Abstract
To open the IRR50 ‘New Circuits of Anti-racism Conference’ held at King’s College London in October 2022, Jenny Bourne, staff member, and Colin Prescod, IRR Chair, describe in their short speeches what the changing of the orientation of the Institute of Race Relations at its 1972 Extraordinary General Meeting had meant and how the organisation had changed its role and focused its commitment over fifty years. Their introduction includes description of the films for IRR directed by Prescod, Struggles for Black Community.
I guess I am here as the story teller – the elder that keeps the community’s history alive – well, that feels very odd indeed. For, when fifty years back we, that is IRR’s staff (in which I was very junior), the membership and community supporters, took on our governing board, funders, and the very vested interests in the old Institute of Race Relations, we had no idea that IRR would last. We were there, like so many organisations at the time – in women’s liberation, in the law, in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, against poverty, homelessness – to change things; yes, in the cliché, to ‘tell truth to power’. It was like a duty, to subvert, that we all had then. And I want to say just a little about how we lived to tell the tale.
Changing ‘race relations’
We have already written and spoken many times about that 1972 U-turn, 1 but just very briefly, I need to reiterate what it meant in terms of understanding and overcoming racism.
A: It said that race relations was not about getting these New Commonwealth immigrants to fit in and the ‘hosts’ to become a little more tolerant – it was about racism, something structured into the economy, polity and society.
B: In other words, Black people were not the problem but white society was. I will give just one example: in areas like North Kensington and Brixton people were in daily skirmishes with the police, being picked up on ‘Sus’, railroaded into jail. Meanwhile, we at the IRR were carrying out an ‘Adjustment Study’ in which people were being asked questions such as whether or not they kept a pet (apparently that was adjusted).
C: Change did not come about by tackling individual attitudes but in changing the laws which framed society and the media which constructed the discourse.
Clear as day now, but then it sounded quite revolutionary.
Dealing with contradictions
You don’t throw out the powerful − leaders of multinationals, the heads of media conglomerates and members of the Lords and Commons − without some kind of come-back. And I want to say a little about that.
Finance: First of all, they told all their cronies and all the trusts not to fund us, so we were broke. We had been in rented offices in Mayfair, swiftly we had to move − and it was to the basement and ground floor of warehouse-type premises in Islington, where sewage water flooded us out when rains got heavy and rats sat under our desks. But supporters came and helped bail out the water and we learnt how to get by, and later how to generate our own income (through our journal) and attract funds from smaller but more radical sources. Members of community groups kept the library and other services going some evenings and weekends.
We learnt, too, as our huge and stratified staff had to be made redundant how to diversify ourselves. I was a junior researcher, suddenly I was book-keeper, fundraiser and company secretary; Hazel Waters had been a librarian, she became a great editor on Race & Class. Liz Fekete came as a volunteer typist for the library, today she is our director. And we also learnt to work collectively, as a team, not as different departments.
Public persona: The old guard tried to portray us in the media as Reds, and trouble-makers, and that did not end in 1972. As we began to take up pressing issues – be it racism in the curriculum, police brutality, deaths in custody, school exclusions – we were pilloried as ‘lefty loonies’ (the New Right equivalent of today’s woke and snowflakes). We were accused of starting riots on the Broadwater Farm estate in the 1980s and Siva, our director, was ‘exposed’ as a violent hoodlum with an iron bar, kept in luxury at the tax-payer’s expense. We should be closed down by the Charity Commission, our incendiary materials should be banned, stormed politicians in the press.
But the position we had taken worked the other way too; it brought to IRR people and organisations from all over the world − our journal Race & Class was supported by leading figures such as Orlando Letelier, Thomas Hodgkin, Basil Davidson, John La Rose, Cedric Robinson, Manning Marable, Eqbal Ahmad, Jan Carew, Edward Said, Ken Jordaan. It had Walter Rodney, Noam Chomsky, Angela Davies, Gail Omvedt amongst its contributors, and Barbara Ransby, Miriyam Aouragh who are with us today − who all opposed imperialism and state racism. And our struggle and precept began to influence groups and be influenced by those on the ground – not just like The Southall Monitoring Group (with us today) but groups in the Netherlands, Germany, Norway (Khalid Salimi is here from the Anti-racist Centre in Oslo), Canada and Australia.
Changing priorities
Activities: I suppose that ever since April 1972 we as an organisation have been asking ourselves – since we are neither in academe nor at the grassroots, but straddling those worlds − how can we, as a progressive educational body, best provide the insights or, rather, the ammunition that others can then use. What are the issues we need to be taking up, how do we do it, do the old concepts work, do we need new ones, to whom are we speaking?
We were not in the business of just replicating what other groups were doing, especially those oriented just at policy amendment and in one specific area. We see issues and struggles as intimately linked; we have taken up those issues that others ignore, often the areas where racism is at its most virulent; we have tried then to put those issues on the agenda for others to learn about and take up – whether it be the impact of Europe 1992 and Fortress Europe, the growth of xeno-racism, Black history as part of British history, the impact of technological change on imperialism, the growth of nativisms and populisms, and so on.
This is not a looking-back conference but a taking stock to know where we are, and I think there are a few things which came out of our struggle – which still stand the test of time:
We as an organisation need to be speaking from the most oppressed, the most powerless, not to the policy-makers and the most powerful.
Many of those precepts came from Siva – whom we celebrate this day. But we should be as aware that, for at least the last ten years, it has been Liz Fekete carrying the torch aloft for IRR – thinking afresh, putting new issues on the agenda, making connections, developing networks and, above all, helping to incubate new stalwart fighters for a new age.
I guess I’m here as another variety of the old guard − one who can testify to the truth of Jenny’s account of the founding practice of the new Institute after the workers took over fifty years ago. So, I thought that perhaps the most useful thing that I could do at this juncture would be to give you a flavour of those times – a little bit then about how I came to the IRR.
You’ve heard from Jenny that the new IRR sided with the struggles against injustice of the new migrant-settler Black communities in the 1970s, sided with their justice campaigns and supported their right to challenge the status quo. This was not a comfortable position to take. Challenging the status quo meant challenging and confronting everyday injustices – at every turn! These Black communities challenged in order to change the very idea of what was ‘acceptable’. They challenged and demanded change in and of the systems that they encountered. And Black community struggles popped up in as many places as racism resulted in injustice – in other words everywhere.
Fifty years down the road, we need to remember that the people making struggles in these communities were arriving, from the 1950s to 1970s, from places with long histories of resistance against racist, violent, super-exploitative and impoverishing colonial oppression. In other words, they were arriving from places with long histories of trying to drive the colonialists out, and multiple attempts to restrain the worst excesses of wickedly racist behaviour. So, these new Black communities were constituted of people coming out of militant anti-colonial traditions.
I came out of those 1970s Black community struggles to which Jenny has already referred. I think it must have been 1974. I would have been arriving at the door of the IRR’s King’s Cross basement and ground floor out of my engaged activism as a member of the Marxist-influenced journal The Black Liberator. At the time Black Liberator’s editorial collective included its founding editor A X Cambridge, Gerlin Bean, Cecil Gutzmore, and Meg Howath.
Looking back, I’d have to say that my activism also extended to my work as an activist-educator at the then Polytechnic of North London (PNL), where I had devised a course titled Underdevelopment and the World System – a course that was central to what was, arguably, the most radical B.Sc. sociology degree in the land. At PNL I recall also from time to time setting up programmes of talks that were open to polytechnic staff and students as well as to local secondary schools, and to anyone else who wished to wander in. The talks were given by radical thinkers like the Jamaican activist-historian Richard Hart, the sociologist Stuart Hall, the pan-Africanist scholar-activist Cecil Gutzmore, and the publisher activist John La Rose; as well as by representatives of campaign organisations like the English Collective of Prostitutes and Wages for Housework. Heady days!
It was one of the polytechnic’s sociology department mature students at the time, Tony Bunyan (later, author of a seminal text The Political Police in Britain, and founder of the organisation State Watch), who personally introduced me to Sivanandan and the IRR. The journal Race & Class, with its publishing agenda that reached from British anti-racist analysis to Third World studies, soon became the source of any number of bibliographical references recommended to students taking my compulsory Underdevelopment and the World System course.
So, I became one of those who was influenced by the IRR – impressed not least by the IRR’s then director, A. Sivanandan. He was a brilliant, marvellous man, that Sivanandan − fiercely intelligent, passionately combative, and with a robust loving embrace for his friends that could be rough and tough!
I also became one of those who would influence how the IRR did its work of metaphorically fuelling the tanks of the fighters on their way to the frontline – to paraphrase Siva. To give just a single outstanding example of the relationship that it was possible to strike up with the IRR, because of its active engagement with Black community struggles. By 1978, I was able to engage Siva with my budding documentary film-making practice − specifically in the film Blacks Britannica on which I collaborated with the accomplished, politically radical Californian documentary film-maker David Koff.
And, by 1982, the IRR was able to use me to make four groundbreaking documentary films. These were works made to be used in Black community campaign struggles, but also made for broadcast on the then new and ‘progressive’ Channel 4 TV. The four films that I directed for the IRR were titled Struggles for Black Community. They made manifest the idea of ‘Black as a political colour’, and they centred on four different sites of Black community in Britain – one, dating back to the late nineteenth century, on Cardiff’s Tiger Bay; one on the town of Southall on the outskirts of London; one on Leicester in the heart of the industrial Midlands; and one on North Kensington/Notting Hill in London, which had been the site of ‘race riots’, so called, that had been stirred up in 1958 by well-known British fascists. All of the research and production work for these documentary films was done by IRR staff. Yet another set of skills that they could turn their hands to. And the production company formed in order to sign the contract with Channel Four was called ‘Race and Class Ltd’ – which still brings a smile to my face.
As we look back now, it is only too clear that these Race and Class Ltd documentary films were connected with that most tantalising intellectual challenge that Sivanandan set himself, to ‘catch history on the wing’; and the films were clearly twinned with his truly seminal essay on Black (Asian and African-Caribbean) struggles in Britain, ‘From resistance to rebellion’.
May I end with an anecdote? Just last weekend I shared a platform with Suresh Grover, amongst others, at an ‘archives event’ in Birmingham. Under the title ‘Blacklash’, the event was related to an exhibition that looked back at the context in which the British Asian Youth Movement emerged as part and parcel of 1970s and ’80s Black struggle in Britain. I noted that the curator of the exhibition, Mukhtar Dar, had included a big blow-up banner image featuring a line from the venerated poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz which read – ‘Come let’s keep going, we are yet to reach our destination!’
I leave you with that thought. We’re not at this conference to reminisce. We’re here to re-commit!
Footnotes
Jenny Bourne has worked at IRR since 1970 and now co-edits Race & Class.
Colin Prescod, lecturer, curator and film-maker, has been a member of IRR’s Council of Management since 1976 and was Chair of the organisation for over forty years.