled in Race Row as Students Told to Be ‘Vigilant’ after Black Man Seen in Grounds. The Telegraph, 6 February 2017. Available at: www.telegraph.co.uk/ education/2017/02/06/oxforduniversity-embroiled-race-rowstudents-told-vigilant/ (Accessed 13 February 2017). Yancy, G. (2008). Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

3 | U N D E RS T A N D I N G R A CI S M W I THIN T HE A C AD E M Y : TH E P E R S I S T E N CE O F RA C IS M WIT H I N H I GHE R E D UCA T I O N

Jason Arday

Introduction This chapter reflects upon my personal experiences of negotiating Whiteness as an academic of colour. Understanding Whiteness is challenging as this concept resides within a backdrop of normative cultures that advance power and privilege at the expense of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) academics. I draw upon my racialised experiences within the Academy as a way to explain how this has shaped my understandings of Whiteness and racial micro-aggressions. For me, a contradiction emerges when we discuss higher education. Universities are revered as a reflection of multi-culturalism and hyper-diversity. However, universities do not always reflect this romantic notion of diversification, belonging and acceptance. In fact, universities can often become sites for reproducing inequality despite their espoused lofty and principled ideals. We are reminded of this when we observe the dearth of diversification within higher education. This becomes apparent when we consider how many (or rather, how few) BME academics occupy academic posts (Bhopal, 2014; ECU, 2015). For the entirety of my academic career, I have always resided within departments as one of the few Black members of staff. Against a backdrop of being ‘the only’, I have often found myself feeling as though I was in positions of vulnerability, operating on the margins of dominant White structures. My positioning within faculties was always characterised by an attempt at survival within the Academy, often deliberately adopting a silenced approach in the hope that I would not draw attention towards myself and the fact that I was noticeably different from my majority White counterparts. There were particular instruments utilised to consistently remind me of the reach and dominance of Whiteness as a tool for reinforcing power, privilege and oppression. Such instruments included being

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undermined, overlooked for promotions and a continuous questioning of my professional capabilities. This form of ‘othering’ highlighted to me that, as a Black academic, my presence powerfully threatens and disrupts Whiteness by challenging the notion that White academics are the gatekeepers to knowledge. A default position for my presence automatically renders and categorises me as deficient in relation to my White counterparts (Ladson-Billings, 2009; Smith and Lander, 2012). The feelings that emerge when recognising that you are being treated differently can be hard to conceptualise. My attempts to discern why I was being treated differently often left me with a personal conflict of not wanting to cause problems or disrupt the power and privilege that I observed daily. However, I recognise the historical legacy of racism that means people of colour are often silenced through normative Whiteness. As the oppressed, I realised that it was not my position to relieve the oppressor of their potential guilt and fragility when confronting issues of racism. Race remains a problematic issue for White academics to confront, because it requires reflection and recognition of how their skin colour affords them privilege, power and opportunity over ethnic minorities (Cordova, 1998; Ladson-Billings, 1998). Given the context within which this chapter is written, it is important to state that much of the insidious racism which transpires throughout the Academy is facilitated through the racial microaggression. Understanding this form of racial violence highlights the subtlety of racism and how it effortlessly transpires through verbal acts which demean faculty of colour. Many BME academics will encounter racism through this medium. In attempting to chronicle my own experiences of negotiating racism within the Academy, it is important to understand how this tool of Whiteness is used to maintain hegemony (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002; Picower, 2009; Wildman and Davis, 1997). To do this, I have structured this chapter to focus on two key areas; first, I will expand on the centrality and persistence of racism within higher education. Second, I will consider the impact of the racial micro-aggression in academia. Finally, I will draw upon my experiences as a Black academic to consider the ways in which BME academics can use their presence to disrupt and challenge normative Whiteness. Importantly, this chapter lends itself to an obligation that we are all collectively responsible for challenging racism in all of its divisive and discriminatory forms. Failing to respond to racial discrimination ensures that the persistence of racism within the Academy will continue,

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resulting in recurrent patterns of poor diversification and inequality reflected throughout society and all of its major institutions (Amico, 2015; Ladson-Billings and Donnor, 2008). Understanding the Persistence of Racism in Higher Education Over the last ten years, government has significantly expanded the number of university places to both increase social mobility and respond to the ambitions of young BME people and indeed other groups previously denied access to higher education (Alexander and Arday, 2015; ECU, 2015). Education is universally regarded as a tool for becoming socially mobile. However, there is an inequity that undermines education’s potential as a tool for social mobility, particularly within higher education. While unprecedented numbers of BME people are attending university, their presence is not accommodated or reflected in many facets of the Academy (Alexander and Arday, 2015; Bhopal, 2014). This becomes evident in curriculum content, belonging and diversification of academic staff. So despite the notion of universities being a catalyst for social mobility and a hub for multi-culturalism, it is clear that as with other institutions in society, not everyone gains equal benefits from being in this communal space (Ahmed, 2012). The centrality and persistence of racism within higher education is enduring: it is often against a backdrop of inequality in which universities have been (consciously or unconsciously) complicit in maintaining discriminatory practices. Whether in terms of admissions, attainment, employment, the student experience or indeed staffing, universities still have some way to go to ensure equality for ethnic minorities in Britain (ECU, 2015). In considering this context, I am reminded of conversations with BME students who were curious and wanted to ascertain why after two years of undergraduate study on a social science degree, they had never considered aspects of racism within society. Interestingly, without prompting they also began to question why there was a dearth of BME academic staff within the university and why the curriculum never reflected aspects of their world view. Unpacking this narrative is complex, because as I explained to the students at the time, certain individuals have the power to change your experience and unfortunately that power does not lie with me. As we begin to think about normative structures within the Academy that ensure certain types of knowledge are legitimised and advanced

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over others, it is important to note that higher education resides within a largely White majority (Delgado Bernal and Villalpando, 2016; Leonardo, 2002; Pitt and Britzman, 2003). To this end, the nature of normative Whiteness has been based on creating a lasting legacy of supremacy (McIntosh, 1992). Penetrating this legacy becomes difficult, particularly because of the low numbers of BME academics in the sector and the difficulties they encounter in attempting to disrupt this space. Understanding how racial inequality transpires within academic spaces signposts us towards just how dominant and powerful Whiteness can be as a tool for subordination, oppression and inequality (Ansley, 1997; Gillborn, 2010; Shilliam, 2015). The challenging of normative Whiteness is paramount to dismantling the cycle of inequality that permeates higher education and society more generally. As something that is persistent and ensues, racism remains an instrument for facilitating the underrepresentation of BME academics in higher education (Henry and Tator, 2009; Shilliam, 2015). When BME students observe diverse and multi-ethnic student populations, a slight contradiction emerges as they simultaneously observe a dearth of BME academics. Having been asked why this is the case, it has always been difficult to adopt a truthful position that does not compromise my professionalism. This becomes even more difficult when these questions are posed as an indication of student dissatisfaction. The language of diversification is often contradictory to inequitable cultures that sustain discriminatory practices and racial inequality, particularly when advanced by senior university stakeholders who are complicit in poor diversification amongst academic staff (Ahmed, 2012; Rollock, 2012). Throughout my academic journey (and particularly as a lecturer), I have encountered an institutional resistance towards work on race and diversity. Often this work has been viewed as not being academically rigorous or robust and purely anecdotal in nature. Universities are particularly challenging places to undertake diversity work because first, academics often regard themselves as ‘being critical’ and thus as not ‘having a problem’ with racism (Ahmed, 2012). Many academics typically ignore documents sent out by diversity practitioners, as these materials are often judged as audit-driven or only relevant to individuals that may have a problem with diversity (Bhopal, 2014; Stovall, 2006). The persistence of racism in the sector (higher education) is also successfully maintained through non-penetrative equality documents

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and interventions. Institutional racism remains engrained within a sector that has been guilty of superficial attempts to prioritise race equality. Diversification documents tasked with the objective of advancing race equality have not been penetrative in stimulating wholesale institutional changes concerning diversity. Perhaps misleadingly, race equality documents are sometimes used as indicators of ‘good performance’. The introduction of the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) Race Equality Charter in 2016 has attempted to place race at the centre of discriminatory practices and inequitable cultures by measuring institutions against a set of diversification benchmarks. As the Charter begins to gain traction, the extent to which this will improve ‘poor diversification’ within the sector remains to be seen. Superficial drives to prioritise this agenda by some universities can sometimes provide a smoke-screen in which senior leadership managers may interpret their endeavours as ‘being excellent at challenging race inequality’ (Arday, 2017a; Ahmed, 2012). In higher education, endeavours to prioritise equality rarely reflect direct institutional changes which advocate deliberate and overt attempts to better diversify staff workforces. Disappointingly, race equality in the Academy often becomes part of an auditing culture which rarely analyses or critiques poor diversification. Sadly, this has been evidenced by the paucity of measures used to change academia from being a dominant White space to a more inclusive one. Diversity as a word is all-encompassing for many universities and is often used to canvas other intersections such as ethnicity, class, religion, gender, sexuality and disability. This particular word is palatable, but often becomes less palatable when used alongside challenging words such as ‘racism’, ‘Whiteness’ or ‘inequality’. The use of these words – particularly amongst BME academic staff – can often cause a resistance and a fragility which struggles to accept and acknowledge that ‘Whiteness’ is complicit in maintaining cycles of inequality (Andrews and Palmer, 2016; Mirza, 2008; Lander, 2011; Williams, 1991). Significantly, for BME academics this also works to destabilise the centrality of Whiteness. The function of Whiteness facilitates access to particular spaces which are often difficult for BME academics to physically disrupt due to a normative notion that only White academics disseminate knowledge within the Academy (Gillborn, 2015; Kincheloe and Steinberg, 1997; Leonardo, 2016). Disrupting these spaces is integral to ensuring that university students, in particular those of

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colour, are exposed to diverse curricula and teaching experiences that speak to their truths, realities and aspirations. As students become more culturally cognisant of the issues that underpin racism throughout society and its institutions, I have begun to recognise the fundamental role universities play in constructing the narrative of racism. This transpires through the bodies that occupy this space and the way curricula is designed to reflect dominant Eurocentric, White narratives. Personally, I have always queried the extent to which this space can be disrupted. The difficulty stems from my position as someone that does not obtain the type of power, privilege and position needed to enforce the type of systemic, inclusive change needed to facilitate broader curricula and greater diversification within the Academy. I have though, become cognisant of my presence as a BME academic and the platform this provides with regards to challenging overt and covert racism within the Academy through the use of anti-racist scholarship and activism. There is a personal recognition that my position within the Academy also comes with a responsibility to conscientise academics on the importance of diversification; and developing curricula that are representative of all students but in particular BME students as the dominant majority that attend university within the UK (Arday, 2017b; Bhopal, 2014; ECU, 2016; Shilliam, 2015). My presence as a BME academic must also speak to supporting BME students who may wish to pursue a pathway into academia by providing the type of mentorship and opportunities that have been continually afforded to White students. Recognising the extent of my privilege and power as a Black male in the Academy is important in continuing to dismantle racial inequality. Through my scholarship and teaching several avenues are available to inspire a generation of BME students who are now challenging what the Academy actually represents with regard to maintaining racist, exclusionary and discriminatory cultures (Chan et al., 2014; Lipsitz, 1998; Turner and Myers, 2000). For some, this may form part of a deeper cognition which acknowledges the importance of having an academic that can resonate and relate to some of the racialised plights BME people face within society. The persistence of racism within higher education, although sustained by many discriminatory and exclusionary processes, is receiving greater scrutiny as more BME academics attempt to challenge this inequality. This resistance against racial inequality within the sector is gathering momentum despite the

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dearth of employment opportunities presented to BME academics within the UK. Inequality thrives on marginalisation and exclusion, for universities to truly fulfil their purpose as a tool for social mobility they must move towards penetrative interventions which de-centre Whiteness as a tool for supremacy (McIntosh, 1990; Solórzano and Yosso, 2002). Additionally, universities must acknowledge that the presence of BME academics facilitates an ever-increasing diverse society and university community which comprises many different faiths, cultures and identities. Understanding the Impact of Racial Micro-aggression in Academia As an academic of colour, the racial micro-aggressions have often been utilised as a ‘tool of Whiteness’ to accentuate that I am deficient or not as capable as my White counterparts (Leonardo, 2002; Picower, 2009). Invariably, disrupting patterns and spaces of normative Whiteness can often lead to assertions regarding one’s professional capabilities and competence. The neutrality of Whiteness sustains itself on positioning BME academics as less competent (Giles et al., 2009; Pérez Huber and Solórzano, 2015). This has been difficult for many BME academics to negate because of the cumulative effect of microaggressions over prolonged periods of time. Within universities, BME academics are operating against a longevity of White supremacy (as a sustained instrument for oppression) which has been founded upon maintaining a wide range of ideological, emotional and performative mechanisms which sustain hegemony (Picower, 2009). For me, understanding the role of Whiteness and the persistence of racism is important as we continue to unpack how racism transpires more insidiously through symbolic acts of violence, including: the questioning of professional capabilities; the marginalising of individuals based on cultural difference; or the trivialising and dismissing of racist occurrences as hyper-sensitivity. Understanding this provides us with mechanisms to be able to conceptualise racialised experiences and perhaps more importantly, manage and confront them within a professional work setting (Pérez Huber and Solórzano, 2015; Puwar, 2004). However, the emotional burden of encountering racial microaggressions is debilitating and is often continuous, eventually eroding confidence (Rollock, 2012). To this end, disrupting White spaces in academia can become emotionally and mentally taxing (Puwar, 2004). For many BME academics this illustrates the stranglehold over

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these spaces and the multifaceted nature of Whiteness. The feeling of being treated differently for many of us undermines the principles associated with equity. For faculty of colour encountering racial microaggressions, this sense of inequity can evoke feelings of isolation, exclusion and marginalisation (Gillborn, 2008; Rollock, 2012). My own experiences of encountering racial micro-aggressions in academia resemble feelings of being undermined and unfairly scrutinised by White colleagues. Ultimately, these experiences have resulted in me becoming a segregated and isolated figure within university departments. My narrative resonates with Sue’s (2010) notion that people of colour are generally perceived to be less capable as legitimate scholars. Unveiling this type of prejudice is often difficult because racial micro-aggressions reside within a perceived subjective disposition, which has historically been posited as people of colour ‘playing the race card’ (Alexander, 2012). This trivialisation of racism makes it even harder for BME academics to confront, report and disrupt. For many academics, accusations of racism are assumed to be contrary to their positions as educated liberals who would never overtly or covertly advance such discrimination. Perhaps, it is against this backdrop that there is a continuation of racist cultures with no penetrative institutional changes (Ahmed, 2012; Bhopal, 2014; ECU, 2015). The paucity of institutional changes within higher education – particularly at senior levels – reminds us that racism is not prioritised as a discriminatory issue. The subtlety of the micro-aggression when compared to overt examples of racism within society and academia lures us into a false narrative that racism is diminishing (Alexander, 2012; Pérez Huber and Solórzano, 2015). As university senior leadership hierarchies gravitate towards more overt examples of racism as a measure for discrimination, the racial micro-aggression traverses effectively under the radar. As the challenging of racism within universities begins to gain more traction and momentum within mainstream presses, notably The Independent and The Guardian (Andrews, 2016; Arday, 2017a; Rollock, 2016), we must continue to confront and report racial microaggressions. By challenging this subtle form of racism, we unsettle the monopoly of power, privilege and knowledge that resides within the Academy, by disrupting metaphors of White supremacy and normativity (Ahmed, 2012; Sue, 2010). Through this resistance, BME academics continue to illuminate the centrality and fluidity of racism

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within higher education, whilst demonstrating that education in many ways reinforces inequality and racial discrimination. The stubborn and persistent nature of racism and the insistence of certain individuals to maintain this inequity in higher education mean that collective endeavour is required to stop racism. We all have a responsibility in academia to speak to this symbolic form of oppression in attempting to disturb the leveraging of power and privilege over marginalised and oppressed minority groups (Gillborn, 2010; Ignatiev and Garvey, 1996). Conclusion This chapter has revealed some of the instruments used to oppress BME academics through two vehicles; the centrality and persistence of racism within higher education and the impact of racial microaggression in academia. I offer this chapter and its discussion to highlight how cultures of normative Whiteness are sustained through curricula, systematic silencing, exclusion, marginalisation, poor diversification and racial micro-aggressions as a way to continue White supremacy within academia. This chapter has also served as a reflexive instrument which helps us to situate racism within the Academy, by illustrating how racial oppression transpires in covert forms and understanding the functions of Whiteness as an instrument to sustain hegemony. The point of departure which subsequently occurs at this juncture recognises that sustained efforts are needed to ensure higher education is reflective of a multi-cultural society. To achieve this, we as BME academics must continue to interrogate racism. In particular, the operant and sustained nature of Whiteness and the inherited power and privilege that accompany this within the Academy. Interrogating racism ensures that we challenge the notion of entitlement, power and privilege at the expense of ethnic minority academics. Establishing legitimacy for BME academics in the guise of normative Whiteness will always remain problematic because of the subordinated view of people of colour. However, disrupting racial inequality is integral if we as custodians of the Academy are to challenge some of the deep-rooted racialised issues which blight the higher education sector. Universities must use their distinguished platform within society as one of its major institutions to challenge all forms of inequality to ensure a greater sense of belonging for all students.

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I accept racism is unlikely to ever disappear, due to its penetrative, divisive and persistent nature. However, university institutions have a responsibility to do more to disrupt its dominant and insidious patterns by challenging racism and inequality with penetrative interventions that endorse greater diversification. Senior leadership managers within universities must be held accountable for not advocating clear strategies to ensure better diversification of staff workforces that are reflective of diverse student populations. The only way to truly achieve this within higher education and perhaps society more generally is through positive or affirmative action. This action ensures that BME academics will at least be given the opportunity to be part of academic staff workforces. Presently, they are not afforded this opportunity, hence the dearth of BME academics within the sector. I conclude this chapter by suggesting that this is really the only feasible way to break the stranglehold of racial inequality and poor diversification within an Academy that has always been inherently White. Our collective actions must speak towards challenging racism within higher education, if we are to dismantle the broader institutional racism that is entrenched within our society. References Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Alexander, C. and Arday, J. (2015). Aiming Higher: Race, Inequality and Diversity in the Academy. London: AHRC: Runnymede Trust, (Runnymede Perspectives). London, Common Creative: Runnymede Trust (Runnymede Perspectives). Alexander, M. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Amico, R. P. (2015). Anti-Racist Teaching. New York: Routledge. Andrews, K. (2016). Black Studies University Course Long Overdue. Available at: www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2016/may/20/ black-studies-university-course-longoverdue/.

Andrews, K. and Palmer, L. (2016). Blackness in Britain. London: Routledge. Ansley, F. L. (1997). White Supremacy (and What We Should Do about It). In R. Delgado and J. Stefancic (eds), Critical White Studies: Looking behind the Mirror. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Arday, J. (2017a). University and College Union (UCU): Exploring Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Doctoral Students’ Perceptions of a Career in Academia: Experiences, Perceptions and Career Progression. London, Creative Commons. Arday, J. (2017b). Confronting Racial Inequality in the Academy. Available at: www.universityworldnews.com/ article.php?story=20170418113613343/. Bhopal, K. (2014). The Experiences of BME Academics in Higher Education: Aspirations in the Face of Inequality.

36 | T R A N S F O R M I N G AC A D E M I A Stimulus Paper. London: Leadership Foundation for Higher Education. Chan, A., Dhamoon, R. and Moy, L. (2014). Metaphoric Representations of Women of Colour in the Academy: Teaching Race, Disrupting Power. Borderlands, 13(2), 1–26. Cordova, T. (1998). Power and Knowledge: Colonialism in the Academy. In C. Trujillo (ed.), Living Chicana Theory. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press. Delgado Bernal, D. and Villalpando, O. (2016). An Apartheid of Knowledge in Academia. In E. Taylor, D. Gillborn and G. Ladson-Billings (eds), Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge. Equality Challenge Unit (ECU). (2015). Equality in Higher Education: Statistical Report, Staff and Students. Available at: www.ecu.ac.uk/ publications/equality-highereducation-statistical-report-2015/. Equality Challenge Unit (ECU). (2016). Equality in Higher Education: Statistical Report Staff. London: ECU. Giles, M., Hughes, R. and Bonner, F. II. (2009). Introduction. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 22(6), 635–637. Gillborn, D. (2008). Racism and Education: Coincidence or Conspiracy? London: Routledge. Gillborn, D. (2010). The White Working Class, Racism and Respectability: Victims, Degenerates and Interestconvergence. British Journal of Educational Studies, 58(1), 2–25. Gillborn, D. (2015). Racism as Policy: A Critical Race Analysis of Education Reforms in the United States and England. The Educational Forum, 78(1), 26–41. Henry, F. and Tator, C. (2009). Contributions and Challenges of Addressing Discursive Racism in the

Canadian Media. Canadian Journal of Communication, 34(4), 35–57. Ignatiev, N. and Garvey, J. (1996). Abolish the White Race. In N. Ignatiev and J. Garvey (eds), Race Traitor. New York and London: Routledge. Kincheloe, J. and Steinberg, S. (1997). Addressing the Crisis of Whiteness: Reconfiguring White Identity in a Pedagogy of Whiteness. In J. Kincheloe, S. Steinberg, N. Rodriguez and R. Chennault (eds), White Reign. New York and London: Routledge. Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just What Is Critical Race Theory and What’s It Doing in a Nice Field Like Education? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(1), 7–24. Ladson–Billings, G. (2009). Who You Callin’ Nappy–headed? A Critical Race Theory Look at the Construction of Black Women. Race Ethnicity and Education, 12(1), 87–99. Ladson-Billings, G. and J. Donnor. (2008). The Moral Activist Role of Critical Race Theory Scholarship. In N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (ed.), The Landscape of Qualitative Research. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Lander, V. (2011). Race, Culture and All That: An Exploration of the Perspectives of White Secondary Student Teachers about Race Equality Issues in Their Initial Teacher Education. Race Ethnicity and Education, 14(3): 351–364. Leonardo, Z. (2002). The Souls of White Folk: Critical Pedagogy, Whiteness Studies, and Globalization Discourse. Race Ethnicity and Education, 5(1), 29–50. Leonardo, Z. (2016). The Color of Supremacy. In E. Taylor, D. Gillborn and G. Ladson-Billings (eds), Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge. Lipsitz, G. (1998). The Possessive

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Investment in Whiteness. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. McIntosh, P. (1990). White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. In B. Schinder (ed.), An Anthology: Race in the First Person. New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks. McIntosh, P. (1992). White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work. In R. Delgado and J. Stefancic (ed.), Women’s Studies, in Critical White Studies: Looking behind the Mirror. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Mirza, H. S. (2008). Race, Gender and Educational Desire: Why Black Women Succeed and Fail. London: Routledge. Pérez Huber, L. and Solórzano, D. G. (2015). Racial Micro-aggressions as a Tool for Critical Race Research. Race Ethnicity and Education, 18(3), 297–320. Picower, B. (2009). The Unexamined Whiteness of Teaching: How White Teachers Maintain and Enact Dominant Racial Ideologies. Race Ethnicity and Education, 12(2), 197–215. Pitt, A. and Britzman, D. (2003). Speculations on Qualities of Difficult Knowledge in Teaching and Learning: An Experiment in Psychoanalytic Research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(6), 755–776. Puwar, N. (2004). Fish in and out of Water: A Theoretical Framework for Race and the Space of Academia. In I. Law, D. Phillips and L Turney (eds), Institutional Racism in Higher Education. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books. Rollock, N. (2012). Unspoken Rules of Engagement: Navigating Racial Micro-aggressions in the Academic Terrain. International Journal of

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Qualitative Studies in Education, 25(5), 517–532. Rollock, N. (2016). How Much Does Your University Do for Racial Equality? Available at: www.theguardian.com/ higher-education-network/2016/ jan/19/how-much-does-youruniversity-do-for-racial-equality/. Shilliam, R. (2015) Black Academia in Britain: The Disorder of Things. Available at: https:// thedisorderofthings. com/2014/07/28/ black-academia-in-britain/. Smith, H. J. and Lander, V. (2012). Collusion or Collision: Effects of Teacher Ethnicity in the Teaching of Critical Whiteness. Race Ethnicity and Education, 15(3), 331–351. Solórzano, D. and Yosso, T. J. (2002). Critical Race Methodology: Counterstorytelling as an Analytical Framework for Education Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 23–44. Stovall, D. (2006). Forging Community in Race and Class: Critical Race Theory and the Quest for Social Justice in Education. Race Ethnicity and Education, 9(3), 243–259. Sue, D. W. (2010). Micro-aggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Turner, C. S. V. and Myers, S. L., Jr. (2000). Faculty of Colour in Academy: Bittersweet Success. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Wildman, S. and Davis, A. (1997). Making Systems of Privilege Visible. In R. Delgado and J. Stefancic (eds), Critical White Studies: Looking behind the Mirror. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Williams, P. J. (1991). The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Derrais Carter

We’re not good enough to not practice. (Kiese Laymon, 2015)

Introduction In the summer of 2016, I attended a workshop and lecture by theorist Frank Wilderson. In his remarks, Wilderson addressed the manner in which discourses of civility play out on the stage of anti-blackness. For Wilderson, denying Black people admittance into the category ‘citizen’ allows for ethnic minorities to become a part of the dominant racial order. As such, the idea of a Black citizen is impossible. Wilderson also questioned how scholars think and write about Black people when the denial of our voices is structurally, ideologically and epistemologically imposed. We can take, for instance, the structure of academic journal articles. Even within social science and humanities disciplines, academic journal articles tend to follow this format: (1) rhetorical/social occasion for the argument, (2) presentation of argument, (3) literature review, (4) method, (5) analysis, (6) results and conclusion. While this approach is perhaps most associated with biological sciences and social sciences, humanists often follow similar structural patterns. However, the point here is the result/conclusion section. This is often where the ‘so what’ question is answered. The author asserts, or reasserts, how the discipline has gained in light of their contribution. Where’s the harm in that? Wilderson makes no attempt to answer the ‘so what’ question. Doing so would, in fact, go against the very argument that he has presented. Wilderson’s necessary provocation addresses a certain impossibility in academic writing, an impossibility that requires us to rethink how we write blackness. After Wilderson, we would do well to step back and consider that the structure of academic writing, when presented using the model above, is quite vicious for how it insists on its own significance, its own relevance. After all, how transformative can one’s argument be when the terms upon which that argument is introduced

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are designed to favour the structure that makes the argument both necessary and null in the first place? When we are professionalised to think, act and create against the possibility of our own potential, what is the cost? Wilderson’s work stokes the fire burning down white supremacy’s ideological house. Not using the master’s tools to dismantle it. Not redesigning it. Not chipping away at the pristine veneer. We would also do well to think about whose concerns we prioritise in our attempts to get free and how. This can often be the case when we centre the concerns of cisgendered and heterosexual Black men and boys to fight on behalf of all Black people. Time and time again, attempting to realise Black patriarchy as a viable political strategy has failed us. We are writing against our demise. We are thinking, writing and being anew. Black folk have been living experiments in freedom. This, we should take seriously. The ways that we enact freedom, the ways that we realise our freedom dreams, require experimentation. Before I proceed, an admission. I support, without a need to qualify, the claim that Western thought is not particularly interested in the construction of a self-sustaining Black voice. At least not a Black voice that does not also advance the desires of white supremacy. Additionally, remaining politically wedded to the idea that centring issues disproportionately affecting Black men and boys will make, and keep, all Black folk free needs to be cancelled. This logic is insufficient. This gut rot epistemology ain’t gon’ save us. Patriarchy won’t save us. This much, we would do well to remember. If #BlackLivesMatter and the Movement for Black Lives has taught us nothing else, it is that we can no longer afford to limit our political imagination to matters involving Black men and boys. Similarly, our political concerns must move far beyond the gaze of white supremacy and claims about cultural appropriation. I am not the first to say this. These ideas are not new. *** There is no progress. There is only the infinite possibilities of the present. (Michelle Wright, 2011)

Black Studies provides a disciplinary stage upon which experiments in Black life can and should play out. Because we’re not good enough to not practise we must write about blackness as allowing the fullest possible expanse of humanity. We must rewrite the social and political

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protocols we default to in order to imaginatively pursue the very people we are often afraid to become. In Jamal Lewis’s short film Otherwise Gender (2016), Black trans femme activist Joshua Allen beautifully states I think about … what it means for people to reclaim parts of themselves that were lost, stolen, or burned away from them. And that’s what my gender nonconformity is to me. It’s about reclaiming all these things that belong to me that I still feel … it’s like an ancestral legacy. Its cell memory … and I’m trying to embody that … In the sense of a return, it’s also destruction. It’s burning shit down. It’s breaking shit up. It’s abolishing a binary. It’s doing all of these things by you just remembering who you are. (Lewis, 2016)

Allen gathers, breaks up and gathers blackness, transness, history, the body, resistance, imagination and possibility. What comes through in this generative statement is a reminder that the space–time of blackness is present. The tense of blackness is present. Blackness somehow remains both in and out of time, pushing against the attempts to be ordered in the present, revisiting and reimagining the past, and producing future possibilities. Allen allows us to be gathered and granted permission. We can also do this work. We don’t have the luxury of safe experimentation. That ain’t how privilege is set up. What we have is institutionally, socially and epistemologically sanctioned vulnerability. In this vulnerability, we have to pursue our own iterations of humanity. Our own versions of civility. Our own discourses of wholeness, should we even want that in the first place. Black Studies gives us that space. It allows space for the cultivation of what historian Darlene Clark Hine (2014) calls a Black Studies mind, ‘a set of historically sedimented and diverse practices and modes of thought’ that structures how we enact Black Studies within and beyond the walls of the academy. Hine identifies five themes and approaches to perform this: (1) intersectionality, (2) nonlinear thinking, (3) diasporic perspectives and comparative analyses, (4) oppression and resistance, (5) solidarity. In addition to laying out broader institutional and epistemological concerns for doing Black Studies, Hine’s five themes and approaches also help us understand where and how we might ‘practise’. Put differently, these fulcrum points tether us as we write against the tide of anti-blackness structuring our lives.

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We write in the ideological shadow of the plantation. Rather, we write against plantation logics which remind us that universities remain strongholds of white supremacy. We write at a historical moment when students and faculty demand that classrooms be ‘safe spaces’. But we know better. Black Studies knows better. Instead of perpetuating a fantasy of liberal inclusion and safety, we cultivate the Black Studies mind. We create spaces, platforms, environments, partnerships, theories, methods and art that witness our freedom in their very creation. We experiment. In terms of writing, Black experimentation produces portals, access points into blackness. It taps into Black interiors, real and imagined. This mode of writing grants us insight into our expectations, wishes, fears and fantasies. It calls into question the very things we believe to know about ourselves, yet it does so in a way that invites exploration of the rawness that questions can produce. Through Black experimentation we become who we ought to be by now and so much more. In the essay ‘A Black Poetics: Against Mastery’ Dawn Lundy Martin writes ‘[i]mpossibility, especially given its irreconcilability, its discomfort, might be in fact what compels or calls for the creative. This is the condition of making. From a place of not knowing’ (2017: 161). This place of not knowing, this Black interior (this presumably ‘pre’ yet really undetermined space), is one site of our ongoing creation. It does not require immediate legibility. It requires no legibility at all. The impossibility of the Black subject, the Black citizen, is the very condition that frees us from affirming or negating blackness as we (think) we know it. Become who you want to make possible. This, I believe, is Martin’s invitation. In her ground-breaking essay ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’ theorist Hortense Spillers (1987) identifies how the negation of Black womanhood enables a host of American national identities to be forged and articulated. In this configuration, Black women exist for all others, but never for themselves. But how might a project that conjures and centres the Black women who fuel the US national imaginary look? Enter Alexis Pauline Gumbs. In Spill: Scenes in Black Feminist Fugitivity, Gumbs (2016) produces vignettes that act as poetry, theory and criticism. She conjures Black women and girls the likes of which we somehow know intimately yet contain, restrain even, to our own detriment. Gumbs writes ‘when you see her dancing by, perceive her, leave her to her journey, breathe her, take a

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moment of gratitude to know that we achieved her’ (2016: 95). Do not intervene, making her an extension of your politics. Do not claim dominion over her voice. Douse your eyes with water. Clear out your ears. Witness her. This, I believe, is an invitation. These texts gather and grant permission. They are not overtly invested in road maps to liberation. Yet, they establish, and often extend, historical and contemporary moments of rupture that remind us to play in possibility. And, let’s be clear, play has always been work for Black folk. These thinkers, writers and creatives turn impossibility into a radical space for remaking Black life. They sprint back and forth. They dodge precision while pinpointing those unrealised social and political desires that haunt us. They traffic in opacity. They wander. We need this. Writing about blackness can so easily reduce Black people to idealised historical victims whose lives are only as important as their legibility to white audiences. What I’m suggesting here is that Black experiments invite us to consider the premises and investigative modes that might produce a Black Studies mind. To thrive in a political moment designed for our obliteration ain’t easy. When our destruction is by design, we cannot carry out business or politics as usual. We have to enact our freedom on multiple fronts. This much we know. We must write against our demise. This is not writing towards liberal representation. This is not writing towards inclusion. This is writing that structurally, spiritually and aesthetically embodies a refusal to acquiesce to the demands of larger structures which are more invested in policing us than freeing us. This is writing that in its very composition undermines the integrity of a carefully orchestrated anti-Black civility as necessary to the proliferation of the discipline. An Opening Now, here we are, wandering through the fires of the political present. Bravely and cautiously wading through the onslaught of political missives and attacks. Cutting through the tide of hate speech attempting to drown out the voices of the most vulnerable. Creating cultural texts that fly in the face of violent ideologies. Producing Black voices in a world yearning for our continued, and persistent, silence. Black Studies galvanises these movements, texts and voices. And it does so with a vision of Black humanity that embodies and expands Hine’s manifesto so that we can be who we ought to be by now.

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References Gumbs, A. (2016). Spill: Scenes in Black Feminist Fugitivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hine, D. (2014). A Black Studies Manifesto: Characteristics of a Black Studies Mind. The Black Scholar, 44(2), 11–15. Laymon, K. (2015). We’re Not Good Enough to Not Practice. [online] 11 January 2015. Available at: www. kieselaymon.com/blog/2015/1/11/ were-not-good-enough-to-notpractice (Accessed 11 June 2017). Lewis, Jamal. (2016). Otherwise Gender.

Available at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1BPygZXUwf0 (Accessed 15 September 2017). Martin, D. (2017). A Black Poetics: Against Mastery. Boundary 2, 44(3), 159–163. DOI: 10.1215/01903659-3898154. Spillers, H. (1987). Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book. Diacritics, 17(2), 64–81. Wright, M. (2011). Physics of Blackness. Available at: https://vimeo. com/32223377 (Accessed 1 October 2017).

5 | C ON F RON T I N G M Y D UT Y A S AN A C AD E M I C : W E S H O UL D A L L B E AC T IV IS T S

Remi Joseph-Salisbury

Following the political upheavals of 2016, I, like many others, experienced feelings of deep trauma (see Jameela in this collection): this chapter emerges out of that trauma. As an early-career academic of colour, reflecting on the events that are unfolding, I am reminded of the words of James Baldwin (1963) when he said, ‘on the basis of the evidence – the moral and political evidence – one is compelled to say that this is a backward society’. These words seem as pertinent to contemporary struggles as they did in the midst of the African American struggle for civil rights legislation. Whilst to a certain extent I share Layla Brown-Vincent’s view that this ‘ain’t nothing new’ (see Chapter 12 of this collection), at the very least, the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump offer stark reminders of the white supremacist conditions we continue to grapple with. This is amplified by the apparent concomitant shifts to the political right across Europe (Shuster, 2016), in Canada (see Tecle and James in this collection), Kenya (see Macharia in this collection) and elsewhere. The Trump and Brexit campaigns have demonstrated a resurgence of the forms of explicit racism and xenophobia (Khalili, 2017) that many of our ‘post-racial’ liberal friends had too readily assumed were consigned to the dustbin of history. Demonstrating the ways in which political discourse shapes the everyday, there have been numerous reports of Trump and Brexit being invoked in everyday racisms in schools, universities and on the streets (Carroll, 2016; Vasquez, 2015). That an image of Trump was left on a black student’s fridge in the UK (Joseph-Salisbury, 2016) attests to the ways in which racisms have implications far beyond the national boundaries in which they emerge. If our oppressions know no national bounds, so too must our resistance (Davis, 2016). My grappling with the events that are unfolding led me not just to reflect upon the state of society but on my role in fighting against

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inequality generally, and racism particularly. Overwhelmingly, I was left with a sense that I was not doing enough. Even more so, I felt that academics and the academe were not doing enough. As an activist and academic who is fundamentally committed to the liberation of oppressed and marginalised groups, I felt, and continue to feel, deeply worried about what it means to be an academic of colour in these times of explicit racial violence. I am cognisant of Baldwin’s provocation that sits on a poster above my desk: ‘at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person’. This is a challenge to bring about meaningful social change. Whilst critical of what it means to think of one’s self as ‘educated’, it is this challenge that motivates me, and that I believe should motivate all academics. The events of 2016 bring these clarion calls into stark focus: this is a matter of urgency. We must absolve ourselves of the delusion that abstract theory will ‘trickle down’. When so many people of colour are preoccupied with long working hours, with mere survival in a white supremacist system that they were never meant to survive, is it not hypocritical for scholars of colour to sit back and expect others to occupy the frontline? Should these times of explicit racist violence not be the wakeup call that urges us to do more? Is there not simply too much at stake for us to sit by on the side-lines? In this chapter, I consider five fundamental principles that I admire in others, and I strive to adhere to myself. These are principles for those of us committed to the quest for black and brown liberation, and the liberation of all oppressed people. I write this as a provocation to myself and to my fellow academics: we must do more. As I offer this provocation, I am mindful of the ways in which such universalistic calls invisibilise particular positionalities. I am mindful of the ways in which – with too little recognition – black women so often shoulder the burden of our struggles and the ways in which my own perspective is shaped by the Western context from which I write. This chapter, therefore, should be read in conjunction with Kamunge, Mwangi and Abdi Ali’s chapter in this collection. This list is not prescriptive and is far from extensive: others will have their own principles, and – being mindful of the importance of self-care and circumstance – we can each only do that which we are able to do. I share my principles as a platform from which we might spring.

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I write not as an expert. I write as somebody still grappling with considerations of what my own role is, can be, and will be within these systems. I write as somebody who, as a PhD student, experienced deep disappointment, frustration and anger at the apolitical nature of much of academia. I write as somebody who has since found sites of inspiration, and individuals and groups who share a commitment to the pursuit of transformative change. Most of all, I write as somebody still trying to find my way. To know the place in which we work seems a pertinent entry point, so this is where I begin. Be Aware and Critical of the Historical and Contemporary Role of the University We must always be aware of (and beware of) the historical role that universities have played in the creation and perpetuation of white supremacy, and in the oppression of black and brown people more generally. This role has been both material and ideological and, as the president of Harvard University suggested in the opening of a conference on the connections between universities and slavery, ‘only by coming to terms with history can we free ourselves to make a more just world’ (Faust, 2017: n.p.). In the material sense, to come to terms with this history is to rid ourselves of the debilitating historical amnesia that so often characterises contemporary debates. To do so, reveals a history in which enslaved people worked on university campuses and were owned by universities; a history in which universities bought and sold enslaved people, drew upon the profits of enslaved labour, and profited from the Transatlantic ‘slave trade’ (Beckert et al., 2017; Higginbotham, 2017; Walters, 2017). Even beyond their fundamental and moral obligation, to recognise that much of the wealth of Western universities is built upon the exploitation of black bodies surely provides scope for universities to be held to account for reparations (Campbell, 2017). In the more ideological sense, we should know the fundamental role that universities have played in constructing the black body as non-human, sub-human, criminal, hypersexual and monstrous. It was from the university that eugenicist thinking arose. In the service of the British Empire, the University of London invented national eugenics (Coleman, 2014). It was this line of thinking that helped to construct an ‘unjust racial hierarchy’ that endures today: this racist pseudo-scientific thought is now entrenched as a ‘foundation of legitimate disciplines such as economics, statistics and genetics’ (Coleman, 2014: n.p.).

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Eugenicist thinking has had devastating social costs for black and brown people (Chase, 1977). Severing contemporary society generally (and the contemporary university specifically) from its past, is key to the maintenance of white supremacy. Such a distortion of historical linkages must be resisted. Whilst eugenicist thought is now widely critiqued (which is not to say it is non-existent), we should remain mindful of the ideological work that has been done, and must be undone. We should also be aware that those pathologies have not merely disappeared, but have re-manifested in the sociocultural pathologies that continue to be the dominant discourse through which universities perpetuate ideas of black inferiority and cultural deficit. In terms of the contemporary role of the university, we should recognise that the education system operates to exclude so many racially minoritised students, and – through various racist mechanisms – often alienates, excludes and marginalises those who do attend (Johnson and Joseph-Salisbury, 2018). It is also important to recognise the university as a neoliberal institution and that its aims will often, if not always, be antithetical to our aims of progressive/radical social change. To understand the role of the university is also to know that, as Azeezat Johnson reminds us, it is not the only site of knowledge production: I return to this point in the fourth principle (‘Know the Wider Communities’). If we are going to bring about social change from these spaces, we need to understand their historical foundations in racist systems and contemporary perpetuation of racial violence. Instead of repurposing some of the master’s tools, we must speak up and begin the task of dismantling the master’s house. Speak Truth to Power As academics of colour who are committed to social change we must endeavour to speak truth to power wherever and whenever possible. To speak truth to power is to take seriously the responsibility we have to our communities, and to ensure we are always firmly on the side of the oppressed. The political events of 2016 demonstrated just how poisonous political discourse can be, and thus, it is imperative that we speak up to offer anti-racist counter-narratives wherever possible. This must extend far beyond academic journals which are, inevitably, the reading materials of the relatively privileged. Academics must challenge the misinformation promulgated through public discourses. In the British context, among a plethora

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of other examples, we see a constant overestimation of the levels of immigration (Richards and Goodfellow, 2015), an overestimation of the state support received by immigrants, and a whitewashing of Britain’s deplorable past (Bhambra, 2016). Across Europe, citizens from the majority of countries overestimate their Muslim population and their future Muslim population ‘by a staggering amount’ (Ipsos, 2016: n.p.). These distortions of reality impact upon public and political discourse. This is evident not only in the Brexit vote but also in the everyday racisms people of colour endure. For Chomsky (1967: n.p.), the unique positioning of those of us in the academe place certain responsibilities upon us: Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyse actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the ‘responsibility of people’, given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.

Whilst Chomsky does not explicitly invoke race, it is our duty as anti-racist scholars to excavate the white supremacist underpinnings of our societies. Intersectional theory demands that this excavation is cognisant of the ways in which hetero-patriarchy, classism and ableism contour white supremacy. Chomsky’s reference to privilege is significant, and raises something of a paradox. In effect, we must utilise our privileges to advance our cause, whilst also remaining critical of those very structures that privilege some voices, our voices, over others. In this sense, our voice should not just be our voice, but should be informed by the perspectives of those who white supremacy too often marginalises. As Cornel West has put it, the duty of the intellectual is to ‘let suffering speak, let victims be visible, and let social misery be put on the agenda of those in power’ (cited by Buschendorf in West 2014: 64). We must bear witness. To speak up and to amplify the voices of those who are silenced is a central tenet of Critical Race Theory and should be important to those of us who strive to walk the walk

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(Hylton, 2012). However, as we do so, we must be ever conscious of the ways in which the notion of ‘giving voice’ can be misused in exploitative ways (for example, see Johnson’s discussion of co-production in this collection) that in actuality ‘speak for’ and maintain the status quo. An oft-cited intervention of Audre Lorde’s is worth rehearsing here. In what has become something of a mantra amongst feminists and anti-racists, Lorde (1995: 32) argues that, When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So, it is better to speak knowing we were never meant to survive.

To speak out takes courage and can place academics in vulnerable positions, this is particularly true for academics of colour.1 In white supremacist institutions like the university, we know that too often our words will not be welcomed. For Lorde, regardless of what we do or do not say, we will always be marked as bodies out of place (Puwar, 2004). In this regard, in a context where ‘we were never meant to survive’, it becomes our duty to speak up. As we do so, support networks become an imperative for our survival in the academe. Be Supportive and Be Supported Academics of colour face a number of racist and racialised challenges that the white majority of academics do not. Discrimination, isolation, marginalisation, disproportionately high workloads, and barriers to promotion characterise the workplace experiences of people of colour generally, and academics of colour specifically (Bhopal, 2014; ECU, 2009; Law et al., 2004). It is conceivable that many of these issues are intensified for those of us who critique and move against the status quo of white supremacy, and the racist mechanisms of our institutions. As is often remarked upon at those rare academic events where the majority of attendees are academics of colour, support networks are of vital importance to our ability to survive and progress in academia. I can testify that the support I received from friends and colleagues through the Critical Race and Ethnicities Network (CREN) was integral to completing my PhD and to getting an academic job. Even to know that there are other anti-racist scholars struggling against the same barriers strengthens my resolve. Given our shared desire to challenge white supremacy, to swim against the tide, it is surely our duty to support each other.

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Those who have been in the academe for a long time have a wealth of experience and knowledge that can be of great benefit to those of us coming up. It is important that those academics are willing to share, and that those of us at more junior levels are willing to seek out that support. Such supportive networks can help more of us enter and remain in academic jobs, and form a critical mass of anti-racist academics of colour. The importance of access to support repeatedly emerges as a key theme in Jason Arday’s (2017) report on the experiences of ‘BME doctoral students’ in the UK. A sense that informal mentoring and support is commonplace for white students, and not always in place for students of colour, makes the cultivation of academics of colour networks an urgent anti-racist act. This must be about more than rhetoric. Academics and activists of colour are increasingly taking heed of the emphasis Audre Lorde places on the importance of self-care. This ‘self-preservation’, she argues, is an act of ‘political warfare’ (Lorde, 2017: 130). Recognising the white supremacist underpinnings of the university, and knowing that we occupy these spaces as ‘bodies out of place’ (Puwar, 2004), should spur us to develop stronger formal and informal networks for self and collective care. These networks should also extend to our students whose experiences are impacted by the very structures we seek to transform. It is equally as important that we look beyond the ivory tower, to cultivate supportive and mutually beneficial networks with members of our communities. Know the Wider Communities In my experience, writing as an academic within the particular context of the UK, it is all too often that academics remain locked away in the ivory tower with little contact with the people, communities and struggles they claim to be a part of. In the city where I have studied and worked, I can’t help but feel despondent at the number of anti-racist academics who have no contact with the community centres and radical anti-racist spaces that exist in the city, and imagine research on antiracism as somehow separate from the communities that have always been at the forefront of organising against racism. Simultaneously, I have long since admired those few academics who are well-known and well-regarded in community spaces: this is something I one day hope to emulate. For meaningful anti-racist progress, the disconnect between academics of colour and our wider communities must be severed.

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Engaging with our wider communities enables us to do the aforementioned work of decentring the university as the site of knowledge production. This is an important endeavour that moves against the racist and classist structures that oppress us. This enables us to collaborate and engage in meaningful dialogue with the organisers, campaigners and activists whose work may well connect with our own but so often goes unnoticed. In the first principle, I suggested that universities have an obligation to repair the anti-black and people of colour violence that they have been, and continue to be, all too complicit in. To realise this requires a reckoning with history, an understanding of the harm universities continue to cause,2 and a radical reimagination of the role of the university. The history of anti-racist struggle tells us that ‘power concedes nothing without demand’ (Douglass, 1857). In the context of the university, we should take these words seriously: the university will concede nothing without our demands. Building meaningful relationships with the communities of colour that are local to our universities can enable us to act as gatekeepers to place demands on universities to begin to reap that which we are owed. With so many academics of colour occupying precarious positions, and with white institutions so resistant to racial justice, we must do so with the support of each other and with a degree of reflexivity with regard to what we are able to do. On a practical level, this principle involves thinking about how we can use university resources and our own skills to benefit those wider communities. We need to invite those communities into the university. We must also recognise the negative feeling the university may induce in those that feel ‘outside’ of it, and where possible, take ourselves, our colleagues and our students out to those communities. Ultimately, these steps should move us towards a breaking down of the barriers that see the university and ‘the community’ as separate entities. As we engage in the dialogue needed to make this happen, we must be ever conscious of how power dynamics play out. This brings me to the fifth principle, reflexivity. Being Reflexive: Are We Doing More Harm Than Good? Undergirding those that precede it, this final principle necessitates reflection and reflexivity. The multifarious trappings of academia, its white supremacist underpinnings and deep implication in the perpetuation of racism, mean that we must always be cognisant of the

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question: are we doing more harm than good? Of course, this is a question that has many manifestations. A variation of this question, one which I often grapple with, is this: is teaching students to be critical outweighing our complicity in a system that perpetuates white supremacy and often exploits students? We might also ask (and re-ask) whether we believe our research can make a meaningful difference? Who does it benefit? Who are we helping? And, what are our underlying motives? As Cornel West might ask, in the context of the neoliberal commodification of higher education, are we more closely tied to ‘ruthless ambition or moral conviction’, a ‘we consciousness [or] … an I consciousness’? (West, 2015: n.p.). Can we do things differently? Whose voices are we privileging? Linking back to the third and fourth principles, reflexivity need not just be an individual pursuit, but is something that we can cultivate collectively, and not just with those of us in the academe. We should be wary of the ways in which white supremacy and neoliberal capitalism morph and reformulate to maintain their interests. Derrick Bell (1993) argued that what we designate as racial progress is often racism taking on a more perverse form. For bell hooks (2010: 15) this manifests in the way that ‘Black Studies, Women’s Studies and Cultural Studies were all revamped [and] … deradicalized’. Sara Ahmed (2017) has discussed the ways in which the illusion of progress can really impede our activism. We must resist the co-optation of ourselves as academics and of our projects and political work: reflexivity is an integral component of our ability to do this. To be reflexive also involves our being aware of the hypersurveillance that, as black academics and academics of colour, we will always be placed under (Wright et al., 2007). This awareness encourages us to recognise the barriers we face and how they may be overcome. To understand this hyper-surveillance is to understand that producing the kind of radical work needed to transform society, and even the not so radical work, might see us listed on Professor Watchlists (Yancy, 2016), our lives threatened (Flaherty, 2017), our being sacked (Schmidt, 2017) or our experiencing the oft-forgotten microaggressions and daily indignities that people of colour so often face (Johnson and Joseph-Salisbury, 2018). To be mindful of our hypervisibility implores us to engage in the delicate balancing act of meeting the demands of our institutions whilst also doing transformative work for social change.

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Being reflexive also involves taking self-care seriously. As scholars and activists of colour, we must learn to balance caring for ourselves (and those around us) with our efforts to make meaningful change. To operate within and against white supremacist institutions can take its toll: we must be wary of the threats posed by the work we do. Conclusion Whilst the events of 2016 are just the most recent surface-level manifestations of deep-rooted white supremacy, at the very least, they offer a wakeup call that we must do more. This wakeup call should be felt sharply by those of us in the academe who have a duty to our communities to bring about transformative change. Of course, there are many ways to do this, and those that I offer here are the principles that guide me. I’m sure others will have their own, and as I grow, through reflexivity and reflection, I will develop others. To be an academic of colour seeking to transform society is no easy task: the many mechanisms of the university seek to thwart our efforts. From the disproportionately high workloads to the institution’s sword over our necks demanding us to publish or perish, we face a huge struggle. Struggle we must. Notes 1 Think of the death threats received by Princeton University history professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor following her denunciation of Trump (West Savali, 2017).

2 For instance, the gentrification of the working-class neighbourhoods of people of colour (Allen, 2004; Bon, 2014; Munck, 2003).

References Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Allen, D. (2004). Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown V Board of Education. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Arday, J. (2017). University and College Union (UCU): Exploring Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Doctoral Students’ Perceptions of a Career in Academia: Experiences, Perceptions and Career Progression. London: Creative Commons.

Baldwin, J. (1963). The Negro Child: His Self-Image. The Saturday Review, 21 December 1963. Beckert, S., Balraj, G., Henle, J. and Stevens, K. (2017). Harvard and Slavery. Transition, 122, 201–205. Bell, D. A. (1993). Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. New York: Basic Books. Bhambra, G. K. (2016). Viewpoint: Brexit, Class and British ‘National’ Identity. Discover Society. Available at: http:// discoversociety.org/2016/07/05/

54 | T R A N S F O R M I N G AC A D E M I A viewpoint-brexit-class-and-britishnational-identity/ (Accessed 24 November 2017). Bhopal, K. (2014). The Experiences of BME Academics in Higher Education: Aspirations in the Face of Inequality. Leadership Foundation for Higher Education Stimulus Papers. Bon, D. (2014). Understanding Columbia University’s Expansion into West Harlem: An Activist’s Guide. Available at: https:// coalitionagainstgentrification. files.wordpress.com/2014/12/ understanding-columbia-university_sexpansion-into-west-harlem1.pdf. Campbell, J. T. (2017). Universities and Slavery, Slavery and Universities Nationally. Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Carroll, R. (2016). ‘You Were Born in a Taco Bell’: Trump’s Rhetoric Fuels School Bullies across US. The Guardian, 9 June 2016. Available at: www.theguardian.com/ us-news/2016/jun/09/californiaprimary-trump-rhetoric-school-bully (Accessed 24 November 2017). Chase, A. (1977). The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Chomsky, N. (1967). The Responsibility of Intellectuals. The New York Review of Books, 23 February 1967. Coleman, N. T. (2014). Eugenics: The Academy’s Complicity. Times Higher Education, 9 October 2014. Available at: www.timeshighereducation.com/ comment/opinion/eugenics-theacademys-complicity/2016190.article (Accessed 24 November 2017). Davis, A. Y. (2016). Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Douglass, F. (1857). West India Emancipation. Canadigua, NY, 3 August 1857.

Equality Challenge Unit. (2009). The Experience of Black and Minority Ethnic Staff Working in Higher Education. Literature Review, 2009. Available at: www.ecu.ac.uk/ wp-content/uploads/external/ experience-of-bme-staff-in-he.pdf (Accessed 24 November 2017). Faust, D. G. (2017). Opening Remarks, Universities and Slavery. Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 15 March 2017. Available at: www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/ universities-and-slavery-1-5-keynote (Accessed 24 November 2017). Flaherty, C. (2017). Concession to Violent Intimidation. Inside Higher Ed. Available at: www.insidehighered. com/news/2017/06/01/princetonprofessor-who-criticized-trumpcancels-events-saying-shes-receiveddeath (Accessed 24 November 2017). Higginbotham, E. (2017). Universities and Slavery, Slavery and Universities Nationally. Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 15 March 2017. Available at: www. radcliffe.harvard.edu/universitiesand-slavery-2-5-slavery-anduniversities-nationally (Accessed 24 November 2017). hooks, b. (2010). Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge. Hylton, K. (2012). Talk the Talk, Walk the Walk: Defining Critical Race Theory in Research. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 15(1), 23–41. Ipsos. (2016). Perceptions Are Not Reality: What the World Gets Wrong. Ipsos MORI, 14 December 2016. Available at: www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/ en-uk/perceptions-are-not-realitywhat-world-gets-wrong (Accessed 24 November 2017). Johnson, A. and Joseph-Salisbury, R. (2018). ‘Are You Supposed To Be in Here?’ Racial Microaggressions and

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Knowledge Production in Higher Education. In Jason Arday and Heidi Mirza (eds), Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy. Palgrave. Joseph-Salisbury, R. (2016). Universities under Pressure to Tackle Racism. The Voice Newspaper, 16 April 2016. Available at: www.voice-online.co.uk/ article/universities-under-pressuretackle-racism. Khalili, L. (2017). After Brexit: Reckoning with Britain’s Racism and Xenophobia. International English Language Quarterly, 4, 2–3: Women on Brexit. Law, I., Phillips, D. and Turney, L. (eds) (2004). Institutional Racism in Higher Education. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Lorde, A. (1995). The Black Unicorn: Poems. New York: Norton Paperback. Lorde, A. (2017). A Burst of Light: And Other Essays. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books. Munck, R. (2003). Reinventing the City? Liverpool in Comparative Perspective. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Puwar, N. (2004). Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies out of Place. Oxford: Berg Press. Richards, V. and Goodfellow, M. (2015). 11 Charts That Show British People Are Wrong about Almost Everything. The Independent, 02 December 2015. Available at: www.independent. co.uk/news/uk/home-news/ immigration-obesity-and-religion-11charts-that-show-british-people-arecompletely-wrong-about-a6757551. html (Accessed 24 November 2017). Schmidt, S. (2017). Professor Fired after Defending Blacks-Only Event to Fox News: ‘I Was Publicly Lynched’, She Says. The Washington Post, 26 June 2017. Available at: www. washingtonpost.com/news/morningmix/wp/2017/06/26/professor-firedafter-defending-blacks-only-event-

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on-fox-news-i-was-publicly-lynchedshe-says/?utm_term=.541fbf6b2b83 (Accessed 24 November 2017). Shuster, S. (2016). European Politics Are Swinging to the Right. The New Statesman, 22 September 2016. Available at: http://time.com/4504010/ europe-politics-swing-right/. Vasquez, T. (2015). I’ve Experienced a New Level of Racism since Donald Trump Went after Latinos. The Guardian, 9 September 2015. Available at: www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2015/sep/09/ donald-trump-racism-increase-latinos. Walters, L. K. (2017). Slavery and the American University: Discourses of Retrospective Justice at Harvard and Brown. A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01440 39X.2017.1309875. West, C. (2014). Black Prophetic Fire. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. West, C. (2015). The Betrayal by the Black Elite, Days of Revolt. The Real News. Available at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CA7NA2TgXBQ. Wright, C., Thompson, S. and Channer, Y. (2007). Out of Place: Black Women Academics in British Universities. Women’s History Review, 16(2), 145–167. West Savali, K. (2017). Princeton Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Tayor Cancels Public Appearances Amid Fox News-Fueled Death Threats. The Root, 1 June 2017. Available at: www. theroot.com/princeton-professorkeeanga-yamahtta-taylor-cancelspub-1795719438 (Accessed 24 November 2017). Yancy, G. (2016). I Am a Dangerous Professor. The New York Times, 30 November 2016. Available at: www. nytimes.com/2016/11/30/opinion/iam-a-dangerous-professor.html.

6 | M AJ ORI T Y M O N I T O R I N G

Sai Murray

I am not



am not White: British, Irish or Any other White background.

I am not



Black or Black British: Black African, Black Caribbean or Any other Black background.

I am not



Mixed-Race.

I am not



Any other ethnic group.

I am not



Other.

Depending on

who is asking the question what my mood is how the question is asked why the question is asked

I may be



a Pomfretian-born Yorkshire writer of Barbadian, English, Afrikan heritage.

I may be



an artist, poet, designer, gardener, cook, teacher, student, father, son, brother, lover.

I may be



a revolutionary internationalist universalist multiversalist Pan-Afrikan womanist anarchist abolitionist activist.

Or not. I would prefer

that this information was not used for monitoring purposes.

7 | C RI P P I N ’ B L A CK N E S S : N A R R A T IV ES O F D I S AB LE D P E O P L E O F CO L O UR FR OM SLA VE RY TO T R UM P

Viji Kuppan

There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. (Audre Lorde)

Like my other critical friends and comrades in this collective I will foreground Black social and political thought to think through the problems and possibilities of anti-racist activist-scholarship in this historical era. Following Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) pathfinding analysis that drew attention to Black women’s lack of legal standing within the American criminal justice system, together with their marginalization within White Feminist Studies and anti-racist politics. I will bring into focus disabled bodies of colour, bodies that are often invisible, even whilst being in plain sight. This essay challenges the effacement of Black life by excavating, recovering and re-appreciating aspects of Black ontology that have for too long remained buried. In this sense, my intention is similar to what James Baldwin shared with his nephew. Talking about his nephew’s grandmother in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin reveals: ‘your countrymen don’t know that she exists … though she has been working for them all their lives’ (1964: 15). I take an interdisciplinary approach to writing this chapter but am guided by Critical Race Theory (CRT), Disability Studies and Black Feminism in particular, as radical and revolutionary forms of intellectual praxis to deal with the evasion and elision of Black disabled personhood. The intersectional perspectives central to each of these frameworks furthers a complex and humane reading of disabled People of Colour (PoC), who are caught at the crossroads of multiple (often violent) forms of oppression. As we must all speak from somewhere, I write from my situated social position as a PoC who is fifty-one years old, disabled, a cisgendered man, from an immigrant working-class background, born in India and raised in the UK. When I was growing up I thought of myself as both Black and Asian. I understood my identity as contingent, complex

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and contradictory as this brief account may reveal: in 1973 when I was six or seven, the National Front (a far-right, White neo-fascist organisation) was out in force in my ‘home’ town Leicester. They were demonstrating against the arrival of South Asian refugees from Uganda. I remember them chanting menacingly, ‘If they’re Black send them back’. Long before I became a ‘Paki’ and ‘Paki Bashing’ was the vogue I understood and indeed was interpellated as the abject and despised Black Other. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to deal adequately with the concept of ‘political Blackness’. To understand the changing contours of Blackness in Britain, I recommend reading Claire Alexander (2017), who expertly discusses our complex history of unity, argument and foreclosure. Despite the fracturing of Blackness that has occurred, it is important to note that older solidarities continue, and are present, for example, in the ‘classic feminist’ text, Black British Feminism (Mirza, 1997), which recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary release. This, together with activist groups such as the Southall Black Sisters and the Organization for Black Feminists, all share a far more plural approach to Blackness. However, my pressing concern is with confronting Empire’s legacy, which continues to imperil Black lives – enacted through White Supremacy’s mixture of sly sotto voce disavowal, strident structures of disenfranchisement and explicit forms of racial violence. I think it important that we recognise the continuities and dis-continuities that exist for ethnic ‘Others’. Colonialism, chattel slavery, indentureship, dispossession and violence (Bhambra, 2014) are a continuum that have points of contact and separation. In this piece I speak specifically to Black Atlantic slavery and its legacies in Black American life. However, I would argue that as PoC we are connected to a shared struggle for racial justice through our knotted colonial histories. Let us remember that the differences between groups can often mask the differences within them, and there is no one essential Black subject. Trans, queer and disabled PoC have always occupied the margin of the margin. Despite this, there is always a ‘we’ and an ‘us’. Although primarily concerned with the rights and freedoms of African Americans, Baldwin understood this connection, which unites all oppressed peoples. In the film, I Am Not Your Negro (2016) reflecting on growing up in the White imagination he comments: And the moment you were born, since you don’t know any better, every stick and stone, every face is white, and since you have not seen a

62 | I N T E R S E C T I O N A L I D E N T I T I E S , I N T E R S E C T I O N A L S T R U G G L E S mirror, you suppose you are too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5 or 6 or 7 to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians – when you were rooting for Gary Cooper – that the Indians were you!

As activist-scholars we need to listen deeply to one another’s thoughts, feelings and concerns; it is only through these deep conversations that more of us will feel heard enough to participate in building strong communities of resistance. (See also Joseph-Salisbury and Johnson in this volume who respectively discuss speaking across different experiences and forms of knowledge production.) The African American activist-scholars bell hooks and Cornel West modelled this approach when they entered a dialogue around race and gender in America. Breaking Bread (hooks and West, 1991) is poetically and inspiringly written, but doesn’t pull away from trenchant social analysis in the dehumanisation of the lives of PoC. At times they disagreed, and took each other to task, but their care and respect for the other’s position, and for the communities to which they serve, ensured that they stayed the distance together. In the book, hooks recalls a moment when she witnesses West ‘rap with a brother in a wheelchair’ (1991: 21). She describes West’s smartly adorned appearance contrasting with the brother’s farrago of old tattered garments. Yet she says: The intimacy of this dialogue between an extremely privileged black man and one of the underclass is in part a reflection of West’s profound understanding of the way the politics of race, class and gender determine the fate of Black men, and his ongoing commitment to eradicating structures of domination that create and maintain suffering. Ultimately, it is the love of Black culture and Black people that surfaces in the night air; the solidarity expressed is real, the sense of brotherhood, the knowledge that he must sustain his connection to the oppressed as it is that bond which brings him to the deepest level of history. (1991: 22)

If we are to take this ‘connection to the oppressed’ seriously, it means understanding disability as more than merely an appendage, mentioned politely in passing when discussing the Black experience. I want to argue that disability is central to understanding the textures and tributaries that flow into forming Black lives. We need to acknowledge that disabled PoC are part of our communities, families and selves, that illness and impairment are part of the life course, and if we follow its path long enough then we all yield to its withering embrace, sooner or later. This ‘falling part’ is expected, yet the societal conditions of

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transnational capitalism that produce and maintain dis-ease are not. Disablement is an important structure of domination, that like White Supremacy, patriarchy and heteronormativity must be dismantled if Black life is to thrive and flourish. Brexit and Trump represented particular moments of rupture in Britain and America for racialised PoC, but longer processes of austerity, antagonism and alienation preceded them. It is to these moments, situations and processes where race, disability and gender collide that I now want to turn my attention. In what follows I want to connect disability to the deep Black-African history that hooks notices West is in communion with, and link this to more contemporary examples. Thus I will talk and engage with Black disabled subjects in all their ‘complexities and convergences with biomedical, neoliberal, racist and imperialist projects’ (Haritaworn and Riley Snorton, 2013, cited in Puar, 2015: 48). Re-materialising Race and Disability Recently I wrote a chapter about disability, leisure and popular culture (Kuppan, 2017). It was subsequently cited for its ‘brutal honesty’ in articulating the politics of disablement (Walters, 2017: 2). However, it was never ‘brutal’ enough. Whilst I stated the importance of engaging intersectionally with race and ethnicity, I did little to further this analysis productively, and instead provided a White history of disability and leisure. This was an egregious error that I now wish to correct. My reason for highlighting this personal failing is to remind myself and other activist-scholars that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ (Lorde, 1984: 110) unless they are used seditiously to decolonise his epistemologies of power and control. In the canonical writings of British materialist disability studies (which I choose not to cite as a wilful act of Black political disobedience) a hidden history of disabled people is revealed; the activist academics who tell this story are mainly White/disabled men, and have tied themselves to the Marxist tradition of historical materialism. The Marxist feminist scholar Teresa Ebert explains historical materialism plainly and pithily as: a mode of knowing that enquires into what is not said, into the silences and the suppressed or missing, in order to uncover the concealed operations of power and the socio-economic relations connecting the myriad details of our lives. (Ebert, 1996: 7)

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Tellingly, she goes on to argue that the focus of materialist critique is to unsettle dominant narratives in order to elucidate how social divisions, ‘specifically gender, race, sexuality and class (I would also add disability) – have been systematically produced and continue to operate within regimes of exploitation’ (Ebert, 1996: 7) in order to dismantle and transform these arrangements. However, in tracing the genesis of disablement as a social product in the modern era, British materialist disability scholars have completely erased its racialised formations. Their analyses purely focus on how increasing industrial capitalism proliferating in the (White) metropolitan centres of Europe marginalised and disadvantaged (White) disabled people. The erasure of Black bodies from this historical record demonstrates the discipline’s White solipsism and Eurocentric tendencies. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the now deceased Black, disabled and gay scholar-activist Christopher Bell (2006) spoke of Disability Studies as being a ‘White Disability Studies’. It is to the haunting ‘silences’, the ‘suppressed’ and ‘missing’ becoming history of Black disablement that I wish to write back to. When Black African people were violently removed from their ancestral homelands and enslaved, it was precisely because their Blackness, although considered deviant and monstrous, could be acquired for less to produce more that they were taken. The African American scholar Robert Young (2009) argued that it is the surplus value that can be extracted from Black racialised labour that reinforces capitalism’s raison d’être, which is the accumulation of profit. The slave ship was the means to realise that profit. It not only transported but also terrorised – transforming Black personhood to flesh, Black flesh, to be bought and sold as a commodity in the marketplace. Nirmala Erevelles, drawing on Hortense Spillers (1987), Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe, an essay that speaks to the theft of Black subjectivities through the Atlantic Slave Trade foregrounds, ‘how race and disability are imbricated in their collective formation of the black disabled body’ (Erevelles, 2011: 39). Despite Spillers only citing disability once, the entanglement of race and disability are clear in her ‘seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen or “escaped” overboard’ (1987: 67) narrative of the flesh. The Middle Passage was a journey of unimaginable cruelty and violation; where the putrefying odours of confinement coalesced with a desperate unknowing terror of its Black human prisoners. But this was not the

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end. On land these casual and wilful acts of torture would continue, intensifying and hardening to become a racist culture and practice that White nations would employ to degrade, dismember and disable Black lives. William Goodell’s (1853) affective account of North American slave codes details the branding, burning, cutting and castrating; eyes beaten out, jaws broken, teeth missing; of arms and legs broken; backs slashed and skulls cleft. These were delivered with an array of axes, balls, chains, collars, dogs, hand irons, knives, rifles and swords. Yet as Goodell goes on to explain, this malice was also inflicted with subtlety and precision: ‘the smack of the whip is all day long in the ears of those who are on the plantation, or in the vicinity; and it is used with such dexterity and severity as not to lacerate the skin but to tear out small portions of the flesh at almost every strike’ (1853: 221). These carnal practices of injury and mutilation were not only to quell (even the possibility) of insurrection but were used to undergird ideas of Black imperfection, monstrosity and depravity. All of this takes place within historical conditions and a socio-economic system that can appropriate and commodify African labour so that ‘black bodies become disabled and disabled bodies black’ (Erevelles, 2011: 40). The Atlantic slave world order underscored the constitutive boundaries of race and disability and determined who did, and who did not matter, of material and immaterial bodies. When Stuart Hall (1991: 48) evocatively wrote: ‘I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea’ he was alluding to the invisibility of the Black Atlantic, the racialised labour that has for centuries produced so much of the identity and culture that defines ‘Englishness’. Hall’s point was that slavery and subordination invisibly sweetened what the English culture consumed. What also remains invisible is how intertwined race and disability were in these commodified processes of enslavement. The historian Stefanie Kennedy’s (2015) brilliant work on New World slavery viscerally brings to life Black labourers’ dangerous proximity to impairment and disability, charting the movement of Black bodies from ship to plantation, to factory. She argues that it is erroneous to suggest that (White) British workers were the first to experience the pain and misery of industrialised life, as this was ‘predicated on an early suffering endured by enslaved labourers on Caribbean plantations’ (2015: 41). The sugar factory was a place of quotidian hazards, where enslaved bodies were regularly scalded, severed and cut asunder.

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Dismemberment was a frequent occurrence, but this did not release the enslaved from bondage like European ‘free’ metropolitan disabled workers. When incapacitated to the extent that they could not operate plant machinery they still had value within the plantation industrial complex and could be redeployed to less dexterous tasks ‘such as gardening and carrying water to the field laborers’ (2015: 41). However, being unable to conform to the corporeal standards expected of ‘ablebodied’ workers, disabled labourers were subjected to even greater acts of sadism by overseers and owners. It could be argued that I have spent too much time concentrating on the history of trauma and suffering involved in enslaved life, instead of focusing on the agency and resistance of Black people within White Supremacy’s Atlantic racialised project. This is purposeful, as I have wanted to draw out the underexposed ways in which impairment and disablement were produced through these White systems of domination. I am also in agreement with Camp and Baptist (2006: 2) who argue that ‘slavery studies that emphasised resistance and the capabilities (rather than the troubles) of slave communities were erasing everything that made the plantation evil’ including the tangled up racialised and disabled violence. Yet resistance and rebellion has always been a feature of how enslaved people narrated, negotiated, fled and fought for their freedom. Whether it was the Maroons, Coromantee or the Haitian uprisings, Black communities have always demonstrated their ability to survive through acts of disobedience. Black disabled defiance is vividly represented in the following vignette: I remember one old slave, who was the most abused man I ever did see. His master had knocked and kicked him about till he had hardly a sound joint in his body. His face was all smashed up, and his right leg was broken to pieces … When he got old and a cripple, he wan’t [sic] worth much … his master didn’t like to drown him; but he thought he’d contrive to make him drown his self. So he drove him into the water for a punishment, and kept throwing stones at him to make him go further in. The slave turned round, and held his hat so as to catch the stones. This made the master so mad, that he waded in with a whip, to drive him further. The slave was a strong, stout fellow, by nature; and cripple as he was, he seized hold of his master, and kept ducking him, ducking him, without mercy. He said he meant to drown him; and I believe he would, if the neighbors hadn’t come and saved him. (Child and Clarke, 1842: n.p.)

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There is also evidence that disabled slaves would help other enslaved people escape, often jeopardising their own safety. Perhaps the most famous is Harriet Tubman, known as ‘Moses’ of the Underground Railroad; ‘at the age of fifteen she intervened on behalf of another slave and was struck in the head by an overseer with a metal weight. From then on Harriet Tubman suffered dizzy spells and sleeping seizures’ (Wallace, 1990: 151). Despite the horrific intersecting and multiple oppressions of race, disability and gender, she was committed to helping free many slaves in her community (Bell, 2011). Some disabled people were also ‘re-valued’ within the captive communities to which they belonged. In the healing traditions of the Obeah, practitioners with physical impairments such as a blind eye, clubfoot or deformed hand were venerated for their experience, wisdom and psychic powers (Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert, 2003: 134). One of the many strategies of resistance the enslaved employed was to feign or exaggerate impairment (Boster, 2013). This obfuscation afforded them a semblance of control over the form and function of their labour, and their purchase and re-sale in slave-owning societies. Therefore I am in agreement with Kennedy when she argues that analysing disability in the context of the Black Atlantic ‘engenders possibilities to read disability among the enslaved, not only as a sign of victimisation but of protest and personhood’ (2015: 49). This perspective on the Black Atlantic world demonstrates how impairment and disablement is far from ‘natural’, but created and produced by the violent economic exploitation of Black life. The abolition of slavery does not signal the end of the relationship between race and disability, Black and disabled lives will continue to be intertwined in the American body politic. These intimacies find expression in the Jim Crow Laws which take their name from the song ‘Jump Jim Crow’, a Blackface performance by Thomas Dartmouth ‘Daddy’ Rice who mimics the song and dance routine of an older, ‘lame’ Black man (Erevelles, 2014). Thus, racial apartheid is signified through the complex and dynamic interplay of race and impairment. This relationship is evidenced again in the nineteenth-century ‘freak shows’ where popular culture reinforced ideas about the monstrous and defective racialised and disabled Other. The ‘Ugly Laws’, enacted in US cities from the 1860s were used to eject ‘undesirable’ bodies from public spaces. Susan Schweik argues that these Laws not only targeted ‘diseased, maimed and deformed’ bodies but are implicated

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in the ‘policing of gender and sexual transgression; nativism, antiSemitism, anti-immigration legislation and to state imposed racial segregation’ (2010: 18). Schweik identifies that Jim Crow and the ‘Ugly Laws’ employ similar racialised and disablist logics that underscore a dominant ‘investment in, the disciplining of, the anxious management of the skin … loaded with social as well as medical significance’ (2010: 187). As we move into the twentieth century, although rarely remarked on, race and disability continue to be dangerously wedded. Whilst many might be familiar with the story of Emmett Till, Anne Finger’s narration illuminates the violent intersections of a racialised and disabled life/death: the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 [was] one of the galvanizing events of the civil rights movement. Although Till’s short life became legendary, few [know] that Till had been left with a speech impairment as a result of a bout with bulbar polio. His mother had taught him, when he had trouble speaking, to whistle in order to get his throat muscles to relax. Visiting relatives in Mississippi from his Chicago home, Till had been tortured and then murdered for having whistled at a white woman. His mother, Mamie Mobley, insisted on an open coffin for her son, wanting to make the brutality of Southern racism visible, and African American newspapers ran pictures on their front pages of his swollen and battered face. Until her death Mobley believed that the whistle leading to her son’s death had been the result of an attempt to free his voice, rather than a wolf whistle directed at a white woman. (Finger, 2006: 262)

This connects to the violent and brutal deaths of other Black disabled men such as Rodney King (learning difficulties) and James Byrd (severe arthritis). Whist I have been critical of Disability Studies for neglecting race too often in its analyses, Bell (2011: 3) argues that ‘too much critical work in African American Studies posits the African American body politic in an ableist (read non-disabled) fashion’. I agree but want to add that we must take account of the critical role that gender also plays in these explicit forms of violence. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s #SayHerName Movement draws attention to police brutality, and the murder, rape and violence inflicted on Black women, many of whom are also disabled in various and complex ways. For example: Eleanor Bumpurs (mental health issues, obesity and

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arthritis); Korryn Gaines (neurological impairments); Jessica Williams (asthma); Gynnya McMillen (heart condition). These are just a few of the many names we must remember when speaking about racialised state violence. Locating Hope in Times of Increasing Despair Trump’s interregnum has inaugurated a culture of abuse in which Black people, disabled people, women and those whose identities cut through all these categories, become his targets. Indicative of his modus operandi are the images of him ‘looming over’ Hilary Clinton during the presidential election campaign debates, and mocking a disabled journalist during one of the rallies. Also, through initially blaming the ‘many sides’ of those present at the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in the summer of 2017, he exculpated White Supremacy and thus gave credence to a posting on a neo-Nazi website that Trump ‘loves us all’ (cited in Thrasher, 2017). In these performances Trump signals his contempt for ethnic ‘Others’ and other ‘Others’. In denying his own racism, sexism and ableism, he normalises mendacity for which he must be held to account. In concluding this chapter, I draw out one last story that ties disabled Black Atlantic slavery to Trumpian White neoliberal ableist times. On 1 September 2016 Colin Kaepernick – an NFL quarterback who played for the San Francisco 49ers – knelt during the playing of the US National Anthem. He explained: ‘I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and People of Colour’ (quoted in Hasan Loggins, 2017: n.p.). On Sunday, 24 September 2017 more than 200 players sat or knelt during the National Anthem in protest of a speech Trump made at a rally in Huntsville, Alabama the previous Friday. In it he said: ‘Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, Get that Son of a Bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’ (quoted in Armen Graham, 2017: n.p.). In his rambling rabble-rousing narrative Trump instantiates ‘us and them’ signalling that some bodies matter more than others, and some bodies don’t even count. The transgressive, unruly (Black) man is the ‘someone’ he wants ‘out’, the ‘someone’ who can be ‘fired’. Where being ‘fired’ is not simply about being ejected from a game show but echoes the way that Black people have historically and are contemporaneously ‘fired’ upon and gunned down. Therefore Remnick argues, ‘It is no

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longer a matter of ‘dog whistling’. This is a form of racial demagoguery broadcast at the volume of a klaxon’ (2017: n.p.). Trump’s appeal to the prejudices of White America continues with him talking of (Black) players earning vast sums of money. Whilst this is superficially true, Black sporting bodies may be lauded on the field of play, yet socially and politically have little power. CRT scholars have therefore argued that ‘athletic Black males have transitioned from the cotton fields and from serving in the big house to serving in the big arena’ (Hodge et al., 2008: 946). Trump regards Black sporting bodies as well-paid ‘entertainers’ who do not have the right to complain or protest about either American culture or their working practices. During a presidential campaign speech in Florida he asserted the game was being damaged by arrangements to make it less violent. ‘See we don’t go by these new and very much softer NFL rules. Concussion? Oh! Oh! Got a little ding in the head – no, no, you can’t play for the rest of the season. Our people are tough’ (quoted in Remnick, 2017: n.p.). Whilst not widely discussed, injury, impairment and disability are highly prevalent amongst those playing or who have played American football. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative brain condition found in individuals with repeated head trauma and is endemic in the game. With Black players accounting for 70 per cent of those playing at the elite level it is easy to see how they are disproportionately affected. At its core the NFL is a White-controlled institution in which the cultural politics of race and disability replicate the structural violence and brutality of plantation life. As I have argued from early on in this chapter the Black body and the disabled body have a long history of overlapping and intertwining. Trumpian times are ahistorical times that continue to forget, efface and imperil Black life. The racial calculus used to value, judge and abuse Black bodies through the Atlantic Slave Trade continues to disavow and disable Black lives through the NFL. Baldwin urges us to re-member that ‘the so called American Negro … remains trapped, disinherited, and despised, in a nation that has kept him in bondage for nearly four hundred years and is still unable to recognise him as human being’ (1964: 65). Whilst the social and economic systems of White Supremacy are uncooperative to change and transformation, let us locate hope within ourselves, and as activist-scholars support disabled PoC. This means standing (or sitting or kneeling) and speaking with

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them – in their struggles for access, inclusion, visibility, representation and acceptability. Let us think and write multi-dimensionally and intersectionally. Crippin’ Blackness, the title of this chapter is an attempt to speak back to the power invested in what Lorde (1984) describes as the ‘mythical norm’ that silently imbues ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ (McRuer, 2006). Robert McRuer, drawing on Queer Studies, theorises crippin’ as way of defiantly ‘coming out’ disabled. In our activist and scholarship lives, let us find the ways and means to encourage and welcome a proud and loud ‘coming out’ for Black disabled people! References Alexander, C. (2017). Breaking Black: The Death of Ethnic and Racial Studies in Britain. Ethnic and Racial Studies, Special Issue: 40th Anniversary Conference. Armen Graham, B. (2017). Memo to Trump after His NFL Rant: Sport Is, and Always Has Been, Political. The Guardian, 24 September. Available at: www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2017/sep/24/donaldtrump-nfl-nba-steph-curry-lebronjames-roger-goodell (Accessed 30 October 2017). Baldwin, J. (1964). The Fire Next Time. London: Penguin. Bell, C. (2006). Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal. In L. J. Davis (ed.), The Disability Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 275–282. Bell, C. (ed.) (2011). Blackness and Disability: Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press. Bhambra, G. (2014). Race, Segregation and US Sociology. Sociology, 62(4), 472–492. Boster, D. H. (2013). African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800–1860. New York: Routledge. Camp, S. and Baptist, E. (2006). New

Studies in the History of Slavery. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Child, L. M. [and Clarke, L.] (1842). Leaves from a Slave’s Journal of Life. The Anti Slavery Standard. Available at: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/clarke/ support1.html (Accessed 15 October 2017). Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1, 139–167. Ebert, T. L. (1996). Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire and Labour in Late Capitalism. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Erevelles, N. (2011). Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Erevelles, N. (2014). Crippin’ Jim Crow: Disability, Dislocation and the School-to-Prison Pipeline. In L. BenMoshe, C. Chapman and A. Carey (eds), Disability Incarcerated. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 81–99. Finger, A. (2006). Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio. New York: St Martin’s Press.

72 | I N T E R S E C T I O N A L I D E N T I T I E S , I N T E R S E C T I O N A L S T R U G G L E S Goodell, W. (1853). The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice Shown by Its Statutes, Judicial Decisions and Illustrative Facts. Available at: https:// archive.org/stream/americanslavec od00lcgood#page/218/mode/2up/ search/skull (Accessed 20 October 2017). Hall, S. (1991). Old and New Identities. In A. D. King (ed.), Culture Globalization and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 41–68. Haritaworn, J. and Riley Snorton, C. (2013). Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death and the Trans of Colour Afterlife. In S. Stryker and A. Z. Aizura (eds), Transgender Studies Reader 2. New York: Routledge, 66–76. Hasan Loggins, A. (2017). We Can’t Hear Colin Kaepernick Any More: He’s Being Drowned Out by Noise. The Guardian, 27 September. Available at: www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2017/sep/27/colinkaepernick-protest-nfl-take-a-knee (Accessed 18 October 2017). Hodge, S. R., Harrison, L. Jr., Burden, J. W. Jr. and Dixson, A. D. (2008). Brown in Black and White – Then and Now: A Question of Sporting or Educating Black Males in America. American Behavioural Scientist, 51(7), 928–952. hooks, b. and West, C. (1991). Breaking Break: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. Boston, MA: South End Press. I Am Not Your Negro. (2016). [Film] Peck, R. dir. Magnolia Pictures. Kennedy, S. (2015). ‘Let Them Be Young and Stoutly Set in Limbs’: Race, Labor and Disability in the British Atlantic World. Social Identities, 21(1), 37–52. Kuppan, V. (2017). Spasticus Auticus: Thinking about Disability, Culture and Leisure beyond the ‘Walkie

Talkies’. In K. Spracklen, B. Lashua, E. Sharpe and S. Swain (eds), The Palgrave Macmillan Handbook of Leisure Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 595–616. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press. McRuer, R. (2006). Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press. Mirza, H. S. (ed.) (1997). Black British Feminism: A Reader. London: Routledge. Olmos, M. F. and Paravisini-Gebert, L. (2003). Creole Religions of the Caribbean: From Vodou and Senteria to Obeah and Espiritismo. New York: New York University Press. Puar, J. (2015). Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled. Social Text, 33(3), 45–73. Remnick, D. (2017). The Racial Demagoguery of Trump’s Assaults on Colin Kaepernick and Steph Curry. The New Yorker. Available at: www.newyorker.com/news/ daily-comment/the-racialdemagoguery-of-trumps-assaultson-colin-kaepernick-and-steph-curry (Accessed 18 October 2017). Schweik, S. (2010). The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. New York: New York University Press. Spillers, H. J. (1987). Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book. Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, 17(2), 65–81. Thrasher, S. (2017). Charlottesville Started with a Statue: Will Americans Confront Their History Now? The Guardian, 14 August. Available at: www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2017/aug/14/ charlottesville-confederatemonuments-racism-us-history (Accessed 5 October 2017).

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Wallace, M. (1990). Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman. New York: Verso. Walters, T. (2017). The Palgrave Handbook of Leisure Theory. Annals of Leisure Research. Available at: www. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1

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1745398.2017.1372062 (Accessed 25 October 2017). Young, R. (2009). Signs of Race in Poststructuralism: Towards a Transformative Theory of Race. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

8 | I N TE RS E CT I O N A L I T Y B E F O R E T HE COU RTS : TH E F A CE V E I L CA S E S

Amal Ali

Introduction The legal regulation of Muslim communities has recently led to scholarly debate, especially regarding the limits of religious freedoms in the public sphere. These discussions are often framed around human rights, multiculturalism, citizenship and the law and focus on the management of religious and cultural difference in the public sphere (Bano, 2010). This is also evident, by the number of cases brought before the European Court of Human Rights (henceforth, ECtHR), by individuals and groups alleging breaches of their fundamental human rights. This chapter explores the way in which laws and policies have systematically discriminated against Muslim women who wear the hijab (head scarf) and/or the niqab (face veil) and the failure of human rights law to protect them. A qualitative review of all the cases before the ECtHR demonstrates that around a third of cases invoking a breach of the right to manifest a religious belief are litigated by Muslim women, and in all of these cases they were unsuccessful. In light of the Trump and Brexit era that we currently live in, with anti-immigrant sentiment on the rise in Europe, this figure is unlikely to change. The debate on veiling in the UK, and across Europe, mirrors political and human rights debates that focus on women’s bodies and the way in which their cultural and religious values are assumed to impede their freedoms. These discussions are underpinned by the question of whether Muslim women are able to freely express their autonomy and agency when choosing to veil. Cultural human rights are often discussed in the context of gender equality and the hijab and veiling have become the symbol of enforced traditionalism (Okin et al., 1999). Intersectionality is also relevant here, as intersectionality recognises that anti-racism often fails to interrogate patriarchy and that feminism often reproduces racist practices (Crenshaw, 1989). Empirical research done in Greece and based on the performance of

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courts suggests that the exclusion and subordination faced by Muslim women is distinct, in that these women face discrimination on three grounds: on the basis of their ethnicity, as Muslims and finally as women (Vakulenko, 2007). It is especially important to note that when a Muslim woman’s body is considered to be a marker of where the state stands in terms of integration, the pervasiveness of violence against women in the West is ignored. As Razack (2008: 124) points out, this dichotomy produces a form of cultural ‘European superiority’. The Human Rights Framework The issue of veiling has been litigated before the ECtHR for over twenty-five years now. The most number of cases originate from France and Turkey, whose state secularisms are most intolerant towards the Islamic practice. Challenged restrictions include niqab bans in the public sector, educational establishments (both staff and students), on forms of ID, including passports, visas and driving licences, and most recently a total ban across all public spaces (SAS v France). The ECtHR is the judicial organ of the Council of Europe: this is a supervisory regional human rights body tasked with protecting and enforcing the rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights (hereafter referred to as the ‘Convention’). After exhausting all domestic remedies, individuals are able to complain to the ECtHR if their convention right, which includes the right to a religious belief, has been breached by a Contracting State Party. Generally speaking, the freedom of thought, conscience and religion is regarded as one of the foundations of democratic society and has been described as a ‘precious asset’ by the Court (SAS v France). Article 9 is split into two rights, Article 9(1) guarantees freedom of thought, conscience and religion, which includes the freedom to change one’s religion or belief and the freedom to worship either alone or in community with others. This freedom of religion is absolute, in the sense that it cannot be limited by the States Parties. Article 9(2) concerns the right to manifest a religious belief, which can be limited provided it’s in accordance with the law, and the restriction is necessary in a democratic society. While a state cannot assess the legitimacy of the manifestation, in the sense that states cannot decide whether a religious practice is indeed a religious practice, instead all acts which are motivated by a religion or belief are considered a ‘manifestation’ if they are ‘intimately linked to the religion or belief’ in that there has

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to be a close link between the act and the belief (Eweida v the United Kingdom). In its case law, the ECtHR has been satisfied that the wearing of the hijab and niqab both fall within the protection of Article 9(2), but it held that these bans are legal provided that they are prescribed by law, and constructed as pursuing a legitimate aim and necessary for a democratic society. This means that there has to be a legal basis for the restriction, and that the limitation must be proportionate to its aims. Furthermore, the Court has allowed for a wide ‘margin of appreciation’ in freedom of religion cases. This refers to the space for manoeuvre that national authorities are granted when fulfilling their obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. While signatories to the European Convention of Human Rights have a positive duty to address both direct and indirect discrimination (Thlimmenos v Greece), the Court has failed to address the harmful impact their line of legal reasoning has had on the lives of Muslim women who veil. As Member States regulate public religious expressions, Muslim women who veil are automatically forced to make the choice between veiling and remaining an active participant in the public sphere. While this disproportionately affects Muslim women, coupled with the fact that these laws are by nature discriminatory under the Convention’s law,1 Member States have in the past successfully argued that the veil bans comply with gender equality. In fact, in the landmark case of Leyla Sahin v Turkey the European Court on Human Rights found that bans on the hijab could be used in order to advance gender equality, as Turkey argued that they considered the hijab itself to be a tool of oppression. In this case, a young twentyfive-year-old Turkish medical student who wore a hijab challenged the prohibition of the religious practice, after being excluded from her university for refusing to remove her veil during her final exams. The Court held that such a ban, while it did constitute an interference with the applicant’s rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, could still be justified as the ban had a legitimate aim of advancing gender equality. It cited the case of Dahlab v Switzerland, a case where the Court upheld the Swiss Constitutional Court’s decision to ban a school teacher from wearing a hijab in class for the following reasons: The Court accepts that it is very difficult to assess the impact that a powerful external symbol such as the wearing of a headscarf may have on the freedom of conscience and religion of very young children. The applicant’s pupils were aged between four and eight, an age at which

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children wonder about many things and are also more influenced than older pupils. In those circumstances, it cannot be denied outright that the wearing of a headscarf may have some kind of proselytising effect, seeing that it appears to be imposed on women by a precept which is laid down in the Koran and which, as the Federal Court noted, is hard to square with the principle of gender equality. It therefore appears difficult to reconcile the wearing of the Islamic headscarf with the message of tolerance, respect for others and, above all, equality and non-discrimination that all teachers in a democratic society must convey to their pupils. (Dahlab v Switzerland, para. 15)

In Sahin, the act of wearing a headscarf is considered an attempt to indoctrinate others, despite the fact that it only involves adults interacting within an educational setting. Similarly, the approach in Dahlab can also be critiqued for being too wide, insofar as the Court does not clarify whether the applicant’s wearing of the headscarf in a primary school setting is considered an act of proselytism because of the age of its students, or whether this restriction would apply to older students. Using this logic would mean that hijab- and niqab-wearing women are immediately imagined as antithetical to democracy and equality (regardless of what age one’s students/colleagues might be). This, by extension, sets up Islam as a religion that is then imagined as antithetical to democracy and equality. This is exemplified in cases like that of Faiza Machbour, because her refusal to remove the face veil was deemed evidence of her inability or unwillingness to integrate. The French Court did not take into consideration the fact that she is married to a French citizen, has raised three French citizens and speaks fluent French, instead they held that she had adopted a radical practice of her religious faith, one they deemed to be incompatible with French values, with a particular focus on gender equality (Conseil d’État, 27 June 2008, Mme Machbour, 286798). In her dissenting judgment of the Sahin case, Judge Tulkens warned about the increase in Islamophobia: I end by noting that all these issues must also be considered in the light of the observations set out in the annual activity report published in June 2005 of the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), which expresses concern about the climate of hostility existing against persons who are or are believed to be Muslim and considers that the situation requires attention and action in the future. Above all, the message that needs to be repeated over and over

78 | I N T E R S E C T I O N A L I D E N T I T I E S , I N T E R S E C T I O N A L S T R U G G L E S again is that the best means of preventing and combating fanaticism and extremism is to uphold human rights. (Leyla Sahin v Turkey, Dissenting Judge Tulkens, para. 20)

It is important to note that in neither Dahlab nor Leyla Sahin did the ECtHR consider the motivating reasons behind those women’s choice to wear the Islamic headscarf, in light of the applicant’s rights to autonomy and choice exemplified in Article 8 ECHR (the right to private and family life), nor did it contemplate the implications banning religious dress had for these women under Article 14 ECHR (freedom from discrimination), despite the fact that these laws indirectly discriminated against Muslim women. According to Evans (2009: 15), the Court has used two contradictory views of Muslim females: the first one is that of ‘the victim of a gender-oppressive religion, needing protection from abusive violent male relatives, and passive, unable to help herself in the face of male dominance’. The second stereotype is that of an aggressor: ‘the Muslim woman as fundamentalist who forces values onto the unwilling and undefended’ (Evans, 2009: 16). Both Leyla Sahin and Lucia Dahlab were intelligent, strong-willed and educated women who wore the headscarf voluntarily and were willing to fight for their autonomy to wear what they wish. Evans argues: The link seems to be the idea of a threat. The implicit threat in the woman who is too powerful, too intolerant too aggressive is easy to see. But the victim is a threat too. A threat to the liberal, egalitarian order. A threat to control by the state and the secular authorities because their coercion is less effective than that of the family and the subculture. (Evans 2009, 16)

In addition, it was formalistic of the Court to discuss the hijab without researching what it symbolises to the women who wear it, despite the fact that the right to autonomy is protected in the Charter and in the Court’s gender equality jurisprudence (Marshall 2014). This ought to be criticised, particularly because the Court held the view that veiling has a proselytising effect by default: this was done without engaging in the debate as to whether this is the best or even the standard interpretation of the practice (see Radicic, 2008 or Marshall, 2006). Within this context, the Court ‘arrogated to itself the competence to judge the symbolic meaning of the Islamic headscarf’ (Gallala-Arndt,

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2006: 601). Despite the fact that the Court has proclaimed gender equality to be a central theme in the Convention (including in the case of Leyla Sahin v Turkey), it has failed to understand that the advancement of gender equality involves challenging all forms of disadvantage, which can be both multiple and intersectional. This can be contrasted with a decision made in 2011 regarding the placement of crucifixes in Italian public schools. The European Court on Human Rights reversed an earlier ruling which unanimously held that this Italian regulation had breached the Convention rights of Mrs Soile Lautsi’s children. The case concerned the question of whether crucifixes could be present in the classrooms of state schools, or whether this act was a breach of the rights to education and religious freedom under Article 9. Italy argued that the crucifix was in fact a ‘passive symbol’ which symbolises peace and civic obedience which the Court accepted. The Court was forced to refer to Dahlab v Switzerland and Leyla Sahin v Turkey, as one could argue that if the act of a teacher wearing a headscarf in the classroom is deemed to be a ‘powerful external symbol’ capable of actively proselytising school children, then the same could be said about a regulation that makes it compulsory for all state schools to place a crucifix in the classroom. The Court countered this with the somewhat weak argument that there was no evidence of indoctrination based on three factors: first, the presence of the crucifix was not supplemented with compulsory Christianity classes (Lautsi v Italy, para. 74) nor was there any evidence of intolerance of other religious beliefs (or, in the case of Mrs Soile Lautsi’s children, no religious belief). Finally the Court held that the presence of the crucifix was in no way prohibiting Mrs Soile Lautsi from exercising her right as a parent by raising her children in the conviction of her choice (Lautsi v Italy, para. 75). The hijab in Dahlab v Switzerland and in Leyla Sahin v Turkey has been constructed by the ECtHR to be a tool of oppression, in two forms. First, it is a tool of oppression on the women who wear them, as it is perceived to be a visible sign of their subordination to the men within their faith. Second, it is a tool of oppression in that it is capable of proselytising to children and adults, regardless of whether it is worn in a Muslim majority country or a country where Muslims form the minority. In both these cases, the religious symbol is worn by an individual, where in the case of Lautsi, the placement of crucifixes

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is state sanctioned. What this tells us is that the attribution of what a religious symbol really means is not determined by the believer, but by those who hold power, as in all three of these cases, the ECtHR didn’t question the construction of the religious symbols. From Partial Bans to Total Bans In 2014, the Court had the opportunity to correct its inconsistent interpretation of Article 9 (which had legitimised restrictions on the religious freedom of Muslim women who veil across Europe). Instead, the Court upheld the French Constitutional Court’s decision that a criminal ban on the niqab could still be justified by reference to the aim of living together (SAS v France). While the Court agreed that there was interference with the applicant’s freedom to manifest her religious beliefs, it justified these restrictions under the umbrella of public safety and ‘respect for the minimum set of values of an open and democratic society’. The ‘minimum set of values’ had been split further into three separate reasonings by the French state: gender equality, human dignity and ‘respect for the minimum requirements of life in society’ or ‘living together’. Whilst public safety is covered in a number of qualified human rights instruments as a legitimate ground for limiting human rights, the same cannot be said for ‘respect for the minimum set of values of an open and democratic society’. The judgment in SAS v France provides a departure (to some extent) from the Court’s previous decisions. It no longer considers forcing Muslim women to remove their niqab as necessary for the advancement of gender equality: [A] State Party cannot invoke gender equality in order to ban a practice that is defended by women – such as the applicant – in the context of the exercise of the rights enshrined in those provisions, unless it were to be understood that individuals could be protected on that basis from the exercise of their own fundamental rights and freedoms. (para. 119)

The Court therefore respects the applicant’s autonomous choice to wear the niqab and refrains from attributing a meaning to it. In fact, the Court goes further and recognises that criminalising a religious manifestation can be ‘traumatising’ (para. 158) and result in the alienation of these women. Furthermore, the Court has raised concerns

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about the Islamophobic remarks made by government officials before the enactment of the law: That remarks which constitute a general, vehement attack on a religious or ethnic group are incompatible with the values of tolerance, social peace and non-discrimination which underlie the Convention and do not fall within the right to freedom of expression that it protects. (para. 149)

The Court didn’t acknowledge the broader impact of the legislation on the Muslim community, including those who don’t agree with the niqab, because the legislation legitimises Islamophobia. The Court also failed to take into consideration the intervening evidence of third parties which specifies the intersectional discrimination Muslim women experience on the basis of being female and Muslim (Brems, 2014). Furthermore, through the banning of religious symbols (which disproportionately affects women without taking into account their intersectional identities), the Court has gone against its own equality case law, which has in the past empowered white women and other underrepresented groups.2 The rejection of France’s justifications based on gender equality and public safety is a step towards a more legitimate approach of Article 9(2). However, what is concerning is the inclusion of ‘living together’ as another restriction on one’s right to manifest a religious belief: it is particularly troubling that this was prioritised over concrete individual rights guaranteed by the Convention. Within this context, ‘living together’ can be used to enable the majority to force a minority group to assimilate to their way of life (para. 2). Interestingly, the Court recognised that using the concept of ‘living together’ as a justifiable ground for limiting Article 9(2) could lead to a ‘risk of abuse’ (para. 2). Nevertheless, by allowing France a wide margin of appreciation, the Court undermined their own concerns and allowed the limitation. The concept of ‘living together’ has the potential to affect future judgments concerning the right to manifest religion, in a similar manner that gender equality and secularism was used in the Sahin case (SAS v France, dissenting judgments, para. 2). While taking into consideration the scope of a state’s margin of appreciation, the Court held that there must be a consideration of the right’s importance, the ‘nature’ and ‘aim’ of the ‘restricted activity’ (Sahin v Turkey, para. 101). The extent to which the Strasbourg Court

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should defer to the national authorities has been considered to be one of the crucial questions that arise when examining the regulating of religious pluralism across Europe. The Court held that France had a wide margin of appreciation because the ban on the niqab had been adopted following a democratic process (SAS v France, para. 154). This assists in considering the legal, political, social and historical context in France, and respects the fact that the law was adopted after an overwhelming political consensus. However, it still remains the task of the government to consider the disproportionate effect such laws will have on Muslim women and the task of the Court to protect the rights of these Muslim women. There is a tendency for judges to defer to the margin of appreciation of Member States ever more routinely in the application of Article 9(2), thereby affording states more discretion to control the public manifestation of religion and in turn disproportionately affect religious women wishing to manifest their beliefs. This does not mean that the margin of appreciation has no place in an international human rights system. However, it should not be applied in a manner that shields the state from supervision and justifies the violation of the rights of minorities on the basis of majoritarian preferences. The Court should also take into consideration other international human rights instruments and progressive developments in comparative jurisprudence, as these are usually more sensitive to the disadvantage of vulnerable groups. This would move human rights to their original purpose, that of placing the rights of the individual at the heart of the international order, whilst being sensitive to national interests. Instead, in these cases it is obvious that the Strasbourg Court was sensitive to the underlying political dynamic. Conclusion It is important to bear witness to the reality that an increasing number of regions, provinces and states across Europe are looking to restrict Islamic manifestations of religious belief. Restrictions on religious freedom across Europe include preventing civil servants, school teachers and students from manifesting their religious belief.3 While Article 9 ECHR allows for the freedom of religious belief, manifestations of religious beliefs can be restricted provided it is prescribed by law, necessary in a democratic society and proportionate. States are given a wide margin of appreciation, in determining exactly

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what is necessary in a democratic society. This has led to the erosion of the freedom to the right to manifest a religious belief. In the summer of 2016, French regions banned the wearing of a bathing suit that was specifically created with Muslim women in mind, because it was constructed as not complying with the French principles of secularism and living together. The French authorities have held that this was important in light of the recent terrorist attacks, thus linking everyday Muslim dress with terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism. We also bear witness to the fact that whenever Muslim women have challenged their state for human rights contravention in relation to their right to manifest their religious belief, the action has led to defeat. There are real gendered and racial implications, which the law alone cannot tackle. Muslim women are disproportionately affected by such bans. When forced to make the decision between manifesting religious beliefs and remaining in the public sphere, many Muslim women choose to stay within in the private sphere and become disconnected from public life. It is important that we recognise how the human rights machinery has excluded Muslim women and that we demand consistent application of human rights law and inclusion. While many fear the loss of their rights as a result of the UK withdrawing from the EU, and the repealment of the Human Rights Act, it is also important to acknowledge that these institutions did little to protect the rights of those in the margins in the first instance. Notes 1 See for example the case of Thlimmenos v Greece App No 34369/97 (ECtHR, 6 April 2000). This case involved a Greek national who was refused a job as a chartered accountant due to his criminal conviction which he received for disobeying, on the basis of his religious belief, an order to wear a military uniform. The Commission held that there was a breach of Article 9 in conjunction with 14 as the right to freedom of discrimination does not only involve treating people in similar situations alike, but by also treating people in different situations differently. Therefore, a person who has a criminal

record for failing to wear a uniform as a result of their religious beliefs cannot be treated the same as an individual who has a criminal record for other serious crimes. This conviction does not imply that he is morally unfit to work as a chartered accountant. 2 Thlimmenos v Greece App No 34369/97 (ECtHR, 6 April 2000). Article 14 of the Convention not only requires that persons in a similar situation must be treated in an equal manner but also requires that persons whose situations are significantly different must be treated differently. See Hoogendijk v Netherlands (2005) 40 EHRR SE22 at 206. See also,

84 | I N T E R S E C T I O N A L I D E N T I T I E S , I N T E R S E C T I O N A L S T R U G G L E S ECtHR, Thlimmenos v Greece (2001) 31 EHRR 15 at para. 47. 3 SAS v France App no 43835/11 (ECtHR, 14 July 2015), Sahin v Turkey App no 44774/98 (ECtHR, 29 June

2004), Lautsi and Others v Italy App no 30814/06 (ECtHR, 18 March 2011), Dahlab v Switzerland App No 2346/02 (ECtHR, 29 April 2002).

References Bano, S. (2010). Beyond the Sacred and Secular: Muslim Women, the Law and the Delivery of Justice. In R. Banakar (ed.), Rights in Context: Law and Justice in Late Modern Society. Abingdon: Routledge. Brems, E. (ed.) (2014). The Experiences of Face Veil Wearers in Europe and the Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, Article 8. Evans, M. D. (2009). Manual on the Wearing of Religious Symbols in Public Areas. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff. Gallala-Arndt, I. (2006). The Islamic Headscarf: An Example of Surmountable Conflict between Sharî’a and the Fundamental Principles of Europe. European Law Journal, 12(5), 593–612.

Marshall, J. (2006). Freedom of Religious Expression and Gender Equality: Sahin v Turkey. The Modern Law Review, 69(3), 452–461. Marshall, J. (2014). Human Rights Law and Personal Identity. London: Routledge. Okin, S. M., Cohen, J., Howard, M. and Nussbaum, M. C. (1999). Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Princeton, NJ; Chichester: Princeton University Press. Radacic, I. (2008). Gender Equality Jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. European Journal of International Law, 19(4), 841–857. Razack, S. (2008). Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslim Women from Western Law and Politics. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Vakulenko, A. (2007). ‘Islamic Headscarves’ and the European Convention on Human Rights: An Intersectional Perspective. Social and Legal Studies, 16(2), 183–199.

Legislation Belgium. Article 563bis to the Belgian Penal Code. Council of Europe. European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms as amended by Protocol No 11 and 14.

France. Constitutional Council Decision of 7 October 2010. Available at: www. conseil-constitutionnel.fr/conseilconstitutionnel/root/bank_mm/ anglais/en2010_613dc.pdf (Last accessed 24 March 2016).

Table of Cases Conseil d’État, 27 June 2008, Mme Machbour, 286798. Dahlab v Switzerland App No 2346/02 (ECtHR, 29 April 2002).

Eweida and others v the United Kingdom App No 48420/10, 59842/10, 51671/10 and 36516/10 (ECtHR, 15 January 2013).

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Hoogendijk v Netherlands (2005) 40 EHRR SE22 at 206. Lautsi and Others v Italy App no 30814/06 (ECtHR, 18 March 2011). Sahin v Turkey App no 44774/98 (ECtHR,

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29 June 2004). SAS v. France App no. 43835/11 (ECtHR, 14 July 2015). Thlimmenos v Greece App No 34369/97 (ECtHR, 6 April 2000).

9 | C OLOU R- B L I N D R A CI S M A N D T HE 20 17 WOM E N ’ S M A R CH : W H I T E F E MINIS M, A C TI V I S M AND L E S S O N S F O R T H E LEFT

Adrienne N. Milner and Adekonyinsola Aromolaran

Introduction On the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration to the United States presidency, 673 Women’s March protests took place on all seven continents. In terms of sheer numbers, the Marches represent an undeniable historic landmark, with an estimated 4.6 million participants in the United States and another 300,000 participants around the globe. Although the Marches were billed as pro-women and targeted issues surrounding reproductive freedom, sexual assault and equal pay, the Marches also aimed to protect legislation and policies associated with immigration, healthcare, the natural environment, LGBTQI rights, racial equality, freedom of religion and workers’ rights (Alotta et al., 2017). However, despite these objectives and claims by organisers that the Marches were inclusive, the Marches were characterised by similar problems evident in other White feminist movements. Many women of colour, and specifically, Black women, voiced concerns about the lack of anti-racist rhetoric and action prior to the Marches and documented incidences of racism during the Marches. The goals of this chapter are twofold: (1) to examine the existence of colour-blind and other forms of racism prior, during and in response to the Women’s Marches; (2) to offer solutions on how future feminist and other forms of activism during the Trump era may shift from a culture of colour-blind racism to that of anti-racism. In order to accomplish these goals, we examine data from the Women’s Marches’ web pages as well as articles, blogs and social media posts about the Marches, with a focus on the March on Washington (the flagship March with an estimated 500,000 participants). Consistent with other scholars who analyse internet articulations in order to investigate racist rhetoric and ideology (e.g. Leonard, 2004; also see Johnson in this collection), we

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also examine the comments sections of internet pieces written by Black women about the Marches and document racist remarks by (perceived) White persons.1 We then consider Black women’s personal experiences and documented incidences of racism as lessons to develop strategies for change in subsequent protests and other forms of activism in the Trump era. Racism and the Rise of the Right In the US there exist stark differences in views on race relations between White people and people of colour. For instance, while 61 per cent of Black Americans and 58 per cent of Hispanic Americans believe that race relations are generally bad, equal portions of White Americans say race relations are good as do those who they say are bad (Stepler, 2016). Black and Hispanic individuals are considerably more likely than White individuals to believe that changes are necessary to achieve racial equality, and there is also a wide gap between Black and White individuals who agree that Black people are treated less fairly than White people across key areas of American life (Stepler, 2016). These statistics highlight the growing prevalence of colourblind racism, a term coined by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2003) referring to the emergence of contemporary racial ideology that White people have developed in order to justify racial inequality and simultaneously exculpate themselves from responsibility, and thus, maintain White privilege and power. Although colour-blind racism has become a dominant racial ideology in America over the past several decades, since the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, there has been evidence of a White backlash rooted in more old-fashioned forms of racism. It could be argued that the rise of Donald Trump is imbedded in a resurgence in White supremacist and White nationalist ideology. According to exit polls from the 2016 US presidential election, vast racial disparities were evident in the voting behaviour of different racial groups, with only 37 per cent of White people voting for Hillary Clinton compared to 89 per cent of Black people, 66 per cent of Latino people and 65 per cent of Asian people. When aggregated by race and gender, election results show that only 4 per cent of Black women voted for Donald Trump as opposed to 52 per cent of White women and 25 per cent of Latinas (CNN, 2016).

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Racism Prior to the Women’s March Perhaps because of these disparities in racial ideology and political preferences between White women and Black women, there existed a racial divide in viewpoints concerning the planning and intended goals of the Women’s March. Although March organisers (Women’s March, 2017a) and honorary co-chairs (Women’s March, 2017b), came from different racial, political and cultural backgrounds, many Black women deemed the March to be uninclusive and centred on White women’s interests. Even the choice of the original name of the event, the ‘Million Women March’, was an appropriation of black activism and culture. Black women swiftly highlighted on social media that ironically, the 1997 Million Women March (an ode to the 1995 Million Man March for Black men) was created by and for Black women, who were often unrepresented in women’s movements. In an effort to be more inclusive, March organisers changed the name of the rally to the ‘Women’s March on Washington’, still appropriating the name of another historical event for Black rights, Dr Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington (Campos, 2016; DeJean, 2016; Oliver, 2016). Aside from expressing their disappointment with the name choice, prior to the March, Black women authored articles about why they did not feel represented by the March, and why they would not be attending. For instance, Jamilah Lemieux (2017) stated: It won’t serve my own mental health needs to put my body on the line (a body that I believe will invite more violence from Trump supporters than paler attendees) to feign solidarity with women who by and large didn’t have my back prior to November. Not yet. Eventually? Perhaps. But not now.

Bridget Todd (2017) also discussed feeling uncomfortable with the Women’s March, knowing that White women may be using it as an opportunity for their own benefit without consideration for how marginalised people could be in danger both at the March and in their daily lives during a Trump presidency: If police make arrests – or worse – it’s marginalized people who will face the brunt of it … I can understand the desire to use your attendance at this march to show that you’re not one of [the white

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women who voted for Trump], but what does that accomplish other than making yourself feel better? … A lot of marginalized people are now at risk because of white women voters … I’m sorry white women, but some of you helped get us into this mess. Perhaps it isn’t your voices that need to be amplified in the aftermath.

Unfortunately, Todd’s predictions have come to fruition – the Southern Poverty Law Center (2016) collected 1,094 bias-related incidents in the month following the election and the Washington Post (2017) has calculated that American police have killed 748 people so far this year, with Black people vastly overrepresented and White people vastly underrepresented as victims of fatal police force. Despite these realities, Todd received a slew of colour-blind racist responses to her article. For instance, on 28 January 2017, Candy Kearny in the online comments section wrote: Bridget: The women’s march may have represented different things to different people, but All women will be marginalized if Roe vs. Wade gets overturned. All people are diminished if any woman, of any color or creed, is discriminated against because of her gender. That is what the women’s marches all over the world were about. I hear prejudice and divisiveness in your voice, and that is what women don’t need right now.

This colour-blind racist reliance on the word ‘all’ is similar to the criticism levied towards the Black Lives Matter movement, with opponents seeking to erase the existence of racism and White privilege through the use of the tagline ‘all lives matter’. In addition to Kearny, other commenters accused Todd of divisiveness, reverse racism and being angry with White women. These tactics rely on stereotypical strategies for diminishing the seriousness of racism and silencing the voices of Black women and people of colour (e.g. accusing racial minorities that speak out against racial injustice of ‘playing the race card’, or being an ‘angry Black woman’). This colourblind rhetoric was also evident in the comments section on Professor LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant’s (2017) New York Times op-ed, ‘Do Not Look for Me at the Women’s March on Washington’. For instance, Ileana Simon on 13 January 2017 stated: You are a woman – and regardless of color, or ethnicity, or sexual orientation, we should be one voice. One voice that says we are a

90 | I N T E R S E C T I O N A L I D E N T I T I E S , I N T E R S E C T I O N A L S T R U G G L E S force. We have rights. We control our own bodies. We deserve equal pay for equal work. One voice to say that it is not just locker room talk. Our daughters and granddaughters deserve a U.S. that is moving forward in women’s rights not backwards.

Manigault-Bryant’s piece also received comments that resorted to more old-fashioned forms of racism. For instance, ‘jane’ on 12 January 2017 in response to the article wrote: It’s ironic that white women are proclaimed not to be inclusive yet black women, like this author, are only interested in how things affect blacks … Black activists seem addicted to attention and power. They use charges of racism to constantly be the center of attention and to gain control.

The discussion of issues surrounding race and racism on the message boards of articles about the Women’s March drew the attention of the press, who began to write news stories with such titles as ‘Women’s March on Washington Opens Contentious Dialogues about Race’ (Stockman, 2017) and ‘Women’s March on Washington Provokes Heated Debate on Class and Privilege’ (WITW Staff, 2017). However, this did not lead to a wider dialogue, but rather contributed to a White backlash against Black women expressing their concerns about the March. This is evidenced in both the title and content of Emma-Kate Symons’s (2017) article, ‘Agenda for Women’s March Has Been Hijacked by Organizers Bent on Highlighting Women’s Differences’: It saddens me to see the inclusive liberal feminism I grew up with reduced to a grab-bag of competing victimhood narratives and rival community-based but essentially individualist identities jostling for most-oppressed status … Can’t we rise above the sniping about ‘privilege’, ‘white feminism’, ‘intersectionality’, and hierarchies of grievance in the face of Trump and the dangers he poses to the American and international liberal world order and women everywhere?

Symons’s adherence to colour-blind racist ideology wherein ‘her’ ‘inclusive’ feminism is being hijacked simultaneously privileges her concerns of what she views as dangerous while dismissing those of women of colour and other marginalised populations, such as LGBTQI persons, arguing that discussions of Whiteness and privilege

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are insignificant, and must be overcome in favour of what she believes to be important. Ijeoma Oluo provides a compelling response to these types of claims made by Symons and other White feminists: I think it’s interesting when people say [women of colour are creating divisions in feminism] because what we have to ask is what is really dividing? Because when you say that it is divisive, are the differences divisive? Or is it voicing the differences that’s divisive? So either you want women of color, trans women, disabled women, queer women to just be quiet and never state what they need in the name of unity, or you want to address it and show that when you say that you’re here for women, you are here for all women. (WBUR, 2017)

Racism at the Women’s March on Washington Reporter Collier Myerson (2017) documented three viral signs that she felt revealed the deep racial divisions which manifested at the Women’s March: (1) ‘Don’t forget: White Women Voted for TRUMP’; (2) ‘BEING SCARED SINCE 2016 IS PRIVILEGE’; and (3) ‘I’LL SEE YOU NICE WHITE LADIES AT THE NEXT #BLACK LIVES MATTER MARCH. RIGHT?’ As Black women predicted, the racism evident in the preparation for the March did not subside during the event. Women of colour writers for popular websites such as Agrawal (2017) and Conteh (2017) discussed Women’s March on Washington White attendees’ apathy and hostility towards speakers of colour and issues that disproportionality affect people of colour, such as police brutality and the Dakota Access Pipeline. These types of reactions by White women when confronted by race-based issues have been explicitly linked by Bonilla-Silva (2003) and Forman (2004) to colourblind racism. Similarly, Oluo (2017) documents tweets bragging about how the Women’s Marches were non-violent, highlighting not only the differential treatment of protestors by police between this event versus demonstrations for the rights of people of colour, but also, the hypocrisy of White women congratulating themselves and law enforcement officers on their nonviolence. This ignorance, apathy and disregard of White privilege also evidences the colour-blind racist ideology entrenched in the Women’s Marches. Similarly to how Black culture was appropriated prior to the March in terms of the original name choice, Black culture was also utilised by White women for their own personal gain during the March without the acknowledgement or consent of Black women. Reflecting on her

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experience at the Women’s March in San Francisco, Lucier (2017) discusses the appropriation of Black activist culture by White women: Signs in the air were wrapped in plastic, each slogan stolen from my lived experiences, my sheroes mouths, my people’s backs. White women, everywhere, taking pictures with their friends, yelling at the sky, screaming chants that they’ve never heard before tonight. Chants that were forged in fires on West Florissant. Chants that were written in candlelight by enslaved Africans who dared steal their freedom from the hands of men who had white women standing beside them.

Lucier (2017) goes on to state that she realised during the March that White women attended for themselves without interest or regard for the interests of Black women and other women of colour, ‘simply mobilized by the fear that something had gone awry in their lilywhite world of privilege’. This is not only evident in White women’s reluctance to engage with issues of race and privilege, but also issues of sex, gender, sexuality and privilege. For example, the name Women’s March and the signature accessory of the Marches, the pink ‘pussy’ hat, functioned to exclude transgender, non-binary and other individuals who exist outside of White, cisgender femininity. Without an intentional focus on representing the interests of those individuals who are routinely marginalised to the highest degree in the current social structure, the Women’s March served to uphold, rather than dismantle, the very forces of the patriarchy that it sought to oppose. Racism in Social Movements in the Trump Era Not only was the racism in the Women’s March reminiscent of previous feminist movements in terms of its exclusion of women of colour, LGBTQI persons and LGBTQI people of colour’s concerns, experiences and voices, racism also permeated other current social movements geared towards resistance in the Trump era. For instance, the March for Science on 22 April 2017 was characterised by a number of the same issues evident in the Women’s March – marginalised academics’ experiences were diminished in favour of the white, male, cisgender, able-bodied majority and issues that supposedly affect ‘all’ scientists equally (e.g. reduction in research funding). In addition, scientists who advocated for discussion about diversity were labelled divisive, and ‘science’ was branded as apolitical and objective (Charles, 2017; Ghorayshi, 2017; Mantey, 2017).

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Furthermore, even though some anti-racist efforts have been made in LGBTQI movements, such as the unveiling of the first Pride Flag to include black and brown stripes in Philadelphia (Rao, 2017), the majority of events based on human rights surrounding issues of sex, gender and sexuality continue to be led by and for White people. For instance, in a Facebook post explaining why the Black Lives Matter Alliance Broward, the Ch’ort’i Maya tribe and the Seminole tribe, among other groups, would not be participating in the 2017 Equality Rally for Unity and Pride held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Jasmen M. Rogers (2017) writes: The experiences and needs of non-cisgender people and people of color were largely absent from the organizing process; and with this absence came the unsurprising erasure of the most marginalized and vulnerable in our community … Of particular concern was the relationship you all formed with law enforcement in the planning of this event. In our meeting with the Equality Rally organizers, we emphasized repeatedly that there is no feeling of equality and safety when police are present. It is a privilege to believe that police will keep you safe.

Rogers’s and other activists’ experiences of racism align with those of Black women in the Women’s March in terms of lack of inclusion, ignorance and apathy surrounding issues of police brutality, limited speaking time at the event and, ultimately, opting for nonparticipation. Even in supposedly liberal spaces such as feminist and LGBTQI movements, Jameela (this volume) argues that the dialogue and reactions of women of colour and marginalised groups is restricted to fitting in and around White opinions and feelings. Conclusion In order to focus strategies for change in subsequent protests and additional forms of activism in the Trump era, it is necessary that feminist and other social movements take into account the multiple social hierarchies that result in differential forms of power and privilege relative to race, gender, socioeconomic status, sexuality, (dis)ability, citizenship status and so on. Smith (2013) clarifies that ‘while all women are oppressed as women, no movement can claim to speak for all women unless it speaks for women who also face the consequences of racism – which place women of colour

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disproportionately in the ranks of the working class and the poor’. As such, it is within this framework that women of colour should continue to build on the theories and practices they have developed for combatting colour-blind and other types of racism. This approach ensures that individuals who embody multiple non-dominant statuses, and thus, experience multiple and interconnected forms of discrimination, are included and empowered by subsequent social movements. Because sexism and racism do not exist in a vacuum, an emphasis on complex and unique identities ensures a multifaceted approach for conceptualising and combatting oppression, which is also multifaceted. That is to say that the forces of power within the patriarchy are tied to other existing power structures, such as white supremacy, heteronormativity and classism, and thus, it is necessary to address all forms of oppression simultaneously. Women of colour who are privileged in terms of their status relative to their gender, class, education, sexuality, (dis)ability, country of origin and other statuses should confirm that their organisations and movements are inclusive and beneficial to those individuals of colour with lessadvantaged statuses. Not only does a greater level of inclusivity serve the most vulnerable members of social movements, it creates the largest and strongest base which benefits all of those involved. White women activists should seek to examine and combat how colour-blind racist ideology and practice has functioned to uphold White power and privilege in their own lives and the organisations and social movements of which they are a part. White women should actively dismantle colour-blind racist narratives in their dialogue with other White individuals and remove colour-blind racist rhetoric from organisation materials, such as mission statements and web content, and replace it with language situated within a racialised framework which leaves room to acknowledge the existence of both racism and White privilege (Crenshaw et al., 1998). One initial requirement for combatting colour-blind racism requires White women to stop treating White womanhood as normative and stop speaking for ‘all’ women. Claire (2016) explains: Treating white womanhood as normative not only serves to marginalise women of colour within the feminist movement, but positions our needs as secondary to those of white women, propagating the hierarchy of race within feminism. Considering

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white womanhood as normative defines who is valued as a source of knowledge relating to women’s experiences, and who is not. It shapes the criteria for who is heard within the feminist movement, and who is overlooked by default. If the concerns of white women become simply the concerns of women, then race – conveniently – ceases to be a feminist issue. Women of colour critiquing racism can therefore be dismissed as threats to feminist unity, accused of ‘trashing’ white women when we critique their racism.

Claire (2016) goes on to suggest that one strategy for decentralising White women’s experiences is to encourage White feminists to apply the same tools of analysis they utilise in their critique of sexism to their own and others’ racism and consider their expectations of men when discussing misogyny to draw parallels between dominant and subordinate groups. We believe that because of the current racial hierarchy, the burden of education about racism and issues facing women of colour should be on White women. In order for White women to educate themselves, one another and other White people, it is necessary that they join movements seeking to fight racism and racial injustice in supporting roles and march alongside Black and Brown people. This may help White women to understand issues such as mistrust of the police and how to be more inclusive in feminist movements. In the case that there is confusion about what White women can do, Oluo (2017) advises they ask such questions of women of colour as: ‘What is holding you back? What is hurting you? What do you need?’ as well as make statements such as: ‘I care about you’. White feminism does not safeguard White, cisgender and feminine women in the Trump era, let alone the majority of people whose rights and livelihoods need protecting. In order to build and sustain the resistance to Trump, it is essential to utilise feminist movements that are fundamentally anti-racist with the goal of furthering agendas that truly benefit women of all identities. Note 1 Documenting racist comments by perceived White individuals in order to expose dominant racist rhetoric and ideology differs from other writing that

‘trolls’ women of colour because of existing power relations surrounding White supremacy as well as the nonexistence of reverse racism.

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References Agrawal, N. (2017). We Need to Talk about This Issue with the Women’s March. Popsugar, January 29. Available at: www.popsugar.com/news/BeingWoman-Color-Women-MarchWashington-43040248. Alotta, J. B., Bandele, M., Billoo, Z., Burroughs, G., Campbell, M. L., Choimorrow, S. Y. and Garcia, A. (2017). Guiding Vision and Definition of Principles. Women’s March on Washington. Available at: https://static1.squarespace.com/ static/584086c7be6594762f5ec56e/ t/587ffb31d2b857e5d49dc d4f/1484782386354/WMW+Guiding +Vision+%26+Definition+of+Princip les.pdf (Accessed 14 June 2017). Bonilla-Silva, E. (2003). Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Campos, R. (2016). Dear White Women: This Is Not about Us. Medium, 21 November. Charles, D. (2017). We Need a March for Science, but This Is Not the One. Aljazeera, 22 April. Available at: www.aljazeera.com/indepth/ opinion/2017/04/march-sciencewashington-170422192356923.html. Claire. (2016). Ain’t I a Woman? Racism in the Feminist Movement. Sister Outrider, 19 May. Available at: https://sisteroutrider.wordpress. com/2016/05/19/aint-i-a-womanracism-in-the-feminist-movement/. CNN. (2016). Exit Polls. 23 November. Available at: http://edition.cnn.com/ election/results/exit-polls. Conteh, M. (2017). What I Witnessed at the Women’s March. Fbomb, 23 January. Available at: http:// thefbomb.org/2017/01/what-iwitnessed-at-the-womens-march/.

Crenshaw, K., Gotanda, N., Peller, G. and Kendall, T. (eds) (1998). Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York: The New Press. DeJean, A. (2016). ‘Million Women March’ Protest Was Appropriating Black Activism So Organizers Did This. Fusion, 12 November. Available at: http://fusion.kinja.com/ million-women-march-protest-wasappropriating-black-act-1793863713. Forman, T. A. (2004). Color-Blind Racism and Racial Indifference: The Role of Racial Apathy in Facilitating Enduring Inequalities. In Maria Krysan and Amanda Lewis (eds), The Changing Terrain of Race and Ethnicity. New York: Russell Sage, 43–66. Ghorayshi, A. (2017). Bill Nye and the Science March’s White-Dude Drama. Buzzfeed, 30 March. Available at: www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghorayshi/ march-for-science-diversity?utm_ term=.cbw1PdZ3l8#.gy22yY54w9. Lemieux, J. (2017). Why I’m Skipping the Women’s March on Washington. Colorlines, 17 January. Available at: www.colorlines.com/articles/why-imskipping-womens-march-washingtonopinion. Leonard, D. (2004). The Next M.J. or the Next O.J.? Kobe Bryant, Race and the Absurdity of Colorblind Rhetoric. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 28(3), 284–313. Lucier, A. M. (2017). Women’s March on Washington: To White Women Who Were Allowed to Resist While We Survived Passive Racism. Essence, 23 January. Available at: www.essence. com/news/white-women-racismwomens-march-washington-privilege. Manigault-Bryant, L. S. (2017). Do Not Look for Me at the Women’s March on Washington. The New York Times,

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9 January. Available at: www.nytimes. com/roomfordebate/2017/01/09/ women-and-their-march-onwashington/do-not-look-for-me-atthe-womens-march-on-washington. Mantey, J. A. (2017). #MarginSci: The March for Science as a Microcosm of Liberal Racism. The Root, 20 April. Available at: www.theroot.com/ marginsci-the-march-for-science-asa-microcosm-of-lib-1794463442. Myerson, C. (2017). Taking a Closer Look at Three Viral Signs about Race and Racism from the Women’s March. Fusion, 23 January. Available at: http://fusion.kinja.com/taking-acloser-look-at-three-viral-signsabout-race-an-1793858334. Oliver, B. T. (2016). Why I Do Not Support the Women’s March on Washington. Personal website, 16 November. Available at: www.brittanytoliver. com/blog/2016/11/16/why-i-do-notsupport-the-one-million-womenmarch-on-washington. Oluo, I. (2017). When You Brag That the Women’s Marches Were Nonviolent. The Establishment, 23 January. Available at: https:// theestablishment.co/when-you-bragthat-the-womens-marches-werenonviolent-b042133ae2bb. Rao, S. (2017). Philly Unveils New Pride Flag with Black and Brown Stripes. Colorlines, 8 June. Available at: www. colorlines.com/articles/philly-unveilsnew-pride-flag-black-and-brownstripes. Rogers, J. M. (2017). Facebook post. 11 June. Available at: www. facebook.com/jasmenmrogers/ posts/10109876887250623. Smith, S. (2013). Black Feminism and Intersectionality. International Socialist Review, 91. Available at: http://isreview.org/issue/91/ black-feminism-and-intersectionality. Southern Poverty Law Centre. (2016). Hatewatch. 16 December.

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Available at: www.splcenter.org/ hatewatch/2016/12/16/update1094-bias-related-incidents-monthfollowing-election. Stepler, R. (2016). 5 Key Takeaways about Views of Race and Inequality in America. Pew Research Center, 27 June. Available at: www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2016/06/27/ key-takeaways-race-andinequality/. Stockman, F. (2017). Women’s March on Washington Opens Contentious Dialogue about Race. The New York Times, 9 January. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/us/ womens-march-on-washingtonopens-contentious-dialogues-aboutrace.html?_r=0. Symons, E.-K. (2017). Agenda for Women’s March Has Been Hijacked by Organizers Bent on Highlighting Women’s Differences. Women in the World, 19 January. Available at: http://nytlive.nytimes.com/ womenintheworld/2017/01/19/ agenda-for-womens-march-onwashington-has-been-hijacked-byorganizers-bent-on-highlightingwomens-differences/. Todd, B. (2017). White Women Coming to My City for the Women’s March: This Is What I Want You to Know. Athena Talks, 20 January. Available at: https://medium.com/athena-talks/ white-women-coming-to-my-cityfor-the-womens-march-thisis-what-i-want-you-to-know130825a18d55. Washington Post. (2017). Fatal Force. Available at: www.washingtonpost. com/graphics/national/policeshootings-2017/ (Accessed 9 October 2017). WBUR. (2017). Women of Color Assess the Impact of the Women’s March. 24 January. Available at: www. wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/01/24/ women-of-color-march.

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Women’s March. (2017a). March Committee. Available at: www. womensmarch.com/team/ (Accessed 14 June 2017). Women’s March. (2017b). Honorary Co-chairs. Available at: www. womensmarch.com/honorarycochairs/ (Accessed 14 June 2017).

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Leon Sealey-Huggins

Dedicated to the work, life and memory of Deyika Nzeribe.

Introduction: Environmental and Climate Justice This chapter began life as a memorial to the death of someone whose work must be remembered for its tireless contribution to the pursuit of justice. Sadly, I was never blessed with the opportunity to meet Deyika Nzeribe in person. However, upon agreeing to deliver the inaugural memorial lecture in his name, I found myself encountering the shadow of his legacy and work in many unexpected and unanticipated places. For that reason, I must begin the chapter by thanking Ikem Nzeribe and Anita Shervington who invited me to deliver the talk that provided the basis for this piece. I am honoured to have been asked to speak at an event in Deyika’s memory. Deyika is someone who recognised the interconnected nature of our struggles. He worked to fight police violence and oppression, co-founding the Northern Police Monitoring Project (based in Manchester, UK). He admired the work of Wangari Maathai, finding inspiration to link environmental, economic and racial justice. In addition to being part of the Greens of Colour subgroup of the Green Party,1 and standing as Mayoral Candidate for Manchester, Deyika campaigned against austerity, and was involved in organisations to commemorate the 45th Pan African Congress. A poet himself, he was also involved in shaping the cultural life of the city, co-chairing Sustained Theatre Up North (STUN), film festivals and many other creative and political projects (Johnson, 2017). I hope this chapter does a degree of justice in addressing a number of the themes that Deyika worked on throughout his career and tragically shortened life. Part of the motivation for the focus of this chapter, is the experience I have encountered of speaking to friends and family from across the

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African diaspora about my research into climate change with its focus on perspectives emerging from the Caribbean region. Frequently I have found that people I have spoken to have indeed heard of climate change, and have some sense of its likely impacts, but often are not overtly aware of its disproportionate impacts on people of colour in the Caribbean and beyond. Upon further discussion, however, it also often emerges that people do indeed have anecdotal knowledge of the impacts of climate change by way of the connections they might have to family and friends ‘back home’. People will speak of relatives whose crops are not flourishing at the times they once were, if at all. Or of beaches that they used to visit regularly on trips home, that are damaged, or no longer there. Sadly, in the wake of 2017’s impactful hurricane season, along with a number of other destructive weather events, I fear even more will be made acutely aware of the strange weather befalling the global South that is increasingly becoming the norm. One important issue to highlight at this point is the way in which analysis of ‘environmental’ problems often gets framed in narrowly technical terms. These framings make it harder to link ‘natural disasters’ to the broader social and political causes that pattern their destructive effects. I would argue, instead, that we can only properly understand the harm being wrought by weather events and climate change by directly connecting it to broader social and political processes of which structural racism is a central part. Too many discussions of climate change neglect concerns of social justice, then, and present climate change in reductionist technical terms (Swyngedouw, 2010). These technical approaches are, unsurprisingly, failing in their own terms to adequately address climate change. The explanation of this failure is inseparable from the practices of racism endemic to the global social order. While the Caribbean’s exposure to extreme weather clearly has geophysical dimensions, it is significantly structured by unequal social relations which are imperialist in character (Sealey-Huggins, 2017). In mainstream discussions of climate change, however, there is hardly ever any consideration of the relationships between the colonial and imperialist histories either underpinning climate change’s causes, or structuring societies’ capacities to respond. Here I am talking about the ways in which the past is not a ‘finished’ entity: it is a process that stretches into the present and into the future, even if these connections

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are too frequently obscured (Trouillot, 1995). Bhambra (2007; 2014) for instance, has implored us to acknowledge that our society, including the very ideas about what counts as ‘organisation’, is bound up with global ‘connected histories’ too frequently forgotten. Perversely, when colonial histories are acknowledged, it is too often in the form of publics and leaders of former and neo-imperial countries expressing ‘imperial nostalgia’ (Narayan and Sealey-Huggins, 2017). To be absolutely clear, the evidence and analysis presented here entails a commitment to the principle that Black Lives Matter. Make no mistake, contrary to the supposed solidarity of the message that ‘we’re all in this together’ (Swyngedouw, 2010), climate change is set to exacerbate existing disregard for Black life, in part through the very universalism embedded in the claim that ‘all lives matter’ (Catney and Doyle, 2011). This universalism obscures the fact that climate change entails uneven and unfairly distributed impacts, which are significantly intensified by an unequal distribution of wealth and resources. In short, my research has found that we cannot understand climate change, either in the Caribbean or globally, without considering the social relations of contemporary forms of capitalism. By this I mean the ways in which the organisation of our economic system is geared towards unending economic growth and the primacy of the pursuit of profit. At the forefront of our analysis we must also maintain a focus on the fact that the capitalist political economy is underpinned by racism (Robinson, 1983; Johnson and Lubin, 2017; Taylor, 2016). Racism, in turn, has underpinned, and been underpinned by, processes of imperialism and colonialism (Anievas and Nisancioglu, 2015). My primary ethical and political concern, and area of research, is the Caribbean region. The region is home to some of the countries most exposed to the impacts of climate change (Bishop and Payne, 2012; Rhiney, 2017; Smith and Rhiney, 2015). Sadly, the same, similar and (in many instances) much worse consequences of climate change apply elsewhere in the global South; across Asia, Africa and the Pacific (Bassey, 2012; Bond, 2012b; Ghosh, 2016). These regions share analogous colonial histories, and post-colonial presents. As such, much of the discussion here will apply to greater or lesser extents elsewhere in the global South. There is a wide and ever-expanding body of literature that details the many ways in which environmental harms are patterned by racism.

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Historically, this work has been particularly focused on the US context, where the environmental justice movement came to prominence (see Walker and Bulkeley, 2006 for an overview). Others, particularly those in social and environmental justice movements, have identified how the often intersecting factors of class, gender, impairment (Fenney, 2017) and other vectors of inequality or disadvantage can pattern exposure to climate change or environmental harm (Cabello and Gilbertson, 2015; Vergès, 2017). Given the relatively recent emergence of climate change as a matter of mainstream concern, the connections between climate change, structural racism and development are less well established. Within this chapter, I begin with a discussion of the uneven distribution of the impacts of climate change, focusing on the Caribbean region. From here I move to consider the inadequacies of existing governance responses that contribute to and reinforce forms of structural racism within a climate regime where Black lives matter less. I then conclude by identifying routes for forms of climate justice. Strange Weather Bears Strange Fruit Anyone who follows the journalistic reporting of climate science would be forgiven for feeling more than a little downhearted at the scale of the unfolding crisis. It seems that the impacts of climate change, or at least the increased frequency of the kinds of ‘extreme’ weather events that accompany climate change, are already being felt. The destruction experienced in the Caribbean during Hurricane Irma in September 2017 was partly caused by the most powerful storm ever recorded. Both Irma, and the preceding storm Harvey, unleashed weather effects that should have been ‘once in a lifetime’ (Chuck, 2017), or ‘once in 500 years’ events (Ingraham, 2017). All of this fits the pattern for stronger Atlantic storms (Bender et al., 2010). We see an increasing number of weather events that, irrespective of their direct connection to climate change, are in the mould of the kinds of weather that climate scientists are warning is going to become more prevalent. Sierra Leone saw mudslides that killed over 1,000 people (Elston, 2017). Bangladesh, Nepal and India have faced flooding that has killed over 1,300 people already. It has also been reported that in 2015 alone, 12,600 farmers in India killed themselves because of a combination of high debt and the dire effects climate change has had on their livelihoods (Carleton, 2017). With 300,000 farmer suicides in the past two decades, this desperation is far from an anomaly. People

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in East Africa have been experiencing famine that is contributing to profound suffering (Williams, 2017). Irrespective of whether or not any one of these individual weather events are directly connected to climate change, I am keen to refocus our attention on the social and political processes that surround these events: in most cases it is people of colour who will lose their lives as weather combines with inequality. We can only understand these processes if we acknowledge the ways in which capitalism is racialised globally. The preceding account of the impacts of ‘extreme’ weather raises even greater concern when considering the lack of appropriate action to secure global warming temperatures to under the ‘1.5°C to (barely) survive’ demanded by so many in the global South (Sealey-Huggins, 2017). As such, we are witnessing the failure of the global governance regime to protect Black lives adequately. This fact should not surprise us if we consider the deadly impacts of wider anti-Black racism. Even if the UN climate change targets (that countries have only voluntarily agreed to) were met, it is calculated that we would likely see in excess of 2.8°C of warming (Reyes, 2015). This figure is unthinkable. Yet the trajectory is alarming already, even if we ignore the poor track record that the richer nations have on abiding by their promises and pledges. I want to suggest that part of why responses to climate change are failing in their own terms is because of neglect of policy makers and others – including in some instances, climate activists (Herron, 2017; Mock, 2017; Virasami and Wanjiku Kelbert, 2015) – to recognise the racialised dimensions of the socially structured nature of climate change. To further reiterate the point, crucial to understanding the connections between structural racism and climate change is an acknowledgement that ‘vulnerabilities’ to extreme weather are not ‘natural’. They are not reducible to environmental or geophysical factors. They are profoundly patterned by the ways in which we organise our societies so as to suit some people’s interests at the direct and indirect expense of others. Those states which are least able to deal with extreme weather are often among the most indebted, or leastresourced. Haiti in the Caribbean, for example, is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Part of the reason why Haiti is in so much debt is because it was forced to pay reparations to France for having the temerity to throw off its colonial master and establish itself as the first Black republic of the ‘new world’ (Bhambra, 2016). Caribbean

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societies more generally, upon securing their ‘independence’, were frequently forced into forms of development (Cain, 2016) that seemed ill-suited to facilitating the flourishing of their populations, but which were well-suited to maintaining or exacerbating inequalities. This is directly traceable to the fact that the wealth generated in the Caribbean during colonialism was expropriated by imperial elites (Beckles, 2013). All of this meant that Caribbean societies were forced to compete on a deeply uneven playing field when they gained their ‘independence’ (Bishop, 2013). When Will Black Lives Matter? Evidence in support of the claim that responses to climate change are unfolding in ways that devalue Black life can be found both globally and locally. Globally, the climate policy regime is overwhelmingly structured in favour of countries in the global North (Bond, 2011; Bond, 2012a; Russell et al., 2012), albeit with a more recent slant towards China and the other BRICs (Brazil, Russia and India). This provides some support for the contention that Black lives don’t matter. To take a couple of examples, the much-hyped COP15 climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009 were widely regarded as a failure for a number of reasons, not least because they did not secure any meaningful ‘post-Kyoto’ climate change deal. Lumumba Di-Aping, representing the Group of 77 and China bloc of 130 nations at the Copenhagen talks, described the agreement under discussion in these damning terms: ‘[i]t is asking Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact in order to maintain the economic dependence of a few countries’. Di-Aping pointed out that the 2°C target was the limit of the ambitions of wealthy countries in Copenhagen (Bond, 2012b). Troublingly, this extent of average warming globally would result in deadly temperatures in excess of 3.5°C for many parts of Africa. It could be argued that if those talks, and the similarly-hyped Paris COP21 talks in 2015, had been more equitably structured the climate governance regime would be considerably more robust than it currently is. For example, it is no coincidence that the two rounds of talks that have had the most media and geopolitical attention have been based in Western Europe. To better understand the connections between climate racism and the structures of our society, I would like to briefly consider the racism endemic to the current global order, and some of its many manifestations.

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‘The Climate Crisis Is a Racist Crisis’ (Black Lives Matter UK, 2016) We live in a global system that is patterned by racist and oppressive social relations (Robinson, 1983; Johnson and Lubin, 2017; Taylor, 2016). This is not dependent on the prejudices of any one individual (Bonilla-Silva, 2017), though those prejudices may help and are often encouraged. Rather, racism is embedded within the neo-colonial, neoimperialist systems of contemporary capitalist society (Johnson and Lubin, 2017; Robinson, 1983; Taylor, 2016). The structural character of racism is too frequently overlooked in relation to climate change. Vergès (2017: 72) employs the term the ‘racial capitalocene’ to centre an analysis bringing ‘together race, capitalism, imperialism, and gender’. Vergès’ analysis is drawn from the work of activists and others across the global South and elsewhere, who have worked to join the dots between the systemic entanglement of racist social relations and the social relations of climate change. In the UK, Black Lives Matter (BLM UK) have been particularly prominent in this (Cullors and Nguvu, 2017). BLM UK orchestrated an action that halted flights at London’s City Airport, located in one of London’s poorest boroughs, a borough with a disproportionately Black population. BLM UK have demonstrated that if we acknowledge the interconnected character of racist and capitalist oppression, then we can understand the environmental violence of climate change as continuous with that of police violence. In fact, it is only by connecting these dots that we stand a chance of dismantling the oppressive structures that devalue Black life. One of the founders of BLM in the US, Patrisse Cullors, suggested in an article written with BLM UK (Cullors and Nguvu, 2017), that: 1) Black Lives Matter is a global Black queer femme-led intersectional movement and network that works across multiple issues. We do not believe in single-issue stories. 2) Environmental injustice has always been an issue and a fight taken on by Black and poor communities. We are the first to die, but we are also the first to fight on the frontlines. 3) The inequalities that turn an extreme weather event into a disaster or human catastrophe mirror the inequalities that cause the disproportionate loss of Black and poor life globally – and the exact systems that Black Lives Matter fights against.

Moreover, if we acknowledge that climate change is already bringing with it the likelihood of millions of people being displaced and

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needing to flee their homes (Cabello and Gilbertson, 2015), we must also acknowledge the racist underpinnings of the frequently violent reception that so many migrants have received as they have risked their lives trying to reach the relative security of Europe (Danewid, 2017). Thinking in this way, we are able to connect climate change to the anti-Black racism represented by the active decision of the Italian government to let, predominantly Black African, migrants drown in the sea (Wintour, 2017). We have to acknowledge, too, that the existing control and mismanagement of migration is racist in general. This is evidenced by deportations that see ‘Jamaican’ people forcibly removed from a country in which they have spent the majority of their lives, to the one in which they happened to have been born (Noronha, 2017). At the risk of belabouring the point, part of the explanation of why there has been inadequate action to address climate change is because of the racism integral to the power structures that underpin the global socioeconomic system (Robinson, 1983; Johnson and Lubin, 2017; Taylor, 2016); Robinson (1983) has elaborated on this as ‘racial capitalism’. Through environmental justice campaigns and scholarship, we already knew that environmental racism means that people of colour are much more likely to be living near sites of industrial pollution and toxic waste (Pellow and Brulle, 2005; Pellow, 2016). Climate change mirrors that disregard for Black life and extends it to unprecedented levels. In trying to think of adequate political responses to these processes, it is important to offer alternatives to the reductive accounts of climate change that risk obscuring the oppressive structures underpinning our societies. Solutions focused on any action or activity that reproduces racialised capitalism are inadequate. Instead we seek to identify the ways in which capitalism is implicated in the very causes of climate change and through this, propose different, more equitable ways of organising our economies and societies. It is also important to acknowledge the ahistorical character of much of the discussion. Dominant accounts of climate change too frequently rest upon an amnesia about the social relations emerging from imperialist and colonial projects. As Ghosh (2016: 146) has pointed out: The fact is that we live in a world that has been profoundly shaped by empire and its disparities. Differentials of power between and within nations are probably greater today than they have ever been. These differentials are, in turn, closely related to carbon emissions.

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The distribution of power in the world therefore lies at the core of the climate crisis.

Considering the case of climate debts in the context of wider calls for reparations further underlines the necessity of acknowledging history as it unfolds in the present. Debts Due, Not Aid Promised: Climate Justice Now! Given the failures of the systems of climate governance to secure Black life, I want to suggest that we can pursue alternatives by focusing on climate debt, reparations and justice. Amitav Ghosh (2016) invites us to acknowledge that climate change is shaped by the relations of empire. If we do this then we are better able to understand how the Dutch – whose empire and industrialisation was built on the backs of unpaid slave labour – can afford €16 billion for flood defence schemes, while most countries in the Caribbean region have reported delays in accessing any of the resources required to implement their plans for responding to climate change. Speaking about the need for funding to support Caribbean societies’ plans for reducing their exposure to weather events, Dr Ulric Trotz, a pioneer in addressing climate change in the Caribbean, has commented: ‘The bottom line is that we don’t have the resources … It’s not that we don’t have any idea about how we need to build resilience’ (The Commonwealth, 2017 – my emphasis). Rather than having to enter into dubious and highly conditional relationships with donor countries and companies (Bracking, 2015), the resources for responding to climate change must be provided to the region on an unconditional basis. The conditions have already been met – they were the systematic exploitation and degradation of the region and its environment throughout the period of colonialism and thereafter (Beckles, 2013). ‘Climate debt owed’, rather than ‘climate aid promised’, is a better model because the latter implies voluntary responsibility on the part of the richer nations, whereas the need is essential, and the responsibility is clear: industrialised countries have, on the whole, benefitted massively from the same processes that caused climate change (Adelman, 2016; Bassey, 2012; Bond, 2012b). Indeed, often these benefits were inexorably linked, via imperialist logics, to the direct exploitation of those countries now understood to be vulnerable. It is these factors that mean that existing reparations movements rightly identify losses to people systematically exploited by imperial elites.

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Part of what gives me hope for climate justice in the Caribbean, is that the Caribbean reparations movement is growing in strength and momentum, alongside other broader movements in pursuit of reparatory justice. In spite of growing support for reparations for slavery and genocide from within the Caribbean and elsewhere, and in spite of the use of reparatory approaches following a number of significant historical atrocities (Beckles, 2013), ‘leaders’ in the global North have been unforthcoming. In a visit to Jamaica, then British Prime Minister David Cameron famously called for Caribbean countries to ‘move on’, authorising the building of a prison for the repatriation of prisoners, whilst ruling out the prospect of British reparations. All of this points to the necessity of both a critique of forms of racialised capitalism, as well as strong social movement action to be able to shift the organisation of societies in a more progressive direction. This more progressive direction must acknowledge that: Climate justice movements are diverse, but a fundamental principle lies at the heart: the recognition that the threats posed by climate change are a consequence of unequal, colonial, economic and social power relations. (Cabello and Gilbertson, 2015: 6)

As such, climate justice is inseparable from social justice more broadly. It is also likely to mean slightly different things in different contexts. In Sikkim, Northern India, for instance, it might mean opposing the displacement and loss of sovereignty engendered by a hydroelectric project (Arora, 2007). In Germany, conversely, climate justice might mean symbolically shutting down one of the largest coal mines in Europe (Ende Gelände, 2017). Indigenous activists opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in the US, meanwhile, could be seen to have been pursuing climate justice when they led a movement that brought critiques of settler colonial disenfranchisement together with those of petrochemical extraction and big oil politics (Stand with Standing Rock, 2017). Understanding our distinctive but entirely connected positions means thinking in broader terms about the importance of solidarity action. This could involve direct action stopping deportations, or the important migrant solidarity work from those working with people at risk of detention or deportation. Solidarity with the victims of climate change will involve dismantling privilege and educating our neighbours who are unaware of the crises

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of hunger and destitution facing millions worldwide (Summers, 2017). It will also involve campaigning for reparative justice, preparing for the movement of people as ‘extreme’ weather hits, and acknowledging the need to redistribute resources so that people are less in need of leaving their homes. This work will not always run smoothly, as was found in London during Paris talks when the ‘Wretched of the Earth’ bloc, named in direct reference to the work of decolonial pioneer Frantz Fanon, were pushed to the back of their march by predominantly white NGOs precisely because their anti-imperialist climate justice message was so political (Virasami and Wanjiku Kelbert, 2015). This last example reminds us of the need to remain vigilant in insisting on a critique of climate change that encompasses radical Black perspectives, as well as confronting the processes that result in the redistribution of life from people in the global South to those in the global North. Evidence suggests that only strong, sustained, radically oriented popular pressure offers hope for responses to climate change wherein the above inequalities are acknowledged, and where, therefore, Black lives matter (Bond, 2012b). After all of this doom, I want to finish with some hopeful words from Noelene Nabulivou, of a number of organisations including: Diverse Voices and Action for Equality, Pacific Partnerships on Gender, Climate Change and Sustainable Development (PPGCCSD), and the Women and Gender Constituency Liaison to the COP23 Presidency. Noelene responded to Trump’s homicidal decision to withdraw from the Paris Accord with the following words: This is not just the decision of one man, rather it is a reflection of an archaic social and economic system, one that is based on shortsighted selfishness and corporatization of our planet. This only strengthens the resolve of all those who deeply care about this planet, all women and all people and all species. Resist and propose. Defend the Commons, work with us on alternate strategies. We will NEVER give up on this beautiful planet. (fenton, 2017)

We will never give up, until and unless Black lives are made to matter as the crisis unfolds. Note 1 The Green Party is a small social and environmental justice party in the UK.

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for Mudslide Victims. SBS News. Available at: www.sbs.com.au/ news/article/2017/09/18/sierraleone-refugee-community-raisesthousands-mudslide-victims (Accessed 12 October 2017). Ende Gelände. (2017). Stop Coal. Protect the Climate! Ende Gelände. Available at: www.ende-gelaende.org/en/ (Accessed 12 October 2017). Fenney, D. (2017). Ableism and Disablism in the UK Environmental Movement. Environmental Values, 26(4), 503–522. DOI:10.3197/0963271 17X14976900137377. fenton. (2017). Pacific Island Civil Society Organizations Respond to Trump Pulling Out of the Paris Agreement. 350 Pacific. Available at: http://350pacific.org/pacific-islandcivil-society-organizations-respondto-trump-pulling-out-of-the-parisagreement/ (Accessed 12 October 2017). Ghosh, A. (2016). The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Herron, A. (2017). If You Care about the Environment, Then You Should Care about Black Lives. Wear Your Voice. Available at: https:// wearyourvoicemag.com/identities/ race/care-environmental-justicecare-Black-lives (Accessed 12 October 2017). Ingraham, C. (2017). Hurricane Harvey Is Third ‘500-Year’ Flood in Houston in 3 Years. The Washington Post. Available at: www.washingtonpost.com/news/ wonk/wp/2017/08/29/houstonis-experiencing-its-third-500year-flood-in-3-years-how-is-thatpossible/?utm_term=.c5b23c4d5f0f (Accessed 12 October 2017). Johnson, A. (2017). Deyika Nzeribe Obituary. The Guardian. Available at: www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/

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of Birmingham. Available at: http:// epapers.bham.ac.uk/2949/. Robinson, C. (1983). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: University of North Carolina Press. Russell, B., Pusey, A. and SealeyHuggins, L. (2012). Movements and Moments for Climate Justice: From Copenhagen to Cancun via Cochabamba. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 11(1), 15–32. Sealey-Huggins, L. (2017). ‘1.5°C to Stay Alive’: Climate Change, Imperialism and Justice for the Caribbean. Third World Quarterly, 38(11), 2444–2463. Smith, R.-A. J. and Rhiney, K. (2015). Climate (In)Justice, Vulnerability and Livelihoods in the Caribbean: The Case of the Indigenous Caribs in Northeastern St. Vincent. Geoforum. Available at: www. sciencedirect.com/science/article/ pii/S0016718515002997 (Accessed 23 December 2015). Stand with Standing Rock. (2017). Stand with Standing Rock. Stand with Standing Rock. Available at: http://standwithstandingrock.net/ (Accessed 12 October 2017). Summers, H. (2017). Poll Reveals 85% of Americans Oblivious to Hunger in Africa and Middle East. The Guardian. Available at: www.theguardian.com/ global-development/2017/jul/13/ poll-reveals-85-percent-americansoblivious-hunger-crisis-africa-andmiddle-east-international-rescuecommittee (Accessed 12 October 2017). Swyngedouw, E. (2010). Apocalypse Forever? Post-political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change. Theory, Culture and Society, 27(2–3), 213–232. Available at: http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/

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doi/10.1177/0263276409358728 (Accessed 20 August 2013). Taylor, K.-Y. (2016). From #BlackLivesMatter to Liberation. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. The Commonwealth. (2017). Commonwealth Warns of Climate Change Threat to Caribbean States. The Commonwealth. Available at: http://thecommonwealth.org/media/ news/commonwealth-warns-climatechange-threat-caribbean-states (Accessed 12 October 2017). Trouillot, M.-R. (1995). Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0725686 8.2015.1122578. Vergès, F. (2017). Racial Capitalocene. In G. T. Johnson and A. Lubin (eds), Futures of Black Radicalism. London: Verso. Virasami, J. and Wanjiku Kelbert, A. (2015). Darkening the White Heart of the Climate Movement. New

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Internationalist. Available at: https:// newint.org/blog/guests/2015/12/01/ darkening-the-white-heart-of-theclimate-movement/ (Accessed 14 February 2017). Walker, G. and Bulkeley, H. (2006). Geographies of Environmental Justice. Geoforum, 37(5), 655–659. Williams, P. (2017). This Is Not ‘Natural Selection’: East Africa Is in the Grip of a Famine Emergency. The Guardian. Available at: www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2017/jul/24/ this-is-not-natural-selection-eastafrica-is-in-the-grip-of-a-famineemergency?CMP=Share_iOSApp_ Other) (Accessed 12 October 2017). Wintour, P. (2017). European and African Ministers Discuss Plan to Tackle Flow of Refugees. The Guardian. Available at: www.theguardian.com/ world/2017/jul/24/european-africanministers-discuss-plan-refugeestunis?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other (Accessed 12 October 2017).

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Kehinde Andrews

In some respects, the election of Trump on one side of the Atlantic and the vote for Brexit on the other are opportunities to reignite antiracist politics. When racism is disguised it can be easier to ignore or put down to other circumstances. But the brazen racism of Trump and the Vote Leave campaign are impossible to ignore. Many people may be having what Cross (1971) called their ‘encounter’ with overt racism for the first time, which may wake them up to systems of racism that oppresses them. There is nothing better to spur a movement than an easy to define enemy. Part of the reason for the success of Black Lives Matter is that the police provide the perfect target for protest, the stormtroopers of racism that we can fight against. Anti-racist protests have already grown out of resistance to both Trump and Brexit, for example the campaigns against Trump’s Muslim ban in America (Scott, 2017). In Britain 30,000 people joined a March Against Racism in London in March 2017, protesting both Brexit and Trump (Bulman and Agerholm, 2017). As welcome as anti-racist agitation is, we need to be careful how we frame such movements. In 1963, Malcolm X warned activists not to be so caught up condemning the ‘Southern wolf’ that we took our eyes off the ‘Northern fox’. Trump and the Brexiteers represent the Wolf, who ‘will show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them’. This is fairly easy to identify: however, it is the apparently well-meaning Fox that will ‘show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling’. Importantly, for Malcolm both are just as dangerous, the problem is we spend all our time watching for the Wolf, whilst being seduced by the Fox. The key lesson here is that racism is a system and how we challenge it must always be on the systemic level. If we use the opportunity post Trump and Brexit to build anti-racism that just focuses on the ‘Wolf’ we will not be addressing the problem

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at its root. Britain and America are exactly the same amount racist as they were before both elections; we are now seeing the ugly face of the system. Worse still, if we solely focus our politics on challenging the bombast of the wolves, we may find that we have built a coalition full of smiling foxes who are not interested in overturning the system of racial oppression. Southern Fox and the Northern Wolf Perhaps the fiercest critique of the civil rights movement in America came from Malcolm X. He indicted the showpiece March on Washington as a ‘farce’, calling it a ‘circus with clowns and all’ (X, 1963c). Although he, and the figure he is most linked to, Martin Luther King, were active on the same issues at the same time, they only ever met once, very briefly. Their lack of engagement should come as no surprise given that Malcolm not only savaged the civil rights movement but also King personally, calling him a ‘modern day Uncle Tom’ (X, 1963a). In the desperation to find unity between competing threads of Black political thought the differences between Malcolm and Martin are often downplayed. We are told they really wanted the same thing but just had different methods, or that they were merging to a similar position towards the ends of their short lives. Don’t believe the hype. Civil rights represents the liberal strand of Black political thought, which seeks access to the existing system so that it can be reformed. Malcolm is the clearest spokesperson for Black radicalism, which argues the West ‘can no more produce racial equality … than a chicken can lay a duck egg’ (X, 1964b). The interplay between Black liberal and radical politics is complicated given our location in the belly of the beast of racism, but we do a disservice to the rich array of Black political thought to conflate competing movements (Andrews, 2018). Black radicalism provides a particular prism through which to view the current system and the prominence of state sponsored overt racism in the form of Brexit and Trump. Malcolm insisted that we dismantle white liberal notions that there was a progressive, well-meaning America that was struggling to be heard over the racists. In this narrative, racism was primarily an issue in the South: after all, that is where the slave plantations were and the region that imposed Jim Crow segregation. In this liberal fantasy, the creation myth of the United States involves the white saviours of the North fomenting war with the South in order to end the abomination

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that was chattel slavery. Lincoln is the messianic figure that ended the horrors of slavery and who died for the sins of the nation, in order to bring freedom to all. This fairy tale continued into the civil rights era with liberals joining the struggle for civil rights in the South. Leaving their college campuses to join protest marches, sit-ins and freedom rides. Civil rights key successes until the 1960s were all in the South: desegregation of schools and public facilities; and voting rights reforms. With the right reforms the South could be like the North and opportunities could flow for African Americans, or so the fairy tale goes. The myth of the liberal white Northern saviour was firmly in tact in this politics: in fact, civil rights depended on the help of those in power who were open to change. For Malcolm this was one of the biggest problems with the movement. A lot has been made of Malcolm being anti-white, because of his condemnation of white people as devils from his time in the Nation of Islam. He was also vehemently opposed to seeking white allies for Black movements. One of the reasons he was so critical of the March on Washington was because he questioned ‘who ever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily-pad park pools, with gospels and guitars and ‘I Have a Dream’ speeches?’. Malcolm did not distinguish between well-meaning and racist white people. He indicted whiteness as a system that all of those who benefit from it are part of, well-meaning intentions or not. Dismantling the myth of the progressive North and racist South is key to how we need to understand racism. Due to the focus of civil rights on the region Malcolm urged people to ‘stop talking about the South. Long as you south of the Canadian border, you’re South’. The only difference between racism in the two parts of the nation is that ‘in the South, they’re outright political wolves. In the North, they’re political foxes’ (X, 1964a). The Southern wolves bared ‘their teeth in a snarl’, with Jim Crow, racial violence and the state openly opposing racial justice: but Malcolm X warned that whilst all the attention was on the Wolf, we missed the trickery of the Northern foxes, who ‘show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling’ (X, 1963a). For all the mythology around the North as some racially progressive space, it was just as implicated in slavery as the South. For instance, the symbolic capital New York was first built on the labour of enslaved Africans. The Civil War was never fought to free enslaved Africans: rather, emancipation was granted as a strategy

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to win the war (Bell, 1992). Lincoln, that noble white saviour, stated in 1862 that ‘if I could save the union without freeing a single slave I would do it’. After the failures of Reconstruction in the South and the viscous racism of Jim Crow, African Americans left for the North to find the promise of America. Rather than the American Dream in the North, they continued to experience the ‘American nightmare’ (X, 1964a). For all of the noise made about Jim Crow in the South, racial segregation was just as severe in the North, with African Americans confined to deprived urban ghettoes, which were more like colonies than equal parts of the nation (Carmichael and Hamilton, 1968). In the present day, American schools are more segregated than they were before the supposedly momentous Brown vs the Board of Education decision in 1954 (Orfield, 2009). Police brutality is perhaps even more keenly felt in Northern cities than in the South, as the rise of Black Lives Matter demonstrates. To distinguish between the Southern overt presentation and the Northern covert manifestation is to miss the point that racism is systemic across the boardIn warning not to be allured by the cunning of the Northern Wolf, Malcolm picked the most highprofile target possible to make his point. John F. Kennedy was a hero for the civil rights movement as a champion of reform and bringer of legislative change. But Malcolm (1963b) saw through the veneer, explaining, That ‘F’ stands for fox. He’s undoubtedly more foxier than any of the others because any time a man can become President and be in office three years and do as little for Negroes as he has done despite the fact that Negroes went for him 80% and he can still maintain the friendly image in the mind of Negroes, I’ll have to say he’s the foxiest of the foxy.

Kennedy was no ally to the Black struggle for Malcolm, which is why when the president was assassinated in 1963, he famously declared it a case of ‘chickens coming home to roost’. The reaction of the Nation of Islam (NOI), who were meant to believe that God was going to wipe out white America in a prophesised apocalypse, was telling. Given the NOI preached that white people were literally devils, created to torment Black people, Malcolm’s words seem relatively tame. Instead of supporting Malcolm he was suspended from the NOI for 90 days by the leader Elijah Mohammed who had specifically instructed there be no criticism of JFK following his killing (X, 1965). The NOI did not

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want to put off white society or the Black community who revered the efforts of the president. Malcolm was always destined to outgrow the NOI, but the fact his departure was precipitated by the organisation defending the legacy of JFK tells us the power of the trickery of the Northern Fox. Distinguishing between the Fox and the Wolf is vital to understanding the situation we find ourselves in today. Trump is the classic Wolf: it would be incorrect to call him a ‘dog whistle’ politician because his racism is at a pitch that all can hear. Before he ran as a candidate he was at the forefront of the so-called birther movement that sought to prove President Obama was a foreigner. During his campaign he embraced being the ‘law and order candidate’, openly opposed Black Lives Matter and pledged to deport millions of migrants and to build a wall. Few of his only accomplishments in the first year of his presidency were to partially install his Muslim ban (Scott, 2017), weaken a range of civil rights protections (Rupert and Hill, 2017) and offer more militarised support for the police. (Jarrett, 2017). His response to white fascists marching and killing a protester in Charlottesville was not to condemn the racists, but argue that their number included some ‘very good people’. One of the benefits of having a Wolf in charge is that people are in no doubt about their intentions and rally to mobilise. In many ways the Fox is more dangerous because it charms you into thinking that things are different. We could use Hillary Clinton as an example of the Fox. She certainly made her share of visits to Black churches and called on a retinue of civil rights leaders to bolster her Black credentials. But it is unlikely that Black people really bought into her hype. African Americans supported her over Bernie Sanders, but there is little to suggest his politics offered any more than a token nod to Black communities (Branigin, 2016). In the election African Americans overwhelmingly supported Clinton, but they did not really have an alternative given the Wolf on the ballot. There was not the same enthusiasm in the African American vote in the past elections (Krogstad and Lopez, 2017), and it is doubtful that anyone really expected much from a Clinton administration on racial justice. Trump’s predecessor is the much more archetypal example of the shrewd and cunning Fox. African Americans took a while to warm up to the candidacy of Barack Obama. He was seen as an outsider, with a Kenyan father and white mother who could not possibly understand the legacy of slavery

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(Coates, 2007). Obama had to prove his Black credentials and did so by touching on all of the cultural keynotes: music, civil rights, the Black church, basketball. Michelle also did a lot of the heavy lifting to assuage doubts about his Blackness. By the time he won the nomination everyone was convinced that he could become the first Black president of America, and after he was elected 69 per cent of African Americans viewed his victory as the ‘fulfilment of Martin Luther King’s dream’ (Taylor, 2016: 140). The expectations for his presidency were great across the Diaspora. There were Obama parties in Britain and a lot of people I know teared up at his historic election. Obama mobilised on the slogan of hope and promised to bring about change. But after eight years the first Black president managed to have no positive impact on racism in America. In fact, the only indicator of progress that improved was the Black unemployment rate. But this has to be put in the context of Black wages falling and food bank usage escalating in the same period. Obama’s America provided jobs but not jobs that could sustain people, highlighted by the stunningly depressing statistic that half of all Black people who have jobs in New York are employed in the fast food industry (Taylor, 2016). Obama was excellent at coming on television after a tragedy like the death of Trayvon Martin and showing his grief. But he was terrible at putting that grief into any programme that could address the issue. Obama’s response to Martin’s murder was to start the My Brother’s Keeper initiative. This was a mostly privately financed programme that sought to mentor fatherless young Black men and was signed with the support of the Conservative right including the demagogue Bill O’Reilly. The programme was the worst kind of approach to Black social problems, as it constructed racism as a problem relating to absentee fathers within the deviant Black family. After all, the racist murder of Trayvon Martin, who was visiting his father, requires a structural examination of police brutality rather than a mentoring programme for fatherless Black youth. This is a cultural conservativism that does nothing to improve the conditions in Black communities and erases Black women and girls from the agenda (Crenshaw, 2014). Despite Obama’s utter failure to address the racist murder of Trayvon Martin, people still continued to have faith on racial issues. I have always been a vehement critic of Obama but even I thought he might throw us a bone, like releasing the Black political prisoners who have been rotting in federal jails for decades. But even though

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during his last days there was no political cost to him taking such action, he did nothing. We blamed the Republicans, the media and the constraints of the system for Obama’s lack of any action on racism. All these are true to some extent but there is a far simpler answer, and that is that he played the emotions of African Americans like a fiddle. At no point did he offer any programme to address racial equality and in fact gave speeches that suggested that Black people had no special claims to justice in America. But he gave just enough nods to his Blackness to keep everyone thinking he had our backs, and would play the system for us. Obama is the definition of the smiling Fox, riding the wave of African American support to the presidency and his post-POTUS place on the circuit of the global elite. Beware of the Fox Post-Brexit Just as American self-perception is based on notions of progressivism and inclusion, the same is true in Britain. The nation sees itself as the one that ‘launched the Enlightenment, that abolished slavery, that drove the industrial revolution, that defeated fascism’ (Cameron, 2014). In this myth making, slavery is not something that Britain was actively involved in, but an evil practice that the great British figures abolished. You would never think that Britain was enriched by enslaving millions of African people: instead, the genocidal practice is seen as something foreign, done on alien shores. In truth the plantations in the Caribbean served exactly the same purpose as those in the American South and were equally part of the British Empire. Caribbean people migrated to the supposed promised land of the mother country later than their counterparts left the American South. The process, however, was very similar. Unable to find secure employment in the lands of the plantation, people left to find a better life. When mass migration began after the Second World War, the Caribbean was still a part of Britain and people’s passports read ‘subject of the British Empire’. Just as African Americans found the North to be no paradise, so too did those who migrated from the Caribbean to the British Isles. They were greeted by open hostility, signs that read ‘no blacks, no Irish, no dogs’; and severe institutional inequality. In contrast to the United States, Black people were not fleeing the Wolf, but found themselves in the Promised Land of Great Britain. The open hostility that migrants faced both pre and post war left a scar on the relations between communities. Race riots occurred where

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whites attacked migrants like in Cardiff in 1919 or Notting Hill in 1958 (Fryer, 1984). Racist killings like those of Kelso Cochrane in 1959, the New Cross Massacre in 1981 and Anthony Walker in 2005, shook Black communities in Britain. Deaths in custody like those of Joy Garner in 1993, Kingsley Burrell in 2005 and Sarah Reed in 2016, have shown the brutal face of institutional oppression. Far right rallies have been an ever-present feature of life for migrants in Britain in their various manifestations from Mosley fascists in the 1930s to the English Defence League today. After the Brexit vote racial attacks skyrocketed (Bulman, 2017). The vote gave licence for the snarling Wolf to return to the streets, removing the mask of respectability and being openly racist and hostile. Such viscous racism took many by surprise, a shocking reminder that racism is still alive and well. Since the passing of the Race Relations Act in 1965, the state has attempted to reduce overt racial prejudice. Prior to the act it was perfectly legal to openly discriminate, and race relations laws were strengthened in 1976, 2000 and in 2010. When mass migration first began, both Labour and Conservative governments adopted a position of assimilation, asserting that migrants would need to abandon their own cultures and tradition to become British (Back et al., 2002). Partly in response to the rabid reaction of the Wolves, a policy of race relations and multiculturalism was adopted in order to make Britain’s minorities feel more secure in the nation. Multiculturalism created space for a ‘community of communities’ to develop with support from the state (Parekh, 2000: xv). This two-pronged approach helped to create an environment where the Wolves were to some extent kept at bay. Never did they go away but after Thatcher’s government left the scene it felt as though the Wolves finally did not dominate the narrative. After the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence and the much-vaunted MacPherson Report which declared the police force to be institutionally racist, you could have been forgiven for thinking that Britain had turned a corner. If ever there was the perfect British image of the smiling Fox, he entered the stage in 1997. Tony Blair was meant to embody the modern Britain needed at the turn of the millennium. He exuded confidence and presided over a party that had an increased number of women and ethnic minority MPs. But this façade of progressivism faded very quickly in relation to issues of racism. He launched the standard conservative attack on Black communities, laying the blame for crime firmly at the door of the

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deviant culture that we needed to root out. In his best patronising tone, he argued that Black communities ‘need to be mobilised in denunciation of this gang culture that is killing innocent young black kids’ (Wintour and Dodd, 2007). His government responded not by addressing the structural causes of the problems but by supporting police initiatives such as Operation Trident set up to over-police Black communities. It was also under Blair’s watch that the end of multiculturalism was declared (Kundnani, 2002). A series of race riots in northern England in 2001 between racist whites and Pakistani and Bangladeshi youths sparked a national conversation about racism. The problem identified was multiculturalism, implying that communities were allowed to live separate lives and develop hatred and resentment towards each other. We were told that ‘community cohesion’ was much better for social mixing and so it was born as a policy agenda (Cantle, 2001). In the typical trickery you would expect from a Fox, the policy aimed to provide space for difference that was underlined by a commitment to British values. Support was removed for programmes that targeted funding at specific communities and initiatives like those bussing children from predominantly Muslim to predominantly white areas in order to socialise. In reality community cohesion was just a mask for a return to the days of assimilation where pledging to commit to Britishness is the only acceptable way to be a part the nation (Back et al., 2002). The suicide bombings of 2005 added a more Wolf-like element to Blair’s race relations programme. Fearing that so-called separate communities were breeding grounds for home-grown terrorists, the Preventing Violent Extremism and Terrorism (Prevent) agenda was born. Unlike community cohesion this is a very targeted campaign aimed at saving Muslim young people from the clutches of extremists. It involves Kafkaesque de-radicalisation programmes for people (especially young ones) who have been identified as at risk of extremism. The hyper-surveillance has effectively turned all those who work in the public sector into spies for the intelligence services, with a legal responsibility to report anyone deemed at risk. The paranoid environment created by Prevent led to the Trojan Horse scandal where previously highly rated schools in Birmingham were downgraded and taken over by the government because of a hoax letter warning of a plot by Muslim extremists to take over certain schools (Shackle, 2017).

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David Cameron came to power pledging to detoxify the Tory image, even changing the logo of the party from Britannia’s torch to a tree. He adopted Blair’s breezy style and very much wanted to be viewed as a compassionate conservative. An enforced coalition with the Liberal Democrats meant that some of the Tory’s harsher plans had to be scrapped and they adopted crowd-pleasing tax cuts to the middle class, like raising the income tax threshold. Cameron always represented himself as fighting back against the more Wolfish nature of the hard right of the party. But let us not pretend he was any friend to minority communities. Under his government austerity hit ethnic minority communities the hardest, whilst running down sectors like education which are supposedly meant to address inequality. The attack on public sector jobs was particularly damaging to Black communities who rely on the state for careers due to severe employment discrimination. His home secretary, Theresa May, presided over one of the most explicitly racist periods of Britain’s immigration policy, with ‘Go Home’ vans, mass deportations and a willingness to let Black bodies drown in the Mediterranean as a deterrent. Nevertheless, Cameron led the country into the Brexit meltdown convinced that he was on the side of liberal social justice. In the Vote Leave campaign, we saw the bared teeth of the Wolf with Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party playing the role of the villain. He openly expressed fears about migration and launched a poster showing a horde of dark migrants streaming into Europe: a vote to leave the EU would prevent these migrants from darkening Britain’s door. Even though there is scant prospect of Turkey joining the EU, the looming threat of 70 million Muslims being able to pour into Britain was a prominent feature of the Vote Leave propaganda. After the Brexit vote was delivered, it acted as a symbol that it is okay to be overtly racist. It is undoubted that the Wolf has been emboldened by recent events with negative effects for minority communities. But it would be a mistake to think that anything has fundamentally changed about the nature of racism because of this. Since becoming Prime Minister in 2016, Theresa May has tried to position herself as a progressive conservative. As home secretary, as well as leaving Black people to drown in the Mediterranean she launched a review of the police’s abuse of the tactic of stop and search. In 2017, as Prime Minister, she launched a race disparity audit (to much fanfare) in order that institutions had ‘nowhere to hide’ over accusations of

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racism. She saw this as the first step in tackling the severe disadvantage that plagued Britain. In complete contrast to Trump she wanted to be seen to be tackling racism head on. But we should not be handing out style points for racism, nor celebrating entirely empty gestures. If May was really interested in addressing racial inequality there was no need to commission an audit. Every single piece of information that was revealed was already in the public domain and it told us nothing that we have not known for years. This was a fig leaf, a tokenistic nod that will achieve nothing and was never meant to. Worse still the government used the audit to highlight the failure of white working classes, who are apparently losing out to ethnic minorities who get so much support. Similarly to May’s highlighting but not solving the problems of policing, there will be no progress made from the audit. However, in burnishing her social justice credentials, she attempt to (and is able to) fool enough of us. Theresa May has been part of a government that has pursued domestic and immigration policies that are just as racist as anything Trump has advanced. Yet, there are no protests or outcry about her racism because she has done it with the trickery of a Fox, rather than the fierceness of the Wolf. In the wake of Brexit and the election of Trump we should learn the lesson that the overt racism of the Wolf is not more dangerous than that of the Fox. That if we reduce the baring of teeth and the snarling of the Wolf we do nothing to curb the trickery of the Fox. Neither Britain nor the United States is any inch more racist than before the vote for Brexit and election of Trump. No matter if it is the Wolf or the Fox, we will continue to be attacked until we overturn the system of racial oppression. References Andrews, K. (2018). Back to Black. London: Zed Books. Back, L., Keith, M., Khan, A., Shukra, K. and Solomos, J. (2002). The Return of Assimilationism: Race, Multiculturalism and New Labour. Sociological Research Online, 7(2). Available at: www.socresonline.org. uk/7/2/back.html. Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the Bottom of the Well. New York: Basic Books. Branigin, A. (2016). Why Some Black and

Brown People Can’t Trust Bernie Sanders, in 1 Quote. The Root. Available at: www.theroot.com/whysome-black-and-brown-people-canttrust-bernie-sande-1820017450. Bulman, M. (2017). Brexit Vote Sees Highest Spike in Religious and Racial Hate Crimes Ever Recorded. Independent, 7 July. Bulman, M. and Agerholm, H. (2017). 30,000 Join March Against Racism in ‘Defiance and Unity’ against Brexit

128 | L E S S O N S F RO M H I S TO R Y, CO N N E C T I O N S AC ROS S S PAC E S and Donald Trump. Independent, 18 March. Cameron, D. (2014). Scottish Independence. Speech at Better Together Campaign, Aberdeen, 15 September. Cantle, T. (2001). Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. London: Home Office. Carmichael, S. and Hamilton, C. (1968). Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Coates, T. (2007). Is Obama Black Enough? Time, 1 February. Crenshaw, K. (2014). The Girls Obama Forgot. The New York Times, 29 July. Cross, W. E. (1971) The Negro to Black Conversion Experiences. Black World, 20, 13–27. Fryer, P. (1984). Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press. Jarrett, L. (2017). Trump to Lift Military Gear Ban for Local Police. CNN, 28 August. Available at: http://edition. cnn.com/2017/08/28/politics/policemilitary-gear-ban-lifted/index.html. Krogstad, J. M. and Lopez, M. H. (2017). Black Voter Turnout Fell in 2016, Even as a Record Number of Americans Cast Ballots. Pew Research Center. Available at: www.pewresearch.org/ fact-tank/2017/05/12/black-voterturnout-fell-in-2016-even-as-a-recordnumber-of-americans-cast-ballots/. Kundnani, A. (2002). The Death of Multiculturalism. Race and Class, 43(4), 67–72. Orfield, G. (2009). Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge. Los Angeles, CA: The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles.

Parekh, B. (2000). The Future of MultiEthnic Britain: The Parekh Report. London: Runnymede Trust. Rupert, M. and Hill, C. (2017). Trump Could Undermine Civil Rights Progress More Than Any Other President. The Hill. Available at: http://thehill.com/blogs/punditsblog/the-administration/347126trump-could-undermine-civil-rightsprogress-more-than. Scott, A. (2017). ‘We Call It the Muslim Ban 3.0’: The Young Yale Lawyers Fighting Trump’s Order. The Guardian, 24 October. Shackle, S. (2017). Trojan Horse: The Real Story behind the Fake ‘Islamic Plot’ to Take over Schools. The Guardian, 1 September. Taylor, K. (2016). From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Wintour, P. and Dodd, V. (2007). Blair Blames Spate of Murders on Black Culture. The Guardian, 12 April. X, M. (1963a). God’s Judgement of White America (The Chickens Come Home to Roost). 4 December. X, M. (1963b). Malcolm X at Columbia. Speech at the University of Columbia, 20 May. X, M. (1963c). Message to the Grassroots. Speech at the Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference, Michigan, 10 November. X, M. (1964a). The Ballot or the Bullet. Speech at King Solomon Baptist Church, Detroit, Michigan, 12 April. X, M. (1964b). Speech at the Militant Labor Forum. New York, 29 May. X, M. (1965). The Autobiography of Malcolm X. London: Penguin Books.

12 | TH I S AI N ’ T N O T H I N G N E W : CON TE XTU AL I S I N G B L A CK R E S P ONS ES T O TRU M P ’S AM ER I CA

Layla Brown-Vincent

One full week after the 45th presidential election in the United States of America (US) resulting in the election of Donald J. Trump, I was in a Wednesday morning staff meeting at a white, southern, private, elite university. Around twelve of my colleagues and I were seated around a conference table debriefing our responses to the election results. Of the twelve including myself, there were only three Black folk present. Several of my white colleagues cried or were so filled with anger and resentment that they could hardly speak. One white woman colleague had the audacity to imply that somehow, disinterested Black non/voters were to blame for villainising Hillary Clinton during her presidential campaign, ultimately resulting in Trump’s ascension to the White House. In response to that implication, one of my Black colleagues erupted (an emotional response which was highly atypical for this particular colleague), reminding everyone in the room that working poor white folks and white women were the primary demographic responsible for the election of Donald Trump (Presidential Exit Polls, CNN, 2016). At that moment, looking around the room, I noticed the angry, tight-lipped indifference on the faces of my Black colleagues, a stark contrast to the tears, shock and dismay of my white colleagues. Later that day, I mentioned my observation to my Black colleagues, to which they replied with a familiar refrain, ‘Donald Trump is crazy, but he ain’t nothing new’. Donald Trump is the product of an institutionalised racism that has waxed and waned since the first enslaved Africans set foot on the shores of the western hemisphere during the Maafa (Swahili for the ‘great disaster’ of the trans-Atlantic slave trade). Donald Trump is the backlash to Barack Obama, the evidence of white supremacist logics becoming more salient in the context of racist tensions rising to the fore of American consciousness. My colleagues went on to explain

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that while they were not happy with the election results, they were ‘not about to sit up and cry about it at work’ because ‘we’ve been through this before’ and much worse. Theirs is the response of the descendants of a people who have been brutalised by the US government and its white citizenry for generations; the response of people who are fully aware of the multiple and varied ways in which Black life is devalued and targeted for extermination. Theirs is also, however, the response of children who are keenly aware that their ancestors fought before them and that we will continue to fight, not only for our survival, but our humanity. We organised ourselves in the face of the Maafa; we led insurrections on plantations throughout the Americas; we organised ourselves in the face of mass lynchings during the reconstruction era; we organised ourselves and fought against Jim Crow legislation; and we are organising ourselves currently against the New Jim Crow and the anti-Black genocidal imperatives of the US government in the twenty-first century. In this paper, I contend that the problems of white supremacy in America are not new, and the only thing that has changed about white supremacy are the faces of the perpetrators. As a Black millennial, I offer perspective on a generations-old problem, that of Black Americans confronting said white supremacy. I explore the angry indifference of mainstream Black responses to the election of Donald Trump and offer examples of organised Black millennial responses to the multiple iterations of white supremacy before and after Trump’s election. Ultimately, I conclude that we are the ones we have been waiting for, that we must look to ourselves and learn from the mistakes and triumphs of the robust histories of Black/African resistance in this country and around the globe in order to see our way out of Trump’s America and by extension, global white supremacy. History Rewards Our Research Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you’ve got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. And once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight. (Malcolm X, 1963)

In an October 2016 article for The Root entitled ‘For Black People, Donald Trump Is America’, Michael Harriot rightfully proclaimed

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‘black people are not shocked and appalled at the antics of Donald Trump. He is not new to us. We don’t want him as our president, but we also aren’t openly weeping about the prospect of four years of Trump’. While this declaration may sound fatalistic to some, it is a sentiment that Black folk with any sense of historical memory know all too well. Just after we received the news that Trump was to become the 45th president, Heather Jones (no date), in a column for Wear Your Voice, wrote ‘This might be the worst day of the year, and late science fiction writer Octavia Butler predicted this day would come’. Jones is referencing the now cult classic Parable Trilogy that Butler was unable to complete due to her tragic and untimely death. In the second book of the trilogy entitled Parable of the Talents, Butler: wrote about a xenophobic and racist demagogue by the name of Andrew Jarrett who became president by galvanizing a fearful and ‘disenfranchised’ majority in post-apocalyptic America. Andrew Jarrett had no real platform, but he was charismatic and spoke to a frustrated American majority in an uncertain time with the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’.

Jones continues by recounting that Jarrett’s character led an administration that: targeted American outsiders, such as women, homosexuals, Blacks, Latinos and anyone who wasn’t considered a ‘good Christian American’. Renegades empowered by Jarrett’s racist agenda terrorized, enslaved, raped and sometimes murdered their victims into submission.

Without a doubt, similarities to the Trump presidency are disturbingly prevalent. However, what Jones appears to ignore here is Butler, born in 1947, was most certainly aware of and affected by the Ronald Reagan presidency. Parable of the Talents was published a decade after the end of Reagan’s tyranny and it was Reagan who ran on and popularised the slogan ‘Let’s Make America Great Again’ during his 1980 presidential campaign. In many ways Trump’s presidency is a composite of two US presidents in recent history who enacted a number of draconian, racist, sexist and classist policies that resulted in mass demonstrations across the country and the globe; demonstrations that reflected the shared interests of folks of colour, women, college students, working poor and immigrants in the US. While it is appealing

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to suggest that Octavia Butler, in her infinite Black woman wisdom, somehow predicted Trump’s despotic rule, it is far more likely that Butler’s knowledge of the past allowed her to understand the cyclical nature of human life, and more specifically, the multitude of ways white supremacy reinvents itself. But just as Ronald Reagan has returned in the form of Donald Trump, so too has the spirit of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements returned, in the form of the Movement for Black Lives and the various other organisations spawned by our racial realities. Just as white supremacy reinvents itself, Black communities revamp old and envision new organised ways of fighting back the evils and degradation of white supremacy. I, personally, was reared with a healthy scepticism of American electoral politics. On numerous occasions leading up to November 2016, I proclaimed aloud that I didn’t think Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 presidential race, despite being (on paper) the most legitimately qualified (though not unproblematic) candidate to run for the position. If I am being honest, I primarily believed this because I am a perpetual pessimist: however, my pessimism is rooted in an external reality. A reality marked by the assassinations of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, the extrajudicial murders of Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown and Sandra Bland, socially engineered phenomena such as the school-to-prison pipeline, residential segregation and the most recent wave of urban gentrification. Perhaps most historically salient is that I, along with millions of Diasporic Africans, live with the multigenerational trauma of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, continued oppression and the absence of opportunities to access benefits supposedly available to the society at large, what Dr Joy De Gruy Leary has conceptualised as Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (De Gruy Leary, 2005). Surviving centuries of these realities leaves the living descendants of the Black Holocaust vacillating between racial paranoia and optimism: we are hopeful and resilient while simultaneously struggling with a reasonable scepticism about Black life post such horrors. It is this precise vacillation that allows Black folk in America and around the world to understand the horror of Donald Trump without becoming immobilised by his rise to power. Leading up to and following Trump’s election, my parents and other elders (much like my colleagues at work), would often remark that ‘we have survived worse and we will survive this too’. One must not assume that statements such as these

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are some form of acquiescence to the wretched condition of Black life in America. These statements must be heard and interpreted with a deep sense of historical memory and with reverence for the legacy of struggle Black folks have led and participated in since European colonisers set foot on the shores of the African continent. On 3 August 2017, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a report entitled ‘Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers’. In this report, the FBI sets a dangerously familiar precedent for surveilling Black Identity Extremists (BIEs). The report contends: BIEs have historically justified and perpetrated violence against law enforcement, which they perceived as representative of the institutionalized oppression of African Americans, but had not targeted law enforcement with premeditated violence for nearly two decades leading up to the lethal incidents observed beginning in 2014. BIE violence peaked in the 1960s and 1970s in response to changing socioeconomic attitudes and treatment of blacks during the Civil Rights Movement. BIE groups, such as the Black Liberation Army (BLA), which was created in the early 1970s to ‘take up arms for the liberation and self-determination of black people in the United States’, engaged in murders, bank robberies, kidnappings, racketeering, possession of explosives, and weapons smuggling. (2017: 6)

While Black Lives Matter (BLM) or the Movement for Black Lives more broadly are not explicitly named in the FBI report, it is fairly common knowledge that BLM gained momentum after the 2014 murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri resulting in a year of organised street protests with national support. With the sleight of pen, the FBI (rightfully) places Black Lives Matter in a Black Power/Civil Rights organising genealogy with the Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party (BPP), the BLA and a host of other Civil Rights and Black Powerera organisations. The danger this document poses is eerily similar to the 1956 Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) launched by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, which was designed to ‘expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralise the activities of black nationalists, hate-type organisations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder’ (FBI, Director, 1967:

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1). As the FBI endeavours to justify increased surveillance of so-called Black Identity Extremists, they attempt to criminalise Black dissent by correlating it with six separate individual cases of anti-police violence. By criminalising Black discontent with the police, the FBI sets the stage for the American public to accept and normalise violent repression of Black dissent in this country. Just as COINTELPRO sought to tear Black organisations apart through espionage and the extermination of its leaders, this new FBI report signals a revitalisation of anti-Black genocide in the form of state-sanctioned espionage. In order to know what it really means to fight white supremacy, what to expect in that fight, and what outcomes we might have to accept in order for the struggle to continue, we must learn from our triumphs and failures against similar historical forms of state violence. What perhaps makes Black Lives Matter a bit more unique to twenty-first-century Black Social Activism is their intentional and unapologetic focus on ‘the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum’ and their outright rejection of respectability politics. Through this focus, Black Lives Matter claims to ‘center those that have been marginalised within Black liberation movements [in order to] to (re)build the Black liberation movement’. Black Lives Matter is the rally cry that awakened the Black masses resulting in waves of mass Black demonstrations in the US since 2012. Back to the Future: A Sleeping Giant Awakens According to their website, #BlackLivesMatter ‘was created in 2012 after Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted for his crime, and 17-year old Trayvon was posthumously placed on trial for his own murder’ when his typical teenage behaviour of smoking marijuana and getting in trouble at school were used to justify Zimmerman’s fears of Martin’s black body. During that same summer, North Carolina (NC) garnered national attention for a weekly series of grassroots led demonstrations that would come to be known as Moral Mondays. Moral Mondays was a response to the NC Republican Party’s 2012 rise to power in the form of majority control of both state houses and the election of Republican Governor Pat McCrory. For the first time since 1870, fiscal and social conservatives had enough control to begin enacting legislation that threatened voting rights, educational access, employment and housing opportunities, environmental justice,

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tax reform along with myriad other concerns (Gold, 2014). In an effort to combat the draconian changes being implemented by Republican legislature that disproportionately harmed Black communities, communities of colour and poor folks, the NC-NAACP declared the citizens’ right to claim their ‘moral majority’ and stop the regressive legislation before it was too late. In a statement titled ‘Why We Are Here Today’, Reverend William J. Barber II of the NC-NAACP declared: (W)e have no other choice but to assemble in the people’s house where these bills are being presented, argued, and voted upon, in hopes that God will move in the hearts of our legislators, as he moved in the heart of Pharaoh to let His people go. Some ask the question; why don’t they be quiet? Well, I must remind you, that it has been our collective silence that has quietly opened the city gates to these undemocratic violators of our rights. (Barber, 2013)

The first Moral Monday demonstration took place towards the end of April in 2013 with a total of seventeen people being arrested. By the end of the summer, nearly one thousand people had been arrested during the weekly protests at the North Carolina legislature. After the first few weeks of demonstrations and arrests, a conservative policy think tank (Civitas Institute) began publishing a database of the Moral Monday’s arrestees with important demographic data like each protester’s name, city and county of residence, sex, race, age, arrest date, occupation, employer (and whether it’s in the public, private or non-profit sector), interest group affiliations and mug shot. The database has since been deactivated, but its purpose is still pertinent: it was designed to create a climate of fear for those participating in acts of civil disobedience. For many, it also meant the possibility of workplace hostility or worse, unemployment. Each week thousands of supporters turned up to the demonstrations to encourage those being arrested. Late in the summer of 2013, House Bill 589 went up for a vote in the NC legislature. HB 589 was a voter suppression bill, the total effects of which only began to be felt in 2016 during the presidential primary season when hundreds of people were turned away from the polls for failure to have a ‘proper’ form of identification (Lerner, 2016). The bill effectively shortened the early voting period by a full week, eliminated same-day registration, required strict forms of voter ID, prevented outof-precinct ballots from being counted, expanded the ability to challenge

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voters at the polls and terminated a pre-registration programme for 16- and 17-year-olds, all changes which disproportionately affected Black, Brown and young voters (Morris, 2016). This bill presented a prime opportunity to increase the participation of Black and Brown youth in the Moral Mondays movement. On 24 July 2013 more than twenty young people, including myself, showed up to observe and protest HB 589 in the legislature, which was filibustered on the floor in anticipation of protests. As a result of the filibuster, we decided to stage a demonstration in the office of Rep. Thom Tillis to demand they kill bill 589. During the occupation of the representative’s office, my partner Joshua Vincent and Bree Newsome (who would later scale the South Carolina legislature’s flag pole to take down the Confederate flag) read statements of demands aloud and within less than five minutes we were arrested (Burns, 2013). Our high-profile arrests afforded us the opportunity to begin organising with a Florida-based group of Black and Brown youth activists who had been following the Moral Mondays movement closelIn April 2012, friends and students at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (a historically Black University) created a Facebook invitation for a conference call to organise against the racially motivated murder of Trayvon Martin. More than 150 people participated in the call and threw out ideas for how best to organise in the wake of Martin’s death. The call resulted in the organisation of a forty-mile, three-day protest march from Daytona Beach to Sanford and ultimately marked the birth of a group of Black and Brown youth that would come to be known as the Dream Defenders. When interviewed about the march, (Palestine native) Ahmad Abuznaid reflected: ‘we thought we’d like to start a movement reminiscent of the civil rights movement of the past, but in our generation’, he said. He recalled a young woman on the call that spoke up and said, ‘You all are defending the dream. You should call yourselves the dream defenders’ (Davis, 2012). For the better part of a year and a half, they organised, grew and prepared for their next major move. By August 2012, they were a formal organisation, even though public attention waned in the months leading up to Zimmerman’s trial. However, his acquittal in July 2013 brought the Dream Defenders back into the media limelight. Phil Agnew (executive director of Dream Defenders) remembers hearing reports on the news claiming Black folks ‘were going to destroy our communities in the wake of the verdict’. Having successfully

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organised the 2012 march, Phil believed they had proven they could be disciplined, smart, energetic, real, strategic and ultimately help present a way forward. In the national uproar following the verdict the group employed a different tactic. From all over the state, Black and Brown youth flocked to the Tallahassee Capitol building in July 2013 to push for an alternative to Florida’s ’stand your ground’ law. During a thirty-one-day sit-in of Gov. Rick Scott’s office, they demanded a review of ‘stand your ground’ and presented their version, ‘Trayvon’s law’, which would effectively repeal it. They asked for an end to racial profiling and the school-to-prison pipeline. For weeks, they staged a sit in on the Capitol’s floor under the Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame wall. Nearby churches provided them with places to shower, local friends offered their homes during the day, and at 5:45 am every day, the Dream Defenders would wake up, move their things from the lobby floor to the third floor and occupy the Capitol. As they occupied the Florida Capitol, they invited youth from all over the county to come and spend a day or two in the Capitol with them, to learn from the work they were doing and ultimately to build connected youth movements across the country. Joshua reached out to the people responsible for coordinating visitors to the occupation and when they learned we had been arrested in a Moral Monday demonstration we were warmly invited: they even asked if we would be willing to take some time to talk about our experiences with the NC Moral Mondays movement. We arrived at the Florida Capitol on day twenty-five of their thirty-one-day occupation. By the end of the weekend, Joshua, Bree and I were Dream Defenders and our relationship with the Florida organisation would lead to years of collaborative grassroots organising. In 2015 BLM called for a national convening which came to be referred to as ‘The Movement for Black Lives Convening’ where more than 1,500 Black folks, there on behalf of themselves and a number of organisations, decided to meet in an attempt to get on one accord. As a result of that convening, more than fifty national and international organisations, including the Dream Defenders, Moral Mondays participants and the newly formed Black Youth Project, created a policy agenda and subsequently came to be known as the Movement for Black Lives. The gift and the curse of Black Lives Matter is that it is both nothing and everything we want it to be at the same time. When I say that Black Lives Matter is nothing, I am not making a value judgement:

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rather I am commenting on the nebulous formation of a hashtag that both empowers young and old Black activists alike and simultaneously leaves us needing and wanting more in the way of organisation and daily strategies and tactics that help us to make Black Lives Matter more. The three women who make up the national public face of Black Lives Matter (Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi) have argued that the nebulous appearance of the BLM network is due to their incorporation of what they understand to be Ella Baker’s leadership model. Barbra Ransby (2003: 167) explains Baker’s notion of progressive leadership as ‘leadership that helped people to help themselves and allowed ordinary people to feel that they could determine their own future’. Baker understood that ‘leadership could not come from the outside or above; rather, the people who were most oppressed had to take direct action to change their circumstances’ (Ransby, 2003: 170). BLM’s adoption of Baker’s notions of leadership have resulted in what they call a leaderful movement, despite it often being characterised as a leaderless movement. This organisational structure is a direct response to what many believe was the more hierarchical, hetero-patriarchal organisational structure prevalent in Black leadership during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. Consequently, this structure makes #BLM operate more like a network that houses a number of different organisations with more traditional leadership styles under the auspice of Black Lives Matter. While many across Black communities interpret this as a critical organisational misstep on the part of BLM, it has allowed them to grow nationally and take on the shape of local Black struggle. Whether this organisational structure makes BLM a stronger and more effective organisational structure remains to be seen: however, the fact remains that the rally cry has awakened a sleeping giant. In this context, the Movement for Black Lives must be understood as a radicalisation of Black millennials that is informed by our histories of struggle in a country that never loved us. Radicalisation in Western propaganda (through this supposed war on ‘terror’) is the equivalent of abnormal, anti-social, illogical and unjustifiable behaviour. Meanwhile oppression, exploitation, poverty and suffering are normalised, inevitable and immutable. In Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson (1983) situates ‘the Black Radical Tradition’ within the realm of a particular class critique informed by a Marxist perspective. Robin D. G. Kelley picks up the torch from Robinson in Freedom Dreams: The Black

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Radical Imagination by beginning with the following questions: ‘What are today’s young activists dreaming about? We know what they are fighting against, but what are they fighting for?’ (2002: 7). Kelley contends ‘Revolutionary dreams erupt out of political engagement; collective social movements are incubators of new knowledge’, But he expresses concerns about his students who mistakenly situate activism and intellectual work at opposite ends of the spectrum of necessary work to be done in the name of freedom. He finds that many are ‘unwitting advocates of a kind of ‘talented tenth’ ideology of racial uplift, trying to ‘reach the people’ with more ‘accessible’ knowledge, to carry back to the ’hood the information folks need to liberate themselves’ (2002: 8). Late in 2017, Trump’s administration, under the leadership of Jeff Sessions, has stoked conservative outrage by allocating resources to examining ‘intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions’, an attack on the nominal policies that exist in the US to create pathways to opportunity for the nations dispossessed. Claiming that white US citizens are somehow disadvantaged, as a demographic, only stokes the flames of America’s rich white supremacist legacy. We, however, should remain undeterred. I am convinced, as is Kelley, ‘that Social movements’ such as the ones we are presently witnessing, ‘generate new knowledge, new theories, new questions’, and that ‘the most radical ideas often grow out of a concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations confronting systems of oppression’ (2002: 9). Radicalisation here should be understood as a process/agency for progress and revolutionary change. The radicalisation of Black youth explored here does not necessarily fit in one neat ideological category; however, their quest for a specific kind of freedom for US Black/African descended peoples puts them on paths moving them progressively toward more radical and, hopefully, revolutionary change. Given that Black youth in this country were radicalised by the brutal state-sanctioned violence experienced during Barack Obama’s presidency, it is no wonder that the election of Donald Trump has not alarmed us much more than usual. Given that our parents and grandparents lived through the traumatic fallout of the Moynihan Report under Richard Nixon and the War on Drugs under Ronald Reagan (Trump’s political heroes), it shouldn’t surprise us that our parents and grandparents don’t see Trump as some new kind of special enemy. Rather than focusing on the despotic particularities of a Trump regime, we must remember that Donald Trump ain’t nothing

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new, because America never loved us. We must look to ourselves and learn from the mistakes and triumphs of our rich histories of Black resistance around the globe in order to see our way out of Trump’s America. References Barber, W. J. (2013). Why We Are Here Today. NAACP of North Carolina/ Carolina Justice. Available at: http:// carolinajustice.typepad.com/ ncnaacp/2013/05/why-we-are-heretoday.html (Accessed 30 June 2017). Burns, M. (2013). Senate Backs Sweeping Election Bill. Wral.com. Available at: www.wral.com/senate-backssweeping-elections-bill/12699232/ (Accessed 1 August 2017). Butler, O. E. (2001). Parable of the Talents. New York: Warner Books. Davis, J. W. (2012). Trayvon Martin: Student Marching from Daytona to Sanford over 3 Days. Bay News 9. Available at: www.baynews9.com/ content/news/baynews9/news/ article.html/content/news/articles/ cfn/2012/4/6/trayvon_martin_march. html (Accessed 15 July 2017). De Gruy Leary, J. (2005). Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Milwaukie, OR: Uptone Press. FBI, Director. (1967). Counterintelligence Program, Black Nationalist – Hate Groups. Internal Security. 25 August. FBI. (2017). Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers. FBI Counterterrorism Division. Gold, M. (2014). In N.C., Conservative Donor Art Pope Sits at Heart of Government He Helped Transform. The Washington Post. Available at: www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ in-nc-conservative-donor-art-popesits-at-heart-of-government-hehelped-transform/2014/07/19/

eece18ec-0d22-11e4-b8e5d0de80767fc2_story.html?utm_term=. f1865f8da761 (Accessed 15 November 2017). Harriot, M. (2016). For Black People, Donald Trump Is America. The Root. Available at: www.theroot.com/ for-black-people-donald-trump-isamerica-1790857104 (Accessed 17 June 2017). Jones, H. (no date). Octavia Butler Predicted a Trump Presidency 20 Years Ago. Wear Your Voice: Intersectional Feminist Media. Available at: https:// wearyourvoicemag.com/more/ entertainment/octavia-butlerpredicted-trump (Accessed 17 June 2017). Kelley, R. D. G. (2002). Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Lerner, K. (2016). Students Are Being Rejected from the Polls Because of North Carolina Voter ID Law. ThinkProgress. Available at: https:// thinkprogress.org/students-arebeing-rejected-from-the-pollsbecause-of-north-carolinas-voter-idlaw-5b7b3f7b8caa/ (Accessed 31 July 2017). Morris, R. (2016). The Challenge to HB 589: North Carolina’s Voter ID Law. University of Kentucky Election Law Society. Available at: www.uky.edu/ electionlaw/analysis/challenge-hb589-north-carolinas-voter-id-law (Accessed 9 November 2017). Presidential Exit Polls, CNN. (2016). Available at: www.cnn.com/election/

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results/exit-polls (Accessed 15 November 2017). Ransby, B. (2003). Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Struggle: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Robinson, C. (1983). Black Marxism: The

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Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. X, M. (1963). Message to the Grassroots. Speech at the Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference, Michigan, 10 November.

13 | U N D E RS T A N D I N G T H E P R E S ENT THR OU GH THE P A S T : S T R UG G L E S A G A INS T RAC I S M

Moussa Traoré

Introduction History, Sociology, Literature, Postcolonial Studies and so many areas in the academy have at one moment or another been concerned with anti-racism. This chapter will draw on Black Diasporic Literature where the fight against racism is both overt and subtle. African American works will be used to illustrate the author’s frustration with the unfortunate situation of ‘not belonging anywhere’: the sociopolitical rhetoric in today’s US especially will show how racism and anti-racism are relevant in this era. The following points are addressed in the paper: anti-racism in the context of the fight for freedom during slavery; Pan-Africanist movements which were associated with maronnage in most cases; subtle female anti-racist struggle by a black female Caribbean protagonist; some examples of tension between blacks and whites in Jim Crow America; and the anti-racist protests against the US National Anthem and flag. The Fight against Racism and the Open Resistance to Eurocentrism This section is based on a case of open, violent and determined opposition to white domination, slavery and racism: it focuses on Nègre Marron’s protagonist, Simeon Louis Jerome, and the marronage process as one form of anti-racism. Raphaël Confiant’s Nègre Marron (2006) presents some exceptional thematic and narrative features that do not appear in Francophone Caribbean slave narratives; these themes include resistance against slave masters on plantations, the search for identity by slaves and at times, the return to Africa. The novel follows a transhistorical ‘collective’ protagonist who doesn’t accept enslavement or assimilation and who never stops resisting. He is a symbolic nègre marron or maroon Negro who resists exploitation and white hegemony in all its forms. The nègre marron’s resistance begins as a reaction to the

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inhuman treatment and exploitation within the Caribbean plantations, and transforms into other forms of resistance like trade unionism, revolutionary socialist oppositions and the fight against corruption and racism. The novel unfolds along various terrains which correspond to specific periods in the history and contemporary situation of the Francophone Caribbean (and the world in general). It addresses how the social contradictions and injustices of each of those periods and eras are bravely combatted by the nègre marron and his allies. The book is par excellence, a critical engagement of anti-racism. The first pages of Nègre Marron evoke a nostalgic longing for the African lands of the nègre marron’s ancestors: the ‘Pays Guinée’ or ‘Pays d’Avant’. One of the most striking and anti-Eurocentric features of the novel is the composite protagonist’s burning desire to return to Africa. That feature distinguishes Confiant’s novel from most of the Francophone Caribbean works, except Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon (2000), where the protagonist completely relocates to Africa in her search for freedom. It is necessary to place the study of marronage in a general context from which that novel emerges as it speaks to how specific Confiant’s treatment of marronage is. He engages slave rebellion and links it to Pan-Africanism – considering the maroon negro’s burning desire to return to his roots in Africa – and also brings feminism in the debate by focusing on the role of a woman who is the leader of the maroon negroes. In Flight to Freedom (2006), one of the fundamental works on marronage, Alvin O. Thompson describes the importance of the phenomenon in the Americas more generally. He portrays it as a revolt action which is part of the fabric of all societies where slavery existed in the Americas: that resistance to exploitation is one of the core features of the diaspora. As Oruno D. Lara writes: For blacks, to exist is to resist the capitalist stronghold which is seeking to neutralize, to annihilate, to liquidate them physically and culturally. In this regard, it must be noted that the diaspora was forged in a dynamic framework of resistance, symbolized by a movement extending over six centuries without interruption. There is no existence without resistance; this will never be emphasized enough. Those communities within the diaspora which have expressed their existence the most are still the ones which have resisted with the greatest zeal. (Lara quoted in Harris, 1982: 59–60)

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But it is above all the nègre marron who himself embodies all the qualities which Eurocentrism denied the black man. The nègre marron is a brave black Caribbean man who refuses the domination of the plantation system and its slavery, and seeks refuge deep in the forest where he creates a community of marrons; together, they work to undermine the domination and exploitation of the plantation system. He is the opposite of the cowardly brainless Africans who never achieve maturity and remain as children forever in Eurocentric writings. In Le Discours antillais (translated as Caribbean Discourse), Edouard Glissant refers to the nègre marron as the courageous hero who openly opposed the mainstream policy of slave owners and plantation proprietors who, for their part, turned the image of the nègre marron into an assassin or a vulgar bandit (Glissant quoted in Confiant, 2006: 169). The Anti-Racism Struggle of Women in the Black Diaspora Heremakhonon, written by the Guadeloupean writer, Maryse Condé and published in 1976, is undoubtedly a conventional ‘return to Africa’ story. Drawing upon her own experiences in Guinea, Condé complicates the well-known trope of locating an unproblematic homeland within continental Africa. In several ways, her protagonist, Veronica Mercier, a Guadeloupean-Caribbean researcher-academic, acts in a way which shows Condé’s own determination to link up with Africa. Written in a first-person narrative, Veronica’s experiences as a philosophy teacher in a local school forms the backbone of Condé’s novelistic narrative. While working as a teacher, Veronica becomes friends with Saliou (the director of the school), and shortly afterwards, enters into a relationship with Ibrahima Sory, the minister of defence and interior. It is through these two relationships that Veronica begins to witness postcolonial Africa, or more specifically, the ideologicalpolitical face of the post-colonial African state. Veronica Mercier resists the derogatory qualifiers and treatment Eurocentrism earns her, and fights to reconnect with her roots which she is convinced are in Africa. That gesture in itself is a fight for freedom and a genuine form of resistance. Heremakhonon is a novel of PanAfrican resistance to Eurocentrism and a search for a black Caribbean identity where the protagonist is feminine. The alienation caused by physical and mental displacement and accentuated by Eurocentric indoctrination is obvious when she refers to herself as a patient in Heremakhonon. By referring to herself as ‘an invalid, Mr. Minister,

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seeking therapy’ (Condé, 2000: 26), she sets up this quest towards a ‘Veronica who is healed’ and who has ‘reconciled with Africans and with herself’ (2000: 56). This sickness resonates with one of the general characteristics of the female rebel Caribbean slave. Thompson (2006: 50) writes that one of the reasons behind the departure from the plantation or the world of slavery was fear and sickness. Veronica Mercier explains her attraction to Ibrahima Sory in these terms: ‘The truth is I am attracted to him, this nigger with ancestors’ (Condé, 2000: 28); she eventually appropriates him as ‘my nigger with ancestors’ (2000: 35). At this level, we can read Veronica’s decision to relocate to Africa as a joyous return to what she sees to be a primitive life, as well as a silent unexpected paradise (Thompson, 2006). Ibrahima Sory is seen by Veronica as the gree-gree or magic medicine that will cure her, gracing her with a new and better past through this rebirth: ‘I came to find a cure. Ibrahima Sory, I know, will be the marabout’s gree-gree. We’ll exchange our childhoods and our past. Through him I shall at last be proud to be what I am. He wasn’t branded. You can see that’ (Condé, 2000: 39). This resonates with Barbara Bush’s (1990) argument which illustrates how enslaved women resisted slavery and went beyond that by maintaining and transmitting African culture. That late action can be perceived as contributing to planting the seed of Pan-Africanism. Barbara Bush’s work captures in all its dimensions the forgotten role of female Caribbean women fighters. Anti-racism Today: How Far We Have Come Although so many people think we are beyond race, anti-racism should certainly be one of the main concerns of today’s society. Whilst the previous section revealed the deep roots of anti-racism, in this section, I illustrate how racism can be branded as exceptional rather than a characteristic feature of everyday society. It was a flail in the past and it is still a plague today; it simply metamorphosed in relation to the dynamics of contemporary society. Emmett Till’s mother’s response to her son’s murder, I Can’t Breathe, Black Lives Matter and the kneeling of players in the US National Football League (NFL) are all examples of Black resistance seen through Nègre marron and Heremakhonon. Critical Race Theory (CRT) provides the appropriate lens for a scrutinisation of race issues both in the two books referred to above, and in today’s US. Namely, Derrick Bell (1987) and Alan Freeman (1978) were amongst scholars

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who were frustrated with the slow pace of racial reform in the United Sates: they argued that traditional approaches of combating racism were producing smaller gains. The emergence of the CRT movement provided a solid launch pad for a battle for black liberation. Jet, an African American weekly magazine, published a photo of Emmett’s corpse in its 15 September 1955 issue, and soon the mainstream media picked up on the story; on 23 September of the same year, the all-white jury deliberated for less than an hour before issuing a verdict of ‘not guilty’, explaining that they believed that the state had failed to prove the identity of the body.

I Can’t Breathe: Eric Garner’s Case and the Shooting of Mike Brown in Ferguson On 17 July 2014, Eric Garner died in Staten Island, New York City, after a New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer put him in (what has been described as) an illegal chokehold for fifteen to nineteen seconds while arresting him. NYPD officers approached Garner on suspicion of selling ‘single cigarettes’ from packs without tax stamps. After Garner told the police that he was tired of being harassed and that he was not selling cigarettes, the officers went to arrest him. When Officer Pantaleo tried to take Garner’s wrist behind his back, Garner pulled his arms away. Still on white racist violence, one can cite the shooting of Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old young black teenager that happened on 9 August 2014, on a quiet side street, in the suburb of St Louis in Ferguson, Missouri. BBC News entirely captures the speed and incongruous aspect of the incident in its 25 November 2014 edition. A close examination of the narratives at this level reveals that Garner’s behaviour echoes the bravery and rebellion of the maroon Negro in Confiant’s novel. As stated in the first part of this chapter, the refusal to comply on the side of the blacks is justified by the relentless harassment and ill-treatment they are subjugated to, by the whites. Much like Garner, the maroon Negro revolts against the white slave master and plantation owner because of the atrocities and cruelties that enslaved people suffer. That excessive violence meted out to black bodies causes a physical violent reaction from them, regardless of the context. Through this, we see the intersections between the Pan-African-era slave rebellion and resistance to the anti-black violence of today’s America.

Kneeling and the National Anthem Colin Kaepernick, a biracial athlete, was adopted and raised by a white family and became the San

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Francisco 49ers quarterback. He first protested on 27 August 2016, when he refused to stand for the playing of the national anthem in protest of racial inequities in the United States (Wyche, 2016). He later transitioned to taking a knee in protest – saying he was doing so to show more respect for military veterans – which has become the iconic pose attached to Kaepernick. He received a lot of criticism from football fans who said that it was disrespectful to the United States. However, Steve Wyche (2016), an NFL media reporter links Kaepernick’s action to Civil Rights and other sports professionals in these terms: By taking a stand for civil rights, Kaepernick, 28, joins other athletes, like the NBA’s Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul, LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony and several WNBA players in using their platform and status to raise awareness to issues affecting minorities in the U.S. (Wyche, 2016)

In The New York Times, Gilmore (2017) covers President Donald Trump’s reaction to Kaepernick’s protests in these terms: ‘Mr. Kaepernick has been heavily criticized by people like President Trump, who claims that an N.F.L. player who kneels during the playing of the national anthem “disrespects our flag” and should be fired’. The same source adds that other critics shared President Trump’s view, when it writes: ‘others argue that he [Kaepernick] is out of bounds as an activist who mixes sports with politics’. This, once more, stresses the relevance of Critical Race Theory in this paper. CRT confronts ‘race-neutrality’ in policy and practice and acknowledges the value of ‘the black voice’ that is often marginalised. CRT challenges past and present institutional arrangements in sports that racially discriminate, subjugate and oppress (Hylton, 2010). Although Kaepernick’s actions initially did not attract any significant attention, one cannot ignore the fact that the protest ultimately had a significant effect. He is seen by some analysts as an actor of ‘good protest’, for instance, in The New York Times, 20 November 2017, in these terms: The problem is that Mr. Kaepernick’s critics, and most of America, don’t really understand how protests work. Our textbooks and national mythology celebrate moments when single acts of civil disobedience, untainted by political organizations, seemed to change the course of history. But the ideal of the ‘good’ protest – one that materialized from an individual’s epiphany – is a fantasy. More often, effective protest is

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One can read in the US sports men and women and their protest a burning thirst and search for something they need and cannot get, and cannot understand, as Kaepernick put it in his interview with Wyche (2016). This protest is a search or pursuit for an identity, as Veronica Mercier, the protagonist in Maryse Condé’s novel Heremakhonon did. As the first part of the paper has shown, that Caribbean woman left her native island and moved to France, where she realised that she did not belong. She therefore proceeded to Africa, hoping to find her roots there. Veronica’s search for identity and ‘sanity’ and ‘belonging’ is so dear to her that she refers to herself as ‘an invalid’. This is an impressive and novel form of search for one’s identity, which cannot be found in the national anthem or the nation’s flag anymore. As his protests seek to show how blackness is too often rendered outside of national concern, one also notices that Kaepernick and his followers embark on the kind of journey Veronica Mercier opted for decades ago, although hers was in the context of the Caribbean woman’s quest for her bearing, roots; a search that she hoped to end or complete successfully, through the Pan-African channel, or the return to Africa. For Kaepernick, it is to place blackness at the heart of America. Conclusion This paper has shown that anti-racism can best be described as a ‘predisposition’, or a state of mind which can be followed by action, as a result of racism. The discussion started with Pan-Africanism and the racial resistance that comes with it. It gradually journeyed toward a more recent manifestation of racism and its antithesis, anti-racism. From the 1955 racist murder of Emmett Till in the Southern US to more recent confrontations like those dubbed, ‘I Can’t Breathe’, ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Take a Knee’. The chapter demonstrated that racist treatments always trigger anti-racist protests or movements, regardless of the epoch or location, and it also showed that anti-racism does not always oppose whites to blacks because in some few cases, certain actors have sided with the camp of those at the other extreme end of the colour line; although not often, whites have sided with blacks in anti-racist struggle. The chapter has demonstrated that there is a strong continuity

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or connection between the Pan-African struggle and the contemporary anti-racist protests which have taken various forms: from the violence meted out to blacks by whites, to the current debate around sports and the marks of patriotism, like respect for the national anthem and the national flag in the US. The chapter showed that the Pan-African struggle, the Civil Rights Movement and the current revolts within the sport arena all aim at the achievement of freedom for blacks, and the respect and assertion of their rights. One of the points that the chapter also highlighted is that from the relatively remote Pan-African struggle to the current anti-racist fight, women have been firmly determined and the two examples that were examined are the heroine in Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon and the women whose voices and actions cannot be underrated in movements like Black Lives Matter. References BBC News. (2014). Ferguson Protests: What We Know about Michael Brown’s Last Minutes. 25 November. Available at: www.bbc.com/news/ world-us-canada-28841715 (Accessed 12 November 2017). Bell, D. A. (1987). And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice. New York: Basic Books. Bush, B. (1990). Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650–1838. Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann (Caribbean). Condé, M. (2000). Heremakhonon. Trans. Richard Philcox. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Confiant, R. (2006). Nègre marron. Paris: Ecritures. Freeman, A. D. (1978). Legitimizing Racial Discrimination through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine. Minnesota Law Review, 62, 1049–1119. Gilmore, G. E. (2017). Colin Kaepernick and the Myth of the ‘Good’ Protest. The New York Times, 20 November. Available at: www.nytimes. com/2017/11/20/opinion/kaepernickprotest-kneel-nfl.html (Accessed 24 November 2017). Glissant, E. (1989). Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville, VA:

University of Virginia Press. Harris, J. E. (ed.) (1982). Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora. Washington, DC. Howard University Press. Hylton, K. (2010). How a Turn to Critical Race Theory Can Contribute to Our Understanding of ‘Race’, Racism and Anti-racism in Sport. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 45(3), 335–354. Jet Magazine. (1955). Story about Emmett Till. 15 September. Johnson Washington, C. (2006). Women and Resistance in the African Diaspora, with Special Focus on the Caribbean, Africa and the USA. PSU McNair Scholars Online Journal, 2(1), Article 31. Thompson, A. O. (2006). Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. Wyche, S. (2016). Colin Kaepernick Explains Why He Sat during National Anthem. San Francisco 49ers. 27 August. Available at: www.nfl.com/ news/story/0ap3000000691077/ article/colin-kaepernick-explainswhy-he-sat-during-national-anthem (Accessed 12 November 2017).

14 | F I GH TI NG F O R S UR V I V A L : L ES S ONS F ROM TH E P A N A F R I CA N R E S I S T A NC E

Tony Talburt

Introduction Black resistance campaigns against Western systems of slavery, colonialism, racial discrimination and exploitation, whether on the continent of Africa, or throughout the Diaspora, have been a significant, almost defining feature of the Black experience. By making particular reference to two important aspects of the Pan African struggle, namely the Black anti-slavery campaigns and the ‘back to Africa’ campaigns of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this chapter discusses two important lessons that can be drawn from these past experiences: this is done within the context of systemic forms of racial discrimination and injustice that prevails in some contemporary Western societies. The chapter argues that although the formal systems of slavery, colonialism and racial discrimination have been legally outlawed in Western societies, there is a need for Black people to continue to organise campaigns of resistance against racial discrimination, drawing upon some of the lessons or experiences during the colonial era. The political and nationalist developments in the USA, particularly highlighted through Donald Trump’s, strong anti-immigration rhetoric, as well as the increasing number of race hate crimes in Britain, which seems to have intensified since last year’s Brexit vote, and the increasing popular support for far-right political parties and the increase in ultranationalism in several countries in Europe, underscores why there is a need for collective and organised Black campaigns of resistance. This chapter discusses two important lessons or patterns that were important features in Black Pan African struggles during the colonial era, which are equally significant in terms of how Black organisations seek to fight against Western forms of racial or ethnic discrimination today. The first of these lessons or patterns is the significance of employing a wide range of network support from the Black community, through the use of collective campaigns of resistance. The second

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lesson is to counteract the negative portrayal of Black people and their communities, by presenting a positive Afri-centric message and philosophy which offers a sense of hope and liberation. The chapter argues that these two features were present throughout the colonial period during what Geiss (1974) referred to as the first phase or ‘protoPan Africanism’ period, and, therefore, important in the current climate as means of challenging Western systems of racial discrimination. It is therefore important to clarify the meaning of the term Pan Africanism as used in this chapter. Pan Africanism, in its broadest sense, refers to the establishment of Black organisations, campaigns or ideologies which seek to challenge particular aspects of European dominance or exploitative influence over Africa and Africans whether on the continent or in the African Diaspora. Talburt (Traoré and Talburt, 2017) has argued that the Pan African movement and ideology should not be considered as a solely twentieth-century initiative, as many features of these Black resistance campaigns were present in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tony Martin (2012), in the preface to his book, also pointed out that although the Pan African concept was coined by Henry Sylvester Williams in 1897, when he established the Pan African Association which met in London, what Williams established was the ‘popularisation of an expression’ that had been established long before ‘without the benefit of a name’ (Martin, 2012: vii). Many of the features of the twentieth-century Pan African ideology and movement – such as ‘back to Africa’, calls for African independence and an Afri-centric world view based on Black pride – all had their roots in the colonial period, long before the start of the twentieth century (Traoré and Talburt, 2017). The term resistance, as used in this chapter, refers to organised and sustained campaigns by Black people against European or Western systems and ideas of domination in the form of slavery, colonialism and also aspects of psychological and socio-cultural forms of control. The focus here is on organised campaigns of resistance through collective Black organisations that seek to challenge the prevailing exploitative and discriminatory systems and ideologies of the Western political establishment. Such resistance campaigns were important during the period of colonialism and slavery, and as such, should be continued today in light of the changing, but equally exploitative systems of inequality and injustice that are still present in many Western societies. Just as Black people and organisations in the Diaspora refused to sit

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back and wait for ‘others’ to liberate them during the colonial era, similar approaches and resistance campaigns against Western systems of exploitation are relevant today. In this context, therefore, the chapter argues that Black resistance campaigns have been closely associated with, or organised through, the use of pressure groups. These groups either attempt to raise public awareness of a particular issue of exploitation, discrimination or injustice, or they seek to put pressure on the authorities to change some aspect of society with which they are not satisfied. In many instances, members of the Black community formed their own organisations or pressure groups specifically dedicated to a particular aspect of Black struggle. For example, some of the leading Pan Africanists such as Henry Sylvester Williams, Marcus Garvey or William Du Bois, were all associated with particular pressure groups or organised campaign groups; Pan-African Association, Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and Niagara Movement respectively. In each case, these Black pressure groups were established to raise public awareness as well as challenge the prevailing colonial attitudes and systems of governments so as to implement change. The Sons of Africa Movement in the eighteenth century, of which Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano were members, or ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘I Can’t Breathe’ campaigns today, are examples of Black pressure groups established to organise specific campaigns of resistance against European or Western systems of oppression against Black people. It was in response to these forms of racial discrimination and marginalisation that Sivanandan suggested that for many Black people, they ‘exist on the margins of European culture and … are creatures of two worlds and of none … marginal man par excellence’ (Sivanandan, 1982: 82). This concept of marginality – whether in Africa or the African Diaspora – has been central to why Black people have engaged in campaigns of resistance. Wherever European systems of colonialism, slavery and exploitation existed, therefore, Black resistance campaigns were never very far away. From the moment Europeans engaged with Africans and sought to control or dominate them (by attempting to control and exploit them or their countries’ resources), African resistance campaigns, specifically against European domination and control, were established (Mazrui, 1986). Had there been no European slavery, colonisation and exploitation, there would have been no Black resistance and Pan African movement. From the very beginning of the

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European colonisation process into Africa in the fifteenth century, its leaders organised resistance campaigns against these advances. Ranger (1985: 48–49) exposes how African leaders were prepared to resist the European take over and control of their kingdoms. Thompson further asserts that once the partition of Africa was officially sanctioned by European powers in 1885, violent forms of resistance took place everywhere from the north to the south of the African continent: for example, the Battle of Adowa in 1896 or the Zulu wars in the 1870s (Thompson, 1969). However, Thompson is only partially correct: Black resistance in Africa started almost 400 years earlier than the nineteenth century: it began once it became clear to the Africans that aspects of European interests were closely associated with economic exploitation. This point was powerfully made by Mazrui when he spoke about ‘primary resistance’, meaning forms of resistance which occurred on the African continent from the very moment the Europeans arrived to conquer it (Mazrui, 1986: 283). Thompson (1987: 107–108) asserted that the English slave trader and sea captain, Sir John Hawkins, on his second and third visits to the West African coast to secure African labourers to sell in the Americas, was frustrated by the ‘organised attacks’ which they experienced at the hands of local Black people. Thompson also describes how, at times, Black people were very often involved in open warfare and regular military campaigns against European slave traders on the African coast. He cited examples from John Hawkins in 1564, who claimed that some of his best men were killed by a band of Africans, after some of his crew members had gone into the interior, against his own advice (Thompson, 1987: 107–112). In fact, the Portuguese writer, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, writing in the middle of the fifteenth century, described a slave raiding attempt by the Portuguese along the West African coast, where they were ambushed by a well organised group of Africans (Newitt, 2010: 47–52). At every point, therefore, where European or Western systems of racial discrimination and exploitation existed, there have been forms of Black resi Black Collectivism against Western Discrimination and Exploitation The first lesson to be noted from these resistance campaigns during the colonial era which is applicable today is the significance of immediate and tireless campaigning through Black community networks and organisations. Not only was the nature of Pan African

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resistance in the colonial era immediate, targeted and organised; these were often collective Black resistance campaigns. For example, in eighteenth-century Britain, one such organised and collective vehicle used to challenge Western exploitation was the use of churches where a readily, though not always predominantly Black, audience was more easily available. Far from being docile or merely accepting a meek and mild Christian perspective, some Black people were able to use the Bible or aspects of the Christian theology as channels through which to propagate anti-slavery sentiments and ideologies. This is best exemplified through Quobna Ottobah Cugoano: in 1787, his publication (Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery) was the first book written by a Black British person that attacked the system of slavery. Having been kidnapped from what is present-day Ghana at about the age of thirteen, he was taken to the Caribbean as a slave, before eventually coming to England. He adopted a Christian perspective in his writings and anti-slavery campaigns and vehemently attacked the evils associated with slavery. He called upon fellow Biblebelieving Christians in Britain to treat all peoples, including Black people, with dignity and equality. Cugoano thus became one of the first outspoken anti-slavery campaigners in the eighteenth century. Cugoano’s brand of Christianity was neither meek nor mild. He used the Bible as a tool with which to both appeal to, as well as attack, the White authorities. He famously warned of dire possible punishments from God, which would befall those engaged in treating Black people unjustly (Cugoano, 1999: 79). In this sense therefore, Cugoano used his close associates, his book, his speeches, contextualised through his religious beliefs, as vehicles through which to spread his message. Far more radical than Cugoano, was the Jamaican-born Robert Wedderburn, who was prepared to engage in violent acts to challenge and undermine what he considered the oppressive British government of the 1820s (Hoyles, 2004). Wedderburn was born in 1762 in Jamaica to a White Scottish father and a Jamaican slave mother but was later sent to live in London, England. He was very much involved in organising a Black resistance campaign in the 1820s aimed broadly at improving the living conditions Black people were experiencing in Britain at the time. Although his central mission was linked to the Spencean movement which was more politically aligned with the ideals of providing social benefits such as land and property rights to the British working class

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more generally, Wedderburn was also very definitely concerned with the plight of the Black population in Britain and in his homeland of Jamaica. Rather than sitting back or remaining silent in the face of European discrimination, Wedderburn’s response was immediate, targeted and, through his weekly ‘preaching’, he regularly addressed up to 200 people with his presentations or lectures on ‘theology, morality, natural philosophy’ (Fryer, 1984: 223). He was particularly inspired by the events pertaining to the Peterloo disturbances in Manchester in 1819 where thousands of people had gathered to demand parliamentary reform, but were met with police or military brutality in which about a dozen of them were killed and several hundreds wounded by these government forces. His call was for people to learn to ‘use the gun, the dagger, the cutlass and the pistol’ (Fryer, 1984: 224). Wedderburn’s radical views, some of which supported violent actions against the government forces, were the main reason for which he was subsequently arrested and charged with sedition and blasphemy. According to one source, Wedderburn was actually planning to ‘incite revolution on the streets of the imperial capital’ (Rice, 2003: 11). As Hoyles (2004) points out, Wedderburn had never forgotten how his own parents had been mistreated physically at the hands of their White plantation owners and in this sense, was certainly one of Britain’s most radical Black anti-slavery campaigners. Through the use of speeches and his writings, Wedderburn was able to reach a fairly wide audience on a weekly basis at his ‘church’ meetings. The key point from these early Pan African resistance campaigns in nineteenth-century Britain was that these individuals used the established institutions of the day, namely the church or mainstream religion, to organise a collective response. The aim was to use these movements as vehicles to raise public awareness and also put pressure on the government of the day to at least hear about their grievances. In this sense, they, like Martin Luther King during the civil rights campaigns in the United States of America, and the anti-apartheid resistance campaigner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, used religion as one of the main sources through which to resist White discrimination, exploitation and oppression. Although there were charismatic individuals who led these movements, what was important was to gather some degree of support in order to give the initiatives greater effectiveness and popular backing. This continues to be a

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crucial ingredient in such resistance campaigns as Black Lives Matter, which is briefly discussed below. Counteracting Western Negativity with Positive Black Liberation The second lesson we can learn from these historical experiences of Black resistance is the significance of propagating a more positive narrative of the Black experience and history. Whereas for many people in Western society, then and now, Africa and Africans were often the subjects of negative feelings and attitudes or were regarded as objects of spectacle and entertainment (Killingray, 1994: 14, 15), for some Black people, a central feature of their resistance movement and ideology was the assertion of the humanity of the African. As a consequence, there was an interest to return to, or reconnect with, the African continent, whether physically or symbolically. One of the features of the Pan African movement and ideology during the colonial era was the desire on the part of Africans in the Diaspora to relink with Africa, thereby presenting the continent in a positive manner. In this sense there was a need to organise initiatives to reconnect and even repatriate to Africa. These kinds of initiatives were often popularly labelled as ‘back to Africa’ campaigns. Martin (2012) points out that from the moment some Africans were separated from their homeland, there was a longing and desire to return. Chevannes (1995) quite rightly asserted that the doctrine of repatriation is kindred to a lineage of ideas and forms of actions 400 years old. These ideas were closely linked with the onset of European slavery and colonialism and did not wait until Garvey popularised the concept in the twentieth century. Chevannes speaks of an ‘idealisation of Africa’, which was a feature which could be identified in the nineteenth century if not before, not only in Jamaica, where he focused much of his work, but also in the wider African Diaspora. For him, this attempt to reconnect with Africa took two main forms. The first was on the physical need to return or repatriate to Africa as an ‘ideal home’: the second centred upon attempts or movements pertaining to a symbolic point of reference denoting a sense of identity and Black pride. These initiatives, whilst often driven by a stand-out individual, were very definitely organised through a collective response in which the significance of Africa, driven by a more Afri-centric perspective, was adopted. The purpose of these ‘back to Africa’ campaigns was

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not only to escape Western discrimination and oppression, but also to raise awareness of the significance of Africa and all things African, and thereby raise the level of Black consciousness. From the late nineteenth century, Edward Blyden advocated the repatriation of Black people from America to Africa. He declared that Black people needed to be free in body and mind and bid farewell to the scenes of bondage and discipline and return to the land of their fathers where they could attain larger opportunities and loftier achievements (Marable and Mullings, 2000: 152). Furthermore, Geiss pointed out that just as America had used the Monroe Doctrine of the 1820s to declare to the world that America was for Americans, so, some Black people had, in the same nineteenth century, declared that Africa was for the Africans (Geiss, 1974: 41). According to Fryer, it was Martin Delaney, an African American, who was one of the very first people to use the phrase, ‘Africa for the Africans’ (Fryer, 1984: 273). In 1859 Delaney was responsible for setting up a voluntary re-emigration to Africa initiative to help build up a modern nation on African soil and for the halting of European imperialism. His policy and thinking was that Africa should be for the African race and for Black men to rule them (Geiss, 1969: 190). Although Geiss referred to Black men, during the same period when Delaney was engaging in his ‘back to Africa’ campaigns, some Black women, such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman in the United States of America, were actively fighting for Black liberation, as examples of nineteenth-century Black Nationalists in their own right (Wright, 2009). Although this particular expedition failed to materialise, it was important in the formulation of a movement which sought specifically to engage in the physical repatriation of Black people to Africa, and raise awareness of the significance of Black pride and identity. This partially helps to explain why such terms as ‘African and Ethiopian’ had been proudly used by former slaves (such as Cugoano and Equiano) as well as African Americans in the nineteenth century (Geiss, 1969). Importantly, the term was not used in reference to single entities, but to the idea of a much wider collective community of Africans in the eighteenth century. There were a number of other notable Black people involved in repatriation initiatives to Africa. For example, Paul Cuffee attempted to help free Black people in America settle in Sierra Leone and in 1815 actually succeeded in transporting thirty-eight people to Africa (Thompson, 1969). The Barbadian Dr Albert Thorne was a firm

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advocate of the idea of Black people repatriating to Africa during the period 1890s–1920s. William Henry Ellis led an expedition to Ethiopia in 1903 and Alfred Charles Sam of Oklahoma sought to link his ‘back to Africa’ initiative with his Akim Trading Company in Ghana in 1912 (Thompson, 1969). This would become a significant feature of later twentieth-century Pan African thought. What is significant about these Black campaigns was that they sought to raise public awareness and influence change. This was, and is, at the heart of what all pressure groups continue to do today. Without seeking to necessarily become part of the government, they seek to challenge the authorities. At a time when racial discrimination was rife, it was important for Black people to assert their own identity and ambitions, by helping to raise public awareness of the conditions affecting Black people, as well as raising Black pride. In the words of Marcus Garvey himself, despite the fact that the world had not valued Black people at their true worth, ‘we are climbing up so fast, and with such force, that every day the world is changing its attitude towards us’ (Blaisdell, 2004: 45). The Legacy of Black Resistance With the attainment of political independence in most of the African and Caribbean colonies from the late 1950s through to the 1970s, the citizens of these countries became politically free, but economically and socio-culturally locked into Western systems of control and domination, characterised by various forms of racial discrimination. Many people in these former colonies, as well as thousands of Black people living in the USA and Britain, still feel marginalised and disempowered, and are, therefore, engaging in resistance struggles to raise public awareness of their plight and put pressure on governments to address their situations. They have sought to do this through at least two different ways: the first was through Black collective action while the second was through initiatives that focus on Black people’s humanity. Black resistance against Western systems of slavery, racism and exploitation forced some Black people to challenge these dominant or prevailing political and economic systems through a variety of forms. Sitting back and doing nothing was not an option. What if Rosa Parks had not sat on that seat? What if Colin Kaepernick had not knelt during the playing of the US National Anthem before the start of a NFL game as a peaceful gesture against police brutality and anti-Black discrimination?

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Both these Black-led campaigns helped to raise public awareness, and the civil rights struggle in particular, resulted in significant legislative changes in America. Alicia Garza, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter Campaign group, started a movement which has a simple and clear purpose which is to fight for a society where Black lives actually matter. There are twenty-six chapters of Black Lives Matter across the USA and, according to Garza, there is no one leader of the organisation. Instead, this ‘new civil rights’ movement ‘combines localised power structures with an all-inclusive ethos that incorporates women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer activists’ (The Guardian, 2015). In this regard, therefore, Black Lives Matter has been able to appeal to a very wide cross-section of the society, rather than the typical charismatic male figure. Furthermore, just as the Black resistance campaigns during the colonial era would later inspire other liberation struggles, so Black Lives Matter campaigns have connected with and inspired other democracy protests across America and even other countries. The Palestinian solidarity activists, Native Lives Matter in Rapid City, and medical students calling themselves ‘the White Coats for Black Lives Protests’, have all been inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests (Petersen-Smith, 2015). Despite the brutalities and negativity that many Black people have had to encounter, the resistance campaigns of Black Lives Matter and the NFL protests are offering a message of Black liberty, equality and hope. Both the civil rights and the Black Lives Matter campaigns helped in providing platforms for Black people to engage in a collective response. In common with the Black resistance campaigns during the colonial era which attempted to fight for Black liberation and equality, the Black Lives Matter campaigns have fulfilled both objectives or lessons. First, these campaigns have had a broad reach across the whole of the United States, and have become much more ‘multiracial’ (Peterson-Smith, 2015). Second, Black Lives Matter campaigns have not only brought this issue to the attention of the government, but also demonstrate that racial discrimination is still a significant feature in American society. In addition, these campaigns continue the tradition of a Black articulation of their own identity, dignity and pride. In this sense, therefore, these current day campaigns have continued a Black resistance tradition that has its roots in the early Pan African struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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With the victory of Sebastian Kurz’s Austrian Peoples’ Party on 15 October 2017 for the first time in Austrian politics, two rightwing parties have both increased their shares of the popular vote and account for nearly two-thirds of the total votes cast in a general election. The last few years have also seen the rise of Marine Le Pen’s right-wing party, the increased popularity of the right-wing extremist political party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), as well as ultranationalist movements in Poland. What these right-wing, extremist political parties have in common is their anti-immigration ideology. These global developments suggest that far from retreating to a corner, Black people will need to continue engaging in resistance campaigns to raise public awareness and influence government decisions in order to challenge such alarming and worrying trends in Western society that often seek to undermine the rights of minority ethnic communities. In conclusion, this chapter has demonstrated that during the colonial era various groups of Black campaigners fought against Western oppression and racial discrimination incorporating two important strategies. The first of these was to engage in collective action, while the second involved the conscious decision to posit a more positive and liberating narrative of Africans and Africa. In this sense, they were part of the first wave of Pan Africanism seeking to liberate Black people from European and Western domination. In addition, this chapter has argued that the current forms of Black protests need to continue their struggle in order for Black people to live their lives in some degree of comfort, security, dignity and equality across the Diaspora. It is important that Black groups continue owning, controlling and engaging in resistance campaigns against Western systems of injustice and exploitation, by fighting for, and contributing towards, their own liberation as was carried out by the first wave of Pan African resistance fighters. References Blaisdell, B. (ed.) (2004). Selected Writings and Speeches of Marcus Garvey. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Chevannes, B. (1995). Rastafari: Roots and Ideology. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Cugoano, Q. O. (1999). Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and

Other Writings. New York: Penguin Books. Fryer, P. (1984). Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press. Geiss, I. (1969). Pan-Africanism, Journal of Contemporary History, 4(1): 187–200.

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Geiss, I. (1974). The Pan-African Movement. London: Methuen. The Guardian. (2015). #BlackLivesMatter: The Birth of a New Civil Rights Movement. Available at: www. theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/19/ blacklivesmatter-birth-civil-rightsmovement (Accessed 1 November 2017). Hoyles, M. (2004). The Axe Laid to the Root: The Story of Robert Wedderburn. Hertford: Hansib Publications. Killingray, D. (ed.) (1994). Africans in Britain. Ilford, Essex: Frank Cass. Marable, M. and Mullings, L. (eds) (2000). Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform and Renewal. An African American Anthology. Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Martin, T. (2012). Caribbean History: From Pre-Colonial Origins to the Present. Boston, MA and London: Pearson. Mazrui, A. (1986). The Africans: A Triple Heritage. London: BBC Publications. Newitt, M. (eds) (2010). The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Petersen-Smith, K. (2015). Black Lives Matter: A New Movement Takes Place. International Socialist Review, 96. Available at: https://isreview.

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org/issue/96/black-lives-matter (Accessed 16 November 2017). Ranger, T. O. (1985). African Initiatives and Resistance in the Face of Partition and Conquest. In A. Adu Boahen (ed.), General History of Africa, vol. 7: Africa under Colonial Domination 1880–1935. London: Heinemann, 45–62. Rice, A. (2003). Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. London: Continuum. Sivanandan, A. (1982). A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance. London: Pluto Press. Thompson, V. B. (1969). Africa and Unity: The Evolution of Pan Africanism. London and Harlow: Longman. Thompson, V. (1987). The Making of the African Diaspora in the Americas 1441–1900. New York: Longman. Traoré, M. and Talburt, T. (eds) (2017). Fight for Freedom: Black Resistance and Identity. Accra: Sub Saharan Publishers. Wright, M. (2009). Pale by Comparison: Black Liberal Humanism and the Postwar Era in the African Diaspora. In Darlene Clarke Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds), Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 260–276.

15 | C OU LD I T H A P P E N H E R E ? CA NA DA ’S MU LTI C U LTUR A L O A S I S A N D G L OBA L R IG HT WING D RI F T

Sam Tecle and Carl E. James

On Friday 14 July 2017, Canada’s national Public Broadcaster (CBC) re-broadcast a radio programme titled ‘American Fascism: It Can’t Happen Here?’ on its popular Ideas strand. The episode, originally aired on 28 October 2016, opened with then candidate Donald Trump warning Americans that things will ‘get worse and worse’ – including having ‘more World Trade Centers’ – if measures are not taken to stop Mexican and Muslim ‘criminals’ from entering the United States.1 On 15 September 2017, following the summer of white supremacist and fascist actions (for instance, the clash of protesters in Charlottesville),2 CBC also aired a programme titled: ‘There Is No Such Thing as the “White Race” – or Any Other Race’ (CBC, September 2017), which featured the host, Michael Enright, in conversation with Princeton’s African American professor and historian, Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People (2010). Enright and Painter discussed the lack of a scientific basis for race, and that the DNA of humans is 99 per cent the same, yet ideas about differences between races structure politics and society at large. Having established that the meanings assigned to different visible characteristics have shifted over time, much of the discussion went on to focus on contemporary racial dynamics in the US and elsewhere. Painter pointed out that to be white in the United States, means you don’t have to think about your privilege or how you came to have it, you don’t have to think about being white. And she continued to make the point that, increasingly now, more white people are having to deal with the history and privilege associated with being white. These radio programmes represent the tendency of Canadians to look at other countries, especially their southern neighbour, as places where white supremacy, fascism and racism exist. Indeed, as the host of the CBC Ideas programme indicated when speaking of the US political

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climate: ‘The idea that today we have a rising leader who’s disseminating a level of fascist rhetoric against a segment of the population, is not really something we have seen in this country’. This tendency of Canadians to not see racism and fascism occurring within their borders is framed by the notion that multiculturalism has immunised them from the political, cultural and social virus of divisiveness. So while of late, the political cultures of major industrialised nations, like the US, the UK, France and Germany,3 have been shifting to the right, thereby contributing to the unhooded and unmasked acts of brazen right-wing extremism, Canadians remain content in their protective cloak of multiculturalism. Hence, their question is not what is the nature and form of racism and fascism in Canada, but ‘could it happen here?’ In this chapter, we argue that the question is not if the right-wing drift (with all its negative social implications) could happen in Canada, but that it has always existed in Canada. In fact, Canada’s false perception of immunity is based on a multicultural discourse that not only obscures its own homegrown right-wing inclinations, but fosters a mythology of an oasis in which everyone – regardless of ethnicity, race, religion and culture – enjoys cultural freedom and tolerance of their differences. Central to this brand of multiculturalism is whiteness with its claims to universality, cultural tolerance (not acceptance) and polite individual racism (rather than systemic or structural). It is this latter brand of racism that cultural competence and unconscious bias ‘training’ is imagined to remedy. The fact is, rather than serving to promote benevolence, multiculturalism in Canada serves as the ideological cover that produces the logic and rationale by which Canadian racism is able to flourish. In this chapter, then, we push back against the presumption that similar fascist, racist conditions and actions do not exist in Canada, noting the cunning ways white supremacy masks the peculiarities of Canada’s right-wing political culture that allows for and produces the myth of Canadian social and cultural harmony. Canada’s Multiculturalism and the Pretensions of Colour-Blindness Introduced in 1971 by Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the Multicultural Policy emerged as a recommendation of the Bilingualism and Biculturalism Commission (1963–1970). This commission was established to inform the government of a way to address the growing diversity of the population due to increased immigration and the

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‘growing nationalist sentiment among French Canadians in Quebec’ (Haque, 2018: 261). The Commission was primarily mandated to: inquire into and report upon the existing state of bilingualism and biculturalism in Canada and to recommend what steps should be taken to develop the Canadian Confederation on the basis of an equal partnership between the two founding races, taking into account the contribution made by the other ethnic groups to the cultural enrichment of Canada and the measures that should be taken to safeguard that contribution. (Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, Book I, 1967, Appendix I; cited in Haque, 2018: 261)

Aside from its concern with the promotion of English–French harmony and opportunities for Canadians to become bilingual in both English and French, a central premise of the Commission, ‘especially in its early phase’, was that the country rested on an equal partnership between the English and French ‘founding races’ (Haque, 2018: 261). However, non-English and non-French Canadians challenged this notion, and in doing so, inspired the establishment of the policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework. The idea was that such a policy would be able to ‘preserve and enhance the multicultural heritage of Canadians’ while working to achieve the social, cultural, political and economic equality of all (Canadian Multicultural Act, July 1988; cited in James, 2010: 137). Interestingly, while French and English are recognised as languages that are integral to the preservation of French and English as ethnic groups – or ‘founding races’ – the same relationship is not ascribed to the languages of other ethnic groups. How then is it possible for minoritised language groups to ‘preserve and enhance’ their culture when there is no support for the medium (their language) by which they must do so? This imagination of Canada as a bilingual and bicultural nation is reflective of its colonial ideology in which its Indigenous population was not considered part of the political, economic and cultural foundation of the country. This purposeful absenting of the historical existence of Indigenous people helped to maintain the idea that Canada was an empty landmass, on which the French and English settled. So too were Africans – who were brought to Canada to become slaves – absent from the colonial script on which Canada built its multicultural discourse. But the political activities of the 1960s, by, for instance, the Red Power Movement and the Black Power Movement, as well as the

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economic and political power of the growing middle-class immigrant population – people, who on the basis of the point system, gained entry to the country because of the preference given to their high levels of education and occupational skills – likely helped to push Canada ‘to rearticulate its formulation for nation-building and belonging’ (Haque, 2018: 262). The fact is, Canadian multiculturalism was not merely to accommodate the growing cultural diversity of the nation at the time: it provided an opportunity to redefine or rearticulate the centrality of whiteness and advance a discourse of cultural neutrality, cultural democracy and colour-blindness that would appease the many ‘newcomers’ to the country and have them accept that they can ‘keep their culture’. Predicated on neoliberal ideology of meritocracy, cultural neutrality, cultural freedom and colour-blindness, Canada’s multicultural discourse conveys a static sense of culture which is perceived to be brought to the country by racialised ethnic groups other than French and English. Hence, cultural difference is in relation to English and French Canadians who are considered not to have any culture. So, while Canada might have been bicultural and bilingual – now multicultural and bilingual – ‘there is no official culture, nor does any ethnic group take precedence over any other’ as Prime Minister Trudeau asserted via Multiculturalism as Policy in 1971. Nevertheless, there is a prevailing construct of who ‘has’ culture – largely foreign Others who are marked by the ‘visibility’ of their bodies in relation to whiteness. Therefore, ‘differences’ in culture (regardless of being in Canada for generations) are used to explain the social conditions, achievements and problems of ‘foreign Others’. According to social theorist and cultural critic, Himani Bannerji (1996), Canada is an ‘imagined community’ where racialised people ‘remain an ambiguous presence and their existence a question mark’. Even so, they continue to live here as outsider-insiders of the nation which offers a proudly multicultural profile to the international community (1996: 105). Moreover, as James (forthcoming) writes: This ambiguous presence of racialized Canadians fosters an ambivalent and paradoxical relationship with racial difference – a difference that is both denied (‘We don’t see difference’) as it is re-inscribed – and in so doing scaffolds a pretention of Canada as a society, compared to the melting pot United States, that has long been a non-racial society.

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Often cited as one of the first – if not the first – country to adopt multiculturalism as an official policy and practice (Tierney, 2007), Canada has come to enjoy the distinction of multiculturalism as its greatest cultural and political export, as well as its most substantive claim to unique standing in the world. These commendations help to bolster the widely held belief among most Canadians that the society is unique and stands as one of the most multicultural, harmonious and tolerant (if not accepting) societies in the world, despite scholars’ criticisms of such claims (Bannerji, 2000; Barrett, 2015; Haque, 2018; James, 2010; Walcott, 2003). It is a discourse by which most Canadians have come to understand their conditions in society, as well as structure and make sense of their lives. The result is a multicultural discourse that is focused on the appearance of accepting difference without attention to how Canadian Multiculturalism’s ‘difference’ is constituted in and through whiteness.

Canada above the Fray? Alluding to and not deliberately engaging with the question and possibility of Canadian fascism, hate and extremist political actions – and doing so through the prism of the societal dynamics of the United States and Europe – allows Canadians to continuously position Canada as above the fray of such divisiveness and hateful rhetoric and actions, a positioning which belies the historical reality. The fact is: right-wing groups have long existed in Canada. For instance, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was formally established in Canada in 1920, and had chapters (with formidable memberships) across Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan (Barrett, 1987). And following the Second World War – specifically, between 1960 and 1970 – with increased unemployment, rising inflation and growing immigration due to changes in immigration legislation (as noted above) there was an exponential increase in right-wing groups, specifically neo-Nazi skinheads who primarily operated in urban centres. Quite telling is an incident on 24 October 1965 when two members of the KKK, Grand Dragons of the Klan from the State of Georgia in the United States, appeared on CBC and were allowed to spew hateful white supremacist rhetoric, espousing the moral superiority of whites (CBC, October 1965). This oft untold historical event indicates how those responsible for Canada’s public broadcaster were complicit in advancing

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right-wing sentiments even then and on which today’s right-wing groups have been able to build. According to Parent and Ellis (2014: 2–3), Canadian right-wing extremism is characterised by a large, loose, heterogeneous collection of groups and individuals espousing a wide range of grievances and positions, including: antigovernment/individual sovereignty, racism, fascism, white supremacy/ white nationalism, anti-Semitism, nativism/anti-immigration, antiglobalization/anti-free trade, anti-abortion, homophobia, anti-taxation, and pro-militia/pro-gun rights stances.

As experts on hate groups and right-wing extremism (RWE) in Canada, Perry and Scrivens (2016) also indicate that more than 100 groups of right-wing extremists exist in Canada. Among them are the Soldiers of Odin (SOO)4 with chapters across the country – the largest of which are in Alberta and Quebec. Reflecting on the state of affairs in Europe, one member of SOO commented: ‘The guys in Europe, they’re dealing with some real shit, we might not see that here for ten or so years. When that happens we want to look as good as possible’ (Lamoureux, 2016). And although Edmonton’s Soldiers of Odin ‘love Canada the way it is’, they proffer: Between the allowing of illegal aliens into this country and giving them the ability to vote and drive, accepting refugees from countries that hate us while Canadians are on the streets, releasing confirmed terrorists back to their organizations to cause more harm against Canada, and demonizing anything that has to do with European Culture to try and create racial tensions to turn citizens on one another; we as Soldiers Of Odin realize that it is time to take back our streets, provinces, and country. (Craggs, 2016)

Another group transplanted onto Canadian and American landscapes from Europe is Pegida Canada,5 which describes itself as a ‘group of likeminded Canadians that are bringing awareness to the people in regards to the Islamic threat to our great country’ (Daro, 2017). And there is La Meute (Wolf Pack), a far-right Quebec-based, anti-Islam group co-founded by Patrick Beaudry that operates a private Facebook group for fear of members losing their jobs; but nevertheless, according to CBC, ‘boasts 43,700 members’ (Montpetit, 2017). Claiming to be opposed to ‘illegal immigration and radical Islam’, La Meute’s website

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notes: ‘We just want to protect our land; we like immigrants, we need immigrants we know … We are not racist’. A recent Facebook post reads: ‘No more white people’ in Montreal; ‘the population is being replaced by immigrants’ (Montpetit, 2017). One of us (Carl), as if to signal a warning, regularly receives the Cultural Action Party Newsletter. The newsletters started coming to his email address after the release of his report on ‘the schooling of Black students in the Greater Toronto Area’ (April 2017). Among the recommendations was that school boards be required to ‘routinely collect disaggregated race-based data that allows for the examination of the experiences of Black students’ (James and Turner, 2017: 69). A subsequent report by the Ontario government that recommended the collection of race-based data (Quan and James, 2017) followed by the Education Minister’s announcement mandating all school boards in the province to collect such data, seemed to have prompted the Cultural Action Party, in its 8 September newsletter to carry an article with the headline: ‘Are White Canadians Becoming Conscious of Their Whiteness’. It noted that ‘an overwhelming preoccupation with race and ethnicity as identity markers can only exacerbate an unhealthy trend that over time will inevitably expand the number of Canadians who identify as “white”’ (Cultural Action Party Newsletter, 2017, personal communication). And after declaring that this expansion is ‘already’ taking place, the article goes on to say: And where did this preoccupation come from? Who cultivated the preoccupation within Canadian society? Was this instigated by Canada’s Anglophone community? Not at all. Rather, the source is our nation’s multicult- pushers and social justice warriors – not to mention government itself. And the way they go about it! Trashing Anglo-Canada, blaming us for their problems, attacking our history and heritage, labelling Canadians of European heritage as malevolent bigots and racists – who WOULDN’T GET SICK AND TIRED of this unjust, punitive behavior?

Vowing that ‘Canadian-born citizens’ will not go gently ‘into the good night of cultural eradication’, the newsletter reminds us that the party has become registered to run in the 2018 Ontario provincial election with its ‘goal of the maintenance of traditional Anglophone, Francophone and Christian identity within Canada’. A recent Statistics Canada report indicated that in 2015, the number of hate crimes reported to police rose by 5 per cent – most

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of them directed toward religious and ethnic minority groups. Specifically, those most targeted for hate were Muslim, Arab and West Asian (Leber, 2017). The report also revealed a 61 per cent rise in hate crimes directed towards Muslims – from 99 incidents in 2014 to 159 in 2015. Besides, according to Statistics Canada, the actual number of hate crimes versus those that are reported can vary by up to twothirds, since there is likely an undercount of the number of hate crimes presented ‘as not all crimes are reported to police’ (Draaisma, 2017).6 Amira Elghawaby, Communications Director for the National Council of Canadian Muslims, similarly commented: ‘Whatever we are looking at, it doesn’t necessarily tell the whole picture’. Responding to this upward trend in the statistics, Canada’s Public Safety Minister, Ralph Goodale, said that the report was ‘deeply troublesome’; falling back on Canada’s multicultural oasis narrative trope when he said: ‘We all need to work very hard to reinforce the generous, inclusive, accommodating nature of the country that has made us the finest example of pluralism that the world has ever known’ (Draaisma, 2017). Defending Canadian Values, Canadian Family and the Place of ‘Old Stock’ Canadians The 2015 national election in Canada was considered to be deeply divisive, and by some people, even hateful. During the election, Stephen Harper, then Prime Minister, declared that the niqab (the face covering worn by predominantly Muslim women – many of them immigrants) was ‘rooted in a culture that is anti-women’ and that it was ‘offensive that someone would hide their identity at the very moment where they are committing to joining the Canadian family’ – that is, at the citizenship ceremony. According to the PM, ‘it is not the way we do things’ (Chase, 2017). The ‘we’ and the ‘Canadian family’ in Harper’s comments can be interpreted to be ‘old stock’ Canadians (read white and English) as opposed to ‘new’ citizens whose morals, values and ethics (read legitimacy) as Canadians are questionable (Gollom, 2015). That the Prime Minister chose to make the face coverings of Muslim women an issue during the election was a politically strategic move which he thought would appeal to the xenophobic, racist and hateful sentiments of the Canadian electorate. And as a Muslim leader, Amira Elghawaby, commented: ‘You can almost immediately see the moment that Mr. Harper started talking about the face veil, we immediately started getting reports of women being harassed in Canada. We can’t make a direct link per se but …

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certainly it was a factor’ (Canadian Press, 2017). Another Conservative political calculation which emerged during the 2015 elections was the setting up of a snitch line to report what was termed ‘barbaric practices’ of some groups. Announced by Conservative candidates, Kellie Leitch and Chris Alexander, Canadians were encouraged to call the national hotline and report any ‘barbaric’ cultural practices being committed by their fellow Canadians to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) (Powers, 2017).7 In addition to the national tip line, the Conservatives also announced a plan to commit $12 million over four years to increase funding to international organisations that prevent the forced marriages of girls and young women in ‘conflict zones’. By attaching an announcement of increased funding to prevent forced marriages of young girls around the world to an announcement of a nation-wide Canadian barbaric cultural practices hotline paints a clear symbolic picture of who the Conservative Party is imagining are the Canadians who would be reporting, and which Canadians are those most likely to be reported on. These initiatives, put forward by the Conservative Party of Canada, are clear indications of an increasingly xenophobic political culture in Canada that mirrors what existed elsewhere – like Trump’s campaign in the US and Le Pen’s in France. And this went on in Canada before Trump and Le Pen’s campaigns. Similarly, in 2017 during the Conservative leadership race, leadership candidate, Kellie Leitch, proposed a ‘Canadian Values Screening Test’ as part of immigration reform (Zimonjic, 2016). The proposed test was expected to help determine the eligibility of who would be granted entry into Canada and was seen as necessary for all refugees and immigrants. Proffered as a policy designed to ‘defend Canadian values’, the Screening Test involved interviews with immigrants that centred on the values of prospective citizens by which the evaluation would assess how well their values aligned with ‘Canadian values’. Some of the values being tested for included: sense of equal opportunity, hard work, helping others, generosity, freedom and tolerance (Tunney, 2017). Notwithstanding the ambiguity of screening for ‘Canadian values’, there was serious criticism around the feasibility – with respect to both the material costs and human resources – of efficiently implementing a Screening Test at all border entry points. In responding to these concerns, Leitch commented: ‘For myself, screening everyone for Canadian values, screening everyone at the border is important My intention is to transfer that cost to the individual who

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is immigrating here’ (Tunney, 2017). The questions on Leitch’s proposed test included: • • •

Are men and women equal, and entitled to equal protection under the law? Is it ever ok to coerce or use violence against an individual or a group who disagrees with your views? Do you recognise that to have a good life in Canada you will need to work hard for yourself and your family, and that you can’t expect to have things you want given to you? (Dickson, 2017)

Clearly, such a proposal does not represent a Canada that is multicultural, tolerant and open but rather xenophobic, paranoid and intolerant, a nation fearful of what (and whom) lay beyond its borders. The assumptions that undergird this Canadian Values Screening Test is one of suspicion and paranoia of anything foreign. With this point, there are striking similarities with the political cultures of the UK, Europe and the US especially with respect to refugees and immigrants. Furthermore, the actions and ideas of these Canadian political leaders do not arch toward a multicultural oasis but rather, seem to have much in common – in style and substance – with far right-wing elements of their American and European counterparts. Conclusion Like many European countries, there has been a proliferation of extreme right-wing groups in Canada in recent times – in part, likely motivated by the recent influx of Syrian refugees.8 And while media attention and public engagement with right-wing extremism in Canada is low – most likely a reflection of the prevalent myth of Canada as a multicultural oasis – it is, nonetheless, quite prevalent here. As Perry and Scrivens (2016) maintain, there needs to be more public, intellectual and academic scrutiny. The fact is, in Canada as elsewhere, politicians and right-wing activists of today are emboldened and unhooded, making little attempt to shield, hide or mask their identities. The boldness, openness and candidness with which these groups espouse their hateful, terrorist, anti-immigration and antiBlack rhetoric is indicative of the right-wing drift of political culture globally. And while observers have been marking this rightward drift, and rightly identify Trump, Le Pen and Farage as its leading figures, in these formulations Canada gets a pass.

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In this chapter, we have shown that Canada is no exception. Indeed, in the context of the current vile political right-wing culture in Canada, as in the rest of the world, the landscape is fertile for these extremist sentiments like xenophobia, protectionism and hardened white nationalism to continue to grow and produce conflict which moves us further away from even the pretence of a tolerant society. The danger with the prevailing myth of Canada as a multicultural oasis is what that narrative and trope prevents us from seeing. In its pervasiveness, this contradictory or false narrative elides the deep and growing divisions already present in Canadian society. Acknowledging these divisions and the structured inequities that make them possible and persistent is but the first step in moving toward a realistic ‘multicultural oasis’. The necessity to remain more vigilant, in a place like Canada, because in the absence of spectacular events of right-wing extremism, the cloak/cover that multiculturalism provides obscures the reality that these sentiments may be more deeply embedded in Canada’s multicultural fabric. Notes 1 Recall that Trump said that the Mexicans entering the United States are people ‘bringing drugs, … crimes, [and] they’re rapists’. 2 The protests which occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, where neo-Nazis (i.e. KKK and other white supremacists dressed in protective riot gear, brandishing automatic weapons and hurling racial epithets) claimed to be protesting the taking down of the Confederate flag and other like monuments. The counter-protesters of Black Lives Matter members, and Gay, Queer, Trans and others clashed with the neo-Nazis, and the resulting violence included a case in which a white supremacist drove his car directly and intentionally into the crowd of counterprotesters injuring nearly thirty and killing one. 3 This is evidence in the elections and/or referenda that resulted in Trump’s presidency in the US, Brexit in the UK, Le Pen’s popularity in France and the

rise of Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany – to name a few. 4 The group was originally connected to one founded in Finland by Mike Ranta who self-identified as a neo-Nazi and was convicted in 2005 for racially motivated attacks on migrants. But the Canadian group is undergoing changes in terms of its alignment with its parent group in Finland which openly expresses extreme anti-immigrant, anti-refugee and anti-Islamic sentiments. See mtv. fi (2017), ‘All of the Battalions of the Soldiers of Odin Patrol in Joensuu Have Several Criminal Convictions’. Available at: www.mtv.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/ artikkeli/lehti-soldiers-of-odininpomolla-rikostausta/5639722#gs.rkrlcNU (Accessed 17 October 2017). 5 Pegida is a German acronym translating to ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West’. 6 It should be noted that not all police services across Canada annually report on hate crimes and incidents. The

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majority of municipal police services in Canada report directly to Statistics Canada on a less than annual basis. And as Chelby Daigle, an Ottawa writer who reports on incidents of anti-Black racism in Canada’s capital, commented: ‘Canadians need to wake up to the issue. I think we are in denial. We all have to start owning this and I think

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when we do that, we’ll be able to push institutions like police and … government to be more accountable’ (Draaisma, 2017). 7 The proposed task force was to be called the ‘Zero Tolerance Barbaric Cultural Practices Act Task Force’. 8 At the time of writing, Canada had taken in about 25,000 Syrian refugees.

References Bannerji, H. (1996). On the Dark Side of the Nation: Politics of Multiculturalism and the State of ‘Canada’. Journal of Canadian Studies, 31(3), 103–128. Bannerji, H. (2000). The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Barrett, P. (2015). Blackening Canada: Diaspora, Race, Multiculturalism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Barrett, S. R. (1987). Is God a Racist?: The Right Wing in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Canadian Press. (2017). Hate Crimes in Canada up in 2015: StatsCan. Sudbury Star, 14 June. Available at: www. thesudburystar.com/2017/06/14/ hate-crimes-in-canada-up-in-2015statscan (Accessed 17 October 2017). CBC. (October 1965). This Hour Has Seven Days: Chuvalo, Welles and the Klan. Available at: http://www.cbc.ca/ player/play/1079593539817 (Accessed 17 October 2017). CBC. (September 2017). Sunday Edition: There Is No Such Thing as the ‘White Race’ – Or Any Other Race Says Historian. Available at: www.cbc. ca/player/play/1047616579814/ (Accessed 17 October 2017). Chase, S. (2017). Niqabs ‘Rooted in a Culture That Is Anti-Women’, Harper Says. The Globe and Mail, 10 March. Available at: https:// beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/

politics/niqabs-rooted-in-a-culturethat-is-anti-women-harper-says/ article23395242/?ref=http://www. theglobeandmail.com& (Accessed 17 October 2017). Craggs, S. (2016). Controversial Soldiers of Odin Group Organizing in Hamilton. Available from: www.cbc.ca/news/ canada/hamilton/soldiers-of-odinhamilton-1.3707723 (Accessed 8 May 2018). Daro, I. (2017). The Anti-Islam Group Pegida Held Its First Protest in Canada. Buzzfeed, 19 September. Available at: www.buzzfeed.com/ishmaeldaro/ pegida-protest-toronto?utm_term=. sj70YqJQk#.opAKYzxWO (Accessed 17 October 2017). Dickson, J. (2017). Leitch Releases Her List of ‘Canadian Values’ Test Questions for Immigrants. iPolitics, 6 March. Available at: http://ipolitics. ca/2017/03/06/leitch-reveals-whatshe-wants-to-ask-during-canadianvalues-screening/ (Accessed 17 October 2017). Draaisma, M. (2017). Statistics on Hate Crimes Fluctuate in Toronto, but Numbers Show Problem Not Going Away. CBC, 13 June. Available from: www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ hate-crimes-toronto-statisticscanada-1.4158723 (Accessed 15 May 2018). Gollom, M. (September 2015). Stephen Harper’s ‘Old-stock Canadians’: Politics of Division or Simple Slip?

174 | L E S S O N S F RO M H I S TO R Y, CO N N E C T I O N S AC ROS S S PAC E S CBC News. Available at: www. cbc.ca/news/politics/old-stockcanadians-stephen-harper-identitypolitics-1.3234386. Haque, E. (2018). Language, Race, and the Impossibility of Multiculturalism. In T. Das Gupta, C. E. James, R. Maaka, G.-E. Galabuzi and C. Andersen (eds), Race and Racialization: Essential Readings. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 259–274. James, C. E. (2010). Seeing Ourselves: Exploring Race, Ethnicity and Culture. Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing. James, C. E. (forthcoming). Black Leadership and White Logic: Models of Community Encourage. In T. Kitossa, E. Lawson and P. S. S. Howard (eds). James, C. E. and Turner, T. (2017). Towards Race Equity in Education: The Schooling of Black Students in the Greater Toronto Area. Toronto: York University. Lamoureux, M. (2016). Soldiers of Odin, Europe’s Notorious Anti-Immigration Group, Beginning to Form Cells in Canada. Available from: www. vice.com/en_ca/article/gqma9m/ soldiers-of-odin-europes-notoriousanti-immigration-group-beginningto-form-cells-in-canada (Accessed 8 May 2018). Leber, B. (2017). Juristat: Police-reported Hate Crime in Canada, 2015. Available at: www5.statcan.gc.ca/olc-cel/olc. action?objId=85-002-X2017001148 32&objType=47&lang=en&limit=0 (Accessed 17 October 2017). Montpetit, J. (2017). How Quebec’s Largest Far-right Group Tries to Win Friends, Influence People. CBC, 21 August. Available at: www.cbc.ca/ news/canada/montreal/quebec-lameute-far-right-1.4255193 (Accessed 17 October 2017).

Painter, N. (2010). The History of White People. New York: W.W. Norton. Parent, R. and Ellis, J. (2014). Right Wing Extremism in Canada. Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, no. 14-03. Vancouver. Perry, B. and Scrivens, R. (2016). Uneasy Alliances: A Look at the Right-wing Extremist Movement in Canada. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 39(9), 819–841. DOI: 10.1080/1057610X.2016.1139375. Powers, L. (2017). Conservatives Pledge Funds, Tip Line to Combat ‘Barbaric Cultural Practices’. CBC, 2 October Available at: www.cbc.ca/news/ politics/canada-election-2015-barbariccultural-practices-law-1.3254118 (Accessed 17 October 2017). Quan, D. and James, C. E. (2017). Unlocking Student Potential through Data. Available at: http://news.yorku. ca/files/Feasibility-Study-UnlockingStudent-Potential-through-DataFINAL-REPORT-Feb-2017.pdf (Accessed 17 October 2017). Tierney, S. (2007). Multiculturalism and the Canadian Constitution. Vancouver: UBC Press. Tunney, C. (2017). Kellie Leitch Would Charge Immigrants for Canadian Values Test. CBC, 7 January. Available at: www.cbc.ca/news/ politics/anti-canadian-valuestest-leitch-1.3925420 (Accessed 17 October 2017). Walcott, R. (2003). Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada, 2nd rev. edn). Toronto: Insomniac Press. Zimonjic, P. (2016). Kellie Leitch Tears up over Role in Barbaric Cultural Practices Tip Line. CBC, 21 April. Available at: www.cbc.ca/news/ politics/kellie-leitch-rcmp-tipline-1.3547430 (Accessed 17 October 2017).

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Keguro Macharia

How does Donald Trump – the figure and his campaign – translate into Kenyan politics? The US held its presidential election in 2016 and Kenya held a contested presidential election in August 2017.1 Reports indicate that Kenya’s president and the party he represents, Jubilee Party (JP), hired Cambridge Analytica, a global data mining company credited with helping Trump win the presidential election (Keter, 2017; Bright, 2017). Even before Trump’s victory, he was familiar to many Kenyans. In a tweet dated 4 May 2016, Twitter user @miss_mumbz asked, ‘but isn’t Donald Trump basically a Kenyan politician juxtaposed in an American context?’ On 10 June 2016, @ kattoloo tweeted, ‘Trump is a typical Kenyan politician – says anything to win the votes’. And on 3 July 2016, @MugambiDon tweeted, ‘If a Kenyan politician takes Trump’s ideas and twists them to fit the Kenyan narrative, most of our parents will vote for them’. By late October and early November, these comparisons between Trump and Kenyan politicians had moved from Twitter to the mainstream media. Sam Kamau (2016), a lecturer at the Graduate School of Media and Communications at the Aga Khan University, described Trump as a ‘perfect representation of a Kenyan politician’. Trump, he claimed, ‘is the master of doublespeak, a pathological liar, and an expert in evading questions and diverting attention from the critical issues’. He added that Trump has ‘insulted, disparaged, and mocked everyone who dares to oppose or criticise him’. Writing in the Daily Nation, Daniel K. Kalinaki (2016) described the US campaign period as ‘America’s most “African” election in many years’, adding that ‘some of the electoral shenanigans in the American election could have been cast in a thirdrate African political documentary’. Despite such seemingly divergent national contexts, what made Trump seem so familiar? Trump was apprehended in two main ways. Macharia Gaitho (2016), a long-time editor of the Daily Nation, Kenya’s newspaper of record, read Trump’s actions through Kenya’s ethnonationalist political

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history. Trump was divisive. Like many Kenyan ethnonationalist figures who run campaigns based on appealing to the idea of the ethnic group as a nation rooted in a specific place – Luo Nyanza, Kikuyu Kiambu, Kalenjin Nakuru, for instance, where the ethnic group modifies and owns the name of a region – Trump ran an ethnonationalist campaign that pitted white US citizens against foreign others, where ‘others’ refers to all groups who don’t identify as white and conservative. Yet, translating Trump to Kenya primarily through his ethnonationalist strategies obfuscates the more banal way he translates: his banal misogyny (Macharia, 2012). Literary critic and cultural theorist Grace Musila (2009) has written about the phallocratic nature of Kenyan politics. It is, she argues, a politics that grounds itself in competing versions of masculinity, and where the material and symbolic combine in unexpected ways. For instance, the political rivalry between Kenya’s two leading political families, the Kenyattas and the Odingas, has often been framed as a contest between the ethnic group that circumcises penises (Kenyatta’s Kikuyu group) and the one that does not (Odinga’s Luo group). Within the Kikuyu-dominated frame of Kenyan politics, uncircumcised men are considered boys. This phallocratic frame that positions Kenyan politics as a contest between men and their penis configurations absents women from Kenya’s dominant political imagination. Moreover, this phallocratic order makes misogyny a quotidian element of Kenyan politics, an element so familiar that almost none of the men writers who commented on Trump mentioned that misogyny was one of the foundations of his campaign, alongside white supremacy. The title of this chapter, ‘Domesticating Trump’, engages the problem of why Trump was at once familiar – primarily because of his misogyny – and illegible – because of his white supremacy. The chapter traces the Kenyan terrain that made his misogyny familiar and maps how this misogyny was apprehended by Kenyan thinkers. The second section of the discussion tracks the effects of Trump’s white supremacist campaign in Kenya. Black organisers in the US documented and highlighted Trump’s anti-black history and campaign, but this labour failed to resonate with Kenyan commentators. This chapter speculates about what these failures suggest about global anti-racist organising. At a moment when Trump is being treated as exceptional in the global imagination, the title asks that we recognise the banality of his misogyny and white supremacy, that we perform the historical and cultural work

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that allows us to see he is simply one more figure in a long line of misogynist white supremacists. To see this is to know – in our bones – that he is not unassailable. We need this knowledge. A brief note on archive and method. Part of my goal in this writing is to take Kenyan digital thinking seriously, especially the thinking that takes place on Twitter. Kenyans are online. According to a report by the Bloggers Association of Kenya (2016: 3), 6.1 million Kenyans are on Facebook, 2.2 million Kenyans are active on Twitter every month and 1 million of those use Twitter daily. WhatsApp also has 10 million users in Kenya. These platforms are not isolated, as content from one platform is likely to be shared across other platforms. Moreover, the report continues, ‘Kenyan media outlets routinely source and quote tweets and other comments from Social Media for their news stories’ (2016: 4). As tweets can be ephemeral – users on twitter switch accounts or make their accounts private or delete their tweets – I have chosen to reproduce tweets in their full form, rather than summarising or paraphrasing. Experience has taught me that scholarship about social media is as much about creating and distributing an archive as it is about analysing that archive. Following Barbara Christian’s (1987) discussion of African American forms of cultural production as forms of theorising and David Kazanjian’s (2015) description of casual and often ephemeral forms of writing – letters, for instance – as black diasporic forms of speculative theory, I treat the tweets I engage not simply as raw data that need theoretical scaffolding and textual elaboration, but as forms of theory: they articulate worldviews grounded in specific geohistories and imagine possible worlds in doing so. Typically, tweets are dismissed as untheoretical because of the short character limit (140 or 280). This claim makes little sense from my Kenyan context and, more broadly, within the history of thinking. African communal wisdom was often distilled from experience and reflection into proverbs (methali in Kiswahili) that were considered archives of wisdom and guides for the present. Certainly, not all tweets distil wisdom and practise philosophy, but character limit has little to do with that. I take them seriously. I invite you to do the same. Banal Misogyny: From Kenya to the US Kenyan political theorist Wambui Mwangi (2013: 16) writes, ‘The Kenyan post-colonial social contract is not a political agreement between allegedly neutral individual citizens but a patriarchal and

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ethnicist order based on the domination of all Kenyan women by all Kenyan men’. This domination is evidenced by the actions of elected representatives. In September 2013, Evans Kidero, Governor for Nairobi County, slapped Rachel Shebesh, a Woman Representative for Nairobi County (Michira, 2013). Despite the presence of witnesses and a video recording that was posted to YouTube and widely viewed by Kenyans, Kidero denied that he slapped Shebesh: ‘As far as I can recollect, I was in my office and I do not remember slapping anybody, all I know is that there was a scuffle at my office’. In fact, Kidero filed a report with the police alleging that Shebesh had assaulted him. Kidero’s actions violated Kenya’s constitutional regulations that those holding elected office should demonstrate ‘respect for the people’; bring ‘honor to the nation and dignity to the people’; and promote ‘public confidence in the integrity of the office’.2 While his actions were widely condemned by women’s rights groups, including the National Gender and Equality Commission and the Federation of Women Lawyers, no formal charges were filed against him and he remained in office (Daily Nation, 2013). In December 2014, during a contentious parliamentary session, the Member of Parliament for Mbiti, Millie Odhiambo, was assaulted by male MPs: ‘I was boxed in the eye by Moses Kuria, as one permanent drunk pulled down my panty and two others lifted my dress’ (Samora, 2014). In March 2015, women legislators ‘complained of rampant cases of sexual harassment within Parliament’ (Njagih, 2015). Also in March 2015, the Member of Parliament for Imenti Central, Gideon Mwiti, invited a woman public relations specialist to his office, held her hostage, raped and brutalised her (Kibet and Ombati, 2015). Unlike Governor Kidero, Mwiti faced criminal charges for ‘raping a married woman’, but he remained in office until the end of his term (Muhindi, 2016). I provide this truncated mapping of Kenya’s misogynist political terrain, from late 2013 to early 2015, to indicate the frame within which Trump’s misogynist campaign was apprehended in Kenya. As Trump’s campaign proceeded, Kenyan commentators became more critical, but a gendered divide emerged. Whereas women critiqued Trump’s misogynist rhetoric, and noted the misogyny in Kenya’s political space, most men focused on Trump’s divisive rhetoric, comparing it to ethnonationalist Kenyan rhetoric. Writing in the Daily Nation, a writer who goes by City Girl (2016) described Kenya’s banal misogyny: ‘This objectification of women by Kenyan men happens

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every single day. In fact, where two or three Kenyan men are gathered, there will be massive disrespect of a woman’. The rhetorical effect of this claim comes from its echo of the Bible verse Matthew 18:20: ‘For where two or three gather in my name, there I am with them’. In City Girl’s reading, misogyny is the foundation and cement and spiritual practice of Kenyan homosociality. This misogyny, City Girl explicates, extends to Kenya’s political culture: ‘Don’t we all know of these MPs who are walking scot-free despite being accused of raping women?’ Rhetorical questions require no answers – they are addressed to and assemble publics of those who know. The ‘we’ invoked here are marked not only as those who know, but those who are complicit in sustaining the phallocratic and misogynist order. This order, as journalist Larry Madowo (2016) commented, is sustained by men who will not vote for women and male politicians who ran ‘physically violent and misogynistic’ campaigns in previous elections, forcing some women to withdraw from consideration. Noting that Trump had proved a ‘misogynist’, leading cultural commentator Rasna Warah (2016) asked, ‘What kind of future can American women expect under such a leader?’ These three writers were among the few in Kenya’s mainstream press who critiqued Trump’s misogynist campaign and forged links between that campaign and Kenyan politics. Most of the articles that appeared in the Kenyan press describing Trump’s misogyny were sourced from Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP). They were published as world news, but not necessarily as news that had any significance for Kenyan politics. #RailaAnotherTrump When Trump was named the official Republican nominee in May 2016, H. B. Manyora (2016) published an article titled, ‘Lessons Raila Odinga Can Learn from Donald Trump’. Raila Odinga heads the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), is Kenya’s former Prime Minister, and is considered the leading opposition candidate to Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, who heads the Jubilee Party (JP). Manyora writes, Raila fought so hard to remove the image of him as a communist revolutionary, an anti-religion and disruptive person, who couldn’t be trusted with the leadership of this country. He even changed his mode of dressing and almost abandoned his trademark cap. Instead, he began to put on the business suits.

180 | L E S S O N S F RO M H I S TO R Y, CO N N E C T I O N S AC ROS S S PAC E S And he did not stop there. He courted businessmen, most of them Kikuyu and won their confidence, not the vote. By 2007, when he had his most successful run for the Presidency, Raila had shed off his radical character and transformed himself into a nationalist and won support across the country. This image worked for Raila in 2007. It is not working now. Why? This carefully cultivated image has left Raila alienated from his supporters who were used to a fiery Raila. This gentleman, almost docile Raila, is a stranger to his fanatical followers of yesteryear. He should go back to the pre-2007 image. And he needs to be tough like Trump. Trump has maintained the image of a tough guy. Americans love that. When this has sometimes bordered on being too coarse, he has been advised to be ‘presidential’. He has disregarded the advice and publicly laughed it off. It has paid dividends as he has vanquished his opponents.

Manyora ignores Trump’s anti-black racism, anti-Mexican xenophobia and misogyny to focus on his phallocratic disposition: Trump is a ‘tough’ guy, or maintains the appearance of being one. And tough guys win Kenyan elections, not ‘gentlemen’. By October 2016, when it appeared that Hillary Clinton would win the US election, Trump had become a toxic figure in the Kenyan imagination. This toxicity emerged through an online smear campaign that used the hashtag #RailaAnotherTrump (Zawadi, 2016). I offer a few representative tweets: @PolycarpHinga Master of tax evasion and an incredibly loose mouth #RailaAnotherTrump 3:02 pm, 21 Oct 2016 @HardTalkKE Narcissistic self declared saviour who is clearly part of the problem #RailaAnotherTrump 3:03 pm, 21 Oct 2016 @Muhahami #RailaAnotherTrump Who watched the American debate? The sentiments of The Donald sounded familiar in Kenya context! Raila Odinga! 3:03 pm, 21 Oct 2016

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@Muhahami #RailaAnotherTrump Creating civil disobedience so that governance can be impossible is RAILA’s strategy! Trump want USA in suspense 3:19 pm, 21 Oct 2016 @KenyaFire #RailaAnotherTrump Donald Trump’s political policy resembles that of perennial elections loser, Raila Amollo Odinga in every aspect! 3:26 pm, 21 Oct 2016 @MacheruF The father of lawlessness #RailaAnotherTrump 3:35 pm, 21 Oct 2016 @JayneKamanga Both of them speaking hate and have already sensed defeat both claiming elections rigged #RailaAnotherTrump 4:59 pm, 22 Oct 2016

With the exception of the one specific accusation that Raila Odinga had evaded taxes, the rest of the claims were vaguely worded, working through innuendo and what Sara Ahmed (2001) describes as ‘problematic proximities’. As Ahmed describes, problematic proximities do not so much describe as suggest, often in insidious ways. For instance, even the claims, ‘I’m not saying Muslims are terrorists’ or ‘I’m not saying gay men are paedophiles’ create a visual and affective link despite the syntax of the sentence. Proximity creates an effect despite the intent of the sentence. By juxtaposing Trump and Raila, the hashtag attempted to mobilise the range of ideological and affective responses Kenyans experienced about Trump. Those troubled by Trump’s misogyny and anti-blackness and anti-immigrant xenophobia were implicitly asked to consider Raila through those frames. Hashtags are contextual and dynamic. When Trump won the US election in November 2016, #RailaAnotherTrump gained another life. Those who had critiqued the earlier tweets, now responded with glee: @SirGmn We need a damn TRUMP REVOLUTION in Kenya!!

182 | L E S S O N S F RO M H I S TO R Y, CO N N E C T I O N S AC ROS S S PAC E S #RailaAnotherTrump 10:11am, 9 Nov 2016 @titomwai those who said #RailaAnotherTrump shud expect their words to be true nxt year! #ElectionNight 10:15 am, 9 Nov 2016 @iam_abeta We are taking our country back come 2017. We too must have an independence day! #RailaAnotherTrump 2:47 pm, 9 Nov 2016 @KhalidIntellect Can Raila do a Trump next year and beat the corrupt establishment that’s Jubilee. #RailaAnotherTrump 8:45 pm, 9 Nov 2016

Trump’s unexpected victory had offered new possibilities for imagining a different Kenya, a Kenya that would experience ‘revolution’, and ‘independence’, doing away with ‘the corrupt establishment that’s Jubilee’. In this rendering, Raila Odinga was positioned as the ultimate political outsider, as Trump had positioned himself, a claim that ignores Raila’s multi-decade political history. This history would include his relationship with his father, who was considered Kenya’s opposition leader beginning in the early 1960s; Raila’s own political stints as Member of Parliament for Langata Constituency (1992– 2013), Minister for Energy (2001–2002), Minister of Roads, Public Works, and Housing (2003–2005) and Prime Minister (2008–2013). In no way can Raila be considered a political outsider based on his history. Yet, if the work of theory is to speculate and, in Frantz Fanon’s (1967: 229) terms, take a ‘leap’ of ‘invention’, these tweets can be seen not as erasing Raila’s past, but as seeing his rise to power as a break from the past. These tweets imagine a different kind of world, and that imagining is tethered to Trump’s unexpected electoral success. That success is abstracted from the banal misogyny and pervasive white supremacy and xenophobia that fuelled it and, instead, embedded within a possible Kenyan future. My broader point is that Trump’s campaign – his losses and wins – became frames through

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which Kenyans could make sense of Kenyan politics. Yet, abstracting Trump’s electoral win from his campaign strategies had the dual effect of making misogyny in Kenyan politics even more banal while making anti-racist critique and solidarity unthinkable. Anti-racist Solidarity? Following Trump’s electoral victory and Kenyan claims that the victory could be emulated by Kenyan politicians, political theorist Wambui Mwangi, tweeted, @wambui_mwangi Lakini, jemeni. Is it a good idea to emulate the man who hates people like you? Kenyan Trump-lites and Trump-wannabes, I am looking at you 1:20 pm, 14 Nov 2016 @wambui_mwangi Kenyan Trump-wannabe’s are quite unfazed that he hates Kenyans especially, hates black people, women, immigrants, anyone not-cis-white-male 10:58 am, 3 Dec 2016

Throughout the election, it had been difficult for Kenyans to think about ‘people like you’: the critique that Trump was anti-black did not feature in Kenya’s mainstream media or, if it did, it received no special attention.

Real Talk? What circulates as Kenyan studies or African studies that focuses on Kenya, by which I mean what is legible as that, as seen in authorities who are cited and editors who control journals and peer reviewers who monitor content, is a mostly white affair. The dominant names are John Lonsdale and Bruce Berman, as foundational figures, and, more recently, Gabrielle Lynch, David Anderson, Nic Cheeseman and Caroline Elkins. These figures – and the students they train – are interested in histories of political violence – hence the disproportionate attention given to the Land and Freedom Army (the Mau Mau) – or in contemporary African politics, where much attention is given to political patronage, clientelism, corruption and violence. It is work that is profoundly uninterested in thinking about whiteness. Sure, there are the bad imperial people who did bad things, but that’s about

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it. This body of work – and the scholars who control it – does not have blackness as one of its key terms. Yes, there is some attention to whiteness in Kenya, but it is striking that the most interesting of that work is from US-based scholars (see Shadle, 2015).

More Real Talk? Within popular Kenyan thinking, blackness is an affair for ‘out there’, even as a colonial-era penal code designed to punish black Africans is still in effect, even as colonial-era white settlers and their descendants now share space with white expatriates working for international companies and NGOs, and both continue to generate and use race-based hierarchies, where black employees are racialised as less competent, thus needing white supervisors. White guests continue to receive preferential treatment in Kenya’s hotels and restaurants and general shopping spaces. Kenya is profoundly racialised. Anthropologist Jemima Pierre (2012) has argued that postindependent African ethnic politics is embedded within modernity’s racial logics. In Kenya, colonial-era distinctions about abilities (the martial people, the educated people, the traders) continue to dominate Kenyan imaginations. But we have no political vernaculars – generally shared languages and strategies – for thinking about and discussing blackness in Kenya and how blackness in Kenya relates to blackness in the US and Europe and the Caribbean. But, we learn from Audre Lorde (1984) that the work is to think about and to work across difference. We – notice I’ve changed pronouns – could complain that Kenyans don’t know how to or don’t want to think about blackness and white supremacy. I don’t see how that’s useful or interesting. Instead, we might ask how thinking about blackness can be articulated alongside thinking about ethnicity. What can thinking about blackness in the Afro-Diaspora learn from thinking about ethnicity in Kenya? And, what can thinking about ethnicity in Kenya learn from thinking about blackness in Afro-Diaspora? Too often, those who think about ethnicity in Kenya – and elsewhere in Africa – are condemned as not thinking about ‘what really counts’. Thinking about race is thinking through and with modernity while thinking about ethnicity is remaining outside of modernity. I find this way of thinking incredibly unproductive. Instead, we might try to create ways to think about blackness and ethnicity as products of colonial modernity across different geohistories. To work with our differences, across geohistories, to pursue freedom.

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Notes 1 The presidential election results were nullified by Kenya’s Supreme Court in September 2017.

2 Constitution of Kenya, Chapter 6, Article 73, Subsection a (ii), (iii), (iv).

References Ahmed, S. (2001). Problematic Proximities: Or Why Critiques of Gay Imperialism Matter. Feminist Legal Studies, 19, 119–132. Bloggers Association of Kenya. (2016). State of the Internet. Bright, S. (2017). After Trump, ‘Big Data’ Firm Cambridge Analytica Is Now Working in Kenya. BBC, 3 August. Christian, B. (1987). The Race for Theory. Cultural Critique, 6, 51–63. City Girl. (2016). Like Trump, Many Kenyan Men Objectify Women. Daily Nation, 21 October. Daily Nation. (2013). Kidero You Slapped Me? Cries Shebesh. Daily Nation, 6 September. Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press. Gaitho, M. (2016). The World Simply Can’t Afford a President Trump in America. Daily Nation, 8 November. Kalinaki, D. K. (2016). A Look at America’s Most ‘African’ Election in Many Years. Daily Nation, 8 November. Kamau, S. (2016). Trump True Reflection of Kenyan Politician. Daily Nation, 7 November. Kazanjian, D. (2015). Scenes of Speculation. Social Text, 33 (4 (125)), 77–84. Keter, G. (2017). Uhuru Hires Data Firm behind Trump, Brexit Victories. The Star, 10 May. Kibet, L. and Ombati, C. (2015). Imenti Central MP Raped Me in His Office, Claims Woman. The Standard, 23 March.

Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press. Macharia, K. (2012). Banal Misogyny. Gukira. https://gukira.wordpress. com/2012/12/27/banal-misogyny/?. Madowo, L. (2016). #FRONTROW: A Woman President? Not in Kenya for Ages to Come. Daily Nation, 1 November. Manyora, H. B. (2016). Lessons Raila Odinga Can Learn from Donald Trump. The Standard, 24 May. Michira, M. (2013). Governor Evans Kidero Slaps Rachel Shebesh Then Quickly Forgets. The Standard, 7 September. Muhindi, S. (2016). Imenti MP Gideon Mwiti to Face Full Trial on Rape Charges. The Star, 8 June. Musila, G. A. (2009). Phallocracies and Gynocratic Transgressions: Gender, State Power and Kenyan Public Life. Africa Insight, 39(1), 39–57. Mwangi, W. (2013). Silence Is a Woman. The New Inquiry, 4 June. Njagih, M. (2015). Kenyan Women MPs Fury over Sexual Harassment. The Standard, 26 March. Pierre, J. (2012). The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Samora, M. (2014). Millie Odhiambo Accuses Moses Kuria of Removing Her Panty in Parliament. The Standard, 24 December. Shadle, B. L. (2015). The Souls of White Folk: White Settlers in Kenya 1900s–20s. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Zawadi, J. (2016). Kenyans on Twitter Liken Raila Odinga to Donald Trump. Zipo, 2 October.

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Beth Kamunge, Wambui Mwangi and Osop Abdi Ali

It is hard to sit at the typewriter and write when there’s a fire around you. This is a sentiment that I (Beth) borrow from thinking with James Baldwin anxieties, as captured in his interview with Paul Weiss: Baldwin: You talk about making it as a writer by yourself, you have to be able to turn off all the antennae with which you live because once you turn your back on society you may die. You may die. And it is very hard to sit at a typewriter and concentrate on that if you are afraid of the world around you. (Baldwin and Peck, 2017: 88)

The following email correspondences and reflections with two black women in Kenya, help to speak to this concern – the concern as to what it actually means, and takes, to write in the midst of relentless assault. I was reminded in these exchanges of the ways in which black women, particularly those in the global South, often don’t get to stop. Despite real fears of systemic vulnerability, premature death and experiences of mental and physical exhaustion, black women often don’t get the privilege to ‘turn off all the antennae’ by which we live. I was reminded by Wambui Mwangi, an African black-feminist and lecturer in Nairobi, Kenya, of the ways in which our intersectional social locations as black women mean we ‘have to’ care about multiple issues all at once. I was reminded that politics doesn’t just happen by marching on the streets in protest, or casting votes, but also by extending hospitality to those who don’t feel safe in their own homes. Opening up our homes, listening, sharing food, allowing others to crash on your couch, offering clean bedsheets and towels, being the shoulder they cry on, maintaining confidentiality – this and other forms of labour are political acts too. This labour is often on top of other professional commitments. I was also reminded that being in the middle of a fire can make any type of writing generally, and succinct, coherent thought in particular,

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a privilege only available to some. Osop Abdi Ali, a humanitarian worker in Nairobi Kenya, reminds me of the ways in which publishing standards tend to construct detached, ‘objective’, ‘rational’, inaccessible writing as good writing, with anything that deviates from this norm being likely to get rejected (see also Macharia, 2014). There are so many events that continue to happen in 2017, that have outgrown any legislative and other frameworks that were previously in place. Is there room for ‘messy’ writing that calls for speculation? that poses more questions than it does answers? that embodies grief and lament – a dirge of sorts? Finally, from both pieces I am reminded of the place and need for dialogue as a central feature of black-feminist organising. In both pieces I see the ways in which people graciously offer and receive the help and support that is needed to imagine and practice freedom together. These resources that enable us to imagine and practise love and freedom include passing along reading suggestions and bibliographies, opening up couches to crash on, giving immigration advice and support, providing proofreading and editorial support, and/or speaking tear-jerking words of affirmation to weary souls. But I also see failures of dialogue, and the ways in which we as black people tend to fail to show up for one another – whether that is in devaluing black women’s unpaid and often ‘private’ labour as inconsequential, to internalised anti-blackness and Islamophobia within the black community. Overall these reflections help us to consider some (though not all) of the significant racialised and gendered absences in this book, and why they exist. The rest of the piece continues with the email exchanges between myself and Wambui Mwangi, followed by correspondence with Osop Abdi Ali. Writings to and from Wambui and Beth Beth: 7 August 2017 Dear Wambui, I hope this finds you well. Thanks for your request on book and peer-reviewed articles on food politics from an African perspective. Well, four years into my project, I am hard-pressed to make recommendations. In fact, this erasure forms the premise of my project, where I am using theories of epistemologies of ignorance, to talk about my personal struggle to find anti-racist feminist work on food particularly from a Black-African standpoint. The few critical pieces that exist are from African American standpoints. Then there is

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obviously work that is gendered, but absents discussions of whiteness, capitalism and patriarchy in its analysis – so I don’t pay attention to that. Anyway, in my second year at the height of my imposter syndrome (‘this work must exist, it must be me who doesn’t know about it’) I sent out requests for bibliography compilations from the most respected listservs in my field(s). I have attached the compilations here, perhaps you might find something worthwhile. My second reason for writing, is to invite you to contribute a chapter in a forthcoming edited collection The Fire Now: Anti-racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence (to be published with Zed Books in November 2018) … Personally, and collectively, we were keen to have responses from across the globe, and not just UK–US dialogues. The title of the book is not only a nod to the legacy of James Baldwin, but also reflects our desire to respond to the urgency of this particular moment. Collectively and individually, we have been greatly inspired by your anti-racist feminist work on erasure, e.g. ‘Silence Is a Woman’ (Mwangi, 2013). We invite you to consider writing a chapter on what this might mean in Kenya (or elsewhere should you prefer) at this present moment. For your consideration, I have attached the abstracts of the chapters that have been confirmed so far, to give you a feel for where the project is headed. Because of the urgency of the moment, Zed Books would like a manuscript draft from us by November 2017 (for peer review and publication in November 2018). We would therefore ask for a first draft by 30 September 2017 – which we understand is a quick turnaround, but perhaps also means a quick turnaround in having a publication out. I look forward to hearing from you with your response either way. Wambui: 7 August 2017 Hi there, I can’t wait to get to all these. I thank you so much for the work. At the moment, though, I have some people staying in my house because where they live they didn’t feel very safe (because [Kenya 2017] elections), so it’s a bit tight here consequently and there’s no real thinking or talking work I can do yet for a couple of days. I’m writing to say thengyiu so mush [thank you very much]! I will write back better and longer as soon as I can. Busu tele [many kisses], Wambui

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Wambui: 7 September 2017 Beth, I’m sorry it took me so long to say sensible things back to you. Thank you for sending me these works: very helpful. So here’s the problem. It’s the same problem as it was before. Yes, there is a thing in my head that I can write, as I’m not quite sure what to do with it otherwise: I’ve been thinking about the ways in which kitchens and cooking work (or can be made to work) as political vernaculars: it’s a metaphor I’ve been walking around and working with for almost a decade. There’s two or three interesting Kenyan feminist riffs on ‘cookery’ going on right now that I might want to look at and therefore write about. Your word length is manageable, although very hard for me because I really find it quite hard to sound intelligent in under 5,000 words after a lifetime of practising to write 10,000-word papers. It took three of the best editors in the wurrrld to get that ‘Silence’ essay down to a manageable length. I’m not joking: it took the combined efforts of one Keguro Macharia, one Shailja Patel and one Aaron Bady to wrangle that bucking bronco. So, I hope you’re also a super-editor, as I guarantee that I’ll need help to make my thinking fit properly into that size box. Usually I can depend on Keguro and his editor-panga [machete] but he has two or three papers due various places in the next few months and is in no condition to be reading anybody else’s papers just now, and he is also about to start teaching. That’s not the real problem, though, or at least it is not yet the problem. It will become the problem when I send you a manuscript that’s 100 per cent over the word limit and ask you to please edit it for me. The real problem is that I am now already behind on two papers, one of which has to be ready for presentation in October, and another which I think has a November deadline. I’m also teaching and classes start on Monday, at the same time as I am trying my best to whip up some feminist trouble about the (very unconstitutional) 12th Parliament. And I’ve got two out-of-the-country talks in the next ten weeks. This is not looking good. Is it at all likely that your deadline might budge? Because if it can go back a bit, yes, I’ll see if I can do something but I can’t even start it until November. So, if the deadline is bright and hard and unmovable, then sigh, no, I really can’t. I’d be simply setting the both of us up for a great deal of stress and disappointment, and then you’d be pissed off and wonder why you ever liked me, etc. I’m so sorry: I’d love to write for you, really. I’m so excited that you’re over there thinking exciting thoughts about food that I can’t wait to

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read, and also lawdy knows Kenya needs you to get that digiri [degree] right quick. I’d be delighted to give you whatever little push-help I can. It’s just that my calendar is simply laughing mockingly at me right now at the thought, and unless I become two people, I’ve no way of pulling this off. Sadly, Wambui Beth: 19 September 2017 Wambui, I hope you are well, as you love and care for self and others. I have been meaning to email you ‘properly’ for a while now. I wanted to ask if we could use your email to me (the one explaining you couldn’t write in this season) in the book. As I was saying to you, I thought it put into words one of my concerns. The title of the book is The Fire Now. There are literal and metaphorical racial, ethnic, gendered, classed fires going on all around the place. But who gets to write whilst the fire is happening? It is possible for our writing to be part of the efforts to put out fires or stop them in the first place. It’s also possible for our writing to get in the way of that. Both those things can be true. When I read your email, I was reminded of how you are giving of your self, time, energy, emotions, resources na kadhalika [etc.] to what you believe in. I would hate for that to get lost because I think you speak for yourself, but also for many (including me) who are constantly juggling. Also, because it highlights some of the conversations that then fall on the wayside, e.g. food, which I am quite saddened by. (Like you – you were saying – I don’t know how to edit … I just put streams of thought and tidy later :-)) So point one, would you be happy for us to use your email as a creative non-fiction piece? If so we could agree what it would look like and its title. Also, if so, could you please speak more to what you understand by ‘the fire now’, with examples if you like (we are 52 per cent and other initiatives you are involved with) and what it looks like for us to be in those fires, fighting those fires etc. and writing (if at all these are different things). No probs if you would rather not. Thank you Wambui for all that you do. Wambui: 20 September 2017 If you were trying to make me cry at my desk, it worked. Oh Beth, how could I possibly say no to anything you wanted after that? Do as you will with the words of mine you found useful. Thank goodness there IS a use for them: I really am a ‘woman’ of letters, but I feel as if all my many thousands of words are hidden: (a) because they’re under

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copyright to someone else or (b) because I wrote them to a person and not for the public. There’s something gendered going on with that as well … Yeah, go for it. If it works for you, it will work for me. Is that official enough permission or do you need a more coherent sentence? Something like: Yes, you have my permission to use the email I wrote to you for your intended publication purposes. Writings to and from Osop and Beth Beth: Hey Osop. Just checking on you and hoping that you are well. I have been following the [Kenya 2017] elections, including what’s supposed to happen tomorrow … sounds like it will be a ‘shit show’ to say the least. I also wanted to check in with the news of the latest bombing in Somalia. I hope your family all over are well and safe. Please let me know what you need and if there’s any way that I can be here for you … but I understand as well if you would rather not talk – about the bombing or elections, or at all. Mad love to Hamdi and the rest of the crew. Beth. Osop: Beth, I don’t know what to say, I really feel I want to write something down and have someone read it … sometimes I am not sure if anybody else is seeing or caring about what’s going on like to black Muslims including here in Kenya like for us Kenyan-Somalis. I just don’t want all of this to go to waste … sorry that I am rambling. I love you. Beth: Hey Osop. No, you are not rambling at all. If there’s anything you have written that you would like me to read, I am happy to do that … but equally no offence will be taken if you would rather not send it to me. I know that despite growing up working-class and female my experience of being a Kikuyu and Christian puts me in a place of privilege on a number of levels. I wouldn’t want to put you in a situation where you feel like you have to educate me on your humanity, or anything like that … but I am also happy to listen, or read if that’s what you need. I love you too.

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Osop: Abayo [sister], you spent so much time with Somalis I think you are honorary Somali haha :-) Anyway I wrote to my aunt who wants to move to Nairobi. I would want you to read. You are a real person and sometimes I feel like I am screaming into a void and nobody is paying attention. This is to my real aunt, but also to many ‘aunties’ that she represents. Beth: Habibti [my love], thank you so much for sharing your letter. I have a slight glimpse of what it’s like to be screaming into a void with no one paying attention … although obviously I can’t fully know what you mean like I said before … I think I told you of a book me and two friends are putting together. If you like, we could include your piece there, but it’s up to you. We hope for the book to be used by secondyear undergraduate students, who will forever witness this thought. As always, if this is not helpful to you then ignore it. Osop: OMG Beth that would be great. But I don’t sound clever. Should I get a ghost writer to re-write it for me so that it can go to the book? Beth: No of course not! You are an intelligent fierce badass. I think sometimes the ability to say things in their simplest form is a/the sign of true clever sounding-ness :-) Osop: Habibti, please do with it as you wish. Add, delete, use, don’t use … it’s up to you guys. *** Dear Habaryar, I heard the news of the attack in Zoope Mogadishu and I hope you and the rest of the family are still keeping well. Since our last conversation, I’ve been thinking about your suggestion of you and your daughters moving to Kenya. But then it occurred to me that life in Kenya is not any safer for a Somali than it is in Somalia. I’m a

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Kenyan Somali and I have lived here my whole thirty years of life and I still have to justify my citizenship on a regular basis. I remember the constant harassment from people in matatus [public mini-vans] while getting to work or leaving work just calling me Al Shabaab. It reached a point where I would board the matatus while listening to the radio on my phone to drown out the negativity. The worst day was when I was almost attacked by a random man while at the video rental place, he got up close to me and just yelled ‘Leave our country. You are not welcomed you Al Shabaab’. The storeowner had to forcefully remove me from the place. The police aren’t any better. Like clockwork, they storm Eastleigh at around 5 pm and start by just randomly stopping people and asking for Kitambulisho [identity cards] and if you are caught outside without the ID then you either pay a ridiculous amount for a bribe or you are jailed and can be even labelled as a terrorist. And night time is the worst because if you are caught outside then you are either raped or if you ask a lot of questions and know a bit about the law and cause a commotion by fighting for your rights then you are gunned down and labelled as a suspected gangster and the report will show that the police were on a stakeout for you. Recently a policeman just shot and killed a Somali youth in the middle of our busy street and it’s still unclear on why. No investigation was conducted and it was even covered in the news but nothing was done. I work for a humanitarian NGO and in most functions with other NGOs, people assume that I am a refugee working as a translator and they are usually very surprised to learn that I am a Kenyan Somali who heads up the biggest programme in one of the most prestigious NGOs in Kenya. They are again surprised to hear me speak and always say that ‘I speak very well for a Somali’ and they ask if I learned English from America and came back to Kenya which I haven’t. They are of the opinion that the only educated Somalis live and studied in the US. Or that Kenyan Somalis can’t be skilled too. I know I’ve been complaining about Kenya but it’s mostly home and the only one I’ve ever known. This too is difficult. I know I’ve given you a lot to think about but I think you should have all the information needed before you think about moving. Stay safe and talk to you soon Love always, Osop

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References Baldwin, J. and Peck, R. (2017). I am not your negro: A companion edition to the Documentary Film Directed by Raoul Peck. New York: Vintage International, Vintage Books. Macharia, K. (2014). Blind Peer Review. (November, 2014). Available at:

https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/ blind-peer-review/. Mwangi, W. (2013). Silence Is a Woman. (June, 2013). Available at: https://thenewinquiry.com/ silence-is-a-woman/.

18 | M OV E M E N T S T H R O UG H T R A U MA : HOW TO S E E OU RS E L V E S

Maryam Jameela

This chapter includes references to depression and suicide.

Mundane Monstrosity What happens when we begin at terror? Retrospectively, the two nights of lying in bed and checking Twitter for news of the Brexit referendum and the election of the 45th president of the United States of America have become intertwined in their emotion, geopolitics, structure and their terror. Both nights involved an uneasy feeling that the core of both these countries would bubble up to the surface, but it was easier to go to sleep with a mix of fear and wearied acceptance that the business of everyday white supremacy could be returned to in daylight hours. I told myself that whilst I thought it likely that the Leave campaign would win, and even more likely that Clinton would lose, I might as well have the last few hours of lying quietly in a dark room before News came to be unleashed and Discourse engulfed us all. In some very significant ways, this is exactly what happened (or, more accurately, is still unfurling in front of us) – Britain’s decision to vote for a stringently racist campaign to leave the EU and the USA’s election of a white supremacist is not a disruption; it is white supremacist business as usual. Plenty has been written about the rich and varied demographics of white people that voted for both of these outcomes, and I do not particularly wish to dwell upon that. Instead, I wish to dwell on the ways in which space has been taken up in the dissemination of these events by broken-hearted white liberals. So often, for women of colour, and female-identifying Muslims of colour, conversations about reacting to Brexit and Trump involve squeezing ourselves in and around white opinions and feelings, if we can even contort ourselves into such a position.

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White liberals openly grieving and expressing their horror over Brexit and Trump has meant that, for once, people of colour have been able to see a small part of the grief we regularly feel in these countries be articulated in a public space in a very specific manner. Amongst whitestream culture, the only instances where Muslim women’s opinions are included in the conversation involves reactions to terrorist events and questions about how oppressive the hijab is. It is a uniquely dizzying feeling that the fear and anguish regularly felt by people of colour at political events is so brazenly and confidently articulated by white people proclaiming that they cannot sleep or eat; so transfixed are they with horror at what right-wing politics has inevitably vomited into the leadership of two of the most powerful countries in the world. All of a sudden, the anxieties experienced by Muslim women before 2017 were in the open, without being specifically addressed to us – articles on self-care that advocated putting the phone down and limiting news alerts, how to switch off, how to protest, how to provide support for one another, were flooding feeds of concerned and right-thinking people. How could this have happened? How could the United States and Britain betray themselves so deeply? Wasn’t it all so very shocking? Not if you’d been paying attention. Even so, the initial outpourings of grief provided an opportune moment for people of colour, who are not regularly thought to have ‘emotions’, to sneak into these articulations of trauma, to allow ourselves to identify with sadness and fear, and to do so without having to find our own spaces, or to carve out safe spaces with online communities or real-life loved ones. Aisha Mirza (2017) elaborates upon what it felt like to discover that overnight Britain had confirmed its departure from the EU, in a characteristic fit of xenophobic, racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric: Despite moving to New York on a scholarship to study the mental health effects of oppression, I am finding it so, so hard to admit to myself that a news story is making me feel like I’m dying so many times a day. I wish the white people telling me that I need to be gentle, that I should talk to those who are different from me, had any idea what it feels like to be this tired. (2017: 170)

Each news alert and the ensuing spiral of horror feels, as Mirza categorises, like dying. I cannot help but think that this must be what it is like to be white – to have your fears go unquestioned, to have

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your scale of emotions echoed, validated and heard. It is an enduring reminder that so many of us continue to be located away from this process as insider outsiders living in the West. One notable bodily reaction since the summer of 2016 has been the specific kind of visceral terror that moves across your body. This is the kind of terror that is tied to not only reactions to Brexit and Trump, but also the cognitive dissonance that sees whiteness proclaim its discomfort as though many of us are outraged at injustice for the very first time. It took me a few months to realise that these vibrations in my body were coming from feeling terror, almost all the time. Part of the reason it took a while to identify it was because I have been struggling with severe clinical depression, anxiety, insomnia and suicidal ideation for roughly the past five or six years. At the best of times, my brain is a trembling pit of deep void-like emptiness and acute terror that I will not be able to make it through another day. Introducing the intense news cycles and very real horror of Trump and Brexit have added to my cocktail of horror, and, this begs the question, what does it look like to experience the deep depression that comes for people of colour seeing white supremacy continue to assert its control in our homes? What does this newly specific iteration of deep depression look like for people of colour who are already well acquainted with it in other areas of our lives? In order to contribute towards building this picture, I will turn to Elisabeth Anker’s 2014 attempt Orgies of Feeling, a white academic’s treatment of affect theory in relation to American foreign politics. The book places melodrama as the understanding principle for how white American citizens have reconciled themselves with American foreign policy and maps the emotional articulations involved in such a commitment. Its inclusion here is intended to bring forward the depth of dangerous scholarship embedded within white academia in order to demonstrate the violence and dehumanising structures in how we understand the movements of trauma. In other words, Anker’s text speaks to much of the white academic output produced against the consistent and terrifying backdrop of whiteness. Its mundane monstrosity is an avenue into opening difficult conversations as to the cogs of structures that stop our remembrances, speech and feelings from being affirmed, honoured and respected. I will parallel my remembrances of Brexit and Trump with reflections upon mental health. The bridge between these subjects, I

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feel, is invisibility and hypervisibility. Muslims, and particularly hijabi Muslim women, become hypervisible and hyperreal symbols of Islam – but those same Muslim women are not imagined to have complex mental health problems, disabilities, queerness, nothing that would distinguish us as full humans. Even so, we have our own movements of trauma that interact with political news, and conversely, we have our own mental health that interacts emotionally and anxiously to news that often positions Muslims as internal enemies. I will be arguing that the combination of not being seen to have trauma that concerns either our personal lives, or trauma from political events that predate Brexit and Trump, is a combination that severely exacerbates problems with mental health. The Morality of Trauma Events like these are ones which are given the status of being watershed moments; they are supposed to alter the course of a country, to bring about seismic changes in policy. I cannot help but feel, though, that they are events which are continuations of a core and historical truth of Western societies – black and brown people are not supposed to exist, never mind prosper, within these systems. Historically, this has been coming. If anything, it feels all too inevitable. This realisation is so familiar that it sticks to your ribs every time you breathe. Moments that appear ground-breaking or notably catastrophic involve, for people of colour, looking at identity categories; I hate that so often with reflective pieces we have to string ourselves out and label our insides in order to explain ourselves. I have had to become acutely familiar with the positions that inform my thinking, and how I am seen by white British people. From their perspective, the most relevant parts of my identity are my Pakistani ethnicity, being Muslim and being brown. These are the identities that flare up, that are thrown into sharp relief when political watershed moments happen. For events as broad as these two elections, everyone is affected to some degree. There is a difference, however, with the fact that our trauma over these election results, over the ensuing political commentary, over the fact that 2017 has seen open Nazi rallies (Washington Post, 2017) across the world, is given a kind of legitimacy. Trauma over structural issues that disproportionately affect Muslim women of colour – housing, employment discrimination,

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Islamophobia, anti-blackness, queer erasure, disability discrimination – are traumas that have never been validated by any cultural zeitgeist. And yet, we now find ourselves seeing echoes of trauma over the rolling news coverage that has characterised 2017. Suddenly, it is easy to find social media feeds with people expressing their anxiety, detailing why they can’t sleep, how their body seizes up when they get another news alert, how they didn’t expect to spend so much time protesting. Even if this mirroring comes from white people, it is an expression of trauma that still allows Muslim women of colour to be seen. To have trauma validated, to be unequivocally told that your suffering is acceptable is a new experience. Of course, this does not mean that the underlying issues Muslim women of colour have been pained by are accepted. It means that as long as we’re discussing politics-related anxiety, there is an outlet for it that positions mental anguish as a reasonable and moral response. Political Identities Anker’s Orgies of Feeling devotes a considerable section to determining the role of legitimacy and collective consent in US politics; it is with these concepts that Anker introduces morality in collective US citizenship. Her construction of ‘felt legitimacy’ is a term that explains ‘an affective experience of authorising state power’ (2014: 111). In other words, Anker articulates a model that builds a connection between US foreign policy decisions and how public support for them is harnessed, in order to construct legitimacy and morality as central to how foreign policy is enacted: The problem is a felt legitimacy untethered to democratic practice: by equating a felt sense of legitimacy with a moral imperative for state action, and with the very act of participation itself, felt legitimacy in melodramatic registers depoliticizes the capacity to partake in governing decisions … [which] further eviscerates the capacity of the people to directly engage in collective action. (2014: 113)

Here, Anker outlines a melodramatic political discourse wherein consent from a public is not emphasised on a democratic level, in terms of voting or dissent, but in terms of emotions or affect, where it is much harder to discern how far public support extends for any policy in question. Such a process or manner of comprehending public support also positions public reaction to a cultural or societal product

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as one where there is no one moment of consent or support. Rather, societal and cultural norms coalesce to drive support home in a manner which appears to be discreet and difficult to track, wield or confront. This model places a moral imperative at its centre; Anker’s argument hinges upon US citizens being convinced that it is morally and urgently correct that the US take action in their foreign policy. Anker’s mode of argument, however, only imagines white bodies that are able to engage in this process of apparent morality and simultaneously erases the black and brown bodies at home and abroad that are killed by US domestic and foreign policy. Anker’s choice to view ‘American’ as a synonym for ‘white’ speaks to the depths in which academic discourse centres white bodies; in order for white emotions to be centred it is paramount that white bodies are concurrently centred also. The most engagement Anker affords the atrocities committed by US policies is to list some of the harm done by US Homeland Security, largely the continued institutionalisation of racism against Arabs, Muslims and Mexicans (2014: 126). As is often the case, this is a short list rather than analytical thought incorporated into the structure of the argument. It speaks volumes, however, in demonstrating the dearth of intellectual exercise in Anker’s model. Anker’s lack of commitment to exploring the lived experiences of those targeted by US policies is so stunning that it begs the question – as an academic who is able to set the tone for these conversations, what are you willing to let go? What are your priorities in analysis? Why? Can you actually live with your reasoning? Both academic and public discourse routinely choose to prioritise conversations that build deeper connections between white bodies, emotions and traumas; these conversations happen amongst the consequent dearth of discourse that fails to imagine people of colour as possessing those same emotions, traumas and lives. The style of Anker’s argument is one that will be intricately familiar to those accustomed to seeing violence against black and brown bodies being given cursory attention in favour of devoting space to white explorations of morality devoid of the guilt and condemnation you would expect. This style is rooted in the fact that at no point throughout her book does Anker mention her identity politics or categories in the text itself. Whiteness often does not feel the need to express why it should be valued, or why it is best positioned to spew forth on any given subject. Whiteness, and to be more specific, white

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people are not required to carve out spaces for parts of their identity that intersect – the work of whiteness is not contingent upon stringing itself out because by its nature it is positioned as valuable, coherent and rigorous. Movements of Trauma People in the US and the UK are ostensibly reacting to the same thing, but there is a gulf in affect. There is a gulf between those who move through white supremacy every day, and those who were introduced to it with the election of Trump. There is a gulf between people of colour experiencing terror at the prospect of what is to come, and those who articulate fear for their future. Anker’s text is particularly central because it is yet another reminder that the bodies who you imagine to suffer, or love, or engage politically, radically inform who you consider to be human. I have been crushingly relieved that there has been a space to see other people articulate their grief at knowing that Trump’s policies and the UK’s swing to the right incites terror into the hearts of many. Usually, this terror is left to simmer underneath the surface, only receiving outlets amongst trusted friends and family, where you can admit that you’re terrified of what is to come for our various communities. We often feel as though we are teetering on the brink of devastation. Often, we fall into those pits of devastation when the unthinkable happens. Even then, before Brexit and Trump, these crises would not be validated and shared by cultural hegemony. Instead, there would be the voices of women of colour, often black women, imploring people to care and to pay attention. It was only with the election of Trump, particularly, that white people shared in this panic. I cannot help but find an assonance between this movement of trauma concerning politics, and with movements of trauma in my own life. For Muslim women of colour, there has been no such movement from a peaceful life that was upturned by some election results; it is instead the case that a structural element of our lives found itself temporarily transported from private to public. For white people, these elections have seen a shocking movement of what was perhaps a smallscale problem before, to the kind of large-scale devastation that affects them as well. On an individual scale, I have been well aware of the rarity of such an occurrence. But I have also found myself resentful. I am all

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too aware of the fact that people of colour have a uniquely different experience of mental health care (Mind, 2013). Of course, my mental health has been affected by Trump and Brexit, but I have also found myself more suicidal over the past two years than I have ever been before. My own conceptions of trauma have moved from private to public; this boundary is crossed almost weekly, but the permeability of said boundary is consistently a struggle. Many of my loved ones do not know I am suicidal; many of them do. I have long conversations with myself as I struggle to articulate what is happening to me. Some of these conversations slip onto my Twitter feed, some into conversations with people. My personal movements of trauma alter frequently and often revolve around the fact that I spend almost all of my time desperately willing myself to stop existing, or for somebody to notice and do something, or to drudge up the final act that will allow me to quiet my brain. The deathly irony of being a suicidal Muslim has never been lost on me. It has been the reason that I have been so careful about who I speak with about my problems. Once again, there has to be a precursor to the conversation: I must consider my identity categories and my subsequent right to take up space before I string myself out and begin a conversation. The movements enacted here are built upon my own personal rules that I have constructed over the years to keep myself alive. These rules are why I found myself filled with rage, delighted and deeply saddened that all of a sudden a majority of people are enacting a movement of trauma that is built upon a sense of community, and validating each other’s trauma through acknowledging and accepting that we are at a difficult time. I suspect the time would become altogether more difficult when we consider that acceptance of trauma, or indeed struggling, is dependent upon skin colour. Anker’s modus operandi is a prime example of the droves of US foreign policy books churned out every so often, only its focus upon affect theory and morality is one which positions it as capable of using the language of social justice activism, but only by and for whiteness. It easily casts aside notions of identity, and moves on to explaining how US policies have come to be justified in spite of the harm they inevitably create. One prominent example of how the language of social justice activisms are increasingly used to centre whiteness is that of the 2017 Women’s March (see Milner and Aromolaran in this collection) where

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white women showed up en masse once their identities as white women were threatened. Amir Talai, an actor who attended the march with a sign that read ‘I’ll see you nice white ladies at the next #blacklivesmatter march, right?’ (Splinter News, 2017), demonstrates the centrality of whiteness at every conceivable turn. Whiteness leaves no room for manifestations of mental health that occur at the same moment as seismic political events. Just as it is impossible, as women of colour, to extricate your identity from your opinions, it is impossible to extricate mental health from politics. Feeling suicidal as a brown Muslim woman cannot be paused when there is a xenophobic political event to react to, and the swirling hole in your chest does not care whether it has been borne out of politics, personal temperament, brain chemistry or racism. When confronted with choices such as the Women’s March or intensely white academic or public discourse, there is no separation of these elements. Even so, separation is precisely what is required from Muslim women of colour in order to see ourselves in spaces that can hear what is all too often framed as our competing concerns in race, politics and discourse. I’m Here for a (Good) Time, Not a Long Time Towards the conclusion of her introduction, Anker states, even in one of the more unliberatory eras in contemporary politics – when political subjects do not just acquiesce to but often actively support policies that sanction large-scale violence and murder, and that shrink venues for dissent, possibilities for political participation, and pursuits of justice – is there a glimmer of a desire to challenge unfreedom, an intent to undo the oppressions that individuals often seem so willing to uphold? (2014: 19)

This question is qualified by Anker with the claim that she does not wish to only look for light in dark times, or to ‘justify the complicity of American citizens who acquiesce to and actively sanction violent, inhumane, or oppressive policies’ (2014: 19, 20) but rather a question geared towards confronting the status of ‘political subjects’ who may well challenge the implementations of ‘unfreedom’ from governments (2014: 20). I cannot help but be reminded of the oft-repeated phrase for those struggling with mental illnesses – ‘it gets better’. Anker’s questions paint a general portrait of violent and oppressive US policies, but her choices

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in discourse speak to a larger web of thought where whiteness weaponises its politics. It has long been a hallmark of white culture to presume that things will get better, that resistance is something to be achieved whilst ignoring the deaths, and both the structural and symbolic violences enacted upon black and brown people. The concept of undoing oppression is one which only holds up against scrutiny if said scrutiny does not involve lived experiences, or, in more bland terms, reality. The desire for light in darkness, for some kind of upheaval against oppression is attractive for obvious reasons. It is not one, however, that I have found myself drawn to since the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election. It feels unbelievable to ask people of colour to join in with this unsure call for hope or light, to ask us to believe in the possibility of overturning centuries of systemic and violent oppression. It is irresponsible, at best, to ask people of colour to look beyond whiteness to imagine a better world. To look beyond whiteness would be to refuse to see the reality of the persistent inability demonstrated by white people to even conceive of people of colour as human. There is much to be done before Muslim women of colour, and people of colour in general, can have our movements of trauma be acknowledged, validated and seen. I do not believe that things will get better, either politically or personally. I do not particularly see why I should be invested in seeing a better future when we cannot be seen in either domain, public or private. I do not see this as an act of pessimism or cynicism, but as one which is instead focused on what has come to pass, and where we are now. I do not think things will get better, but I will continue to try not to die. I do not think things will get better, but I will continue to engage with social justice activism. I do not think things will get better, but I will continue to work to see those who are invisibilised and hypervisibilised. References Anker, E. (2014). Orgies of Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hurston, Z. N. (2015). How It Feels to Be Colored Me. Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books. Mind (2013). Mental Health Crisis Care: Commissioning Excellence for Black and Minority Ethnic Groups. London:

Clinical Commissioning Groups. Available at: www.mind.org.uk/ media/494422/bme-commissioningexcellence-briefing.pdf (Accessed 10 October 2017). Mirza, A. (2017). Staying Alive through Brexit: Racism, Mental Health and Emotional Labour. In Sabrina Mahfouz (ed.), The Things I Would Tell

208 | U N D E R S TA N D I N G A N D R E F R A M I N G O P P R E S S I O N You: British Muslim Women Write. London: Saqi Books. Splinter News. (2017). An Interview with the Guy behind One of the Most Controversial Signs from the Women’s March. Available at: https:// splinternews.com/an-interviewwith-the-guy-behind-one-of-themost-contro-1793858313 (Accessed 5 November 2017).

Washington Post. (2017). Here’s What a Neo-Nazi Rally Looks Like in 2017 America. Available at: www. washingtonpost.com/news/local/ wp/2017/08/13/heres-what-aneo-nazi-rally-looks-like-in-2017america/?utm_term=.3ebfdcd3c602 (Accessed 10 August 2017).

19 | F U N D AM E N T A L B R I T I S H V A L UES : MOV I N G TOW A R D S A N T I - R A CI S T A ND MU LTI C U LTUR A L E D UCA T I O N ?

Sadia Habib

It is the British, the white British, who have to learn that being British isn’t what it was. Now it is a more complex thing, involving new elements. So there must be a fresh way of seeing Britain and the choices it faces: and a new way of being British after all this time. (Kureishi, 1986: 38)

Introduction The amplified racism and Islamophobia in the post-Brexit and post-Trump age, where people of colour are violently excluded, vilified and abused must be reflected and acted upon in educational spaces with young people. It is young people who can use opportunities and safe spaces in schools, colleges and universities to review, re-think and re-create what it means to be British in multicultural Britain. Recent research on initial teacher education and anti-racist education though reveals a lack of training for teachers on how to move classroom conversations beyond media stereotypes about ethnic minorities (Lander, 2014). Multiculturalism has distinct meanings according to political and philosophical stances (Steinberg, 2009), and different uses depending upon whether you are describing organisations, curriculums, policies or practices (Osler, 2008). Multicultural diversity and anti-racism implementation does not solely involve teachers’ reflections upon personal identity, but teachers must also come to understand and challenge White supremacy and White privilege (Howard, 2006). Teachers are sometimes neglectful of how ‘white-supremacist thinking informs every aspect of our culture including the way we learn, the content of what we learn, and the manner in which we are taught’. There is a pretence, even in anti-racist work, ‘that racist and whitesupremacist thought and action are no longer pervasive in our culture’ (hooks, 2003: 25).

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In this chapter, I argue that rather than marginalise issues of ‘race’ and racism, we need anti-racist education to become firmly embedded in any exploration of Britishness or Fundamental British Values. Through its focus on a monolithic national identity, Fundamental British Values (FBV) policy has contributed to the continuing demise of anti-racist education in schools, whilst racism and Islamophobia are increasing rapidly in society (Habib, 2018). I draw upon my research in a multicultural London secondary school showing young people’s conceptions of race and lived experiences of racism are inseparable from their discourses and debates on British identities and belongings. I argue teachers must explore Britishness through an anti-racist lens, emphasising the urgent need for an anti-racist framework that promotes alternative respectful ways of discussing citizenship, race and migration (Finney and Simpson, 2009). The Stranger on the Shores of Britain For many years, Britain has obsessed over ‘race, racism and national identity’ (Malik, 2002: 1), and it has been racialised people (either through Empire or foreign policy) that have suffered the lived realities of political discourses and decisions. At a time when we continue to witness rising local, national and global incidents of racial and religious prejudice and hate crime (Bulman, 2017), the pedagogies advocated by anti-racist and multicultural education become even more necessary. Governments though are fixated upon promoting insular and xenophobic rhetoric of assimilation, nationalism and patriotism. The FBV policy which schools are expected to advocate neglects the decades of work that anti-racist and multicultural educators have done to ensure schools are inclusive and supportive of students of colour. The FBV policy has been heavily critiqued for being illinformed, poorly conceptualised and damaging to student and teacher relationships (Lander, 2016). Panjwani’s research with Muslim teachers, for example, shows they do not find British and Islamic values to be incompatible, but argue FBV duty is flawed and problematic: ‘the lack of clarity, irrelevance, inadequate choice of values, conflict between proclaimed values and state practices’ (2016: 333). Thirty years ago, Kureishi (1986) emphasised the complexity of Britishness, while demanding new and fresh ways of viewing Britishness. Stale and old ways, however, with their haunting and harrowing shadows of White colonialism and imperialism, continue

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to embody contemporary Britishness. The FBV agenda has emerged alongside other worrying trends whereby the global and the expansive is feared, and the insular and the national are lauded. Surveys in the 1990s, for instance, had stated European identity would overtake national identifications (Kershen, 1998). Yet today in Europe, the rise of ugly nationalism (Bhambra, 2014) is no longer the sole domain of far-right extremists, but discourses of hateful nationalism that demonise immigrants and multiculturalism are terrifyingly mainstream (Amin, 2012: 119). The 2016 Referendum to leave the European Union (Brexit) brought forth evidence of mainstream British politicians willing to employ aggressive rhetoric of Othering and exclusion. Some politicians have historically denied the relationship between Britishness, Whiteness and racism (Back et al., 2002); yet British cultural nationalism was historically ‘a language of race’ (Gilroy, 1992: 56). This is especially evident today, as being British is once again equated with being White. Even if Whiteness is not ‘an explicit condition of being British’, Britishness is still ‘racially coded’: thus ‘race is deeply entwined with political culture and with the idea of nation, and underpinned by a distinctive kind of British reticence – to take race or racism seriously, or even to talk about them at all, is bad form’ (Parekh, 2000: 38). Brexit has brought forth the bigotry that was bubbling away below the superficial veneer of British values. This nation is not the only one witnessing resurgent racism: global and transnational ways of belonging have also been impacted by the election of Donald Trump. In 2016, the election of Trump converged with the bigotry of the Brexit campaign. This coalescence saw racism and Islamophobia become even more bold, brash and blatant. Othering is increasingly taking place through new racisms targeting culture and difference, rather than supposed biological or physical differences. Britishness is, thus, manipulated to emphasise who does not belong to Britain because of difference (Walters, 2012). The parading of prejudice and racism has become an everyday and accepted norm, resulting in scholars and activists asking important questions about the impact of everyday normalised racism. Research is needed on what this rise in racism means for young people of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds in Britain. How can young people negotiate the tensions of local, national and global belongings in a time when racism and Islamophobia are on the increase?

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Fundamental British Values (FBV) In the ‘prevailing backlash’ against multiculturalism (Meer and Modood, 2014: 6), there seems to be a common goal across British governments to further exclude ethnic minorities through FBV. This call for FBV is often critiqued for it is not progressive, inclusive or anti-racist (Amin, 2012). The FBV policy is a return to assimilation in Britain. The narrow, insular and racist approaches of FBV policy and practices are brought to light by the Teachers’ Standards that insist teachers monitor and report students’ sense of Britishness, and also enforce an assimilatory vision upon Muslim students: Though not stated, the instruction teachers will be bound by (that is not to undermine British values) suggests that teachers instead will through their teaching impose British values on students and by doing this downplay the value of minority ethnic cultures and the values that inform minority ethnic cultures. (Maylor, 2016: 319)

Teacher educators are concerned that the stipulation to not ‘undermine FBV’ – which is included in the Teachers’ Standards and directs their personal and professional behaviour – has not been addressed or challenged by the media, schools and even teacher education organisations (Elton-Chalcraft et al., 2017). If the ‘Teachers’ Standards’ – compiled after I conducted my research with art teachers and students on teaching and learning about Britishness (Habib, 2018) – require teachers not to undermine FBV (Department for Education, 2011), this raises crucial questions about teachers implicated in enacting racist and Islamophobic policies. They can find themselves, sometimes unwittingly or unwillingly, serving as ‘instruments of the state’ (Lander, 2016: 275). Teachers might feel uneasy personally, professionally and pedagogically about the contradictions and injustices of enforcing FBV policy; and may feel coerced into upholding institutionally racist policies such as monitoring and reporting on students who are seen as dissenting or resisting hegemonic societal attitudes, expectations and ideologies (Lander, 2016; Farrell, 2016; Smith, 2016; Panjwani, 2016; Maylor, 2016). Although teachers are often seen to be advocates of social integration rather than policies of assimilation, some teaching staff do believe that students affiliated with their ethnic or cultural identities are alienated from Britishness (Keddie, 2013). Teachers can be guilty of transmitting

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an ideology of assimilation to their students, as well as diminishing the significance of multiple, fluid and evolving identities and attachments. The ‘message’ received here by ethnic minority students would be ‘forget the culture of your parents, discard any affiliation to your ethnic background and blend in’ (Troyna and Carrington, 2012: 2). Cultural assimilation is frequently promoted by educationalists who assume ‘a successful student of color is an assimilated student of color’ (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002: 31). Reclaiming Multiculturalism, Rejecting Fundamental British Values We have witnessed the demise of multicultural educational policies and anti-racist education in this neoliberal age (Mitchell, 2003). Instead politicians attempt to reinvigorate an ‘assimilative national project’ (Alexander, 2007: 115), moulding the citizens of the nation by emphasising national cohesion. Britishness becomes ‘a political project and a tool of statecraft’, as a targeted response to migration and multiculturalism (Back, 2009: 204). At times when political discourses become tools of statecraft, teachers can use classroom discussions to explore why and how assimilationary rhetoric has emerged, and how it might continue to unfold. Young people from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds will require structured and safe spaces to reflect upon what it means to be British during a time when assimilation, nationalism and FBV dominate the socio-political landscape of multicultural Britain. If young people from ethnic minority communities have become accustomed to assimilative social projects ‘to make the Other into one of us’, projects that have been recognised as having ‘exhausted themselves in their futility and discrimination’ (Sandercock, 2005: 220), then discussions in safe spaces in schools about migration and multiculturalism are necessary. The growing fear is that a racist postBrexit society will capitalise on exclusionary and insular attitudes towards Britishness, and therefore call for more assimilative policies, particularly targeting Muslims. This is exemplified through news headlines like ‘Be more British Cameron tells UK Muslims’ (Walters, 2014); headlines that ignore the empirical data showing Muslims ‘feel’ British (Meer et al., 2015). Media and political discourses in this way seek to construct British Muslims as Other and not British enough.1 British Muslims are dismissed as less-than citizens (Gilmartin, 2008), as Britons come to internalise the ‘new McCarthyism’ (Fekete, 2009)

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of policies creating ‘fear and suspicion of Islam and Muslims’ (Revell, 2012: 78). Pernicious media representation – especially concerning Muslims and their incompatibility with Britishness (Archer, 2003; Amin, 2003) – is ‘digested and repeated, feeding existing stereotypes and fuelling fears’ about the state of the nation (Commission for Racial Equality, 2005: 19). Moore et al. (2008) found that print news coverage during 2000 to 2008 frequently depicted British Muslims as a threat to British values. Sian et al. (2012) also conducted critical discourse analysis of print news and found prevalent Islamophobic discourses that positioned Muslims as ‘foreigners’ and ‘outsiders’. Yet Muslims of all ethnicities identify strongly with Britishness (Nandi and Platt, 2014), perhaps more than any other religious group in Britain (Karlsen and Nazroo, 2015). It is important to explore with young people the ways in which ‘the politics of multiculturalism’ involves ‘facing an imperial history that has brought people from around the globe into intense and sometimes terrible contact’ (Back, 1996: 8). Critical analysis of post-Brexit multicultural Britain could involve examination of the contradictory notion of the ‘multicultural nation-state’, for it will always contain those who ‘think they have founded it or should have a special role in running it’ (Baumann, 1999: 32). Ethnic minorities have long been ‘racialized as inferior, or dangerous and foreign, and therefore outside the boundaries of the British national collectivity’ (Anthias and YuvalDavis, 1992: 45). An expression of ethnicity that was perhaps more ‘confined to the privacy of family and community’ and did not make ‘political demands’ (Modood, 2005: 466) might have once been more tolerable to British society, but since the 1990s ethnic minority youth have become more politicised, confident in publicly ‘asserting their Britishness’, and more ‘articulate and aggressive’ in challenging institutional inequalities (Anwar, 2002: 188). Kundnani (2005) powerfully argues our racist values are the real problem; instead of dismantling the institutional racism that pervades social structures, Muslims are depicted as strange/ alien, and – through the lens of the ‘war on terror’ – as the enemy. White Britons come to blame the decline of Britishness on migrants and Muslims (Commission for Racial Equality, 2005), mirroring government and media rhetoric regarding the ‘war on terror’ which is successfully ‘exaggerated’ to create moral panics (Yousuf, 2007: 366).

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Researching Youth Voices on Britishness and Belonging Almost a decade ago, my research into the meanings of Britishness in southeast London showed racism was an everyday experience for young people. The A level students2 I interviewed reflected upon the pernicious racisms they had experienced. Afruz, a Bangladeshi male student, explained Britishness was epitomised by the National Front. The racist violence that Bangladeshi communities had once suffered at the hands of the National Front3 seemed to be entrenched in Afruz’s experiences of British identity. Afruz and his peer Robert (of Ugandan and Russian heritage) had recalled playing football in Year Eleven (aged fifteen to sixteen), reflecting on a sense of ‘segregation’ as the White students would want to play ‘Whites against Blacks’. This might have begun in jest, they conceded, but it soon became the norm. It was always the White boys who represented England against ‘anyone coloured, anyone not White, anyone not English basically’, Afruz recalled. Years before Brexit then Afruz and Robert spoke about racism being an everyday feature of school life, while their classmate Michelle was shocked to hear about the racist jibing common amongst the boys. She had not encountered the racist taunts in her experience of school. Afruz explained to Michelle that the White boys used words like ‘coon’: ‘do you know White people used words like that in the 1970s, when proper racism happened. They just bring them words back’. If Afruz and Robert referred to racism as a common feature of school life before Brexit, questions are raised about how young people today are experiencing the amplified racism of recent years. Is it more overt, violent and ubiquitous today, at a time racism is tied up with an inward-looking nationalism and patriotism, which prevails post-Brexit and post-Trump? The A level student Robert, again long before Brexit, argued promoting nationalism is dangerous and symbolically demeans the Other: I don’t see anything wrong with being proud of your culture, but when you start teaching nationalism, you start to be wary of other cultures, maybe thinking yours is superior to theirs … that’s a danger. You shouldn’t teach that in schools. Somewhere like America, they may not say it, but they have this air of superiority about them, they think that other cultures coming there should maybe conform to their society.

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Robert went on to critique assimilationist rhetoric and media representation where ‘immigrants are perhaps seen as inferior because of their culture. They are expected to acclimatise to British culture. But I think that people should embrace multiculturalism because that’s the world we live in’. Robert’s multiple cultural influences – Ugandan, Russian and British – steered him away from identifying with nations. Nationalistic sentiments homogenising diverse and complex societies (Cohen, 1994) was a concern to Robert, as was the problematic ‘ideological aura attached to nationhood’ (Billig, 1995: 4). When nationalism rears its ugly head through far-right extremism propagating ‘division between us and them, between citizens and foreigners’ (Osler and Starkey, 2005: 11), patriotism is ‘manipulated and transformed into a dangerous nationalism’ (Carrington and Short, 1998: 150). There is a danger that in championing British history, values and identity, diverse students’ ethnic and cultural heritages are viewed as marginal and insignificant. Pride in the nation is perpetuated at the expense of acknowledging the shameful histories of Britain’s colonial aggressions (Fortier, 2005; Zembylas, 2008). In the United States, teachers who openly critique the political status quo are already vulnerable to neoliberal hard-lined practices and neoconservative ideologies which can destroy their teaching career and livelihood (Groenke and Hatch, 2009; Gabbard, 2009). Politicians have for a long time attempted to render race invisible by underemphasising, even ignoring, institutional racism and racial inequalities (Gillborn, 1995; Ratcliffe, 2011; Craig and O’Neill, 2013). This ignoring of racism has seeped into professional practice with new teachers (Solomon et al., 2005; Pearce, 2012; Lander, 2014). A major challenge for anti-racist activism is how to ensure Critical Whiteness Studies4 is incorporated into the pedagogies, policies and practices of educational and social policy. Race, racism and racial inequalities need examining in schools (Maylor et al., 2006); my teaching and research experience shows that through critical race theory and critical pedagogy we can begin to address social inequalities. Examples of neglecting ‘race’ issues include loss of funding for regional Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) networks, the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s responsibilities being decreased, and the Government Equalities Office having its budget almost halved (Gillborn, 1995; Craig and O’Neill, 2013). Institutional racism and racial inequalities are deemed insignificant.

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Yet worryingly, ‘Britain cannot get over its past and racism holds the society hostage’ (Back, 2009: 205). Critical race theorists argue racism needs to be interrogated, victims given voices and empowerment, unity and solidarity encouraged through ‘hearing their own stories and the stories of others, listening to how the arguments against them are framed, and learning to make the arguments to defend themselves’ (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002: 27). Examining racisms should not solely focus on ‘personal prejudice and ignorance’, but also on institutional racisms experienced by school students (Gillborn, 1995: 36), as well as on ‘new racisms’ that reveal socio-cultural (or religious) targeting of the Other (Back, 1996). Moreover, ethnic identities are often explored in relation to adults, and mostly in urban multi-ethnic areas; thus, children’s ethnic identities as well as the ethnic identities of those situated in rural White areas need researching (Scourfield et al., 2005). Conclusion: Examining British Identities through a Critical Lens Thirty years ago, Jacobson argued that the redefining of Britishness would not be ‘rapid or problem-free’: ‘an awareness of persisting prejudice and discrimination emanating from the white majority will undermine hopes for an end to exclusivist conceptions of the “nation”’ (1997: 196). The young people in my research similarly show how decades later prejudice and discrimination impact upon their sense of Britishness. Working with young people in schools – to help them to explore contemporary belongings and identities – necessitates exploring fragmentary and multiple identities (Brah, 1996; Faas, 2012), global citizenship (Osler and Starkey, 2005) and how distinctive diasporic identifications make traditional national affiliations more complex and nuanced (Back, 1996; Gilroy, 2002). Conventional notions of national identity that call for a stable and fixed identity for citizens who should only belong to one country have long been negated. Even if government wants to hold onto a singular version of Britishness, identity cannot be defined in one consistent way. Identities are ‘several, sometimes contradictory or unresolved’ (Hall, 1996: 598); identity is ‘as a process, as a narrative, as a discourse, it is always told from the position of the Other’ (Hall, 2000: 147). Teaching about Britishness must not engender ‘“indoctrination into a narrow, fixed, uncritical and intolerant nationalism” (Breslin,

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Rowe and Thornton 2006: 21)’ (Maylor et al., 2007: 6). Respectful ways of discussing citizenship, race and migration which support equality, anti-racism and ensure rights of marginalised people, for example refugees, are urgently necessary (Finney and Simpson, 2009), for students to benefit emotionally, socially and intellectually from studying Britishness. Anti-racist education concerns pedagogies and policies combatting individual and institutional discrimination through advancing racial equality (Troyna and Carrington, 2012). Language and music, for example, are two social sites where London youth may come together sharing urban multicultural ways of doing Britishness through contesting racisms (Back, 1996). Critical theorists argue racism is not a mere appendage to British history. Racism is perceived as inherent in British identity (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992). In Citizenship Education lessons, race is sometimes essentialised, the topic of racism is not adequately handled and Britishness is equated with Whiteness by teachers (Chadderton, 2009). One reason for teachers being unprepared to handle debates around racism may be that ‘there is no one monolithic racism but numerous historically situated racisms’ (Back, 1996: 9). To be a critical pedagogue is to recognise education is not neutral (Lather, 1986; Denzin, 1989; Patton, 1999; O’Toole and Beckett, 2013; Smyth and McInerney, 2013), and therefore how we engage in learning and teaching about Trump and Brexit cannot be neutral. Not when there are increasing incidences of racial and religious abuse and attacks. Notes 1 Until 1948, British women who married non-British men were prevented from holding legal status as British citizens (Paul, 1997). Only after 1983 were they able to ‘pass on Britishness to their children’ (Ward, 2004: 39). 2 A levels are qualifications obtained in the post-compulsory education sector, usually at the age of seventeen or eighteen. 3 Other students also articulated notions of Britishness and belonging as

frequently unsettled by the presence of the National Front. Perhaps because electoral support rose for the National Front in 2002 (Jensen et al., 2012), this extreme right-wing group, that some might have thought defunct, was a visible threat to the ethnic minority students. 4 Critical Whiteness Studies concerns White people ‘and their sense of self, their interests and concerns’ (Cole, 2016: 5).

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China Mills

Promoting Fundamental British Values On 22 March 2017 an attack claimed to be linked to ‘Islamic terrorism’ resulted in the deaths of five people on Westminster Bridge (outside the UK Houses of Parliament). In the aftermath, Theresa May (UK Prime Minister) stood in front of Number 10 Downing Street and gave a speech (a part of which is reproduced below): The location of this attack [Westminster Bridge] was no accident, the terrorists chose to strike at the heart of our capital city, where people of all nationalities, religions and cultures come together to celebrate the values of liberty, democracy and freedom of speech. These streets of Westminster, home to the world’s oldest parliament, are ingrained with a spirit of freedom that echoes in some of the furthest corners of the globe. And the values our parliament represents: democracy, freedom, human rights, rule of law – command the admiration and respect of free people everywhere. That is why it is a target for those who reject those values. But let me make clear today, as I have had cause to do before, any attempt to defeat those values through violence and terror is doomed to failure. (Theresa May, 22 March 2017)

The values Theresa May names – democracy, rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs, including those without faith – are what the Department for Education (2014) claim constitute ‘Fundamental British Values’ – to be taught in all schools in England, and assessed by the school inspection agency Ofsted. The Ofsted School Inspection Handbook (2014: 35) states: ‘The social development of pupils is shown by their: acceptance and engagement with the fundamental British values’. In order for schools to be rated by Ofsted as ‘Outstanding’ they must show that they promote: ‘Pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural

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development and, within this, the promotion of fundamental British values, are at the heart of the school’s work’ (Ofsted, 2014: 42). The UK has seen a domestic avalanche of counter-terrorism legislation, of which British Values is one key part. This is made explicit in legislation imposing compulsory duties on schools and universities, requiring educators to assist in the identification and monitoring of young people ‘at risk’ of extremism. This signifies a growing but historically contingent interface between psy-expertise, security and education (DuRodie, 2016). Moving away from psychologising ‘extremism’, this chapter argues that teaching British values is more than a counter-terrorism strategy, it is a psychic defence mechanism to protect and privilege whiteness, deny the violence and radical exclusions on which liberal values have been built, and maintain an anti-black social order. The chapter concludes that in order to understand ‘British values’, we need pedagogical approaches that can trace and bring to bear upon white supremacy the colonial histories, political contexts and normalised state violence that form the backdrop to the emergence of British citizenship. Pursue, Protect, Prepare and Prevent: The Story of a Shipwreck and a Desert Island Preventing ‘radicalisation’ is a central tenet of the UK’s counterterror strategy CONTEST (first introduced in 2003), which is organised into four strands of activity: Pursue, Protect, Prepare and Prevent. Since the Counter-Terrorism Security Act 2015, Prevent’s scope has narrowed, concentrating on identifying and addressing ‘radicalisation’, particularly in Muslim communities. In the 2011 (and 2015) Prevent legislation, extremism is defined as: vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. We also include in our definition of extremism calls for the death of members of our armed forces, whether in this country or overseas. (Home Office, 2011: 107)

The revised (2015) Prevent strategy continues to embed British Values within its very definition of extremism and, furthermore, extends links to education, stating that ‘early education funding regulations in England have been amended to ensure that providers who fail to promote the fundamental British values … do not receive funding from

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local authorities for the free early years entitlement’ (Home Office, 2015: 13). To further assist in embedding counter-terrorism strategies within education, a whole industry of training providers has grown up (see, for example, training provided through the Global Learning Programme and the Citizenship Foundation), alongside a vast literature of guidelines (largely available for free online), mainly aimed at teachers. For example, the Department for Education (DfE) released (2014) guidelines on how to translate British Values teaching into spiritual, moral, social and cultural (SMSC) education (as part of section 78 of the Education Act 2002); and the Association for Citizenship Teaching released Guidelines for teachers to develop a curriculum response to the Prevent duty (Expert Subject Advisory Group for Citizenship, 2015). A favourite activity in teaching British values, and promoted by a number of training providers and provided as a free online resource through the Citizenship Foundation, is the ‘story of a sailing ship which is shipwrecked on a desert island’ (Citizenship Foundation, 2015: 1). In the story, the crew face various dilemmas in the fair running of their affairs, ‘how to share out power, food and the treasure they discover’ (2015: 1). The aim of the activity is to get children talking about ‘the difference between power based on force and the proper rule of law in which fairness is achieved through consultation and democracy’ (2015: 1). In this scenario, the island on which the ship is wrecked is deserted, blank, it has no history, it has no indigenous peoples, it is ‘empty’ land ready to be ‘discovered’ and colonised. The island resembles a whitewashed fantasy of the Americas (and of all colonised land), ready to be ‘discovered’ by a white man in a boat. Here we see the ‘doctrine of discovery’, always racialised, where time is seen to begin with those who ‘discover’, while indigenous peoples come into existence only through contact with whiteness, and where ‘the moment of discovery is never named as violence’ (Razack, 2015: 12). Like the desert island, governmental conceptualisations of British values remain very quiet about the political and colonial context for the emergence of these values and for British citizenship more widely. They explicitly do not engage with the fact that ‘what it is to be British cannot be understood separately from empire or the imperial modes of governance that remained dominant well into the twentieth century’ (Bhambra, 2016).

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Here we can see that Britishness is never framed as violence, it is instead framed as the opposite of violence, where extremism is defined as opposition to British values and where radicalisation is constructed as an individual psychological and pathological process (often described as akin to a virus). This process ‘disavow[s] the structural violence on which liberal society itself depend[s]: the ways in which racialised “others” live in a “state of exception” in which liberal norms are permanently suspended – paradoxically, in the name of defending the liberal way of life’ (Kundnani, 2014: 114). This is illustrated by Michael Gove (2006: 136) (who was Secretary of State for Education in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government between 2010 and 2014) in his book Celsius 7/7, which called for assassinations of terrorist suspects and a ‘temporary curtailment of liberties’ to prevent Islamism from destroying the West (see also Kundnani, 2014: 174). It is also illustrated in the incarceration and torture of terrorist suspects in extra-judicial sites across the world, sites where rule of law no longer applies. Against this lies a landscape where ‘liberal democracy and the rule of law are imposed worldwide through the conditionalities of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and whenever convenient, through military intervention’ (Santos, 2014: 169). This gives a different reading to Theresa May’s claims that British values echo throughout the farthest corners of the globe. Rule of law was in fact ‘one of the most vigorously advertised aspects of British Empire’, which portrayed itself as ‘planting the principles of the Magna Carta in foreign soils around the globe’ (McBride, 2016: 10). In 2014, ‘to mark the 799th anniversary of Magna Carta’, then Prime Minister David Cameron wrote an article on British values for the newspaper the Mail on Sunday. For Cameron, the principles of the Magna Carta ‘shine as brightly as ever’ because they paved the way for the values that ‘make Britain, Britain’, and therefore ‘every child’ should learn about it. For Cameron, these values and their historical underpinnings form ‘the bedrock of Britishness’. While he thinks history should be taught ‘with warts and all’, he says ‘we should be proud of what Britain has done to defend freedom’, and we should be ‘more muscular in promoting British values’. Cameron mentions ‘history’ six times in his short article. Yet amongst the many things missing from his history of Britain is awareness of how ‘the violence of imperialism was legitimated in its being exercised through law’ (Fitzpatrick, 2011: 19). McBride (2016) traces how British colonial rule illustrates how

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rule of law relied upon and developed unequal political and economic systems. Despite their glorification of British history, Theresa May and David Cameron appear to exhibit a ‘profound historical forgetfulness’ and ‘historical amnesia’ in relation to British history, which is, for Stuart Hall, ‘a decisive mental repression’ which attempts to ‘wipe out and efface every trace of the colonial and imperial past’ (1978: 26). Violence and terror are positioned as antithetical to British Values in a move that is amnesic of Britain’s violent colonial history and violently racialised present that also ‘echo’ around the globe. Hesse (1997: 87) draws upon Derrida (1982: 213) to explore how this amnesia is part of a ‘white mythology’ that ‘has erased within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink’. Here ‘“whiteness” forgets its contested antecedents’, it ‘represses the historical context of racism because the threat of the “racialised other” absorbs all attention’ (Hesse, 1997: 87). White governmentality, for Hesse (1997: 99–100), is an entrenched and routinised form of government that legislatively ‘valorises whiteness’ while framing people of colour as ‘a threat, a resource, a fantasy’ – to be regulated by whiteness. For Richardson (2006) the nation itself and national identity are fantasy structures which have an ‘emotive strength’ and draw upon history and tradition as a legitimating force. Drawing upon this concept of fantasy allows us to engage with a different set of values: ‘values that European culture has tried to distance itself from’ (Hook, 2012: 131) – the things it does not want to admit about itself and that it thus projects onto others. Thus, while the explicit curriculum focus on British Values is new, it is embedded within punitive and carceral techniques long used domestically to ‘manage’ the racialised and criminalised figures of those deemed ‘mentally ill’, and internationally to manage resistance to colonialism, including counter-insurgency strategies developed through colonial wars (Kundnani, 2014; Heinz, 1998). A key role is played here by the reconfiguration of radical political challenges into seemingly individual psychological pathologies. Winning Hearts and (Especially) Minds Winning hearts and minds is key to British counter-radicalisation policy. Minds, particularly, are central to the Prevent duty and British values policy, for within this discourse, radicalisation is located

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within ideologies constructed as prone to violence, and within the individual mentalities susceptible to these ideologies. Those ‘at risk’ of radicalisation are portrayed as psychologically vulnerable to specific ‘psychological hooks’, with mental health problems named as a potential risk factor (HM Government, 2012: 17). Coppock and McGovern (2014) trace how psy-expertise (psychology, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and psychiatry) plays a key role here, both in searching for the social and psychological factors that may contribute to the acquisition of a ‘terrorist mindset’ (Moghaddam, 2005; Wiktorowicz, 2005), attempting to locate a ‘cultural-psychological disposition to violence’ (Kundnani, 2012: 8–9), and in framing interventions aimed at halting radicalisation, for example, referring children seen as ‘at risk’ of radicalisation for cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) through the CHANNEL programme (HM Government, 2012: 21). A quick glance into the colonial history of psychiatry and psychology shows us that this reconfiguration of resistance and ‘threat’ into psychological pathology is not a new shift. In multiple colonial contexts (particularly in India and East Africa but also currently in many settler colonies) the diagnostic practices and treatments of the psy-disciplines were used to reconfigure colonial hierarchies and social inequality as ‘natural’ through coding them as genetic dysfunction, and as within the ‘neurologically primitive’ brains of the ‘natives’ (McCulloch, 1993: 39; Heinz, 1998). This enabled colonialism to remain uninterrogated because ‘medicalised explanations for dissent’, are ‘far preferable [to those in power] to economic and political analyses that might find colonial practices to be culpable in African unrest’ (Mahone, 2006: 250). Fanon rallied against the colonial configuration and psychologism of poverty and exploitation in colonised Algeria as being ‘mere states of mind’ (Adams, 1970: 811), instead locating the source of pathology within the colonial machine, and not within the natives’ brains (Fanon, 1961). Thus, to imagine the end of colonial rule came to be reconfigured in colonial East Africa as a symptom of mental disorder (Mahone, 2006); just as the attempts of African slaves to escape enslavement in the Americas was seen as a form of insanity (Fernando, 2010). A similar logic permeated J. C. Carothers’s psychiatric examinations of Mau Mau ‘rebels’ in 1950s Kenya, and his findings that the uprising was ‘not political but psycho-pathological’, a conclusion that conveniently validated the need for continuing colonial government (Kundnani,

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2012: 4). Similarly, the 1960s saw the arrival of the diagnosis of ‘Protest psychosis’ – a condition in which participating in the Black Power movement was seen to drive black men to ‘insanity’ (Metzl, 2009). The role played by psy-expertise within radicalisation can also be glimpsed in what is constructed as its antidote – resilience. According to guidelines about Prevent, ‘schools have a responsibility to build pupils’ resilience to radicalisation by promoting fundamental British values and enabling them to challenge extremist views’ (Expert Subject Advisory Group for Citizenship, 2015: 1). Here British Values are constructed as key to resilience to radicalisation and to challenging extremist views, where ‘extremism’ itself is defined as opposition to British Values (Home Office, 2011; 2015). Resilience itself has a psychological history (illustrated by Howell, 2014), linked to ‘learned helplessness’ (Seligman, 1972), which was extrapolated to humans from experiments on dogs, and became a guiding concept in the USA’s ‘War on Poverty’ from the 1960s onwards. Here it was used to explain poverty as being not the result of structural racism and inequality but instead a symptom of poor people’s (and particularly poor urban African Americans) psychological attributes of ‘helplessness’ and ‘low self-esteem’ (Howell, 2014). Later on, learned helplessness also informed the development of torture techniques within the George W. Bush era War on Terror (Mayer, 2008). A remedy for learned helplessness put forward by Seligman (one of the architects of Positive Psychology) is learned optimism and resilience. Thus, it is not surprising that Seligman is now the main architect of the US Army’s resilience programme, where positive psychology is being employed to enable soldiers to ‘grow psychologically from the crucible of combat’ (Seligman, 2011), positioning resilience as central to a never-ending war (see Howell, 2014 for a detailed discussion). Therefore, the colonial logic that reconfigures structural violence into individual psychopathology both structures and haunts current counter-terrorism legislation in UK schools and more widely. Here the psy-disciplines work to perpetuate racism as a condition that enables the story of Western civil progress (including psy-progress) to be told (Razack, 1998: 4). Doing this means that any counter-story can be framed as opposition to ‘British values’, as a symptom of radicalisation that is psycho-pathological, and in need of state surveillance and early psychological intervention. Or if too late, then requires incarceration

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and potential suspension of rights in the name of, although never named as, white supremacy through liberalism. The Psychic Life of White Supremacy While I want to resist colonial-style psychologisation (make no mistake, this chapter is not going to conclude by calling for increased access to therapy for white supremacist neo-conservatives – not even for the closet ones), I wonder about the psychic and subjective mechanisms that enable the maintenance of white privilege in an anti-black world. For example, Bergland (2000) and Razack (2015) show (in relation to what is now known as Canada and the USA) that ‘considerable anxiety surrounds the way European Americans imagine themselves as the original citizens of this land and as a people innocent of conquest and violence’ (Razack, 2015: 135). Razack (2015: 202) shows how racism connects to the maintenance of a ‘settler colonial social order’, which includes the material practices and subjectivities that racism secures (2015: 202). She further shows that colonialism is an ‘ongoing material project’ that relies upon and produces an ‘entrenched systemic, devaluing of indigenous lives’ (2015: 202). The construction and maintenance of white innocence is written throughout UK counter-terrorism strategies and the invocation of British values. As a white Brit, I would argue that this is not simply forgetful. It involves psychic and subjective work to maintain colonial and racist subjectivity, of which denial of racism and ‘forgetting’ of colonial violence are central components (see Kincaid, 1998 for a powerful account of white tourist subjectivity in Antigua). Here Hook’s (2004; 2005; 2012) work on the processes of defence, disavowal and repetition at work in the maintenance of white supremacy in apartheid South Africa is useful for thinking about the call to British values as a psychological defence of colonialism and racism. Teaching British values, then, I argue, is more than a counter-terrorism strategy, it is a psychic defence mechanism to protect and privilege whiteness, while maintaining an anti-black social order (including the education system). It is a defence against the anxiety that revolves around maintaining the material effects of white privilege and supremacy that structure many white people’s lives in Britain. Yet this is a defence mechanism that must constantly find new ways to be expressed and repeated, such as through teaching British values.

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Conclusion Many of those who are part of the industry of training that has developed to embed British values into curriculum practices are, if not overtly critical, clearly cautious about these values. Many of the guidelines and training activities question the ‘Britishness’ of the values being taught and instead suggest they may be values that are universally shared (Expert Subject Advisory Group for Citizenship, 2015: 5). The slippage from ‘British’ to universal values is common across the British Values policy ensemble. For example, while for David Cameron values such as rule of law are as British as ‘fish and chips’ (2014), he also acknowledges that these values are shared by others in other countries – illustrating the way whiteness ‘conceals itself discursively’ as universal (Hesse, 1997: 87). Furthermore, invoking certain values (such as rule of law and tolerance) as universal overlooks and actively delegitimises non-Western ethical and political values (Santos, 2014). Santos (2014) further problematises such values by showing the current ‘state of exception’ that structures governance in many parts of the world, and that operates by restricting democratic rights in the guise of safeguarding democratic rights, violating human rights in order to defend human rights, and eliminating life in order to preserve life (2014: 127). This chapter has traced British Values as an explicit tool to embed discourses of Britishness within schools; and as a mechanism through which the nation is narrated, empire performed, and as a form of race-making (Knowles, 2003: 21). Drawing upon Hesse’s analysis of white amnesia and white governmentality, it is possible to see how schools and curriculum policy are positioned as sites to inculcate the psychic operations of a ‘British nationalist imaginary’ (1997: 96). Yet the intersection of education and security is not ‘new’, as schools have long been a tool of white supremacy (Gillborn, 2005) and part of the security state, ‘embedded in a longer genealogy of colonialism, intervention, and patriarchal, racist ideologies’ (Nguyen, 2014: 118). Nguyen (2014) traces how, post 9/11, schools in the US have been constructed as ‘essential sites of war on terror strategy’ (2014: 113), where education is folded into ‘the assemblage of technologies used to explain and advance military intervention’, forming part of an ‘imperial strategy of war’ (2014: 109). Following Razack (2015), I think we need pedagogical approaches and tools that can trace and bring to bear upon white supremacy the

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colonial histories and political contexts for the emergence of British citizenship. To do this, there is a need to utilise ways of thinking that render co-presence between different ways of knowing possible (Santos, 2014: 118), and create spaces for students to see their own complicity in racism and colonialism. These would be spaces that enable white British people to see that they/we ‘are each implicated in systems of oppression that profoundly structure our understanding of one another. That is, we come to know and perform ourselves in ways that reproduce social hierarchies’ (Razack, 1998: 10). Alongside this we need a sensitivity to how colonialism and the psy-disciplines work/ed together in their shared projects of the (re)articulation and (re) location of outside structures to being inside people – the naturalisation and biologisation of colonial, racist, sexist, homophobic, nationalist, ableist hierarchies. Histories, and how they shape the present, are always important in such a project, and help us to see that ‘the question of terrorist violence carried out by extremist or ideological nonstate actors is inseparable from the wider background of state violence that is defined as normal, necessary, and rational’ (Kundnani, 2014: 289). Rather than claim innocence to secure whiteness, we (white people) further need to be alert to the psychic and subjective investments and attachments to the privileges of being white and British in an anti-black world, and the embodied and perhaps subconscious mechanisms that we employ to defend these positions and the colonial social order on which they are built. References Adams, P. L. (1970). The Social Psychiatry of Frantz Fanon. American Journal of Psychiatry, 126(6), 809–814. Bergland, R. L. (2000). The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Bhambra, G. (2016). Brexit Means Brexit Means Go Home: Connecting Citizens, Migrants, and Minorities. Paper presented at the Critical Race and Ethnicities Network (CREN) conference ‘Intersectional Interventions’, University of Sheffield, 18 June. Cameron, D. (2014). British Values. Mail

on Sunday, 15 June. Available at: www.gov.uk/government/news/ british-values-article-by-davidcameron. Citizenship Foundation. (2015). Available at: http://citizenshipfoundation.org. uk/lib_res_pdf/0105.pdf. Coppock, V. and McGovern, M. (2014). ‘Dangerous Minds’? Deconstructing Counter-Terrorism Discourse, Radicalisation and the ‘Psychological Vulnerability’ of Muslim Children and Young People in Britain. Children and Society, 28, 242–256. Department for Education. (2014). Promoting Fundamental British

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Values as Part of SMSC in Schools. Departmental advice for maintained schools. UK Government. Derrida, J. (1982). White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy. In Margins of Philosophy. Trans. A. Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. DuRodie, B. (2016). Securitising Education to Prevent Terrorism or Losing Direction? British Journal of Educational Studies, 64(1), 21–35. Expert Subject Advisory Group for Citizenship. (2015). The Prevent Duty and Teaching Controversial Issues: Creating a Curriculum Response through Citizenship. Guide for Teachers. Association for Citizenship Teaching. Fanon, F. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. C. Farrington. London: Penguin Books. Fernando, S. (2010). Mental Health, Race and Culture. London: Palgrave. Fitzpatrick, P. (2011). Terminal Legality: Imperialism and the (De)Composition of Law. In D. Kirkby and C. Coleborne (eds), Law, History and Colonialism: The Reach of Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gillborn, D. (2005). Education Policy as an Act of White Supremacy: Whiteness, Critical Race Theory and Education Reform. Journal of Education Policy, 20(4), 485–505. Gove, M. (2006). Celsius 7/7. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hall, S. (1978). Racism and Reaction. In Commission on Racial Equality (eds), Five Views of Multi-Cultural Britain. London, pp. 23–35. Heinz, A. (1998). Colonial Perspectives in the Construction of the Psychotic Patient as Primitive Man. Critique of Anthropology, 18, 421–444. Hesse, B. (1997). White Governmentality: Urbanism, Nationalism, Racism. In S. Westwood and J. Williams (eds),

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Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memories. London: Routledge, 86–121. HM Government. (2012). Channel: Protecting Vulnerable People from being Drawn into Terrorism. A Guide for Local Partnerships. Home Office. (2011). Prevent Strategy. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. Home Office. (2015). Revised Prevent Strategy. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. Hook, D. (2004). Fanon and the Psychoanalysis of Racism. In D. Hook (ed.), Critical Psychology. Lansdowne: UCT Press. Hook, D. (2005). Paradoxes of the Other: (Post)colonial Racism, Racial Difference, Stereotype as Fetish. Psychology in Society, 31, 9–30. Hook, D. (2012). A Critical Psychology of the Post-colonial: The Mind of Apartheid. London and New York: Routledge. Howell, A. (2014). The Global Politics of Medicine: Beyond Global Health, against Securitisation Theory. Review of International Studies, 40, 961–987. Kincaid, J. (1988). A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Knowles, C. (2003). Race and Social Analysis. London: Sage. Kundnani, A. (2012). Radicalisation: The Journey of a Concept. Race and Class, 54: 3–25. Kundnani, A. (2014). The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror. London: Verso. McBride, K. (2016). Mr. Mothercountry: The Man Who Made the Rule of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCulloch, J. (1993). The Empire’s New Clothes: Ethnopsychiatry in colonial Africa. History of the Human Sciences, 6(35), 35–52. Mahone, S. (2006). The Psychology of Rebellion: Colonial Medical

234 | U N D E R S TA N D I N G A N D R E F R A M I N G O P P R E S S I O N Responses to Dissent in British East Africa. The Journal of African History, 47(2), 241–258. May, T. (2017). Westminster Attacks Were an Assault on British Values. Speech, 22 March. Available at: www.youtube. com/watch?v=7wCyZExsv7c. Mayer, J. (2008). The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. New York: Anchor Books. Metzl, J. M. (2009). The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Moghaddam, F. M. (2005). The Staircase to Terrorism: A Psychological Exploration. American Psychologist, 60, 161–169. Nguyen, N. (2014). Education as Warfare? Mapping Securitised Education Interventions as War on Terror Strategy. Geopolitics, 19(1), 109–139. Ofsted (The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills). (2014). School Inspection Handbook. Manchester: UK Government.

Razack, S. (1998). Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Razack, S. (2015). Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody. Toronto: University of Toronto. Richardson, G. (2006). Singular Nation, Plural Possibilities: Reimagining Curriculum as Third Space. In Y. Kanu (ed.), Curriculum as Cultural Practice: Postcolonial Imaginations. Toronto, Buffalo, NY and London: University of Toronto Press, 203–222. Santos, B. S. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Seligman, M. (1972). Learned Helplessness. Annual Review of Medicine, 23(1), 407–412. Seligman, M. (2011). Flourish: A Visionary Understanding of Happiness and WellBeing. New York: Free Press. Wiktorowicz, Q. (2005). Radical Islam Rising: Muslim Extremism in the West. London: Rowman and Littlefield.

21 | ‘B E E X AC T L Y W H O YO U A R E ’ : BLA C K FEM I N I S M I N V O L A T I L E P O L I T I CA L R EA LIT IES

Kadian Pow

Introduction As an American citizen living in Britain, I felt a double sense of betrayal over the volcanic political decisions in 2016: Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, followed by America’s election of Donald Trump for president. Growing up in America, on the cusp of ‘Generation X’, the most frightening political event I had experienced was the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, which took place a few months after my leaving university. I had not personally lost anyone, yet I grieved for those who had. I grieved because I was frightened and uncertain of what the consequences a response to this event would entail. I felt a similar trepidation upon waking to the news of Donald Trump’s win in November 2016. Instinctively I knew the retro brand of racism for which he advocated would have devastating consequences. People were going to die. In Britain and the United States, in 2016, white supremacy won. Historically, Black women had faced this precipice before. Personally, I had not. I knew better, intellectually, but emotionally I was grieving for the loss of possibilities I imagined could follow the election of the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama. On the night of his election, in 2008, I watched white people indiscriminately hugging any Black person in their path. I watched my fellow African Americans flood intersections on U Street, and saw Black girls dancing joyously on the hoods of immobile cars. Such was the emotional high associated with what Obama’s election represented. Perhaps I wanted that feeling again, and imagined the historical significance of the first woman president. Of course representation, while important, differs from the complex reality of imperialist policies all American administrations have followed. There is no denying that whatever valid criticisms could be levelled at Hillary Clinton, she is not the same as Donald Trump, and I knew that when I voted for her. The

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morning after the 2016 election was emotional, too. I was distressed for many of my immediate family members, mostly Black women, still living in the US. I knew the devastation it would mean to the material reality of their poor and working-class lives. Under Clinton, the possibility that the Affordable Care Act would continue to expand and meet the needs of my family was real. Trump campaigned on a promise to destroy it. 2016 Political Context There is much ado about the interference of Russia in America’s election process, and the ideological changes Russia’s subversion of democracy presents to the fabric of America’s identity (Glasser et al., 2017). While this foreign threat is important and the intelligence of Russia’s meddling incontrovertible, America’s greatest threat to its citizens has always been its domestic white, patriarchal supremacy, and the divisions upon which it thrives (Jardinia, 2017 and Wright, 2017). It is of this which Russia successfully took advantage (Graham, 2017). In America, 63 per cent of white men and 52 per cent of white women chose Trump. Eighty per cent of Black men and an astounding 93 per cent of Black women chose Hillary Clinton (Edition.cnn.com, 2017). The votes for Brexit stack up similarly along demographic lines (Lambert, 2017). The greatest polarity was between Black people and those who identified ethnically as ‘Christian’ (code for white). The former voted for Brexit at 27 per cent, while the latter group did so at 58 per cent. Those who identified as ‘Jewish’ or ‘White’ voted to leave the European Union at rates of 54 per cent and 53 per cent, respectively. It is an inconvenient truth that Russia’s pro-Trump and anti-Clinton propaganda efforts galvanised most potently, though not exclusively, among white populations. The majority of those who voted for Trump were white, spanning all genders, classes and age ranges (Edition. cnn.com, 2017). Similar is true for Brexit voters (Lambert, 2017). As minorities in both countries, Black people voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU, and for Hillary Clinton. Whatever criticisms there are of Clinton, by a vote of 93 per cent, Black women chose her, at the highest rate of any voting demographic (Edition.cnn.com, 2017), as the only viable choice for president in 2016. They voted with the epistemology of their lived experiences. They voted to reinforce the weakened levees holding back the force of white supremacy. The storm

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is here, and through its unfolding trauma, we must find ways to both survive and thrive. I am most interested in learning how to do that from the group whose embodied realities have, historically, compelled them against political moves that further seek to compound their oppression: Black women. ‘Possibility’ as a concept is, in some ways, dependent on a known or stable reality, not necessarily a progressive one. What Brexit and Trump’s presidency represent are unique volatile disruptions that make the near future more difficult to navigate. There is no precedent for leaving the EU, especially in a highly globalised economy. There is no precedent for an American president who flagrantly exhibits disdain for the democratic principles his office is charged with protecting. The sense of anxiety provoked by this instability makes it harder to fight nihilism. ‘Possibility’ and nihilism are incompatible. But the realities of our existence in these political climates face us each day. This paper seeks to explore the extent to which ‘possibility’ can be reclaimed amid volatile political realities, and how best to survive and thrive in an oppressive climate of such uncertainty. It does so by focusing on the experiences and recommendations of Black women who voted with the wisdom of their lived experience. The British and American women I interviewed for this article lived lives that were, in part, forged during huge, shifting political realities and loss. The focus is not on advocacy for political strategies or lobbying, but through tackling small regimes of domination often ignored or devalued when considering the relationships between being-ness, femininity and the radicality of blackness as an identity embodied by Black women. To further understand this, I will share perspectives from interviews1 with Black women, both British and American, who dedicated their minds and their bodies to the fight for Black liberation in decades past and present. From the contours of their struggles, we can draw strength and inspiration to live radically in an era that would prefer our despair. Being-ness, Radicality and Black Feminism In times of great loss, it is tempting to draw inward toward helplessness, numbness or depression, stemming from the psychological dis-ease we experience. One of the best pieces of unsolicited advice I received followed the funeral of my grandfather in 1999. My great aunt Verna, a Pentecostal Christian, who still lives on a farm in Jamaica with an outhouse, walked up to me and whispered, ‘Be who you are;

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be exactly who you are’. I cried. It is one of the most important things anyone has ever said to me. Great Aunt Verna’s words were daring me to push from the inside out, and live as if I am doing so on purpose, and not by accident. If silence is violence, then so too is making our selves small when we know we are so much more. Audre Lorde (1978a), in the poem ‘A Litany for Survival’, writes that we do not speak because we are afraid our words will not be heard, but in silence we are still afraid. So, it is better to speak when we remember ‘we were never meant to survive’. I kept returning to my aunt Verna’s axiom regularly when conceptualising this paper. The simplicity of what it urges is quite radical. The continued miracle of our survival as Black people demands we be exactly who we are. This is an active process, dependent on ‘possibility’. It involves imagining our presence beyond the present whilst simultaneously engaging with the demands of that present. This is the type of radial possibility our enslaved ancestors passed down to us. The Radicality of Being Exactly Who You Are What does it mean to be radical? One of my PhD supervisors, Professor Kehinde Andrews, insists that everything cannot be radical. There must be some established, agreed upon basis for the meaning of radical. It is akin to how we have all had to get reacquainted with what it means to tell the truth, and to call a lie a lie, in the Trump era. A basic understanding of ‘radical’, from the Oxford English Dictionary, yields the following: Radical (adjective): relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough; characterized by departure from tradition; innovative or progressive. (‘Radical’)

One of the challenges with the term ‘radical’, within blackness, is its near exclusive association with ‘resistance’. The latter is a refusal to accept, comply or be affected by something, and by itself does replace radicality. To say that Black lives matter, in 2017, is to espouse a radical idea that is still being hegemonically resisted with white supremacist cries of ‘White lives matter!’ So ‘resistance’ cannot replace ‘radical’. Compounding the problem is the masculinist association with which the term ‘radical’ is imbued, due to the greater mobility men have historically enjoyed, and the association with physical, symbolic or

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performative acts. Former American football player, Colin Kaepernick, has been praised for ‘taking the knee’2 in protest to America’s on-going discrimination against Black people, particularly the murder of unarmed civilians by state forces (NFL.com, 2016). But Kaepernick’s acts of protest are only made possible through the ‘radical’ thought that as citizens, Black people are entitled to full humanity, pursuant to that which is enshrined in the Constitution. ‘Resistance’, as the primary synonym for ‘radical’ becomes representationally focused, which can make its association with the ideology of blackness confining and dependent upon being publicly constituted. All acts of resistance are about one thing: our demand, as Black people, to claim the fullness of our humanity, to which we are entitled. Full humanity, as a radical idea, cannot then be exclusively associated with masculine, performative or triumphant acts. Audre Lorde describes ‘the erotic’ as a source of power that comes from a deeply feminine place within us (1978b), and that when we access that, we are our truest selves: ‘exactly who we are’. For a people who were never meant to survive, and, who have had to invent our own becoming, our presence, our existence is radical. Our being-ness is radical. Becoming, as philosopher Kal Alston (2005) intones, in self-reflection, is a process without a singular destination. It is a continuation of coming into one’s self. If blackness is a process of becoming that requires repeated access of an interior self, which comes from a deeply feminine place, then blackness itself is queer – a continual state of revision. It cannot binarily compare to the fixity and confining terms of whiteness, because binaries require strict boundaries on either side. Queerness, like blackness, is never fixed. That lack of fixity was necessary for our enslaved ancestors. They knew, intrinsically, that they were meant to be free persons. To dare to dream and then act in faith, despite all reality telling you otherwise – that is radical. Belief is radical. The thought (I am meant to be free) led to actions that affected the fundamental nature of slavery and colonialism as institutions. We cannot praise a gun-toting Harriet Tubman, leading her people out of bondage, without acknowledging the radicality of the belief propelling those actions. As historian, Thavolia Glymph says, ‘freedom is often reified as a “thing” or “place” that one can “obtain” or “go to”. But freedom is not separate from the understandings and intuitions of those who seek it’ (2008: loc. 320). Claiming the full humanity of our blackness, in whatever ways we can, is a key tool in surviving the Trump and post-Brexit regimes.

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Deregulating Blackness as an Intervention into White Supremacy The deregulation of blackness from within its ideological confines is one of the ways we can practice emotional liberation, as we work to compel changes to a larger oppressive system. My use of the term ‘deregulation’ – a process often associated with loosening control and oversight in industry – is purposeful. Deregulation curtails control and relaxes boundaries of operation. There is a sense of sovereignty to blackness that is beyond the limitations of how we are represented (Quashie, 2012). Stuart Hall (1992) writes that, due to our encounters with colonialism, ‘Black’ is a floating signifier containing no essential core. So, it is ‘only through the way in which we represent and imagine ourselves that we come to know how we are constituted, and who we are’ (1992: 261). When we ideologically regulate our being-ness as Black people, we make it possible to step into the fullness of who we are, who we can be. Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman (2012), writing about the historical erotics of regulating race and gender in the United States, says, Understood historically, in the nascent American Republic composed of dislocated Europeans from varied countries, blackness provides the delineating contours for the emergence and consolidation of whiteness as a necessary component of (individual and national) identity and as the basis for group claims to privileges as both coherent subject and New World citizens. (2012: 21)

In other words, American nationalism is conceived and sustained through white supremacy’s binary dependence on blackness. Whiteness knows itself only through not being Black. To then define our identity in opposition to whiteness implicates us in a parasitic relationship in which Black people are the food being consumed. Too often be-ing Black means being controlled by institutions, but also by our own communities and selves for self-protection. The illusion of safety usually results in regulating ourselves into ‘acceptable’ boundaries that were devised for our containment. But in a world where people cannot even agree that Black lives matter, and blame us for our own murders, regulating ourselves into confinement and respectability can still leave us dead. In hostile times, when the instinct is to make ourselves small, we should actively take up ideological and emotional space with our humanity as we quest to be exactly who we are. What if

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we tried radical being-ness – the revolutionary idea that Black people, and blackness itself, is an uncontainable process of construction. What Aunt Verna whispered into my ear gave me permission to renounce Christianity and leave the Church. I stopped feeling ashamed to let my thoughts run wild. Without the ideological confines of Pentecostal Christianity, a new world of possibilities opened for me. Be-ing is a verb. We are a people in the making, daring to imagine ourselves in kaleidoscopic ways. I am interested in the ways in which Black women are key contributors to how we think about the possibilities of be-ing Black. Black Women Who Paved the Way in Volatile Times This idea of Black identity construction is rooted in the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877) of the American South, following Emancipation and the Civil War’s end. Reconstruction is a fitting term, as those who were formally enslaved as property began re-constructing the humanity long denied to them. Black women played a key role in this reclamation. Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008) is a compelling study of Black women’s roles during Reconstruction. Glymph found that Reconstruction was often overlooked by historians of that era, or not deemed important enough to be read as ‘radical’ in resistance terms. She writes: ‘Slave women’s resistance within the plantation household is the least acknowledged component of the larger struggles of slave women in the South’s cotton, rice, sugar and tobacco fields after emancipation’ (2008: loc. 2914). By determining the valuation of their own labour, previously enslaved women reclaimed control over their bodies, humanity and right to an interior, private life. Moreover, on a macroeconomic scale, this forced changes in the power dynamics of the plantation household, and larger labour relations in the South. These changes impacted white plantation owners and mistresses, as well as Black men and families. To go from being classified as property to pursuing self-determination is a stunning achievement by Black women. They pursued citizenship, land ownership, femaleness (denied through white patriarchy), and private leisure time. ‘Most of all’, writes Glymph, ‘they claimed the right to determine for themselves what all of this meant’ (2008: loc. 4105). These acts of reclaiming the self had far-reaching political and socio-economic consequences, the echoes of which are still felt today.

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Surviving and Thriving: Listening to Black Women Whether it be during Reconstruction, or the 2016 presidential election,3 the trend of ignoring the voices and contributions of Black women has a long history. As Glymph proved, when we lean into Black women’s experiences, we expand our understanding of self and our world. To that end, I interviewed seven Black women between the ages of fifty and eighty, four Americans, three British.4 I was especially interested in how they coped during political flashpoints, when the future seemed unstable, and their communities were under constant assault. I have permission to use the first names of my interview subjects, and have tried to use their voices as much as possible. One woman I interviewed, Denise, shared a more recent anecdote about Black women changing institutions for the betterment of their entire community in Britain: I used to teach social work, so I was involved in a lot of … anti-racist, social work arenas. So, I saw in the 80s, particularly Black women, going into social work with a clear set of political and social objectives about what they wanted to do about certain issues confronting the Black community. So, it wasn’t just about getting a job; It was about bringing certain perspectives to those state-run, public organisations. Black women in the social work arena, for instance, worked to address issues of transracial adoption involving Black children going to white homes, and the lack of cultural readiness and awareness of those families.

Denise says the view is that these kinds of actions were regarded as compromising with the state, and that state-focused anti-racism efforts were not the location of ‘real’ activism. However, those women effected institutional changes ‘that have opened possibilities, both for employment, but also changed some of the ways those institutions have responded to the Black community’. Designating Black women’s work as lesser, or unimportant, fails to consider ‘the very radicalism of the audacity of these Black women to think they could go into those [institutional] spaces … I got into serious trouble in higher education for speaking up. And I know a lot of Black people who did’, recalls Denise. Black women in Britain expanded the idea of radical activism by having the gall to push institutions to accommodate them and their community. This kind of re-accommodation is what scholar Barnor Hesse calls re-inhabitation (2015), which is to inhabit or re-inhabit spaces from which we have historically been excluded. Black women

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showed an audacity and entitlement to take up space, and not just on their own behalf, but also on behalf of their communities. Psychological Disorientation and the Consequences of Taking Up Space Many of the women I interviewed had mixed perspectives on the contours of our present political realities, and the extent to which it gave them déjà vu. One of the early themes that emerged was psychological distress experienced due to both the violence of the social climate in the 1960s and 1970s, and their fight for more spaces in which to become themselves. Femi began at Sarah Lawrence College, in New York, in 1969. By the end of her freshman year, the Kent State massacre in Ohio (1970) had taken place. The killing of four, unarmed university students, during a mass protest, by the Ohio National Guard rocked the nation. Despite this, Femi kept taking political risks on campus. She, along with several other Black women took over buildings at Sarah Lawrence to protest the lack of Black content in the curriculum, and lack of Black faculty. Their actions were unheard of at the school, where, a few years prior, Black students were completely unheard of. The attitude was ‘You need to be thankful you’re here’, according to Femi. Femi shared an anecdote about how she pushed through the intellectual confinement of her Euro-centric courses. ‘l loved [Nikki Giovanni’s] poetry because she would say things like “fuck”. … Nikki talked like she talked’, said Femi. This was in stark contrast to the iambic pentameter she was being taught in her writing class. When she tried to introduce the works of Giovanni and Nina Simone to her majority white writing class, they would pick apart everything Femi loved about the works. This made Femi angry, pushing her to write her own poem beginning with ‘fuck you’. ‘That was my first protest. I used every curse word I could think of. That was the point. They went crazy. But I knew that was a turning point for me. I knew that my creativity was not being accepted for [who I was]’. Here Femi exhibits what Black women can be pushed to when the very things with which we identify, or find beautiful and think of as an extension or integral part of ourselves are attacked, it fuels a resentment because we believe we are being ignored. We must find a way to release that energy. Often the first form is fuelled by anger. We must find a way to say we are here and will not be ignored. For Femi, who still writes, that began with ‘fuck you’.

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Being ignored is a denial of space – one’s being-ness. It also denies emotional space and ideological space to one’s identity. This is reflected in Femi’s act of rebellion in her poetry. In Black Feminist Thought (2000), Patricia Hill Collins outlines the contours of Black women’s ideas and the penchant for traditional scholarship to subjugate or devalue those ideas. (This is not dissimilar to what Thavolia Glymph discovered about Reconstruction.) Collins notes that, perhaps, because as a historically oppressed group, Black women’s knowledge diverges from standard academic epistemology theory. Instead it takes on artistic and expressive forms. She notes that more people would have been exposed to musical poetry of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith than would have ever read Nella Larsen’s novels (2000: 15–16). As critical social theorists, Black women’s collective thoughts ‘aim to find ways to escape from, survive in and/or oppose prevailing social and economic injustice’ (2000: 8–9). What Femi did with ‘fuck you’ is validate Black women’s intellectual thought by claiming space in that classroom with her voice. Femi went on to say, ‘We don’t often have a choice of being a writer, or whatever. We’re a Black writer. We don’t get to exercise whatever we are. We’re looked at like that by our own, by ourselves even’. Media scholar, Tara Pixley (2015), echoes Femi’s sentiments in an essay on the instability of representation. Pixley says, by making a limit appear as a height, the prevailing discourse of blackness then becomes always a primary and most central characteristic in the self-sustaining engine of hegemonic production. Thus, whatever else [a person] may be, they can only be that if they are a Black version of it … Whiteness, however, is rarely ever so bound. (2015: 31)

Whatever Black people do is always seen as a lesser, or niche version of a white default. We do not get to be the template. What Collins emphasises, however, is that Black women, historically, have created templates for be-coming because we are often denied aspiring to the ones that already exist. This is the dialectic of oppression and activism (2000: 12), through which our subjectivity is constituted. Affirmation and Caring Because pain and alienation are often the consequence of the process of recovering our full humanity, affirmation and care-taking were

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also themes that came up again and again in the lives of the women I interviewed. Josephine, a former nurse living in England, describes care-taking as her life’s work since she was eighteen, and as something that saved her life. She recalls ‘I lost my son when he was four. That was something I can’t get out of my system. My marriage break [sic] down, and all of that was in the same time frame. But I still get up and jump over my hoops, and get on with my life’. Caring for others gave her focus when she was experiencing her own emotional trauma of the loss of a child and a partner. Seen as a feminine preserve, caretaking is regarded as both necessary, but paradoxically without value. By extension, those who are the primary purveyors of doling out care also become undervalued. Care-taking can be an erotic instance that reflects a necessary reliance on community. We are not self-sustaining renewable resources of care. However, always extending care to others can, sometimes, distract from trauma within the self to which we cannot attend. Femi shared a powerful memory of watching the film The Color Purple, and being overcome with emotion in one scene. When Shug [Avery] said to [Celie] you have a pretty smile? I just started crying. No one ever said anything like that to me, ever, growing up. From the time my grandmother died [when I was twelve] to the time I left California [when I was eighteen]. There was nothing that was good about me that anyone told me.

Femi mentioned that whilst she was attending Sarah Lawrence College, Toni Morrison was working at Random House Publishers. Morrison was the first Black person to work there. Femi sent her a story entitled ‘The Lady of Grand Central Station’. Morrison responded with a letter, which Femi has kept to this day. It reads, in part, ‘You have a gift. Don’t give it up’. Femi recalls that Morrison ‘was the only positive force in my life’ at the time. Neither of the two women knew each other, yet Morrison sensed that by contacting her, Femi was looking for affirmation. Black women’s relationship with each other has been a central concern in the works of novelists like Morrison, but dates back to Black women intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Known as the first Black woman public intellectual in America (Richardson, 1987: 35), Maria W. Stewart is credited as the first Black feminist who saw value in Black women’s relationships with each other, as well as the active and affirming community it fostered (Collins, 2000: 2).

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She encouraged them to draw upon this as a say against the systemic oppressions she identified as the cause of Black women’s poverty (Collins, 2000: 2). Bonnyeclaire, who attended Sarah Lawrence College with Femi, believes affirming and representing each other as Black women is an ‘obligation’ Black women have, so as not to fall victim to white supremacist ‘brainwashing of the ruling majority’. She goes on to explain: We have to have the consciousness as Black women to take authority; assume the responsibility to include us [emphasis added] in the dialogue. Include us in the assumptions. Include us in the core of the literature … if we don’t make the effort, no one else is going to do it.

Affirmation is not a petty concern. Historically, as Abdur-Rahman (2012) notes, desirability for African Americans is very important in both the political realm and that of cultural productions because it ascribes individual and communal value to blackness. This affects who is recognised as members of the citizenry as well (2012: 17). Through affirmation and recognition, Black women lay claim to their nation as citizens who belong, and as women who are Black – something historically denied to them through white supremacist patriarchy. Paying It Forward: Community For Black women, the idea of caring is very much bonded to the possibilities of tomorrow. The women I interviewed were concerned with how they could be most beneficial to generations coming after them. Sometimes this work can have detrimental consequences in a hegemonic culture of white supremacy. It did for Denise. She was harassed out of a senior lecturer position, at an English university, for which she had worked twelve years. Among the reasons [for this ousting] was, first I was identified with raising issues that they did not want, but also Black and minority ethnic students would come to me and tell me things they were not happy about [within the university], and I would raise them. I got the reputation for being ‘troublesome’.

She recalls one meeting with her then head of department, in which she was asked not to raise the issue of ‘race’ again. Denise says

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‘I had the bare faced audacity to look this white head of department in the face … and I said “I’m a Black woman. I can’t give you that reassurance. No”’. After that point, the department head organised a concerted campaign of harassment, designed to compel Denise to resign. Denise’s anecdote exemplifies the ways in which care-taking can be politically and personally detrimental. Denise notes, however, that she is still a ‘troublemaker’. The American Black feminist pioneer, Maria W. Stewart, troubled how Black women thought of themselves in the nineteenth century (even before Reconstruction), one of the most confining periods in history for African American women. She urged them to see the potential power they possessed (Richardson, 1987: 34). Stewart knew that the future of Blackness had to be mentally untethered from the limitations white supremacy imposed: ‘It is useless for us any longer to sit with our hands folded, reproaching the whites; for that will never elevate us’ (Richardson, 1987: 53). In other words, who we are cannot depend on what white supremacy dictates. Instead, she urged women to ‘possess the spirit of independence’, and to be bold and fearless (Richardson, 1987: 53), much in the way that Lorde does in ‘A Litany for Survival’ (1978a). These are radical commands, both then and now, but they are necessary. Stewart saw in Black women the lynchpin to preserving a future for African American communities. To facilitate this, Stewart recognised that, having little political power available to them, Black women would need to tap into the potential of their power within. The Value of Being Exactly Who You Are ‘Be who you are. Be exactly who you are’. Whether she knew it, or not, my great aunt Verna passed on to me a gift, a legacy that has been passed down by Black women like her for centuries. Her words would equip me to deal with the many challenges I would face as a Black woman trying to live from the inside out. Several of my interviewees mentioned the importance of such self-knowledge and its connection to thriving and the legacy of the future. For most of them, the sense of personal empowerment found in the process of becoming, or knowing themselves is something they are compelled to pay forward. Yvonne notes that within the context of being who you are is ‘where you can do the most good’. If knowledge is power, then knowing who we are makes us powerful.

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Notes 1 I interviewed seven women, four Americans and three British. Not all of them are represented in this chapter. 2 Kaepernick, beginning in 2016, while playing for the San Francisco 49ers refused to stand for the national anthem out of protest. He later changed to kneeling on one knee after consulting with a Black military veteran (CBSSports. com, 2017).

3 Here I reference the fact that Black women are the most reliable voting block (Vyse, 2017) of the Democratic Party (as evidenced by the exit polls for the 2016 elections), and served in significant positions for Hillary Clinton’s campaign – the highest of any Democratic candidate, including those of President Obama (Akindele, 2016). 4 Only five are represented in this chapter.

References Abdur-Rahman, A. (2012). Against the Closet: Identity, Political Longing, and Black Figuration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Akindele, T. (2016). Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Makes ‘Herstory’ with the Most Black Women in Any Presidential Campaign. Essence. com. Available at: www.essence. com/news/politics/hillary-clintonblack-women-campaign (Accessed 8 November 2017). Alston, K. (2005). Knowing Blackness, Becoming Blackness, Valuing Blackness. In George Yancy (ed.), White on White/Black on Black. Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield, 297–308. CBSSports.com. (2017). Here’s How Nate Boyer Got Colin Kaepernick to Go from Sitting to Kneeling. Available at: www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/ heres-how-nate-boyer-got-colinkaepernick-to-go-from-sitting-tokneeling/ (Accessed 8 November 2017). Collins, P. H. (2000). Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge. Edition.cnn.com. (2017). 2016 Election Results: Exit Polls. Available at: http://edition.cnn.com/election/ results/exit-polls (Accessed 7 November 2017).

Glasser, S., Dovere, E. and Debenedetti, G. (2017). Forget Comey. The Real Story Is Russia’s War on America. POLITICO Magazine. Available at: www.politico. com/magazine/story/2017/06/11/ forget-comey-the-real-story-isrussias-war-on-america-215245 (Accessed 7 November 2017). Glymph, T. (2008). Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graham, D. (2017). What the Russian Facebook Ads Reveal. The Atlantic. Available at: www.theatlantic. com/politics/archive/2017/09/ vladimir-putin-master-of-identitypolitics/539058/ (Accessed 7 November 2017). Hall, S. (1992). What Is This ‘Black’ in Popular Culture? In Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley, and Claudine Michel (eds), The Black Studies Reader. New York: Rutledge, 255–264. Hesse, B. (2015). Keynote speech. The Black Studies Association conference. Birmingham City University, Birmingham. Jardina, A. (2017). White Identity Politics Isn’t Just about White Supremacy: It’s Much Bigger. Washington Post. Available at: www.washingtonpost. com/news/monkey-cage/

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wp/2017/08/16/white-identitypolitics-isnt-just-about-whitesupremacy-its-much-bigger/?utm_ term=.b2f6b03c0471 (Accessed 7 November 2017). Lambert, H. (2017). 7 Graphs That Explain How Brexit Won. The Independent. Available at: www. independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ eu-referendum-result-7-graphsthat-explain-how-brexit-won-euexplained-a7101676.html (Accessed 7 November 2017). Lorde, A. (1978a). A Litany for Survival. The Black Unicorn: Poems. London: W.W. Norton & Co. Lorde, A. (1984) [1978b]. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press Feminist Series, 53–59. NFL.com. (2016). Colin Kaepernick Explains Why He Sat during National Anthem. Available at: www.nfl.com/ news/story/0ap3000000691077/ article/colin-kaepernick-explainswhy-he-sat-during-national-anthem (Accessed 8 November 2017). Pixley, T.-L. (2015). Trope and Associates.

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The Black Scholar, 45(1), 28–33. DOI:10. 1080/00064246.2014.997601. Quashie, K. 2012. The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ‘Radical’. Def. 1 and 2. (n.d.). OxfordDictionaries.com. Oxford Dictionaries. Web, 9 October 2017. Available at: https:// en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ radical. Richardson, M. (1987). America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Vyse, G. (2017). Bernie Sanders’s Army Is Not the Democratic Base. New Republic. Available at: https:// newrepublic.com/article/143286/ bernie-sanderss-army-notdemocratic-base (Accessed 8 November 2017). Wright, K. (2017). On White Identity Politics and American Terrorism. The Nation. Available at: www.thenation. com/article/on-white-identitypolitics-and-american-terrorism/ (Accessed 7 November 2017).

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Patricia Noxolo

Introduction This chapter will explore the politics of re-imagining post-Brexit Britain as a shared place. It will argue that, despite the fact that the Brexit vote is often interpreted as a sign of an irredeemably divided nation, Britain is a place that is made daily in and through the lived experiences and material interactions of its diverse population. Diana Evans’ novel The Wonder (2010) will be interpreted as an archive of this shared materiality that makes place. In doing this, the novel suggests the importance of laughter in accessing ephemeral traces of past materiality, albeit in unpredictable ways. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of the importance of laughter in post-Brexit Britain. Divisive Nostalgia in Post-Brexit Britain In the United Kingdom, we are in a time when place is being re-made in exclusionary ways. The outcome of the 2016 Brexit vote (in which the UK electorate voted for Britain to leave the EU) has been interpreted as an angry shout by the white working classes, whilst the 2017 General Election (in which there was a sharp rise in young and Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) voter participation) led to an unexpectedly sharp rise in the Labour share of the vote. Even though the Conservatives retained overall power, the election result has been interpreted as an angry shout back by the country’s young and BME populations. Whatever fuels these seemingly contradictory outcomes, one remarkable feature of both electoral campaigns was nostalgia, for an allegedly more hopeful (1960s) or a less complicated (pre-mass immigration) past: more than the outcome of either vote, we can read populist nostalgia as a divisive feature of the present British political moment, particularly in terms of the intersections of age, race and class (Kenny, 2017).

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The overall argument of this paper is that the conversation could begin from a very different place, from present-day Britain as a shared place. The Runnymede Trust’s 2017 collection Minority Report: Race and Class in Post-Brexit Britain reflects in a similar way on the ways in which race and class are being defined against each other in the present moment. Satnam Virdee’s (2017) contribution pushes against analyses that divide race and class, arguing that this (more than the settled whiteness invoked in the Brexit campaign) was a feature of British imperialism. Over the long five centuries of that history, the British working classes were often themselves racialised as a lower breed of humanity than the aristocracy: their racialisation as white, in contrast to colonised populations, was an important tool in the recruitment of the working classes into the British nationalist and imperialist project (see also Bonnett 1998). Moreover, Shaheen and O’Hagan’s (2017) contribution points out the obvious truth that, just as BME populations are not confined to either the working classes or the middle classes, racism is not confined to the white working classes.1 Structural racism is a function of structural power, and almost by definition the middle and upper classes are much better-positioned to deploy it. The everyday experience of the BME middle classes, including BME academics, is that privileged staff and students regularly demonstrate their capacity to racialise, exclude and intimidate (see also Tolia-Kelly, 2017). Gargi Bhattacharya’s (2017) contribution looks at the ways in which border policing has become a diffuse feature of everyday life: people from a range of professions, including administrators and landlords, now have to formally legitimate the rights (to, for example, work and accommodation) of employees and service users. This extends to universities, which have to formally monitor the attendance of international students on an ongoing basis.2 Commentators such as Don Flynn have been highly critical of the ways in which this everyday summoning of the spectre of threatened borders fuels intra-communal hostility and suspicion,3 and Bhattacharya (2017: 20) notes that border policing ‘must be understood as one of the central racialising techniques of our time’. Omar Khan (2017: 24) concludes the collection by setting an agenda for considering race and class together, in all the complexity of their differences: ‘race and class do not completely overlap, but they are connected because of the way that advantaged groups exercise economic power’. This is the starting point of this paper: to try to imagine a more inclusive view of the making of Britain as a shared place.

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Making Place as Shared Matter Homi Bhabha’s ground-breaking 1994 work, The Location of Culture, set out two contrasting views of the narration of the nation. There are pedagogic narratives of the nation, which imagine the nation’s history as linear and ordered. The nostalgic narratives around Brexit and the recent elections can be seen as examples of this. Such narratives tidy away any conflict, struggle or difference within the nation, reconceiving it as disruption or invasion. In the UK, the racialisation of pedagogic narratives entails a wide range of erasures and denials, not only of the long history of diversity in the UK (Fryer, 1984; Bressey, 2015; ToliaKelly, 2010), but also of the brutalities and incoherencies of British historical activities in the colonies (Havinden and Meredith, 1993; Shepherd and Beckles, 2000). Wilson Harris (2011: 33) has described such a process as ‘the dead tide of self-indulgent realism’ – as the tide comes in repeatedly, sweeping away debris, pedagogical narratives involve the iterative re-imposition of order on a chaotic and diverse reality, a repetitive process of ‘disremembering’ (Noxolo, 2006: 264). Bhabha (1994: 145) contrasts pedagogic narratives with the performativity of everyday culture, which is made up from the ‘scraps, patches and rags’ of daily life, and is not always amenable to tidying into a grand narrative. To imagine a more inclusionary process of placemaking requires attention to people’s lives as they are lived in the UK, to their messiness and incoherence. Similarly, Frantz Fanon (2001: 183) refers to culture as ‘the zone of occult instability’, referring to the essentially unknowable, constantly changing, culture of the people, which they are constantly in the process of making ‘now’, and to which intellectuals must go to meet them, rather than imposing a ready-made tradition upon them. More recently Malcolm James’ (2017: 112) study of young people in East London who are racialised as white has pointed to the ways in which young people perform politics in their everyday lives as agonistic struggle. Close attention to their performances can help us understand ‘how young people performed neoliberal oppression and also how they struggled against neoliberal marginalisation’. Such attention is a useful corrective to Brexit-engendered stereotyping. These performative views of the nation as place proclaim it as made, on a daily basis, by a great diversity of people in place. Britain as a postcolonial place, but also as a global centre, is not only made in this way by the everyday performances of people inside UK borders, but

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is constituted by a range of transborder flows of money, goods and services: for example, financial trading in London draws flows of money and people in from many different financial centres elsewhere (Massey, 2006), whereas flows of money earned by migrants working in the UK flow to an increasing number of countries in other parts of the world, materialising for example in changed architectural landscapes (Ndjio, 2009). As Doreen Massey (2006) has put it, the nation is a place that is constituted by both its internal and its external geographies. So we might say there is a transnational ghosting of the nation outside its borders, a constant remaking of the nation through its shadows in other locations. At the same time the nation as place is accreted through the histories located within its borders, so that there is a temporal ghosting of the nation in its buildings and landscapes; not just in its monuments and official memorials, but in its everyday sites of life (streets, parks, disused wastelands). For example, Madgin et al. (2016) describe the strong emotional attachments to place that are elicited by photographs of playgrounds and facilities that have been closed due to austerity in Glasgow. People effectively jump time through photographs, remembering both their own embodied experiences in that location, as well as the stories told to them of previous generations’ embodied experiences: ‘she [an aunt] told me it was pure good, it was the football pitches, tennis, badminton, different clubs, and she still would go there but it’s been shut down and she just never had anywhere else to go’ (Madgin et al., 2016: 686). This last quote gives a sense of how place-making is not only to be understood in terms of the ephemerality of memory as ‘ghosting’, but also in terms of the materiality of accreted practices and mobilities of bodies. There are frictions in the presence of bodies in place: breaths, skin cells, microbes and grease patches all accumulate and erode the environments surrounding them. Conversely, the effects of environmental injustices on the health of vulnerable people (see Agyeman, 2014) reveal the fact that places construct the bodies, not just the memories, of the people that inhabit them. For example, air and water pass through and rest on or become absorbed by our skins and hair (see Sealey-Huggins, this volume). To focus on the mutually porous materialities of people and place (see Noxolo and Preziuso, 2012; Barad, 2007) is to radically re-imagine narratives of belonging in and to place. At a fundamental level, everybody has a body, and places make all the bodies in them, whilst all the bodies in a place make that shared place.

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These material interactions between people and place leave material traces in place over time. These traces are sometimes formal memorials (plaques, documents or museums), but sometimes they are much less formally traceable, such as footprints in worn pathways, handprints on walls, or certain ways of walking or speaking that are passed on from gait to gait or from mouth to mouth. Such material traces give places their character, and make them what they are. The work of remaking our understanding of place-making in more inclusive ways is a work of revealing places as shared archives of material interaction with and between irreducibly diverse people and environments. In the rest of this chapter I want to illustrate this work using the example of Diana Evans’s novel The Wonder, which I see as an archive of material interactions between diverse people, and which suggests that laughter can be deployed as a key to access material interactions in the past, albeit an unpredictable one. Finally, the chapter will conclude with some thoughts about the importance of laughter in the politics of understanding Britain as a shared place. The Wonder of Place as Material Archive Diana Evans is a black British writer, with a background in dance performance. She draws on that background in The Wonder, her second novel, which describes the attempts of a young Londoner named Lucas to trace the life of his father Antoney. Antoney was a dancer in a pioneering contemporary dance troupe called ‘Midnight Ballet’. As Lucas searches into the scant documentary evidence of his father’s life – newspaper clippings and clothing in a long-unopened wardrobe, and the recollections of ageing dancers and friends – the novel itself documents the often-forgotten history of black dance in the Caribbean and the UK, often bringing the fictional characters into contact with historical figures: Lucas interviews Edwin Starr; the evolution of the Notting Hill Carnival is told through the experiences and reflections of the characters as they walk through Ladbroke Grove; as a boy, Antoney is inspired into a life in dance when he sees Katherine Dunham’s dance troupe perform on stage in Jamaica. The novel’s function as an archive really comes into its own in relation to that which is normally not documented – the material presence and mobilities of people. Characters are defined by the way their bodies dance or walk, with ‘signature’ moves, capacities and habits. Lucas, for example, ‘had thin wrists and elongated hands and,

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with his large flat feet, dancing did nothing for him’ (Evans, 2010: 10). Habitually, he ‘drifts’ off a straight line when walking and people walking with him have to find ways not to be gradually pushed off the pavement (2010: 93). Movement is key to people’s experience of place. When Lucas finds Riley, a journalist who knew his father, Riley describes Midnight Ballet’s early tours as a series of journeys, a montage of movement: ‘Rusty train rides through the southern counties, sun-splashed promenade walks watching diamonds frolic over the sea’ (2010: 137). Even Lucas’ sister, Denise, whose life as a florist seems dominated by flowers that are rooted in the ground, watches a tulip very intently and sees that even plants are constantly in motion. On that occasion, Denise sees the movement: ‘The tulip walked up itself’ (2010: 258), but is forced to acknowledge that, since people are animals who are not able to stay still for long enough to appreciate growth in vegetable bodies: ‘growth is invisible’ (2010: 258). Similarly, 1990s London, the setting for the book, is a place and time characterised by rapid change, described as ‘the sweep of gentrification’ (2010: 15). This is a dramatic sweep across space, across Brixton, Ladbroke Grove and Harrow Road (2010: 15). It is also a change that sweeps through time: for example, a café in which Lucas interviews one of the other members of his father’s dance troupe, has changed from a music hall in the early twentieth century, to a rundown cinema, to the Swedish-funded ‘swanky … Grove Screening Rooms’, with a brasserie in which the waiter is forced to wear a white bow tie of which he says, ‘I look like a dick’ (2010: 77). The collapsing of all these functions over time into the 1990s gentrified name speaks of a moment which the (early) twenty-first-century reader can appreciate as itself situated in the ongoing stream of history: ‘where tattooists rubbed shoulders with bar staff, vinyl junkies, tramps, hostel dwellers … where the clearest signs could be seen of the sweep of gentrification that was surging across the city … Lucas was hopeful of the things Tony Blair might be able to do to stop the capitalists poncifying the street with their novelty boutiques and aubergine-coloured teashops’ (2010: 15–16). The twenty-first-century reader can recognise that the hopeful Blairist moment of the mid-1990s (in which New Labour’s campaign tune was ‘Things can only get better’) did not deliver on deterring the ultra-capitalist development practices that were rapidly transforming the buildings and streets that Lucas treasured.Although

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the novel does not forensically describe the friction of bodies in place (the invisible accretion of breaths and skin cells), the novel very clearly sets out to archive the often-undocumented motion of human and non-human bodies in places, from walking gaits to choreographed dance movements. These undocumented everyday embodiments are the shared place-making practices of BME and working-class people. Having focused on the materiality of embodiment, I want in the next section to focus more tightly on one embodied practice that enables a hyper-corporeal jumping to occur, which suggests embodied ways of accessing those material traces in place. Laughter as Unpredictable Key to Place as Material Archive Beyond archiving everyday materiality in the making of place, the novel also suggests laughter as a means of revealing it. It is the laughter itself, as an embodied act that shakes the body (not the humour that might inspire it) that seems to move people into a heightened awareness of embodiment in place. For example, though Lucas searches for documentary traces of his father Antoney and of his dance practice, and although he is never able to discover what happened to Antoney ultimately, the laughter that surrounds Antoney’s dance practice echoes through the shared places that they inhabit. For example, as young boys, Lucas and his friend play in a disused church that they had no way of knowing had been the space that Midnight Ballet used for rehearsal. Yet, eerily, the boys listen hard and what they hear is laughter (Evans, 2010: 87): ‘They listen harder and now there are many sounds, voices, drums, laughter’. The author uses this link to jump backwards from Lucas’s life into a narration of the dance troupe’s time. In a detailed passage set in the dance troupe’s time, in 1960s London, Antoney finds the inspiration for his signature work through laughter. In narrating this the novel suggests that laughter allows connections with material traces of other bodies, not only across time but also across space. After puzzling for some time about the nature of inspiration in relation to dance choreography, Antoney, Lucas’ father, is unexpectedly transported into gales of laughter that move his body: ‘He laughed again over the music, leaning backwards and bending forwards’ (2010: 143). It is this laughter that awakens him to the physical presence of Simone, the dancer who inspires his signature work, through a suddenly heightened affective state that is knitted

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together from the combination of the laughter as it leaves him, the music, and the physical presence of the dancer: The space around her seemed to shine, to come alive, most of all down by her feet and around the neck. He had a funny sensation that his blood was quickening, that he was speeding up inside in a kind of heightened excitement. Coltrane’s sax in the background. The woman, the bird, equal in the instant with the sax. The first few steps of the dance miraculously came clear to him. (2010: 143)

The dance that Antoney choreographs on this occasion, ‘Bird’, becomes Midnight Ballet’s most famous piece, and its fame engenders documentary evidence that Lucas is able to use to trace the dancer Simone. Simone is photographed dancing ‘Bird’ for a newspaper review, and Lucas finds the cutting in a wardrobe in his canal boat home. He arranges an interview with Simone, in order to find out more about his father. The effect of this interview is to show that embodied histories leave documentary traces that may seem more concrete than laughter, but are nonetheless not always possible to re-inhabit. The mobile presences of dancers, choreographed via the instantly creative affordances of laughter, are frozen and distanced in photographs. This is similar to Denise’s discovery that plant growth is invisible for restless humans: the different temporalities of still, slow-moving and fastmoving people and objects mean that movement is not always easy to re-package and re-call. Lucas finds that the frozen time capsule of the newspaper article connects imperfectly with the changed embodiment of Simone, the surviving dancer. When Lucas meets her in the 1990s, she is older and more self-conscious than the person who inspired Antoney, causing a time-lagged disorientation between the photograph and the living person: ‘Lucas found it disorienting, having studied the photograph for so long in its grainy black-and-white spell … to see this over-bejewelled lady in front of him, in three-dimensional form … She was garish by comparison, like a middle-aged Chaka Khan, or Naomi Campbell’s mum’ (2010: 74). The material effects of laughter are more instantaneous, more immediately communicative, than photographs can hope to be. So laughter can be a more sensitive, more effective and more creative means to make human bodies sensible to the material traces of other bodies archived around them. Laughter is a delicate and unpredictable key to the material archive of place however; it does not always move

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the body across space and time. Antoney and Lucas never actually meet: Lucas’s parents split while his mother is pregnant. A bitter laughter accompanies the impossibility of overcoming the shortest physical distance that comes between them, and Antoney begins the descent into his (probable) insanity and suicide: He bought a gift for his son, a little wooden bus that he could roll around on the floor. He ventured with it to the canal one afternoon and saw Toreth [Lucas’s grandmother] sitting on the bow with the baby on her lap. He had a tiny brown face and was kicking up his legs. It made Antoney laugh out loud with a bulge in his throat. Even though he still had a key to the gate, and he ached to pick up the boy and smell him, he couldn’t pluck up the courage to go any further to present his gift. (2010: 289)

So, although the novel explores place as a material archive, and hints that laughter might be a key to revealing it, there are no guarantees, either in laughter or in documentary evidence. Understanding place as shared, through the materiality of the diverse bodies that inhabit it, is an act of imagination and political will. As Stuart Hall (2000) argued some time ago, community in place occurs through collectivity ‘without guarantees’. Conclusions As is clear from the beginning of this chapter, we are in rather serious times post Brexit, in which divisive political rhetorics are setting a construction of white working-class racism against a construction of cosmopolitan diversity. This chapter has suggested that we need a more imaginative vision of place, in which we recognise that all the diverse bodies living in the UK (and indeed those connected with the UK but living outside it) make Britain as a place. Diana Evans’s novel, The Wonder, archives some of that shared materiality, and suggests that laughter might be a powerful, if unpredictable, force for re-connecting with it. Recent writing on laughter (Emmerson, 2017; Noxolo, forthcoming) as an embodied practice (rather than on humour) reveals it as a potentially powerful political force. The source of its unpredictability is also the source of its power: laughter breaks up societal and disciplined conventions and reveals the chaotic and disordered potency of our bodies (see for example Parvulescu, 2010). In a time when nostalgia is

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used to construct Britain’s past in terms of homogeneity and middleclass vanguardism, in terms of desire for a past that never was, a past that seeks to cancel out the lived ‘conviviality’ (Gilroy, 2004) that is so much a feature of the everyday life of people living in Britain, laughter is an embodied posture of immediacy, creativity and simply shared life. Notes 1 Those who voted to leave the EU have often been stereotyped as white working-class voters, elderly and in the north of England, desperately seeking an end to multi-culturalism, which they see as having left them behind. However, Hennig and Dorling (2016: 20) demonstrate that only 24 per cent of Leave voters were from the two lowest of five social classes: ‘The Leave voters among the middle classes were crucial to the final result. This was because the

middle class constituted two thirds of all those who voted’. See also Flinders (2014). 2 See the recent documentary ‘Everyday Borders’ (Wemyss et al., 2017); see also earlier work on the securitisation of immigration, an important channel through which these widespread approaches have become normalised (Noxolo and Huysmans, 2009). 3 For critical news reporting around the introduction of the relevant legislation, see Travis (2013).

References Agyeman, J. (2014). Global Environmental Justice or Le droit au monde? Geoforum, 54, 236–238. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bhattacharya, B. (2017). The Mysterious Intersections of Race and Class. In Runnymede Trust (eds), Minority Report: Race and Class in Post-Brexit Britain. London: Runnymede Trust, 19–22. Bonnett, A. (1998). How the British Working Class Became White: The Symbolic Reformation of Racialized Capitalism. Journal of Historical Sociology, 11(3), 316–340. Bressey, C. (2015). Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste. London: Bloomsbury. Emmerson, P. (2017). Thinking Laughter beyond Humour: Atmospheric

Refrains and Ethical Indeterminacies in Spaces of Care. Environment and Planning A, 49(9), 2082–2098. Evans, D. (2010). The Wonder. London: Vintage. Fanon, F. (2001) [1963]. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin. Flinders, M. (2014). Low Voter Turnout Is Clearly a Problem, but a Much Greater Worry Is the Growing Inequality of That Turnout. Available at: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ politicsandpolicy/look-beneath-thevote/ (Accessed 6 November 2017). Fryer, P. (1984). Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto. Gilroy, P. (2004). After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture. London: Routledge. Hall, S. (2000). Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall. London: Verso. Harris, W. (2011). The Eye of the Scarecrow. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press.

260 | U N D E R S TA N D I N G A N D R E F R A M I N G O P P R E S S I O N Havinden, M. and Meredith, D. (1993). Colonialism and Development: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies, 1850–1960. London: Routledge. Hennig, B. and Dorling, D. (2016). In Focus: The EU Referendum. Political Insight, 7(2), 20–21. James, M. (2017). Negative Politics: The Conformity, Struggles and Radical Possibilities of Youth Culture in Outer East London. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 20(2), 107–124. Kenny, M. (2017). Back to the Populist Future?: Understanding Nostalgia in Contemporary Ideological Discourse. Journal of Political Ideologies, 22(3), 256–273. Khan, O. (2017). Race and Class: From Analysis to What Next. In Runnymede Trust (eds), Minority Report: Race and Class in Post-Brexit Britain. London: Runnymede Trust, 24–28. Madgin, R., Bradley, L. and Hastings, A. (2016). Connecting Physical and Social Dimensions of Place Attachment: What Can We Learn from Attachment to Urban Recreational Spaces? Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 31, 677–693. Massey, D. (2006). London Inside-Out. Soundings, 32, 62–71. Ndjio, B. (2009). Migration, Architecture and the Transformation of the Landscape in the Bamileke Grassfields of West Cameroon. African Diaspora, 2(1), 73–100. Noxolo, P. (2006). Claims: A Postcolonial Geographical Critique of ‘Partnership’ in Britain’s Development Discourse. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 27, 254–269. Noxolo, P. (forthcoming). Fleshy Textualities: Laughter in Caribbean Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Noxolo, P. and Huysmans, J. (2009). Community, Citizenship and the War

on Terror: Security and Insecurity. London: Palgrave. Noxolo, P. and Preziuso, M. (2012). Moving Matter. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 14(1), 120–135. Parvulescu, A. (2010). Laughter: Notes on a Passion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Runnymede Trust (2017). Minority Report: Race and Class in Post-Brexit Britain. London: Runnymede Trust. Shaheen, F. and O’Hagan, E. M. (2017). How Not to Think about Class. In Runnymede Trust (eds), Minority Report: Race and Class in Post-Brexit Britain. London: Runnymede Trust, 22–24. Shepherd, V. and Beckles, H. (2000). Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader. Oxford: James Currey. Tolia-Kelly, D. (2010). Landscape, Race and Memory: Material Ecologies of Citizenship. London: Routledge. Travis, A. (2013). Immigration Bill : Theresa May Defends Plans to Create ‘Hostile Environment’. Available at: www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/ oct/10/immigration-bill-theresa-mayhostile-environment (Accessed 6 November 2017). Virdee, S. (2017). Some Thoughts on the Theory, History and Politics of Race and Class, or Why Class Analysis Must Take Race Seriously. In Runnymede Trust (eds), Minority Report: Race and Class in Post-Brexit Britain. London: Runnymede Trust, 14–17. Wemyss, G., Cassidy, K. and Yuval-Davis, N. (2017). Welcome to Britain in 2017, Where Everybody Is Expected to Be a Border Guard. Available at: https://thedial.co/articles/welcometo-britain-in-2017-where-everybodyis-expected-to-be-a-border-guard (Accessed 6 November 2017).

23 | D E M AN D I N G T H E I M P O S S I B L E: R ES P ON D I N G T O T H E F IR E NO W

Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Azeezat Johnson and Beth Kamunge

The impossible is the least that one can demand. (James Baldwin)1

Dear Reader, We hope that you have processed this book with the love and warmth with which it was written. Following Baldwin, we think of love not in the ‘infantile American sense of being made happy’, but as ‘a state of being’, a ‘tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth’ (Baldwin, 1964: 82). As editors, we each came to this project having seen our loved ones burnt, and knowing that, the fires of white supremacy continue to burn around us. Azeezat watched her sister Basirat navigate her fears and angers as a Black hijabi in a world that is so violently anti-Black and anti-Muslim – Basirat constantly shows Azeezat how our beings are so much more (complex and beautiful) than the racial violence that looks to objectify and devalue our existence. Remi watched his younger sister India slowly come to understand the deep racial inequities that shape the world, the world of her loved ones and her world. He continues to watch, knowing that their younger sister, Talia, is awakening to these gross inequities. Beth looks on in horror at how white supremacy continues to shape ‘African politics’, whilst simultaneously watching in awe at the push-back online and ‘in real life’ by different generations of those of us who believe in love and freedom. Love and freedom – the gifts Beth would like to pass on to nephews and nieces, particularly the two now growing up as firstgeneration British citizens. This collection is about expressing a love that can ‘strengthen you against the loveless world’ (Baldwin, 1964: 7). It is this love that motivates us and gives rise to a fiery determination that burns deep inside. This book is borne out of our need for spaces wherein more of us can find room to breathe and see ourselves centred in our hopes and

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dreams for the future. The Fire Now is part of our determination to bring about change; to fight fire. This is not only about the functioning fires of white supremacy: we write with the knowledge that our voices carry their own power that is amplified through the production of this edited collection. This is our quest, our daring and our growth. The Fire Now brings together a wide range of authors because we know that, in these times of explicit racial violence, we must pay even greater attention to the differences in our vulnerabilities when exposing the function of white supremacy. We know that some bodies are too often closer to the fire, and that some burns are too often wilfully unseen, unknown and unspoken. We know that true liberation will only come when we are all free from the fire’s ubiquitous threat. We hope that this collection builds upon and contributes to collective efforts to ‘end the racial nightmare’ that characterises our world (Baldwin, 1964: 89). We do not underestimate the enormity of such a task, but, motivated by love, we have no option but to struggle. We struggle for you, our loved ones. We struggle for a future we do not yet see, and for those we do not yet know. We struggle with urgency and purpose, knowing that, as Baldwin put it, ‘the impossible is the least that one can demand’ (1964: 89). Writing as academics, we felt keenly the need to interrogate our own positionalities and to question the work that we do. This is why, in Part I, we brought together works that reflect our sense that transforming academia will be an important step in tackling the explicit racial violence we are faced with. By first focusing on academia, we seek to be ever mindful of the words of Stuart Hall: ‘we must struggle where we are’ (cited in Gillborn, 2008: 202). We must also recognise the relative privilege imbued in occupying such positions, and take seriously the responsibilities that come with that privilege. In Part I, Muna Abdi urged us to think through the politics of who can claim the lofty role of the writer, before Azeezat Johnson drew our attentions to the racialised and racist ways that ‘knowledge’ is produced in academia. In order to struggle where we are, we must be mindful of the power that structures knowledge production. Jason Arday’s chapter showed that the struggle in academia is a struggle to withstand the ubiquitous threat posed by micro-aggressions. In this piece, Arday bears witness to the (often unseen) ways in which racisms operate. In so doing, he shows that even the relative privilege of academia does not protect us from racism’s pernicious effects. Whilst racial micro-aggressions are one

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way in which white supremacy is maintained, Derrais Carter’s chapter showed how the very structures of our writings can fan the flames of white supremacy. However, through those structures of writing, Carter showed us an opportunity for subversion and resistance. Following Carter, Remi Joseph-Salisbury urged us to re-centre an activism that informs our duties as academics within these institutions steeped with imperial and racist legacies. Knowing that approaches threaten to do great harm if they are not intersectional, Part II of the collection focused specifically on the intersectionality of identities and of struggles. Sai Murray opened Part II with a poem that speaks back to the limiting identity categories offered on monitoring forms: our identities will not be bound, Murray shows. Viji Kuppan’s intervention centred disabled bodies of colour that are too often rendered invisible when discussing the function of white supremacy. Amal Ali showed how the legal regulation of veiling poses a threat to Muslim women, particularly at the intersection of race, religion and gender. Taking the 2017 Women’s March as a case study, Adrienne Milner and Adekonyinsola Aromolaran showed how feminist actions too often marginalise Women of Colour: intersectionality must be at the heart of feminist action. Leon Sealey-Huggins encouraged us to see how the climate crisis disproportionately impacts upon Black and Brown communities: ‘the climate crisis is a racist crisis’, and must be seen through an anti-racist lens. In Part III, the authors sought to highlight connections across space and time. As the authors show us, there are lessons to be learnt and inspirations to be drawn. Kehinde Andrews warned against letting Trump and Brexit lead us to take our eyes off systemic racisms. Building from this, Layla Brown-Vincent showed us that, for many Black people, Trump ‘Ain’t nothing new’, whilst Moussa Traoré showed how contemporary anti-racist acts are a continuation of anti-racisms of the past. Following Traoré, Tony Talburt looked to historical Pan-African resistance for lessons and inspiration to inform the present. Sam Tecle and Carl James challenged us not to let the explicit racism of Trump lead us to not see the racism that bubbles beneath Canada’s multicultural rhetoric, and Keguro Macharia highlighted the manifestations of Trump-like politics in contemporary Kenyan politics. In Part IV, the authors encourage us to understand and reframe our oppressions. The opening contribution from Beth Kamunge, Wambui Mwangi and Osop Abdi Ali – as a dialogue

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between three Black Kenyan women – reminded us of how everyday invisibilised struggles (surviving) mean that so many voices, particularly those voices at the sharp end of white supremacist oppression, often go unheard in collections such as these. From here, Maryam Jameela’s chapter drew attention to the ways in which the trauma (and emotions) of People of Colour is so often invisible and delegitimised. Sadia Habib troubled the notion of ‘Fundamental British Values’ before suggesting that in light of the proliferation of racisms following the Brexit vote and Trump’s election, critical pedagogues must eschew the myth of neutrality and tackle the issues head on through their teaching. China Mills also problematised the idea of Fundamental British Values as she showed how mental health is deeply wrapped up in racism and colonialism. Kadian Pow’s chapter spoke about the cultivation of a sense of radical being-ness, through quotidian Black feminisms, and Patricia Noxolo showed how laughter, as an embodied practice, helps to re-mark places and spaces that are increasingly exclusionary. Where do we go from here? This collection is not the end, nor the beginning. This collection is the continuation of our fire of resistance. As we speak up and speak back against the function of these atrocities, we inherit the tradition of past anti-racist scholars and activists. We use this book to inspire future conversations, contributions and activisms. We hope this book offers strength to those who are too often burnt without notice, and shows the connections in our quest. Surviving these fires must include drawing connections across these experiences: we hope this collection fans the flames of resistance. Throughout this book, we have been deliberate in centring voices that are often relegated to the margins. In doing so, we speak out against the inequalities that underpin our understandings of racial violence today, wherein the experiences of racialised bodies are silenced within mainstream discourse. However, this marginalisation is too often perpetuated within anti-racist scholarship and action: as was stated in the Introduction, we are critical of the absence of trans voices within this collection, as well as voices that speak against penitentiary systems that commit so much violence against Black and Brown bodies. These erasures perpetuate a system wherein already marginalised bodies are kept out of sight and out of mind, even as we attempt to grapple with the nuanced functioning of white supremacy. This is why we must repeat: The Fire Now is above all a call for further conversations and dialogues that push us to care for more, and be better

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for all of us. Contemporary anti-racist scholarship and activism cannot afford to exclude those among us who have spent too long within the margins of our societies (and our social justice movements). Starting from those within this marginal positioning would thus include fighting for a world wherein all of us, and not just some of us, could be free. This book is written in the hopes of such a world: it is written knowing that ‘the space in which [we’ll] fit will not exist until [we] make it’ (Baldwin cited in Pierpont, 2009: n.p.). The Fire Now lights a match against current racist conditions that require us to take up less space in order to ‘fit’. We look towards creating spaces wherein more of us can be recognised for all that we are and could be. To our siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews: we hope you can see this collection as a labour of love for you, as a desire to find the words that put your lives and experiences up front and centre. We hope you find comfort within these words as you see our many voices unflinchingly challenging racist logics and sentiments across disciplinary and national contexts. We hope The Fire Now makes you feel a little less isolated as you reckon with how your experiences and fears are part of wider systems and histories that terrorise so many of us. But most of all, know that we love you and fight for you to be all that you can be; with everything that we are. Note 1 Excerpted from The Fire Next Time c 1962, 1963 by James Baldwin. Copyright renewed. Published by Penguin Books and

Vintage Books. Used by arrangement with the James Baldwin Estate.

References Baldwin, J. (1964) [1963]. The Fire Next Time. London: Penguin Books. Gillborn, D. (2008). Racism and Education: Coincidence or Conspiracy. Abingdon: Routledge.

Pierpont, C. R. (2009). Another Country. The New Yorker, 9 February. Available at: www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2009/02/09/anothercountry (Accessed 25 August 2016).

A F TE RW ORD

George Yancy

‘So, do you hate white people?’ That is a question that I’ve been asked either explicitly or by implication after white people have read my work or attended a lecture that I’ve given. The question, thus far, has only been asked or implied by white people. I am disturbed by the question as it speaks to forms of white fear of self-interrogation, fear of going to that place of vulnerability that lays bare white racism, the questioner’s white racism. Indeed, undergirding the question is a deflection away from the responsibility that they, as white people, must embrace because they are the perpetuators of racial injustice and are complicit with white supremacy and white privilege – even as they may not be conscious of such forms of racist collusion. The question deflects from the necessity that they ought to engage in fearless listening, to listen to the words, the disruptive metaphors, and the counter-narratives of white intelligibility that are deployed to reveal them to themselves as they are. Moreover, to raise the question about ‘my hate’ of white people (and specifically of those who pose the question) can function to render white people (them) ‘victims’. I become the ‘hater’, and they become the ‘hated’, the pariah, those who are unjustifiably loathed. In that moment, my so-called hatred can function to re-centre their whiteness as ‘innocent’ and thus render ‘my hatred’ of white people the problem. When the question is now asked, I often talk about my long list of white friends. By doing so, my aim is to return to white people their false manoeuvre (‘My best friend is Black’) to escape any charge of white racism, but I also deliver a powerful critique of the question regarding ‘my hatred of white people’, which, for them, is really about their white self-absorption. It is my way of saying, ‘You are not the racialized target here despite how your question positions you as such’. There are also times when I want to ask: ‘If I hate white people, then why in the hell do I spend my precious time giving talks like this one before an audience filled with so many white people, where I attempt

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to encourage them to see their white racism?’ Or, ‘Why would I waste my treasured time writing this or that unyielding critical article on whiteness for you?’ What I do, and what I dare, is obviously not about hate, but about the possibility, no matter how pessimistic my outlook, for white people to see themselves within the context of their complicity in the perpetuation of white supremacy. The powerful words of Frantz Fanon come to mind where he writes, ‘Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions’ (Fanon, 1967: 42). The question also implies a problematic reduction. It is as if I can’t critique the spinelessness of many white people when it comes to their failure or refusal to interrogate their racism without also loving them. Why can’t I do both? Critique, for me, can function as the embodiment of love, though not the kind of perfunctory sentimentality that passes for love within a society fundamentally shaped by the logic of a market driven ethos, where hyperreality replaces forms of robust embodied relationality, and where temporary and transient stimulation replaces an affective intensity that is potentially generative of enduring bonds of alliance, trust, forgiveness, acceptance, solidarity and friendship. Critique, then, as an embodiment of love, demands more from white people; it demands honesty and vulnerability. Within this context, it’s the belief in the possibility of love that refuses to accept its faux/ersatz instantiations. Critique, then, as an embodiment of love, ‘shall force our [white] brothers [and white sisters] to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it’ (Baldwin, 1962/1995: 9). Lastly, the question also attempts to erase the dialectical structure of whiteness. Even if I did hate white people, which I don’t, the question locates ‘my hatred’ as the genesis of a problem that has no anchorage vis-à-vis the actual, long blatant history of white hatred of Black and Brown bodies, their brutalisation, their experiences of white microaggressions and macroaggressions, their being torn to pieces, molested, dehumanised and oppressed. So, while I don’t hate white people, I am filled with justifiable rage and anger against global white supremacy and the ways in which it has attempted to decimate the lives of people of colour through pernicious white racialised forms of colonial usurpation. To focus on ‘my hatred’ is to belie the dialectical self-formation of whiteness as the ‘thesis’ and people of colour as the ‘antithesis’. Yet, it is whiteness that constructed the historical racial binary. In fact, whiteness is, by its very structure, binary and thereby

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parasitic upon the denigration and demonisation of, in this case, the racialised other. These opening paragraphs in my Afterword are informed by the prophetic voice and spirit of African American literary figure James Baldwin, especially in terms of his thematisation of how white people attempt to flee their responsibility and escape to places of false innocence. As Baldwin (1962/1995: 5) writes, ‘But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime’. In fact, this profoundly significant text that you hold – The Fire Now: Anti-racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence – is saturated in Baldwinian love, urgency and courageous speech. It is a text filled with righteous anger and passion, which implies suffering. Yet, the text is a site of anger (not hatred) that refuses the prolongation of white supremacist racism around the world. And it is a site of passion or suffering that will not allow defeat to have the last word. The contributors to this important text write from a place of both anger and suffering. They articulate and theorise hard truths and realities from that place of anger and suffering toward the end of contributing to the emancipation of the least of these, the wretched of the earth, the subaltern. Yet, they do this while being cognisant of their own racialised embodiment and how they, too, are targeted by various hegemonic forces because of their complex racialised identities, and how they are weary of the constant fightback. According to the editors of The Fire Now, ‘We write because we are simultaneously afraid, tired and angry’. Afraid, because white supremacy is toxic, death-dealing, blood-lusting and insidiously pervasive. Tired, because people of colour should not have to live in a racialised and racist world where their ontology, their very being, continues to be assaulted, policed, truncated and nullified. It is a form of gratuitous existential labour where one is forced ‘to prove’ one’s existential worth. To be ought to be sufficient to be worthy of being. Angry, because of local and global injustices, because of racist hatred, because our parents, siblings and children have suffered for far too long under the yoke of whiteness, the yoke of white power and privilege. Angry, because not only its people, but the earth itself suffers from deniers that our activities are destroying the ecological matrix out of which we were formed. Angry, because being so helps to keep us fighting, alive, focused, true, relentless.

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The Fire Now is a deep and probing political, pedagogical, historical, global, cultural and philosophical text, and one that is conceptually pregnant at the intersections of these axes, though shaped by a selfreflexive awareness that it is not an exhaustive project. The contributors within this text don’t privilege theory over praxis; rather, they recognise both as central and interdependent. Indeed, the university itself is deconstructed as ‘the site’ of truth and criticality. In this way, academia itself is marked as an ideological space of privilege that comes replete with its own forms of epistemic blinkers and exclusions of certain voices and the valorisation of other voices. The contributors emphasise not only the transformation of academia, but the importance of listening to, being receptive to, and being taught and transformed by embodied voices outside of the academy. The editors are explicit about The Fire Now having been ‘written to and for those we love – many of whom are outside of academia’s privileged walls’. Even as I write this Afterword, I am painfully aware of the ways in which my voice, my act of writing itself, is an act of relative privilege that is predicated upon certain academic norms that are hegemonic and hierarchical. Yet, like the contributors, I am also humbled by and grateful to those who have engaged in forms of labour that have made my act of writing a reality. This reality, the space and time to write, is made possible not only because of loved ones who worked hard at often inferior and humiliating jobs during de jure Jim Crow segregation, but also because of people of colour around the world who have fought and given their lives so that I (we) can begin to finish the struggle that they began. This is now our struggle, one motivated, in my case, by a long history of Black diasporic pain and suffering, resistance, joy, laughter and dignity. As the text makes clear, there are deep lessons from history to be drawn from and connections across space and time to be embraced. The Fire Now collectively embodies a written form that communicates through a personal register, one that speaks to various mutual relationships of concern, some of which are familial, others of which are non-familial. Indicative of Baldwin’s letter of love to his fifteen-year-old nephew, The Fire Now is a text that takes seriously the transformative power of love to speak beyond the lies, myths and ‘alternative facts’ embedded within the logics of the white imaginary, whether within the US vis-à-vis Trump’s authoritarian white nativism, the UK vis-à-vis the xenophobia that fuels Brexit, or outside of both within the Global

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South where Black women and women of colour suffer. As Baldwin (1962/1995: 3) knows all too well, his own father ‘was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him’. The contributors within this text perform counter-narrative and counter-discursive white epistemes, ones that constantly reclaim resistance and agency, forms of resistance that are both local and global and forms of agency that render suspect and problematic neo-liberal, asocial, atomic conceptions of autonomy. Because this text is linked to contextually and historically grounded and informed realities, the contributors take standpoint epistemology seriously, locating performative acts of truth-telling from within the lived experiential contexts of its scholars of colour, lived experiences that are intricately intersectional and that move across national boundaries. The Fire Now recognises and speaks to multiple acts of violence that Black bodies and Brown bodies endure and how those bodies are marked within the context of other axes of oppression – gender, sexuality, ability, class, ethnicity, religion, geo-political locationality. The editors have created a text that functions as a safe space that invites ‘a wide range of authors because we know that, in these times of explicit racial violence, we must pay even greater attention to the differences in our vulnerabilities when exposing the function of white supremacy’. In short, The Fire Now is a global text that refuses the recognition and valorisation of a single voice or a single issue, even as the text, as a whole, is concerned with racial violence and anti-racist and praxis-informed scholarship. Given its global scope, the text is self-consciously antiunivocal, comprehensive, intersectional and multidisciplinary. ‘Whilst we include scholars from the UK and the US’, according to the editors, ‘we are also purposeful in centring voices from outside these contexts generally, and beyond the West particularly’. The process of moving the epistemic centre and focusing on critically informed inclusive voices helps to effectively meet the challenge of what the editors refer to as ‘racisms’ dynamism, it’s ever mutating forms’. This speaks to the repetition and yet difference in terms of the contemporary ways in which racism metastasises globally. This means that the fire now, the conflagration now, threatens to consume the global demos completely. The contributors powerfully show that Baldwin’s warning, which was no doubt first spoken from the mouth of an enslaved Black body, is not next time, not in the future. It is now. More specifically, according to the editors, ‘This book is born out

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of our sense that we (as anti-racist scholars and activists) must bear witness to these times of explicit racial violence: we must work towards changing our fates within the fire now’. As such, then, this international cadre of scholars-cum-activists ‘foreground the fires that have left so many of our countries torn apart by neo-imperialist wars, and the fiery right-wing rhetoric that continues to terrorise and silence so many of us within our daily lives’. As Michael Brenner (2016: n.p.) argues, ‘The unpalatable truth is that authoritarian movements and ideology with fascist overtones are back – in America and in Europe. Not just as a political expletive thrown at opponents, but as a doctrine, as a movement, and – above all – as a set of feelings’. On this score, now is the opportune time, not tomorrow. This speaks to the urgency of addressing and attempting to eradicate our collective dehumanised existential condition, of overthrowing hegemonic structures that render our Black and Brown bodies dispensable. Martin Luther King Jr. understood what the urgency of now meant. He understood how certain mythical conceptions of temporality problematically sustain conditions of unfreedom. King (1991: 270) writes that the myth of time ‘is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice’. He also writes, ‘Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability’ (1991: 270). In fact, King knew all too well the mantra: ‘Wait!’ It is a form of ‘wait’ that people of colour have heard ad nauseam. Within the context of Black and Brown bodies constantly undergoing forms of racialised violence, marginalisation, mass incarceration, profiling and racialised death, the concept of ‘waiting’ makes no sense at all. Within such a context, ‘waiting’ is a form of cruel temporal postponement, another day of suffering, another day of violence, another day of death by the white state and proxies of the white state. Within the context of the binary structure of hegemonic whiteness, ‘wait’ signifies the desperation of those privileged by whiteness. ‘Wait’ is a cry, a fear of the danger of loss. As Baldwin (1962/1995: 8) writes, ‘To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity’. Of course, given the global reach of whiteness, that danger, that loss, is also (will have to be) global. Charles Mills (2014), who has written extensively and insightfully on the global dimensions of whiteness, writes, ‘Globally, the Racial Contract creates Europe as the continent that dominates the world; locally, within Europe and

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the other continents, it designates Europeans as the privileged race’ (2014: 33). He also writes, ‘Moreover, it is not merely that Europe and the former white settler states are globally dominant but that within them, where there is a significant nonwhite presence (indigenous peoples, descendants of imported slaves, voluntary nonwhite immigration), whites continue to be privileged vis-à-vis nonwhites’ (2014: 37). Lastly, Mills writes, ‘Today, correspondingly, though formal decolonization has taken place in Africa and Asia black, brown, and yellow natives are in office, ruling independent nations, the global economy is essentially dominated by the former colonial powers, their offshoots (Euro-United States, Euro-Canada), and their international financial institutions, lending agencies, and corporations’ (2014: 36). ‘Wait’ reeks of cowardice – both within the US and globally. ‘Now’, on the other hand, is a demand, a scream, that operates according to diametrically opposed temporal logics. It is the cry of the oppressed, it is the cry of the contributors to The Fire Now, it speaks to a temporality of refusal to go on as usual. The text is a global cry, a transnational, multicultural, multi-gendered, multi-disciplinary clarion call. In stream with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (2011: 67), the contributors to this text realise that ‘whenever one person is offended, we all hurt’. They understand the deep implications of shared vulnerability and collective solidarity. As Heschel writes, ‘We must continue to remind ourselves that in a free society all are involved in what some are doing. Some are guilty; all are responsible’ (2011: 85). The contributors to this text, as the editors make clear, act collectively with a ‘sense of urgency, and [a] desire to speak back’. The process of speaking back, of screaming back, is the sine qua non of liberation from oppression. The contributors have not, as Heschel warns against, ‘lost the capacity for outrage’ (2011: 85). As King (1991: 292) writes, ‘We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed’. The Fire Now necessitates no less from its contributors and readers. The editors agree with Baldwin (1962/1995: 103) that ‘the impossible is the least that one can demand’, especially as Black life in the US ‘testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible’. On this score, the contributors are painfully aware that such an achievement is gained in the face of the continuously raging fire of white supremacy. They are also aware, as argued, of the selective silences regarding those who are being impacted by the flames. According to the editors, ‘We

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know that some bodies are too often closer to the fire, and that some burns are too often wilfully unseen, unknown and unspoken. We know that true liberation will only come when we are all free from the fire’s ubiquitous threat’. The concept of fire within The Fire Now functions as a double entendre. There is the fire of destruction and devastation, leaving death in its wake. And then there is that fire seized upon by Black and Brown bodies that is unyielding in its intense and burning quest for global justice, peace and love. It is that fire that dares to ‘change the history of the world’ for the collective better (Baldwin, 1962/1995: 105). It is that fire that will leave the ‘self-assured, smug certainty of one’s honesty’ in ashes (Heschel, 2011: 176). It is that fire whose aim is ‘to end the racial nightmare’ (Baldwin, 1962/1995: 105) to light up the night with freedom songs, dances of liberation and anti-oppressive forms of embodied freedom. It is that fire that sears those ‘mirrors [that] can only lie’ and scorches those masks that are worn that ‘we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within’ (Baldwin, 1962/1995: 94). In short, this form of fire is socially, politically, psychologically, spiritually and existentially cathartic. As the editors write, ‘We also hold onto a fire that is cleansing, that comes from speaking up and out against the violence that surrounds us’. It is an embodied fire that not only fights back against intense and raging geopolitical and systemic institutional fires of hate and racial violence, but also a fire that refuses everyday acts of white micro-denial, obfuscation and bad faith. It is the fire that un-conceals the hidden motivation in the question: ‘So, do you hate white people?’ The Fire Now is a text about love, invitation, hospitality. It is a deep stirring in the soul. As Cornel West says when referring to the concept of fire through the historical framework of prophetic fire, ‘Fire really means a certain kind of burning in the soul … So, you straighten your back up, you take your stand, you speak your truth, you bear your witness and, most important, you are willing to live and die’ (Yancy, 2017: 264). Consistent with West’s conception of the prophetic dimensions of fire, The Fire Now: Anti-racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence is a powerful and indispensable text that refuses to remain silent as the fires of global oppression and global violence consume our world. It is a text that dares to bear witness and speak truth to power.

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References Baldwin, James. (1962/1995). The Fire Next Time. New York: The Modern Library. Brenner, Michael. (2016). How Autocracy Will Come to America. Available from: www. huffingtonpost.com/entry/howautocracy-will-come-to-america_ us_583f559ae4b0c68e047ec72f (Accessed 20 May 2018). Fanon, Frantz. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. (2011).

Abraham Joshua Heschel: Essential Writings, ed. Susannah Heschel. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. King, Martin Luther Jr. (1991). A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington. New York: HarperSanFrancisco. Mills, Charles W. (2014). The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornel University Press. Yancy, George. (2017). On Race: 34 Conversations in a Time of Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press.

IN D E X

#BlackLivesMatter, 39, 134, 138, 206 #RailaAnotherTrump, 179–83 #SayHerNameMovement, 68 #WhyIsn’tMyProfessorBlack, 18 @HardTalkKE, 180 @iam_abeta, 182 @JayneKamanga, 181 @kattaloo, 175 @KenyaFire, 181 @KhalidIntellect, 182 @MacheruF, 181 @miss_mumbz, 175 @MugambiDon, 175 @Muhahami, 180, 181 @PolycarpHinga, 180 @SirGmn, 181–2 @titomwai, 182 @wambui_mwangi, 183

Ali, Osop Abdi, 189–97 Alternative for Germany (AfD), 160 Anderson, David, 183 Anker, Elizabeth, Orgies of Feeling, 200, 202, 205, 206 Anthony, Carmelo, 147 anti-blackness, 38, 40, 190, 202; see also discrimination anti-immigrant sentiment, 74, 171 anti-racism, xvii, 6, 7, 15–37, 44–55, 86, 117, 142–9, 183–5; responsibility for, 27 anti-racist scholars, 49, 50 anti-racist struggles, of women in the Black diaspora, 144–5 anti-slavery movement, 150 anxiety, politics-related, 202–4 Arday, Jason, 50 assimilation, 81, 125 Austrian People’s Party, 160

ableism, 5, 6 Abuznaid, Ahmad, 136 academia: apolitical nature of, 46; inequality in, 29; transforming of, 6; White supremacy in see White supremacy, in academia academic journal articles, structure of, 38 academics: Black, Othering of, 27; duties as activists, 44–5; see also BME academic staff affect theory, 205 Afri-centric discourse, 151, 156 Africa, idealisation of, 156 Agnew, Phil, 136–7 Agrawal, N., 91 Ahmed, Sara, 52, 181 Akim Trading Company, 158 Al Shabaab movement, 196 Alexander, Chris, 170 Alexander, Claire, 61

Back, Les, 20 Back to Africa campaign, 150, 156–8 Bady, Aaron, 192 Baker, Ella, leadership model, 138 Baldwin, James, xvii, 15–16, 44, 45, 61, 70, 189, 191; The Fire Next Time, 2, 60 Bangladesh, flooding in, 102 Bannerji, Himani, 165 Baptist, E., 66 Barber II, William J., 135 bathing suit, banning of, in France, 83 Battle of Adowa, 153 bearing witness, xvii, 5, 16; in academia, 15, 22, 23 Beaudry, Patrick, 167 being exactly who you are, 8 Bell, C., 64, 68 Bell, Derrick, 52, 145–6, 145 Bell-Scott, Patricia, xvii Berman, Bruce, 183 Bhambra, G., 101

276 | I N D E X Bible, used as channel for anti-slavery sentiment, 154 bibliographies, sharing of, 190, 191 Bilingualism and Biculturalism Commission (Canada), 163 binaries, abolition of, 40 birther movement, 121 Black Atlantic see slave trade, Black Atlantic Black body, construction of, 46 Black citizen, impossibility of, 38, 41 Black collectivism, 153–6 Black culture: appropriation of, 91; utilised by White women, 91–2 Black Diasporic Literature, 142 Black dissent, criminalisation of, 134 Black liberation, positive, 156–8 Black Liberation Army (BLA), 133 Black life, interdiction of, xvi Black Lives Matter (BLM), 89, 93, 101, 104–7, 117, 120, 133, 134, 137, 138, 145, 148, 149, 152, 159 Black Lives Matter (UK), 105 Black Lives Matter Alliance Broward, 93 Black Panther Party (BPP), 133 Black political disobedience, 63 Black Power movement, 132, 138, 164 Black radicalism, 118 Black resistance, legacy of, 158–60 Black sporting bodies, as entertainers, 70 Black Studies, 40, 41, 42; deradicalisation of, 52 Black study, xvii, 38–43 Black unemployment rate, 122, 123 Black voice, construction of, 39 Black womanhood, 41–2 Black women, 204; don’t get to stop, 189; lack of legal standing, 60 Black writing, experimental, 41 Black youth, radicalisation of, 139 Black Youth Project, 137 Blackness, 8, 40; political, 61; study of, 184; writing about, 42 Blair, Tony, 124–5 Bland, Sandra, 132 Bloggers Association of Kenya, 177 Blyden, Edward, 157 BME academic staff: in posts, 26; lack of,

28, 29, 32, 35; workplace experience of, 49 bodies out of place, 49, 50 Bonilla-Silva, E., 91 Brand, Dionne, Ossuaries, xv Bree, Joshua, 137 Brexit referendum vote, 2, 4, 7, 8, 15, 17, 44, 63, 74, 117–28, 150, 198–200, 207; contextualisation of, 17–19; followed by racial attacks, 124 Britishness, 124 Brown vs the Board of Education case, 120 Brown, Michael, murder of, 132, 133, 146 Brown-Vincent, Layla, 44 Bumpurs, Eleanor, 68–9 Bush, Barbara, 145 Butler, Octavia, Parable Trilogy, 131–2 Byrd, James, 68 Cambridge Analytics, 175 Cameron, David, 108, 126 Camp, S., 66 Canada, 7; as multicultural oasis, 162–74; elections in, 169; indigenous populations of, 164 Canadian Multicultural Act (1988), 164 Canadian Values, defence of, 169–71 Caribbean: effect of climate change on, 100, 101, 102; migration from, 123; reparations movement, 108; slave narratives in, 142–4 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), racists broadcasting on, 166–7 Carter, Derrais, xvii Ch’ort’I Maya tribe, 93 Charlottesville, Virginia, rally in, 69 Cheeseman, Nic, 183 Chesnutt, Charles, The Marrow of Tradition, xviii Chevannes, B., 156 Christian, Barbara, 177 Christianity, compulsory classes in, 79 Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), 70 churches, use of, 154, 155 circumcision, in Kenya, 176 circumstances, importance of, 45 citizenship, testing for, 170

INDEX

City Airport, London, protest at, 105 ‘City Girl’, 178–9 civil disobedience, 135 civil rights, 121, 138 civil rights movement (USA), 118–19, 132, 133, 149 civility, 38, 42 Claire, 94–5 classism, 94 Cliff, Michelle, ‘If I Could Write This in Fire...’, xvii climate crisis, as racist crisis, 99–113 climate debt, 107–9 climate disasters, 3 climate justice, 107–9 climate policy regime, global, 104 Clinton, Hillary, 69, 87, 121, 129, 132, 180, 198 co-optation, of BME academics, 52 co-production, 22, 49 Cochrane, Kelso, 124 Collins, P. H., 22 colonialism, 103, 104, 106–7, 150, 151, 156, 184 colour blindness, in Canada, 163–6 commons, defence of, 109 communities, knowledge of, 50–1 ‘community cohesion’, 125 comparative analysis, 40 Condé, Maryse, Heremakhonon, 143, 144–5, 148, 149 Confiant, Raphaël, Nègre Marron, 142–4, 145 connection to the oppressed, 62 conscience, development of, 45 Conservative Party of Canada, 170 Conteh, M., 91 cookery, feminist views of, 192 Cooper, Gary, 62 COP15 climate talks, 104 COP21 climate talks, 104 Counter Intelligence Programme (COINTELPRO), 133–4 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 60, 68 crippin’: of Blackness, 60–73; theorisation of, 71 Critical Race and Ethnicities Network (CREN), 3, 49

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Critical Race Theory (CRT), 48, 60, 70, 145–6, 147 Cross, W. E., 117 crucifixes, in classrooms, 79–80 Cuffee, Paul, 157 Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah, 152, 157; Thoughts and Sentiments, 154 Cullors, Patrisse, 105, 138 Cultural Action Party Newsletter, 168 Cultural Studies, deradicalisation of, 52 cultural tolerance, 163 curriculum content, 28 Dahlab, Lucia, 78 Dahlab v Switzerland case, 76, 79 Dakota Access Pipeline, 91, 108 De Gruy Leary, Joy, 132 deadlines in publishing, 192 Delaney, Martin, 157 Di-Apring, Lumumba, 104 dialogue, 21–2 diasporic perspectives, 40 digital culture, taken seriously, 177 disability, 15, 201; politics of, 5, 6; rematerialising of, 63–9; White history of, 63 disability discrimination, 202 Disability Studies, 60; White, 64 disabled people of colour, 60–73 disablement, 63; as social product, 64; Black, 64 discrimination, 158, 201 dismemberment, in slavery, 66 Diverse Voices and Action for Equality, 109 diversification, of academic staff, 28, 34, 35; importance of, 31 diversity: as practice, 29; use of term, 30 DNA of human beings, 162 doing more harm than good, 51–3 Dream Defenders, 136, 137 Du Bois, W. E. B., xvi, 20, 152 Eanes de Zurara, Gomes, 153 East Africa, famine in, 103 Ebert, Teresa, 63–4 education , as tool of social mobility, 28

278 | I N D E X elections, people turned away from polls, 135–6 Elghawaby, Amira, 169–70 Elkins, Caroline, 183 Ellis, J., 167 Ellis, William Henry, 158 Enright, Michael, 162 environmental and climate justice, 99–102, 105 environmental justice movement, 102, 106 epistemologies: alternative, 23; of ignorance, 190 Equality Challege Unit (ECU), 30 Equality Rally for Unity and Pride, Fort Lauderdale, 93 equality: between men and women, 171; in university context, 28 Equiano, Olaudah, 152, 157 Erevelles, Normala, 64 espionage, 134 eugenicism, 46–7 Eurocentrism, 31, 144; resistance to, 142–4 European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), 77 European Convention on Human Rights, 75, 76 European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), 74, 75–6, 78, 79–80 Evers, Medger, 132 Eweida v the United Kingdom case, 76 exclusion, 47 face veil cases, 74–85 Facebook, 167 fake news, 4 Fanon, Frantz, 109, 182 far right movements see right wing politics Farage, Nigel, 126, 171 farmers in India, suicides of, 102 fascism, rise of, 4 fear, 198, 204; of the world around you, 189 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Black Identity Extremists, 133–4 Federation of Women Lawyers (Kenya), 178 feeling tired, 199

feminism: Black, 8, 16, 17, 21–2, 60; divisions in, 91; White, 86–98 Fleming, Crystal, 17–18 food, feminist work on, 190, 193 Forman, T. A., 91 France, 103; banning of bathing suit, 83; Constitutional Court decision on niqab, 80; positions on Islamic head scarf, 81–2 freak shows, 67 free speech, 4 freedom of thought, conscience and religion, 75 Freeman, Alan, 145–6 Fryer, P., 157 Fundamental British Values, 8 Gaines, Korryn, 69 Gaitho, Macharia, 175–6 gang culture, 125 Garner, Eric, 146 Garner, Joy, 124 Garvey, Marcus, 152, 156 Garza, Alicia, 138, 159 Geiss, I., 151, 157 gender equality, 76, 79, 80; under Islam, 77 gender nonconformity, 40 geography, 20; embedded with whiteness, 18; paradox of, 22 Germany, coal mines in, 108 Ghosh, A., 106, 107 Glissant, Edouard, Le Discours antillais, 144 global warming, 103 ‘Go Home’ vans, 126 Godell, William, 65 ‘good protest’, 147 Goodale, Ralph, 169 Greece, research into law courts, 74–5 Greens of Colour group, 99 Grenfell Tower fire, 2–3 guilt, 27 Gumbs, Alexis Pauline, Scenes in Black Feminist Fugitivity, 41 Haiti, payment of reparations by, 103 Hall, Stuart, 65 Harper, Stephen, 169

INDEX

Harriot, Michael, 130–1 Harvard University, 46 hate crimes, in Canada, 168–9 hate speech, 42 Hawkins, John, 153 heteronormativity, 63 higher education: neoliberal commodification of, 52; racism in, 26–37; see also academia hijab (head scarf), 74, 78, 199, 201; as tool of oppression, 79; banning of, 76; meaning of, 78; regulation of, 76 Hine, Darlene Clark, 40, 42 historical amnesia, 46 historical materialism, 63–4 histories, stealing of, 13 history: deep Black-African, 63; lessons from, 7; study of, 130 Holland, flood defences in, 107 Homeland Security (USA), 203 hooks, bell, 52, 63; with Cornel West, Breaking Bread, 62 Hoover, J. Edgar, 133 House Bill 589 (USA), 135–6 Hoyles, M., 155 Hull, Akasha T., xvii human rights, in relation to veiling issues, 75–8 Human Rights Act (UK), repeal of, 83 Hurricane Harvey, 102 Hurricane Irma, 102 hurricanes, 100 Hurston, Zora Neale, 198 I Am Not Your Negro, 61–2 I Can’t Breathe movement, 145, 146, 148, 152 Ideas programmes, 162–3 identity: categories of, 201; complexity of, 60–1 identity politics, 203 immigrants, deportation of, 121 immigration: centrality of, xvii; overestimation of figures for, 48; rhetoric against, 150; see also antiimmigrant sentiment impairment, feigning of, 67 inclusion, 42

| 279

India, flooding in, 102 inequality: and climate change, 99–113; in higher education, 31; racial, disruption of, 34; see also equality integration, 77 intellectuals, responsibilities of, 48 intersectionality, 6, 40, 48, 63, 67, 74–85, 102, 105, 189 Islam, 6, 77; manifestation of belief restricted, 82; opposition to, 167, 169; seen as antithetical to democracy and equality, 77 Islamophobia, 81, 190, 202 Italy, 106 James, C. E., 165, 168 James, LeBron, 147 ‘jane’, 90 Jet, 146 Jim Crow, 67–8, 120 Johnson, Azeezat, xvi Jones, Claudia, xvii Jones, Heather, 131 Joseph-Salisbury, Remi, xvi Jubilee Party (JP) (Kenya), 175 Kaepernick, Colin, 69, 146–8, 158; Trump’s criticism of, 147 Kalinaki, Daniel K., 175 Kamau, Sam, 175 Kamunge, Beth, xvi, 189–97 Kazanjian, David, 177 Kearny, Candy, 89 Kelley, Robin D. G., Freedom Dreams, 138–9 Kennedy, John F., assassination of, 120 Kennedy, Stefanie, 65 Kenya, 7, 44, 175–86, 189–97 passim; elections in, 191, 194; living in, 195; phallocratic politics of, 176 Kenyan studies, 183–4 Kenyan-Somali people, 194–5 Kenyatta, Uhuru, 175–86 Kenyatta family, 176 Kidero, Evans, 178 Kikuyu group, 176 King Jr, Martin Luther, 4, 88, 118, 122, 132, 155

280 | I N D E X King, Rodney, 68 kneeling for the US National Anthem, 69, 146–8 knowledge, decentring of, 22 knowledge production: sites of, 21, 47; university as site of, 51 Koran, 77 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), in Canada, 166 Kurz, Sebastian, 160 La Meute group (Canada), 167–8 Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau), 183–4 languages, loss of, 13 languages policy, in Canada, 164 Lara, Oruno D., 143 Lautsi v Italy case, 79 Lautsi, Soile, 79 Lawrence, Stephen, 124 Laymon, Kiese, 38 Le Pen, Marine, 160, 170, 171 leaderful movement, 138 leadership models, 138 legitimacy, in USA, 202 Leicester, 61 Leitch, Kellie, 170–1 Lemieux, Jamilah, 88 Lévi-Strauss, C., 19–20 Lewis, Jamal, Otherwise Gender, 40 Leyla Sahin v Turkey case, 76, 77–9 LGBTQI people, 90, 92, 93 LGBTQI rights, 86 Lincoln, Abraham, 119, 120 ‘living together’, 81, 83 Lonsdale, John, 183 Lorde, Audre, 16, 20, 49, 50, 60, 71, 184 Lucier, A. M., 92 Luo group, 176 Lynch, Gabrielle, 183 Maafa, 129–30 Maathai, Wangari, 99 Macharia, Keguro, xviii, 4, 192 Machbour, Faiza, 77 MacPherson Report, 124 Madge, C., 22 Madowo, Larry, 179 Manigault-Bryant, LeRhonda, 89–90 Manyora, H. B., 179–80

March Against Racism (London), 117 March for Science (USA), 92 March on Washington, 86, 88 margin of appreciation, 82 marginalisation, 5, 47, 49; of Black people, 158; of disabled people, 64 maronnage, 142, 146 marriage, forced, prevention of, 170 Martin, Dawn Lundy, ‘A Black Poetics...’, 41 Martin, Tony, 151, 156 Martin, Trayvon, murder of, 122, 132, 134, 136 Marxism, 63–4, 138 May, Theresa, 1, 126–7 Mazrui, A., 153 McCrory, Pat, 134 McMillen, Gynnya, 69 McRuer, Robert, 71 Mediterranean, Black people drowning in, 126 melodramatic political discourse, 202 mental health, 199, 200–1, 205, 206 messy writing, 190 micro-aggression, racial, 20, 27, 34, 52; in academia, 32–4 Middle Passage, 64 migrant solidarity work, 108 migrants: deportation of, 126; drowned at sea, 106 migration: from the Caribbean, 123; into Britain, 124 Million Women March, 88 Mirza, Aisha, 199 Mirza, H. S., Black British Feminism, 61 misogyny, 176, 177; in Kenya, 177–9; in USA, 177–9 Mobley, Mamie, 68 modernity, 184–5 Mohammed, Elijah, 120 Mohanram, R., 19 monitoring, 59 Monroe Doctrine, 157 monstrosity, mundane, 198–201 Moral Mondays, 134–6 Morrison, Toni, Beloved, xvii Movement for Black Lives, 39, 132, 133, 137, 138

INDEX

Moynihan Report, 139 multi-culturalism, 28, 124; identified as problem, 125; in Canada, 163–6, 166–9 Muria, Moses, 178 Musila, Grace, 176 Muslim populations, overestimation of, 48 Muslim women of colour, 199, 201, 204, 206 (trauma of, 201–2) Muslims, 74–85, 198; as Other, 16; ban on, in USA, 1, 117, 121; in Kenya, 194; legal regulation of, 74 Mwangi, Wambui, 189; ‘Silence Is a Woman’, 191–2 Mwiti, Gideon, 178 My Brother’s Keeper initiative, 122 Myerson, Collier, 91 Nabulivou, Noelene, 109 Nation of Islam (NOI), 119, 120–1 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 135 National Football League (NFL), 145, 159; rules of, 70 National Front (UK), 61 National Gender and Equality Commisssion (Kenya), 178 Native Lives Matter, 159 negativity, Western, countering of, 156–8 nègre marron, 142–4 Nepal, flooding in, 102 networks of resistance, 150, 153–4 networks of support, 49–50 New Cross Massacre, 124 Newsome, Bree, 136 Niagara Movement, 152 niqab (face veil), 74, 80; banning of, 75, 80, 82; opposition to, 169; regulation of, 76 Nixon, Richard, 139 nonlinear thinking, 40 Northern Police Monitoring Project (Manchester), 99 Northern Wolf, 118–23 Noxolo, P., 22 Nzerbie, Ikem, 99

| 281

Obama, Barack, 87, 121–3, 129, 139 Obama, Michelle, 122 Obeah healing traditions, 67 Odhiambo, Millie, 178 Odinga, Raila, 179–80; career of, 182 Odinga family, 176 Oluo, I., 91, 95 Operation Trident (UK), 125 oppression, understanding and reframing of, 7 Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) (Kenya), 179 O’Reilly, Bill, 122 Organization for Black Feminists (UK), 61 othering, 16, 61; of Black academics, 27 Pacific Partnerships on Gender, Climate Change and Sustainable Development (PPGCCSD), 109 Padmore, George, xvii Painter, Neil Irvin, 162 ‘Paki Bashing’, 61 Pan African Congress, 99 Pan-African Association, 151, 152 Pan-African resistance, 7; lessons from, 150–61 Pan-Africanism, 142, 143, 144, 145, 148, 149, 160; use of term, 151 Pantaleo, Daniel, 146 Parent, R., 167 Paris Accord, US withdrawal from, 109 Parks, Rosa, 158 past: not a finished entity, 100–1; which is not past, 1 Patel, Shailja, 192 patriarchy, 63, 94; Black, 39 Paul, Chris, 147 Pegida Canada, 167 Perry, B., 167, 171 Peterloo, 155 PhD studies, 49, 50 Pierre, Jemima, 184 plantation logic, 41 police: brutality of, 91, 120, 122, 158; institutionally racist, 124; killings of people by, 89; militarised support for, 121; present at marches, 93; target for protest, 117

282 | I N D E X political acts, of Black women, 189 political is personal, 8 Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, 132 pressure groups, use of, 152 Preventing Violent Extremism and Terrorism (Prevent) (UK), 125 Pride Flag, with black and brown stripes, 93 problematic proximities, 181 Professor Watchlists, 52 publishing, standards of, 190 queer people, 159 Queer Studies, 71 queerness, 5, 61, 105, 134, 201; erasure of, 202 race: as feminist issue, 95; concept of, 162; re-materialising of, 63–9; study of, 184–5 race disparity audit (UK), 126 race equality, auditing culture of, 30 Race Equality Charter, 30 race hate crimes, in UK, 150 Race Relations Act (UK) (1965), 124 race riots, 123–4, 125 race studies, 5, 29 racial discrimination, resistance to, 150 racism, 7, 18, 51, 74, 86–7, 93, 94, 104, 105–7, 125, 126, 158; around Women’s March on Washington, 88–91, 91–2; colour-blind, 86–98; environmental, 5; everyday, 44; fight against, 95; in American South, 118–19; in higher education, 26–37; in social movements in Trump era, 92–3; institutional, 30, 129, 203; not prioritised as issue, 33; persistent nature of, 35; polite individual, 163; state sponsored, 118; structural, 99–113; struggles against, 142–9; systematic, 117–28; underpins capitalist political economy, 101 racisms, proliferation of, 8 radical teachng practices, 16 Raghuram, P., 22 Ranger, T. O., 153 Ransby, Barbra, 138 rape, 68, 178

Reagan, Ronald, 131–2, 139 Red Power Movement, 164 reflexivity, 51–3 refugees, Syrian, arriving in Canada, 171 religious belief, right to manifest, 75 Remnick, D., 69–70 reparations, 46; movement for, 108 reparative justice, 109 repatriation see back to Africa campaigns Republican Party (USA), 134–5 resistance, use of term, 151 Rice, Thomas Dartmouth, 67 right wing politics, 18, 87, 162–74, 199; in Canada, 166–7 Robinson, Cedric, Black Marxism, 138 Rodney, Walter, xvii Roe v Wade case, 89 Rogers, Jasmen M., 93 roots, in Africa, finding of, 148 rules for keeping alive, 205 Sahin, Leyla, 78 Sam, Alfred Charles, 158 Sanders, Bernie, 121 SAS v France case, 75, 80, 81–2 school-to-prison pipeline, 137 Schweik, Susan, 67–8 Scott, Rick, 137 Scrivens, R., 167, 171 secularisation, 83 self-care, importance of, 45, 50, 53 Seminole tribe, 93 Sessions, Jeff, 139 sexism, 7, 94, 95 sexual harassment, in Kenyan parliament, 178 Sharpe, Christina, 1 Shebesh, Rachel, 178 Shervington, Anita, 99 Sierra Leone, 157; mudslides in, 102 Sikkim, hydroelectric project in, 108 Simon, Ileana, 89–90 single-issue struggles, 60 Sivanandan, A., 152 slave codes, North American, 65 slave trade, 153; Black Atlantic, 61, 64, 67, 69, 70, 132 (invisibility of, 65)

INDEX

slavery, 64, 119–20, 142–4, 150, 151, 156, 158, 164; abolition of, 123; Britain enriched by, 123; resistance to, 154; universities’ complicity in , 46; violence of, 64–5, 66; women’s resistance to, 145 slavery studies, 66 Smith, Barbara, xvii Smith, S., 93 ‘so what’ question, 38 Soldiers of Odin (SOO), 167 solidarity, 6, 40 Somali youth, killed, in Kenya, 196 Somalia, bombing in, 194, 195 Sons of Africa Movement, 152 South Africa, anti-racist struggles in, 155 Southall Black Sisters, 61 Southern Fox, 118–23 Southern Poverty Law Center, 89 spatiality, politics of, 4 speaking for others, 94 speaking truth to power, 47–9 Spencean movement, 154 Spillers, Hortense, ‘Mama’s Baby. Papa’s Maybe...’, 41, 64 ‘stand your ground’, 137 standardisation of terminologies, 6 Standing Rock, 3, 108 struggle, importance of, 53 Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 133 sugar factory, as place of hazards, 65–6 suicide, 205, 206 support networks see networks of support Sustained Theatre Up North (STUN), 99 Switzerland, 76 Symons, Emma-Kate, 90 Take a Knee, 148 Talai, Amir, 206 Talburt, T., 151 terror, 198, 199, 200, 204 terrorism, 199 ‘the fire now’, meaning of, 193 things getting better, 206–7 this ain’t nothing new, 44 Thlimmenos v Greece case, 76 Thompson, Alvin O., Flight to Freedom, 143, 145

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Thompson, V., 153 Thorne, Albert, 157 Till, Emmett, murder of, 68, 132, 145, 146, 148 Tillis, Thom, 136 Todd, Bridget, 88–9 Tometi, Opal, 138 trans people, 92, 134, 159 transness, 40, 61 trauma: morality of, 201–2; movements of, 204–5; movements through, 198–208; of Muslim women of colour, 201–2 ‘Trayvon’s law’, 137 trickle down theory, 45 Trojan Horse scandal, 125 Trotz, Ulric, 107 Trudeau, Pierre Elliot, 163, 165 Trump, Donald J., 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 17, 74, 87, 88– 9, 109, 117–28, 150, 162, 170, 171, 175–86; as ‘nothing new’, 129, 131, 139–40; as Wolf, 121; associated with culture of abuse, 69–70; Black responses to, 129–41; contextualisation of, 17–19; election of, 44, 63, 129, 139, 181–2, 183, 198–200, 204, 207; ethnonationalism of, 175–6; inauguration of, 86; misogyny of, 177–8, 181 Truth, Sojourner, 157 Tubman, Harriet, 67, 157 Tulkens, Judge, 77–8 Tutu, Desmond, 155 Tweets: as form of theory, 177; ephemeral nature of, 177 Twitter, 205; use of, 21 Ugly Laws, 67–8 UK Independence Party (UKIP), 126 United States of America (USA), 158–9, 150, 165, 171, 175–86, 198–208; elections in, 175; environmental justice movement in, 102; foreign policy of, 203; legitimacy in, 202; national anthem, anti-racist protests against, 142 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 152 university: anti-racism in, 142; as neoliberal institution, 47; as site of inequality, 26; concedes nothing

284 | I N D E X university (cont.): without demands, 51; critique of, 46–7; decentring of, 51; see also higher education University of London, seat of eugenics, 46 Vergès, F., 105 Vincent, Joshua, 136 violence, xv, 171, 200, 203; against Black women, 68; antipolice, 134; epistemic, 19; of slavery, 64–5, 66; political, 183, 206; racial, 6, 15, 18, 45, 51; structural, 23 vulnerability, 26, 49; to extreme weather, 103 Wade, Dwyane, 147 Walcott, Rinaldo, xvi Walker, Anthony, 124 War on Drugs, 139 Warah, Rasna, 179 Ward, Jesmyn, xvii water, clean, battle for, 3 we are 52 per cent, 193 weather, extreme events, 100, 102–4 Wedderburn, Robert, 154–5 Weiss, Paul, 189 West, Cornel, 48, 52, 62, 63 White backlash in the USA, 87, 90 White Coats for Black Lives Protests, 159 White liberalism, 202; reactions to Trump and Brexit, 198–9 White nationalism, 87 White people, portrayed as devils, 119, 120 White privilege, 162 White spaces, in Academia, disruption of, 32–3 White supremacy, 1, 23, 29, 32, 39, 47, 48, 61, 63, 66, 69, 87, 94, 134, 139, 162, 166, 176, 182–3, 198, 204; definition of, 18; disrupting metaphors of, 33; in academic context, 2, 15, 17–19; in universities, 2, 15, 51, 52

White women, on Women’s March, 206 White working classes, failure of, 127 Whiteness, 18, 119, 162, 165, 168, 169, 183–4, 190, 200, 205–6; as tool for reinforcing power, 26–7, 29, 32; claim of universality, 163; destabilising the centrality of, 30; embedded in academic institutions, 16; in academia, 23, 200 (critiquing of, 19– 21); negotiation of, 26; neutralisation and protection of, 16; neutrality of, 20, 22, 32; proclaims its discomfort, 200 Wilderson, Frank, 38–9 Williams, Henry Sylvester, 151, 152 Williams, Jessica, 69 Wilmington insurrection, xviii witnessing see bearing witness woman of letters, with hidden words, 193–4 women: Black (shoulder burden of struggle, 45; violence against, 68); Muslim, 8, 15, 74–85 (excluded from human rights machinery, 83; harassed in Canada, 169); see also Muslim women of colour Women and Gender Constituency Liaison to the COP23 Presidency, 109 Women’s March (2017), 7, 86–98, 205–6 Women’s Studies, deradicalisation of, 52 Wretched of the Earth bloc, 109 Wright, Michelle, 39 writing in the fire now, 189–97 Wyche, Steve, 147 Wynter, Sylvia, xvi X, Malcolm, 7, 117, 118–28, 130, 132 Young, Robert, 64 Zimmerman, George, 134, 136 Zulus, 153