Dear IRR News subscriber,

It’s just under two weeks since the horrific suicide bomb-attack in Manchester, and the IRR, like others, has been struck by the dignified and united response of Mancunians to an onslaught which left twenty-two people dead and scores seriously wounded. But not everyone has responded positively to calls by Greater Manchester’s civic leaders to avoid hatred and bigotry. This week, we have extended our coverage, in our regular calendar of racism and resistance, to include post-Manchester racial attacks. And Liz Fekete, in ‘How right wing media undermined Manchester’s message of ‘coming together”’ argues that in some sections of the British media, as well as in extreme-Right circles across Europe, a counter-narrative emerged which portrays liberalism as a major threat to ordinary people’s security.

At a time when the issue of the nation and what constitutes ‘us’ is to the fore, we examine contributions from two key thinker-activist teachers who have, challenged conventional notions of both class and race. In a review of the launch of Chris Searle’s autobiography in Tower Hamlets where the 1971 school students’ strike happened over Stepney Words, Jenny Bourne pays homage to the work of one of the East End’s most profoundly engaged educationalists. And we publish excerpts from a speech on ‘Archives, race, class and rage’ by Colin Prescod, one of the UK’s leading black curatorial advisors, in which he insists that Blackness belongs in any full history of ‘Great’ Britain.

IRR News Team