Dear IRR News subscriber,

‘Racism impacts on different communities at different times in different ways. But anti-racism, the fight against injustice, cannot be differential, exclusive or sectional’, said IRR’s vice-chair and human rights lawyer Frances Webber, speaking at a meeting on ‘Confronting racism: a return to collective principles’ this week. We republish her speech which draws attention to the anti-racist, anti-imperial struggle in the UK, and how ‘we strove to build unity in the fight against racism’.

Reviewing the seminal text The Heart of the Race, first published in 1985 and republished now thirty-three years later, IRR’s Sophia Siddiqui explores the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist grounding that is still urgent today, and what young activists can learn from historical black women’s activism in the UK. Also on black history, Danny Reilly reviews a publication on The Stars Campaign for Interracial Friendship, a little-acknowledged struggle which arose to combat racism after the 1958 anti-black Notting Hill ‘riots’.

One of the thinkers who has done most to analyse and theorise racism and colonialism and the nature of resistance is C. L. R. James. Read for free a new Race & Class article on ‘The Americanisation of C. L. R. James’ by New York college teacher Jonathan Scott, who takes issue with the way that C. L. R. James is now being reinterpreted, and de-Marxified for a neoliberal era.

And finally, our fortnightly calendar of racism and resistance continues to document key events in the UK and Europe.

IRR News Team