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 of harms both to Muslim
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‘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 communities face hatred and violence
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 and racism. Green capitalism and
European governments’ targeting of migrant solidarity activists for prosecution must stop, says IRR
The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) publishes today a compelling new report on ‘crimes of solidarity’, drawing attention to a dramatic increase in prosecutions, restrictions and penalties, against a variety of civil society actors. The online publication of When Witnesses Won’t be Silenced: citizens’ solidarity and criminalisation comes just days after the Global Legal Action
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 of land, Big tech corporations
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 around ‘Asian grooming gangs’, we
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 authority housing is converging with
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 text’, profoundly shaped the fields
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 – not peaceful anti-deportation activists
The Windrush scandal exposes the dangers of scaremongering about ‘illegal immigrants’
The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) publishes today a background paper showing how the injustices meted out to the Windrush generation are not anomalies but the logical result of an immigration system that, over many years, has weaponised the idea of ‘the illegal immigrant’. How can people who considered themselves British over a lifetime suddenly