Anti-Racism

Articles on racism and anti-racism. See our pamphlet "How to Beat the Racists"

The end of affirmative action

“Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment of the Negro is raised,” wrote Martin Luther King in 1963, “some of our friends recoil in horror.” ( Why We Can’t Wait ) The US Supreme Court, nourished by newly minted Federalist Society jurists — and no friend of African Americans, delivered the coup de grace to affirmative action in higher education. This counterrevolution was decades in the making, the culmination of a steady erosion since the late 1980s. Even the 1977 Bakke decision upheld affirmative action not on the basis of compensation, but because the experience of...

France: against the police who kill!

At 8am on Tuesday 27 June, two police officers shot a 17-year-old man dead at the wheel of his car in Nanterre. In a video posted on social media, two police officers on motorbikes are heard ordering the driver to open the car door, one of them holding a gun to the driver’s head and shouting: “Open up or I’ll put a bullet in your head!” We then see the car move forward and the policeman shoots the young man at point-blank range, even though the vehicle wasn’t moving towards him or endangering him. Once again, the police have killed a young person of North African origin in the French banlieue...

No level playing field in cricket

Famously Lord’s cricket ground, the self-declared “home of cricket”, has a marked slope. The 27 June report from the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket confirms that English cricket is more generally not played on a level playing field. The report looks at the deep institutional racism and sexism in cricket, and links it to broader class inequality. English cricket long had a strict and explicit class divide, up to 1963 being played by Gentlemen (amateurs) and Players (professionals), using different changing rooms and entrances onto the field...

What Washington can teach London about history

Last week, on a visit to Washington, D.C., I spent some time in two new museums and walked away wondering why we don’t have museums like that in the UK. The first was the National Museum of African American History and Culture. This museum, established by an act of Congress in 2003 and finally opened just seven years ago, is enormously popular. It tells the story of the Black experience in America, from slave ships right up until the Black Lives Matter movement. One cannot walk through its many rooms and not be moved. Some of the rooms warn the visitor: a thick red border around an image is...

Jews in the anti-racist imagination

In Outcast: How Jews were Banished from the Anti-Racist Imagination , Camila Bassi seeks to reintegrate a critique of antisemitism into a critique of racism. Moreover, she makes a case for a more universalist, humanist anti-racism — a confrontation with racism that is also a critique of race. She does this through a confrontation with left-academic discourse around Jews, antisemitism, and Israel/Palestine. (A disclaimer at the outset: Bassi wrote a foreword for my own book on left antisemitism, and I provided a cover quote for hers. Both our books were published by the same imprint, No Pasaran...

An anti-racist politics “with DuBois”

Writing 120 years ago in the introduction to his Souls of Black Folk , the American intellectual W E B DuBois declared that the “problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour line.” These were the bleakest of times for Black Americans who faced Jim Crow, lynching, terror. And in Africa and Asia the European empires continued to repress and exploit Black and Asian populations. The Souls of Black Folk was a demand for Black freedom and also a polemic, in the first instance against Booker T Washington. Washington was criticised for attempting to make a pact with dominant white...

Harry Belafonte, 1927-2023

Better known as a singer, Harry Belafonte performed in a number of films and was a long-standing civil rights activist in the United States. Born in Harlem, he was the son of Jamaican parents, becoming attracted to the theatre at an early age. His first film was Bright Road in 1953. followed by Carmen Jones (1954), Island in the Sun (1957) and others. He famously turned down the role of Porgy in Otto Preminger’s film adaptation of Porgy and Bess , saying the role was racially stereotyped. From 1954 to 1961 he refused to perform in the American South. He concentrated on his singing career, but...

The varieties of racism

In an American television chat show broadcast in February 2022 Whoopi Goldberg argued that the Holocaust had nothing to do with racism

Diane Abbott and racism

Left-wing MP Diane Abbott has apologised unreservedly for what she wrote about “Irish, Jewish and Traveller” people not suffering racism. Even ultra-Blairite John McTernan commented: “Swift and appropriate apology from Diane Abbott. She has been subjected to vile racist abuse throughout her career, and her apology should be accepted in the spirit it is offered”. The Labour leadership, which has largely declined to defend Abbott against racist and misogynist abuse, is opportunist and hypocritical on bigotry and oppression, and will show that again if it doesn’t lift her suspension from the...

The racism of "The Birth of a Nation"

Eugene Debs (1855-1926) was the main public figure of the US Socialist Party in the era when it won over 900,000 votes in the presidential elections of 1912 and 1920. Later socialists, learning from the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution as well as rising black struggles, were critical of Debs's limitations, and of course the language he used was the language of his time; but Debs spoke out eloquently against racism. The Birth of a Nation (1915) has been called "the most influential film in history". The merits of the spectacular drama The Birth of a Nation excite bitter comment whenever it...

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