Race

A black woman spoke up from the audience at a public meeting held earlier this year, to launch a new issue of Race and Class, the journal of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR). She was a teacher, struggling with the new legal duty on teachers to monitor and report signs of ‘nonviolent extremism’ among their students. Children were becoming frightened to express their opinions. What was she…

Brexit hasn’t just been a shot in the arm for people on the Right, it’s kicked a lot of Greens, anarchists and socialists into positive action. The vote on 23 June to Leave the EU has energised progressive people in a lot of places around the UK to put renewed energy into tackling racism…

In this issue, we are offering some resources for campaigners struggling for peace and justice in post-Brexit Britain. Here is an excerpt from Linda Stout’s invaluable book, Bridging the Class Divide – and other lessons for grassroots organising. In this book, Linda explains how she, a white woman who grew up in poverty in rural North Carolina, founded and built up…

There can’t be many books reviewed in PN that have been compared to the writings of James Joyce and also need the help of www.urbandictionary.com to explain their vocabulary. But please don’t let either of these facts put you off reading this beautifully-written coming of age story!

The book opens with a map of Baltimore in the 1980s, annotated with the contemporary version of ‘Here be Dragons’ (‘Leakin Park – body…

Liz Fekete is director of the seven-person Institute of Race Relations in central London. She is one of Europe’s leading authorities on racism, heading one of the most respected advocacy groups in the UK, a body which has published a rigorously radical journal, Race & Class, since 1974. That could sound intimidating. In person,…

For some decades, Betsy Leondar-Wright has been running workshops about classism, for the last dozen years as part of Class Action, a group based in Boston, Massachussetts, in the US.

In an interview with PN, Betsy notes that many of us have a picture we’ve built up from the women’s movement and other such movements: ‘We have a template: there’s a dominant group, there’s a targeted group/an oppressed group, and in Class Action we’re using this template all the time.’…

How should a white anti-racist respond to racist remarks by another white person? How does it change things if the anti-racist is middle-class, and is reacting to the prejudice of someone who is working-class?

In her book Class Matters, long-time activist and trainer Betsy Leondar-Wright tells an arresting story that turns the conventional wisdom on its head. Betsy, who is white and middle-class, was the…

On 10 November 2015, it will be 20 years since the Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight Ogoni colleagues were hanged by the military government for campaigning nonviolently against the oil company Shell.

It will be nearly 60 years since Shell started drilling in the Niger Delta. Home to 20 million people and 40 different ethnic groups, the Niger…

I woke up this morning to nine people being killed: Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Reverend DePayne Middleton-Doctor, the honorable reverend Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, reverend Daniel Simmons Sr, reverend Sharonda Singleton, and Myra Thompson.

I am dragged down and hurt, and I can barely feel the full pain that reading those names weighs…

Once upon a time (not very long ago), most white feminists didn’t think about how stereotypes of white womanhood helped to maintain racist ideologies. But though the word ‘intersectional’ may not have been coined until 1989 (by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw), black feminists have long been writing about – and at – the intersections of race, class and gender.

Vron Ware’s groundbreaking book discusses these ideas in a critical look at the historical interactions between feminists…

In 1936, the Indian scholar BR Ambedkar was invited to give a speech to the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal (Forum for Break-up of Caste), a group of high-caste Hindus. The controversial speech was never delivered, and the conference was cancelled, but Ambedkar published the speech himself, together with the letters and records of the ensuing debate.

In her book-length introduction, ‘The Doctor and the Saint’, Arundhati Roy draws out the significance of this speech (‘Annihilation of Caste’)…

Catalyst Project works to consciously create a culture that helps white people take strategic and effective anti-racist action as a part of multiracial movements.

We think that white anti-racist organising requires that we move away from competitive, individualist thinking, and instead support as many people as we can to be effective change agents, working in accountable relationships with people of colour-led organisations. These shifts in organising culture help create more…

‘Come what may; we’re here to stay’. This rallying cry of the Asian Youth Movements (AYMs) of late ’70s Britain evokes a defiant identification with a new and radical Britishness. Facing the brunt of fascist abuse and police indifference, these second-generation South Asians, unlike their parents, knew that they wished to stay in Britain and grew up in an environment both challenging and hopeful.

Another popular chant went: ‘Labour, Tory, both the same: both play the racist game’,…

It all started with a room full of grassroots activist trainers, a US anti-oppression worker and a discussion about power and privilege.

‘I think there was discomfort, unhappiness, shock, disbelief, anger, that: “Oh, I am a part of this problem. This feels uncomfortable.” Because as social justice activists we try not to replicate the very same oppression we are trying to change,’ Denise Drake told Peace News recently.

Drake is a trainer with Turning the Tide, a London-based…

I look forward to receiving and reading my copy of Peace News. It is always interesting, often challenging and non-parochial, so you do indeed produce something well worth having.

However, the last few copies had me really puzzled with the phrase ‘people of colour’. What do you mean? The peace camp report makes this somewhat clearer as do the letters and your replies. While understanding where you are coming from with this, I find it clumsy, precious and offensive.…