Anti-Racism

The editorial in last week’s Solidarity suggests a "programme for active working class unity" in response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. The article falls short in three main respects.

The Office of National Statistics compile statistics on the number of Hate Crimes reported each year. They have more than doubled since 2012 to 103,000 in 2018-19. Of those, nearly 79,000 were race hate crimes. Between April 2018 and March 2019 the police made 376,000 stop and searches In England and Wales, a rate of 7 per 1,000 people. The rate for white people, however was 4 per 1,000 and for Black people 38 per 1,000.

The murder of George Floyd has sparked a global movement against racism and police brutality. The discussion of racist violence and police repression have again shone a spotlight on how dangerous it is to be a black man in America. But by viewing the criminal justice system as the frontline of structural racism and men as the primary participants, we risk ignoring the violence which is a day to day reality for black women. Black women’s interaction with the state, through law enforcement, is marked by violence. Black women are murdered by the police. They are assaulted and injured by the...

On Saturday 6 June 6,000 people (equivalent of 45,000 in Britain) demonstrated in Tel Aviv against the plan of the new Netanyahu-Gantz coalition government to formally annex large parts of the West Bank to Israel, thus creating a bar against any future Palestinian state being more than a collection of scattered patches of land. Netanyahu has long threatened annexation, and now the government talk of moving on 1 July. Police initially tried to ban the protest on virus-control grounds, but backed down. The Joint List of Israeli-Arab parties, the soft-left Meretz, and the grassroots movement...

The great surge of protests across the world sparked by the killing of George Floyd is bringing a new generation of young activists. They deserve more than the hurried reforms now offered here and there in the USA. Reforms can stick, deepen, become a lever for more, but only through the work of a movement which works and educates week by week, year after year. The unequal toll of the pandemic, the shredding of health care and social provision, the cascade of job cuts, the climate emergency, show a whole world needs to be changed, and simultaneously on many fronts. In a society ruled by the...

Jocelyn Cruywagen (pictured above left) is a worker at Lambeth council, a rep and activist in Lambeth Unison and an anti-racist campaigner. She spoke to Sacha Ismail. Black Lives Matter is about more than just killing and violence. It’s also about black people being denied jobs, rights and equal opportunities. We need radical, revolutionary change. Labour and the unions should be leading people onto the streets with our banners and flags, yes, with social distancing measures, but taking a lead. There is the pandemic, but there is also the much longer-term pandemic of racism. We have to tackle...

Black Lives Matter protests have swept the world, and not just the big cities. Fraser Andrews reports on the 6 June protest in a relatively small town, Milton Keynes. This was by far and away the most the most significant protest I’ve ever seen here in Milton Keynes. I estimate up to 1,000 gathered — in a city of 250,000. That’s five times the size of any anti-austerity demonstration here at the peak of that movement. Lots of home-made signs. A mostly young crowd, mostly black and other people of colour. Little organised socialist presence. As the “official” demonstration ended not long after...

Three quarters of people in the US view George Floyd’s murder as part of a problem of racial injustice — a major shift from a few years ago. According to a 3-4 June Ipsos poll, 74% believe the killing was “a sign of broader problems in the treatment of African Americans by the police” and only 26% that it was an “isolated incident”. Six years ago, shortly after the police murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, 43% said they were signs of a broader problem, and 51% isolated incidents. In 2014, 60% of white Americans thought those killings were isolated incidents; today 70% think Floyd’s...

Three-quarters of Minneapolis’ city council members have pledged publicly to disband the city’s police department and introduce new systems of “public safety”. This is good news in that it shows the impact of anti-police protests and their success in shifting the political narrative. Minneapolis demonstrators booed and heckled mayor Jacob Frey when he refused to commit to “abolishing” Minneapolis PD. He deserves booing for his double-dealing attitude to the anti-police movement. But it’s also true that the council policy is in fact more tentative than the “instant anarchist utopia” it sounds...

Some ideas for the British labour movement to fight for: 1. The right of oppressed people and the labour movement to self-defence against police violence. 2. Curb police powers, including: sharply restricting the use of force; aggressive prosecution of police who kill and violate human rights; abolition of stop and search; ending undercover infiltration of social movements; disarming and demilitarisation. Replace the Independent Office for Police Conduct with a strong, elected body. Restore and expand legal aid. 3. Accountability including subordinating forces to elected local representatives...