Institute of Race Relations

Failing victims, fuelling hate

How can a genuinely anti-racist feminist approach tackle serious sexual violence without demonising entire communities? In 2019 we saw the further entrenchment of the ‘grooming gangs’ narrative in the media and in public debate around child sexual exploitation in the UK – a narrative that is has promoted a number…

‘One liberation is bound to another’: beyond the concept of White Privilege

To complement the re-issuing of Sivanandan’s path-breaking collection of essays, Communities of Resistance,  Race & Class leads with a thought-provoking piece calling for a new politics of ‘radical kinship’ to forge the dynamic internationalist politics now needed to combat growing racism and fascism. Across the globe, women, BAME and LGBTQI…

Green New Deal – panacea or problem?

As the notion of a Green New Deal rapidly spreads as an answer to capitalism in US and UK media and political circles, our lead article in July 2019 asks if Green capitalism can propose a real solution to the ecological crisis and the human crises of poverty, austerity, immigration…

Resisting the new colonialisms

The April 2019 issue of Race & Class shows how the reinvention of colonialism through the domination of digital technology and transnational flows of securitisation is being met by unique forms of resistance. ‘Today, a new form of corporate colonisation is taking place’, argues Michael Kwet, ‘Instead of the conquest…

Challenging far-right racism means standing up for women’s rights, says IRR

Today, on International Women’s Day, the IRR warns that anti-immigrant Islamophobic currents in Europe are growing on the back of the racialisation of sex crimes. Writing in the UK context, Kay Stephens, as part of an anti-racist feminist collective in London, argues that in order to resist the toxic narrative…

The London Clearances a background paper on race, housing and policing

New IRR publication provides a fresh take on housing, policing and racism in London. The moral panic over supposedly dangerous black, urban subcultures in London, emerges at a crucial time, argues the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) in a challenging background paper published today. The impact of financialisation on local…

Barbara Harlow – insistently against the stream

This week, the IRR publishes a memorial issue of Race & Class celebrating the lifework of the late Barbara Harlow, Solidarity here and everywhere. Barbara Harlow, a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin described as ‘a critic of both the world and the…

IRR statement on Stansted 15 verdict

IRR vice-chair Frances Webber comments on the stansted 15 verdict, a trial where laws designed to deal with terrorist threats at airports have been brought against human rights defenders. The crime of endangering airport security, under the Aviation and Security Act, was designed to deal with terrorist threats at airports…