Below is the introduction to a new edition of A. Sivanandan’s classic collection of essays Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism. A. Sivanandan was the foremost intellectual of the black working-class movement in Britain during its insurgent heyday from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. The essays collected here, written between…
Co-authored with Jeanne Theoharis Declaring white nationalism a form of terrorism won’t combat white nationalism — but it will grant more arbitrary powers to a carceral state that preys on the most vulnerable. Over the last few months, there have been growing calls to categorize white nationalism as a form of terrorism and to extend…
Fifteen Terrorism Acts in the last 20 years have created an oppressive and racist legacy. The left must not shy away from promoting a new vision of “security”, argues a new report out this week. Twenty years ago, a backbench MP called Jeremy Corbyn criticised a new Terrorism Bill that Tony Blair’s Labour government was…
There is a growing acceptance in the US that the war on drugs has led to a system of mass incarceration which, in many ways, resembles the Jim Crow system of segregation and disenfranchisement – as Michelle Alexander has argued. Even the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, who, over the last few decades, have backed almost every…
Until recently, US academia maintained a strong division between the analysis of racism and the analysis of capitalism. The former flourished within certain limits while the latter was neglected; each was artificially separated from the other. But that is no longer true. A body of work has emerged in the last few years that draws…
Fifty years ago, British politician Enoch Powell set the template for a racist neoliberal populism that has reached its apotheosis today. On April 20, 1968, British member of parliament Enoch Powell addressed a small meeting of conservative activists in a Birmingham hotel and called for the “re-emigration” of the million or so people of color…
Co-authored with Khaled A. Beydoun, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Detroit Mercy. Millions of people have now watched the video of Anila Daulatzai, a pregnant 46-year-old college professor, getting dragged off a Southwest Airlines plane on September 26 at Thurgood Marshall Airport in Baltimore. After it happened, the airline put out a statement alleging that…
Critics say the case raises serious questions about how the government treats radicals of all stripes. Co-authored with Erin Corbett and Anevay Aponi Zapata. President Donald Trump has pledged to end the “anti-police atmosphere” he associates with the Black Lives Matter movement. And the most powerful man in America enjoys at least some audience for that kind of talk: Last year, more than a hundred…
The US intellectual class has failed to understand the racism at the core of Trump’s political project. The discussion is focused on two questions: Are Trump voters decent, salt-of-the-earth workers protesting their economic insecurity, or hate-filled Archie Bunkers? Are his transition appointments hateful bigots or mainstream conservatives? What both questions obscure is that white supremacy…
For the first time in British political history, a far-right political movement, fuelled by Islamophobia and nativism, has won in a national poll. Yet more than a week after the Brexit vote, Britain’s mainstream political commentators have been unable to state that simple fact. Instead, they see the vote as either a legitimate protest against…