Abstract
This article brings together contributions from participants in a roundtable discussion on ‘Anti-racist organising today’ which concluded the ‘New Circuits of Anti-racism Conference’, King’s College London, October 2022 (IRR50). Five key anti-racist writers and activists – Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee, co-authors of Race to the Bottom: reclaiming anti-racism (Pluto Press, 2022), Shanice Octavia McBean, co-author with Aviah Sarah Day of Abolition Revolution (Pluto Press, 2022), and Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Laura Connelly, co-authors of Anti-racist Scholar-Activism (Manchester University Press, 2021) – came together to discuss the key themes of their books, the influence of A. Sivanandan on their activism, as well as the main issues for anti-racist organisers today.
Keywords
Introduction
Concluding the IRR50 conference on ‘New Circuits of Anti-racism’ at King’s College, London in October 2022 was an incisive roundtable discussion with five important anti-racist activists – Azfar Shafi, Ilyas Nagdee, Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Laura Connelly and Shanice Octavia McBean – who have not only recently published books on the state of racism today but are embedded in anti-racist organising in the UK.
Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee are co-authors of Race to the Bottom: reclaiming antiracism, covering the rise and fall of Britain’s Black Power movement. 1 Azfar has organised in movements against racism, state violence and for the Palestinian liberation struggle, whilst Ilyas is an activist and writer focusing on anti-racism, civil liberties and policing. Emerging out of their frustrations as PhD students in the neoliberal academy, Remi Joseph-Salisbury, a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester, and Laura Connelly, a lecturer in Criminology at the University of Sheffield, co-authored Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism. 2 They are both involved with the Northern Police Monitoring Project, a grassroots organisation in Greater Manchester working with local communities to resist police harassment, and are part of the No Police in Schools campaign. Shanice Octavia McBean is a writer and activist in the feminist abolitionist group Sisters Uncut. She co-wrote Abolition Revolution 3 with Aviah Sarah Day, a Black community organiser with Sisters Uncut and Hackney Cop Watch as well as a lecturer in Criminology at Birkbeck, University of London. Abolition Revolution was written in the political ferment following George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis in 2020 and the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer in south London in 2021 (Figure 1).
Ilyas Nagdee, Azfar Shafi, Shanice Octavia McBean, Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Laura Connelly.
The roundtable was facilitated by Jasbinder S. Nijjar, a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey and a member of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR)’s council of management, who also works with The Monitoring Group in Southall, west London, a community of resistance with important links to the IRR. As he noted in his introduction, ‘while racism has a past and a present, as things stand, racism also has a future’. The discussion aimed to look to the future of anti-racism in the UK – how activists are organising today, what the key issues are they seek to address and what the challenges are.
The session began with each co-author describing the content of their respective book, followed by reflections on the influence of A. Sivanandan on their thinking and practice. As all contributors are also activists – in grassroots organising, in trade unions and in the academy – they shared how their involvement in activism informed the arguments in their books. This was followed by a discussion on the role of history in their work – histories of colonialism, post-war state racism and community resistance – and explored what resonances of the past could be detected in the present moment. The final question focused on what an abolitionist perspective for the UK looks like and where we could see this materialising on the ground. Abolition was a key theme of the conference, and this discussion continued a transnational dialogue with the conversation with Black feminist US-based organisers, Barbara Ransby and Derecka Purnell. 4
What follows is a compilation of the key insights that emerged from the roundtable discussion. Ilyas and Azfar take us back to 1967 when Black Power, infused by Third Worldist internationalism, strove to build a self-reliant Black community in Britain. In their contribution, consolidated following the conference, they explain the main themes of Race to the Bottom, which seeks to connect readers to the radical histories of anti-racist struggle, and particularly the British Black Power movement, in order to cut through the ‘anti-racism from above’ that has taken root in the UK since 1981. Shanice’s contribution, an edited version of her presentation on the day, picks up from where Azfar and Ilyas leave off. She asks what a transformative, socialist project that is both anti-capitalist and anti-racist looks like? As the first written history of Sisters Uncut, she traces its journey from an activist group focused on ring-fencing funding for domestic violence services, to a revolutionary abolitionist organisation at the forefront of pushing back against police powers. And finally, Remi and Laura’s contribution, also consolidated after the conference, focuses on a different terrain; the university, and how scholar-activists can work in service for ‘communities of resistance’ 5 and the broader anti-racist project, whilst resisting co-option by the neoliberal university (Figure 2).
A photograph of the panel on ‘Anti-racist organising today’. Reproduced by permission of Christopher Newfield.
Reclaiming anti-racism
AZFAR SHAFI and ILYAS NAGDEE
Britain, 1967: the decade that opened with Harold Macmillan’s ‘Winds of Change’ speech came to a close with Britain locked in a whirlwind of contradictions. In the midst of battles, between its New Left and the Enoch Powell-inspired New Right for an alternative to a fraying post-war model, emerged Britain’s Black Power movement. Inflamed by the sharpening of British state racism, inspired by the march of Black Power through the US and infused with the militancy of Third World liberation struggles, Britain’s Black Power era was ushered in by the visit of Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture in 1967, and the formation of the Universal Coloured People’s Association (UCPA), with countless groups and formations following thereafter. 6
As the organised political expression of the most alienated sections of British society, Black Power articulated a politics integrating race and citizenship alongside class, and emerged as a potent challenge both to the post-war social contract, and to the mainstream British Left’s insistence on minimising the centrality of race in Britain. As diffuse, heterogenous – and indeed, fractious – as it remained as a movement, this was the intellectual challenge of Black Power in Britain: penetrating through the self-mythology of the British state, and recognising the inherent interconnection between capitalism, racism and imperialism. Spurning the romance of British social democracy, Black Power organisers advanced an analysis that social democracy, even at the height of the welfare state, Keynesianism and the fabled ‘spirit of ’45’, was not just blemished by racism, but built upon it. Meanwhile its political contribution lay in its ability to amalgamate struggles against economic exploitation, social alienation and the democratic exclusion of racialised communities, while also articulating fierce anti-imperialist critiques to situate struggle in an international analysis of power.
The development of communities of resistance
The politics that prevailed from 1967 was not a narrow anti-racism: it was a struggle for Black community, for Black self-determination, for Black Power. From their place on the edges of British society, African, Asian and Caribbean people were compelled to develop communities of resistance, organising autonomously through community, culture and the development of radical political consciousness. 7
By evading the constraints of the Labour Party and official trade union machinery, Black Power organising was able to avoid the restraining influence that they exerted on the native working class of Britain, and was able to defy the illusory binary between workplace or economic struggle, on one hand, and political struggle, on the other. And as such, it developed forms of organising to radicalise individual social struggles into sharper political antagonisms – transforming campaigns into national causes, and turning social centres, bookshops, strike committees and political parties alike into nodes in a radical political network, and reorganising localities into communities of resistance against state and popular racism.
Therein lay the threat of Black Power. The challenge that confronted successive governments was not just in dispatching individual Black Power activists or organisations, but in denying Black communities their means of developing autonomous, radical self-organisation. The British state’s repression of Black Power was fierce and debilitating, targeting frontline organisations as well as the sites through which radical culture and Black political consciousness could be formed. 8 This was best symbolised by the state harassment of the Mangrove restaurant in West London – which culminated in the seminal trial of the Mangrove 9 in 1971. 9 But while this repression spanned both Conservative and Labour administrations through the 1970s, it was not until the first Thatcher government, in its response to the legendary 1981 uprisings, that a comprehensive strategy emerged to contain the radical potential of Black Power in Britain.
Containing Black Power
The Thatcher government was keenly aware of the dangers posed by rebellion among racialised communities, particularly in the midst of industrial unrest, biting economic recession and an emboldened far Right. When these were realised in April 1981 with the Brixton uprisings, the response of the Thatcher administration (with the Scarman inquiry into their causes), as well as of Labour Left-run councils (experimenting with ‘municipal socialism’) set the template for an ‘anti-racism from above’ to contain and co-opt Black Power politics.
Anti-racism from above was predicated on a tripartite model, which reoriented the transformative aspirations of Black Power towards the narrow ambitions of:
Black enterprise, thereby redefining a political problem of racism into one of simple economic advance, by promoting entrepreneurialism and seeking to develop a Black middle class as the new leadership of their respective communities.
A politics of recognition, with Black communities striving for official recognition as a constituency by the state and its institutions, to facilitate a turn towards a civic politics of inclusion. Such a mode of politics traded on confrontation with the racist state in favour of the opportunity to mobilise claims upon it, and to be reflected within its institutions: the politics of ‘representation’ and of ‘Black faces in high places’.
Revamping civil society, by creating a Black voluntary sector populated by local government-funded charities and non-profits, to continue the work of nominally anti-racist organising with the stability of funding streams. By taking anti-racism out of community networks and into networks of patronage, and by making organisations ultimately accountable to benefactors over Black communities, this new civil society gradually drained the politics out of anti-racist organising and fostered a culture of dependency.
Individually, each of these stratagems had been trialled and tested over the years on Black communities in Britain, with varying degrees of success. But, in tandem, and amidst the Thatcherite reorganisation of post-war Britain, they offered a seductive proposition: a partial, fragile, but hitherto unattainable space of inclusion for racialised communities within the bounds of Britishness and the British national project.
In return, the expansive Third Worldist internationalism that had defined Black Power was gradually muted in favour of an attempted integration into the British social hierarchy, severing the organic connection between anti-racism and anti-imperialism. And in time, sections of British citizens of colour could be mobilised to defend their newfound privileges against incoming migrant populations, upholding the very Faustian bargain that Black Power organisers had once assailed much of the British Left for.
Anti-racism from above
In seizing upon emerging contradictions – economic, social and political – within Black communities, anti-racism from above enabled a rising Black petit-bourgeoisie to assert its self-interest as the high standard of Black politics, reaching its natural conclusion with the rise of a non-white prime minister today. Black Power was progressively replaced by the Black civic power of non-profits, attempts at building Black corporate power and, ultimately, an emphasis on Black cooperation with power, mediated through various public and private forums. These would culminate in the doctrine we have come to know as state multiculturalism and mirrored the growth of neoliberalism emerging alongside it. The defeat of Black Power was, in a word, Thatcher’s other legacy.
State multiculturalism established an umbilical cord between racialised communities and state funding and patronage. The ability of communities of resistance to reproduce themselves was shattered, and radical organisations were largely suffocated out of existence by the struggles over funding, co-option, repression or burnout. The transformative horizons of Black Power were eschewed for a narrow, technical ‘anti-racism’. And without the ability to organise communities in defence of themselves and their livelihoods, this ‘anti-racism’ itself has become outsourced to organs and institutions of the racist state – to the likes of the police, the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Labour Party.
With the rise of anti-racism from above, Black communities in Britain had their histories of resistance muted as their fates were mortgaged off to their newly anointed leaders. But any explanation for this, or for the continued inability to generate mass-based, radical and sustained anti-racist movements in Britain – in spite of major upsurges – cannot be found in easy answers.
Neither casual invocation of ‘identity politics’ nor narratives of ‘betrayal’ are sufficient to explain the conjuncture that faced Black Power activists of the 1980s, as the Left in Britain and worldwide were progressively inflicted with major defeats. In turn, the crisis of modern anti-racism cannot be attributed to any single ideological aberration alone. Rather it must be considered alongside the organisational model set in motion after 1981, and the ways in which this redefined anti-racism’s political terrain.
Towards a transformative socialist vision
This legacy of defeat came to the fore in summer 2020, with the Black Lives Matter uprisings across the country. As heartening as the scale of the protests was to see, the question of why there was no proper existing infrastructure to channel radical, grassroots anti-racist and anti-policing action pointed directly back to the dismantling of Black radical infrastructure post-1981. So, too, did the vexed questions of inter-ethnic solidarity, the uncritical reliance on rights-based or legalistic approaches to organising, and the perverse perseverance of ‘representation politics’. The question we are faced with now cannot be reduced to a simple binary between ‘streets’ and ‘institutions’. What are needed are institutions of a different kind to those that have predominated since 1981 − which organise and develop the energy of uprisings into popular power, rather than channelling it into lobbying or patronage politics.
The powerful assessments of Black Power – with its analysis of race, class and citizenship – are needed now as much as ever, with the unwelcome return of debates over the primacy of race v. class, on inter-ethnic solidarity, and on the question of ‘political Blackness’. In particular, with the trade union movement slowly rebuilding itself, recovering the Black Power critique of British trade unionism and its ingrained blind-spots on race and imperialism is essential if it is to escape the historical failings of the British labour movement. And the innovative form of organising through which Black Power groups were able to develop communities of resistance is critical at a time like this when encounters with state violence, with fuel poverty, with slumlords can just as likely be crucial radicalising experiences towards socialism as they are marks of a wretched society.
For the Left, a bold socialist vision must include re-inserting the struggles against capitalism within a liberatory anti-racist framework, rather than retreating to its own comfort zone of post-war welfarism. This must be a socialism that speaks of the working class in its totality – and integrates the manifold struggles against racism and the state into a radical political programme. Ultimately, it is only through imbuing class struggle with the politics of radical anti-racism and anti-imperialism that we can develop a truly transformative project.
On Abolition Revolution
SHANICE OCTAVIA McBEAN
Abolition Revolution does two things. 10 First, it actually references and is influenced by engagement with our peers – the people that we have done politics with for years. But it isn’t just an intellectual exercise, it’s also a reflection of our experience in the movement. One of the most pivotal moments of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK was the Westfield protest in 2014, which I attended. 11 Aviah [Sarah Day] and I were both involved in 2021 and the struggles over the death of Sarah Everard and the rise of the Kill the Bill movement. 12 So, in part, the book is our tentative proposals on what things we might do towards abolition in the UK.
The second thing that the book does is to connect to the Black Radical Tradition – people like Claudia Jones, the Black Panther Party, the Combahee River Collective. These were anti-imperialist Communists and revolutionaries often very strongly connected to a materialist Marxist tradition. What we try to do in Abolition Revolution is to make sense of abolition in the context of a fight for revolution, not in this romantic sense that can confuse a revolution in the boardroom with one at the barricades. Our revolution is proletarian, working-class, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, and we argue in the book that abolition is the pre-drinks, revolution is the ‘sesh’. 13
The book is split into sixteen theses and each thesis is a self-contained argument that you can read on its own, but obviously we encourage you to read the whole book. We look at the tools of policing, and by that, we don’t mean tasers and batons and guns; we mean race and the historical tools of social control and coercion. We look at the idea of policing by consent, which is a tool of policing particular to the British context; we look at the concept of coercion and control which, if you’re a feminist, you’re familiar with because it’s the definition of domestic violence. So, we use that as a framework to understand what policing is, and does, in society. We look at the way in which ideology is central to policing as it moved from the colonies to the mainland and was less, although still, physical violence and transitioned to ideological violence.
On Sivanandan’s influence
What stands out for me, which we picked up on decades later in the struggles that we took part in, is what Sivanandan said in terms of identity politics. He said that ‘the laboratory of social change, it would appear, is the self, but the self is also in the world, and so the world changes with the changing of the self and the self with it’. 14 What he’s doing there is critiquing the idea that you understand your individual place in the world as the site of politics. He was foreshadowing what we would later come to face as neoliberalism, individualism and consumerism getting kind of injected into our movements. You know, with the collapse of a strong tradition of Black radicalism in the UK and its transformation into an influencer factory, for example, of who can shout the loudest on Twitter. A lot of his work foreshadows the way in which neoliberalism collapsed politics into the individual, competitiveness, division and rupture.
What I think is really powerful about his work is that he did not collapse into a lazy class reductionism where the only lens is class or exploitation. So, for example, when he discusses the way in which immigration laws changed, in the ’40s,’50s ’60s and ’70s out into the modern day, those conversations weren’t just the ebbs and flows of a completely untethered bourgeois sentimentality around race. What he was describing was the way in which immigration law is used to maintain and manage exploitation of the white working class, to manage the loss of influence that Britain was having in the former colonies, and to create a new super-exploited class of Black and Brown workers. That isn’t just a conversation about exploitation, but is also about the way in which the conceptual separation between oppression and exploitation is a false one . . .
Revolutionary politics, the politics of collectivism, of ‘coalitionism’, of solidarity, all at the heart of Sivanandan’s work, were also at the core of Black feminisms like those of Claudia Jones and the Combahee River Collective. My and Aviah’s names might be on the book, but actually the content of it, the arguments, the politics have all been formed in conversation with our comrades, our collectives and the people that we’ve organised with, and the movements that we’ve been part of. Take the Clapham Common vigil for Sarah Everard, for example, which you all might be familiar with, which was a flash point and the beginning of the Kill the Bill movement. The decision to turn up to the vigil that night, despite the diktats from the police, 15 was taken in a kitchen in East London with multiple people debating what the right response was to that political moment. We tried to capture that collective voice in the book – that comes from our experiences as part of the movement over the past few years.
Against police powers
Abolition Revolution contains, I guess, the first written history of Sisters Uncut as an activist group and there’s a whole thesis dedicated to that organisation’s political and ideological journey, from being about ring-fencing funding for domestic violence services to a radical revolutionary abolitionist organisation, kind of leading protests against growing police powers. . .
If you are Black or working-class, or in any way marginalised or oppressed or exploited, you’ll very soon realise that there’s a disjuncture, a disconnection, misalignment between the experience of policing and the mythology and ideology that surrounds policing – we’re told policing is about protection, yet the way in which we experience policing is harm; we’re told policing is about making and creating safety, yet it makes and creates and sustains and invigorates violence. What the book tries to do is make sense of that misalignment from our own personal experience and that of our families.
On history
Part two of the book, called ‘Roots in Empire: the history of criminalisation and resistance’, is on how we got to where we are today. Policing isn’t actually just an institution; the institution is part of what policing is, but policing is actually the way in which the ruling class responds to the challenges of maintaining a class and capitalist society. Policing is the system which includes the institution, but also includes an ideology that covers the different ways in which violence is mobilised in an economic system of social control. Then on top of that, policing uses race and sexuality, gender and poverty to organise, communicate and rationalise its violence and pick its targets. . .
It’s no surprise that we’re getting the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Act, one of the most draconian pieces of legislation certainly in my memory, and possibly in the memory of lots of people in this room. You know, criminalising one-person protests, increasing the use of suspicion-less stop and search; you’re getting the Public Order bill that’s soon going to become an Act, when we’re seeing one of the worst economic crises, again in living memory. . .
Abolition in a UK context
What does a UK abolitionist perspective look like? Defund the police in the US was an incredible moment because what it did was raise the question that the resources that we give to police are not ‘normal’, and that there are alternatives; i.e., abolition is about what we want to build, both in terms of personal relationships and society more generally.
Here, we’ve just had over a decade of austerity where the police have been defunded but we have not as a result seen the violence of policing reduce. In fact, we’ve seen the opposite − a sharpening of violence on the streets, on picket lines, in workplaces. During the pandemic, crime went down but, despite that, in the first three months of it, 22,000 black men and boys in London were stopped and searched. That is a number equivalent to a quarter of London’s black male population aged 15−25. . .
For what abolition means in the UK, I think first we have to start from that history of policing by consent, and withdraw that consent. This could mean interrupting the processes that the police use to legitimise their own power, like report after report (Scarman, Macpherson, etc.) and recommendations to improve police behaviour, to recruit more Black and Brown personnel and so on, that fail, of course. Someone is murdered in police custody, we have PR and protests and then lengthy legal processes that go on for years and years, and families are dragged through the mud and destabilised. It happens over and over. So, it means being controversial, being brave enough to start saying, look, these legal processes are not working for us, what can we do differently? How can we wrench justice from the system and not play the system on its own terms?
The final thing in terms of abolition in the UK means that we have to fight to change the material conditions on which ‘policing by consent’ is built. It is those who have next to nothing that want to protect those crumbs they have. So, we are back to class struggles against poverty, struggles against the individualising of issues, and bringing communities back together in collective organisations and collective action through things like mutual aid which are important for transforming the material conditions of our lives.
Anti-racist Scholar-Activism
REMI JOSEPH-SALISBURY and LAURA CONNELLY
Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism was a long time in the making. 16 The idea for the book emerged out of our frustrations as PhD students with an academia that we saw as detached from the ‘real world’, and from our own inability to meaningfully connect our work within the academy to our activism outside of it. Since that time, although we have grown increasingly sceptical of the potential of the neoliberal-imperial-institutionally-racist university to create radical social change, we have become more aware of, and inspired by, those occupying the margins, the academics who find ways to exploit the contradictions in the system for the benefit of communities of resistance and anti-racism more broadly.
Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism centres the accounts of twenty-nine such people. Diverse in terms of career stage and academic discipline within the Social Sciences and Humanities, the people we interviewed either self-identified as a ‘scholar-activist’, were identified in this way by others, or were involved in ‘scholar-activist’ networks. That is not to say that all interviewees accepted the label of ‘scholar-activist’. Rather, most of them problematised the concept, raising concerns about how it can be over-claimed and/or co-opted by institutions, emptying it of its radical potential. We argue in the book, therefore, that anti-racist scholar-activism has greatest utility when it is understood as something we do – an always unfinished project – rather than something that we are.
The praxis of anti-racist scholar-activism has a long, rich history both in the UK and internationally. Yet as a concept it is slippery, overlapping with a range of related terms, including Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s ‘subversive intellectual’, Patricia Hill Collins’ ‘intellectual activist’, and Walter Rodney’s ‘guerrilla intellectual’. 17 In some ways, the specific praxes of scholar-activism crosscut with other approaches within academia and yet, taken together as an orientation, anti-racist scholar-activism is antithetical to the dominant norms and values of the contemporary university. Put simply, anti-racist scholar-activism refers to the attempts to bridge scholarship and activism for the benefit of anti-racist social change. But it is more than that, too. Among other things, it involves taking up explicitly political orientations that disavow pretensions of neutrality; recognising that theory and action go hand-in-hand; valuing a deep embeddedness within communities of resistance; adopting an ‘in but not of’ 18 orientation so as to exploit the opportunities the university presents for radical change within and outside of it; and combining all of this with a critical understanding of racism that recognises it as systemic and historically rooted.
Working in service
Fundamental to our rendering of anti-racist scholar-activism is the notion of working in service. Here, we draw inspiration from the work of A. Sivanandan and others involved in the radical transformation of the IRR.
19
Prior to the transformation, IRR had been a firmly establishment body which had sought to ‘study the relations between races in an objective, scientific manner’.
20
It placed its focus primarily outside of Britain on the ‘new emerging nations’ of the ‘Third World’, with a view to the ‘prospects of businesses to invest there’. As Jenny Bourne explains, the Institute was ‘totally irrelevant . . . to the concerns of Black people’.
21
Its pretension to neutrality was ‘absurd and immoral’.
22
Those involved in the transformation of the IRR from within were driven by a desire to be ‘part of the solution to racism’, rather than ‘part of the problem’.
23
In sharp contrast to its predecessor, the transformed IRR ‘rejected objective “race relations”’
24
and saw itself as working in service to those at the sharp end of racism and imperialism. They worked in service to anti-racist struggle, as A. Sivanandan explains:
If we could not be at the barricades in the fight for racial justice, we could, at least, be servitors in that cause. We could do research that spoke to the issues and problems confronting Black communities. We could be a servicing station. We could put gas in the tanks of Black and Third World peoples on their way to liberation.
25
This notion of working in service is one we take up in our theorisations of anti-racist scholar-activism. It is an idea we see in the work of other influential anti-colonial and anti-racist thinkers, such as Walter Rodney and Patricia Hill Collins. 26 It is one that inspired many of those we spoke to, directly or indirectly informing their praxes. In the neoliberal-imperial-institutionally-racist university, we argue that such an orientation is counter-hegemonic: it rubs against the pressures to work in service to power and the tendency for academics ‘to lead and not serve’. 27 Such an orientation has implications for a range of questions with regard to praxis, including those concerning accountability and usefulness. Working in service to racial justice implores us to see ourselves as accountable not to the university but to communities. It encourages us to strive for our work to be useful not to those in power or to the university, but to communities we are embedded within and the broader anti-racist project.
Reparative theft
A key way in which scholar-activists work in service is through what we refer to as reparative theft: the act of ‘stealing’ resources from the university for communities of resistance. 28 This is made justifiable (or reparative) and necessary by the (historical and contemporary) extractive and harmful tendencies of the university. There are parallels again here with the work of the IRR. As Stuart Hall explains of the transformation, ‘it was in effect a kind of hijack of the resources that had been built up in the institution’ and a repurposing of those resources in service to communities of resistance. 29 In academia, notwithstanding the ever-increasing limits imposed through neoliberalism, reparative theft can take on a range of forms. Most obviously, we can steal resources through the creative use of funding streams but also through time, and access to space and resources, including social capital. This theft often requires duplicity and subterfuge, but as Choudry reminds us, despite the increasing constraints in Higher Education, ‘there remain possibilities to use resources and locations in universities in the service of struggles and movements’. 30
Struggle where you are
Another idea that we develop is the imperative to struggle where you are. We take this idea primarily from Stuart Hall who offered it as a piece of advice to a Black community group. 31 Relatedly, Walter Rodney insisted that ‘the first level of struggle for the intellectual is in his [sic] own sphere of operation’. 32 This is important in reminding us that scholar-activism is not only about engaging in struggle ‘out there’. Rather, it is also about turning our critical gaze on the university and rejecting the mythology that situates the university above the harms of society. Instead, it recognises the university as a site of – and a key producing force in – historical and contemporary injustice. Indeed, there are myriad ongoing harms that need to be resisted, as demonstrated by the industrial action of the UCU, and the resistance work of student groups such as Cops off Campus and Rent Strike, amongst many others.
For many of those we spoke to, the classroom offered the primary site for responding to the imperative to struggling where you are. We develop the concept of the classroom-to-activism pipeline to consider how we might set up our classrooms to encourage students to move from the classroom into activist spaces, to move from abstract theory to theory for action. This, of course, is not easy given the devastating impact of neoliberalism on teaching and learning, but as the knowledge, energy and skills of students are directed out of the university to activist spaces, it might even be thought of as an act of reparative theft. Central though the classroom may be, we also think more widely to highlight the importance of unionisation, and of speaking up and challenging power in meetings and decision-making spaces – that is, we consider the duty scholar-activists have to hold institutions to account for the harms they perpetuate. As we do so, however, we consider how, for a range of reasons (minoritised identities, migration status, precarious contracts), some of us are more vulnerable and surveilled than others, which means there is a need to be strategic about how oppositional work is done, when it is done, and by whom.
Anti-racist scholar-activist futures
A central thread that runs throughout the book is the importance of meaningful reflexivity, a reflexivity that encourages us to reflect on our own contradictions and complicities. As our interviewees make clear, although the university presents opportunities to work in service to social justice, anti-racist scholar-activism requires that we continually question ourselves and the power structures we are maintaining. A question we must ask, therefore, is are we being co-opted by the system and selling out? 33 When we do, we might – now or sometime in the future – be confronted with the possibility that our affiliation with institutional power means we are causing more harm than good. With that in mind, we must never become too comfortable within the academy and should be working to bolster existing and build new alternatives to the university. We should engage in collective freedom dreaming. 34
Footnotes
Sophia Siddiqui is the Deputy Editor of Race & Class and one of the organisers of the IRR50 conference. This article brings together contributions by Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee, Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Laura Connelly and Shanice Octavia McBean.