Training is the Graveyard of Struggle: An Anti-Racist History

The following is the text of a talk given at Goldsmiths College’s Department of Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies on December 11, 2020. Anti-racist training should not be part of the demands we make because it’s the easiest way for our struggles to be co-opted and defanged. Training as a solution implies theories of racism…

For Black Panthers, Radicalization Entailed Self-Transformation

As a new generation rises up against racist police and vigilante violence, organizers are thinking through how to build a mass movement that fully engages the most marginalized. Useful lessons can be found in the history of the Black Panther Party, if one reaches beyond the imagery of leather jackets and shotguns. Susie Day’s new…

From Fanon to ventilators: fighting for our right to breathe

To neoliberal states, the pandemic is a racialized security threat and a market opportunity. Our fight is for the right to breathe — in every sense. Ruling elites are pursuing the convergence of two dreams in their response to COVID-19: a state dream and a market dream. The state dream entails emptying public space of…

Incarcerating the Crisis book cover

Book review: Incarcerating the Crisis by Jordan Camp

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…

Did the FBI Spy on This Black Muslim After 9/11 Because His Dad Was Linked to Malcolm X?

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…

Britain’s Michael Browns and Eric Garners

Co-authored with Harmit Athwal Britons following the news of protests against police killings of black people in the US should not feel too smug about the situation in the UK.   Not for the first time, our outrage at American racism goes hand in hand with complacency about Britain’s own history of institutional racism and…