Race

1 August 2016Review

Verso, 2016; 228pp; £9.99

There can’t be many books reviewed in PN that have been compared to the writings of James Joyce and also need the help of www.urbandictionary.com to explain their vocabulary. But please don’t let either of these facts put you off reading this beautifully-written coming of age story!

The book opens with a map of Baltimore in the 1980s, annotated with the contemporary version of ‘Here be Dragons’ (‘Leakin Park – body…

1 June 2016Feature

Decades of dedication, giving a voice to the voiceless

Liz Fekete (with megaphone) at a candlelit vigil for justice for Ricky Reel, New Scotland Yard, London, 21 October 2014. Photo: Peter Marshall

Liz Fekete is director of the seven-person Institute of Race Relations in central London. She is one of Europe’s leading authorities on racism, heading one of the most respected advocacy groups in the UK, a body which has published a rigorously radical journal, Race & Class, since 1974. That could sound intimidating. In person,…

1 February 2016Feature

The final part of our interview with Betsy Leondar-Wright, author of Missing Class

For some decades, Betsy Leondar-Wright has been running workshops about classism, for the last dozen years as part of Class Action, a group based in Boston, Massachussetts, in the US.

In an interview with PN, Betsy notes that many of us have a picture we’ve built up from the women’s movement and other such movements: ‘We have a template: there’s a dominant group, there’s a targeted group/an oppressed group, and in Class Action we’re using this template all the time.’…

1 February 2016Feature

How should a white anti-racist respond to racist remarks by another white person?

Betsy Leondar-Wright. Photo: Rodgerrodger via Wikimedia

How should a white anti-racist respond to racist remarks by another white person? How does it change things if the anti-racist is middle-class, and is reacting to the prejudice of someone who is working-class?

In her book Class Matters, long-time activist and trainer Betsy Leondar-Wright tells an arresting story that turns the conventional wisdom on its head. Betsy, who is white and middle-class, was the…

1 October 2015Feature

Remembering Saro-Wiwa

Graphic: Emily Johns

On 10 November 2015, it will be 20 years since the Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight Ogoni colleagues were hanged by the military government for campaigning nonviolently against the oil company Shell.

It will be nearly 60 years since Shell started…

1 August 2015Comment

Matthew Armstead reflects on the Charleston church massacre

The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. Photo: Cal Sr from Newport, NC, USA.

I woke up this morning to nine people being killed: Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Reverend DePayne Middleton-Doctor, the honorable reverend Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, reverend Daniel Simmons Sr, reverend Sharonda Singleton, and Myra Thompson.

I am dragged down and hurt, and I can barely feel the full pain that reading those names…

1 August 2015Review

Verso, 2015; 282pp; £11.99

Once upon a time (not very long ago), most white feminists didn’t think about how stereotypes of white womanhood helped to maintain racist ideologies. But though the word ‘intersectional’ may not have been coined until 1989 (by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw), black feminists have long been writing about – and at – the intersections of race, class and gender.

Vron Ware’s groundbreaking book discusses these ideas in a critical look at the historical interactions between feminists…

1 June 2015Review

Verso 2015; 416pp; £16.99

In 1936, the Indian scholar BR Ambedkar was invited to give a speech to the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal (Forum for Break-up of Caste), a group of high-caste Hindus. The controversial speech was never delivered, and the conference was cancelled, but Ambedkar published the speech himself, together with the letters and records of the ensuing debate.

In her book-length introduction, ‘The Doctor and the Saint’, Arundhati Roy draws out the significance of this speech (‘Annihilation of Caste’)…

25 November 2014Feature

The US anti-racist collective, Catalyst Project, recently circulated this text with the subject heading ‘What do you mean by anti-racism?’

Catalyst Project works to consciously create a culture that helps white people take strategic and effective anti-racist action as a part of multiracial movements.

We think that white anti-racist organising requires that we move away from competitive, individualist thinking, and instead support as many people as we can to be effective change agents, working in accountable relationships with people of colour-led organisations. These shifts in organising culture help create more…

3 April 2014Review

Pluto Press, 2013; 204pp; £19.99

‘Come what may; we’re here to stay’. This rallying cry of the Asian Youth Movements (AYMs) of late ’70s Britain evokes a defiant identification with a new and radical Britishness. Facing the brunt of fascist abuse and police indifference, these second-generation South Asians, unlike their parents, knew that they wished to stay in Britain and grew up in an environment both challenging and hopeful.

Another popular chant went: ‘Labour, Tory, both the same: both play the racist game’,…

3 April 2014Feature

Anti-oppression work becomes a renewed focus for UK grassroots trainers

It all started with a room full of grassroots activist trainers, a US anti-oppression worker and a discussion about power and privilege.

‘I think there was discomfort, unhappiness, shock, disbelief, anger, that: “Oh, I am a part of this problem. This feels uncomfortable.” Because as social justice activists we try not to replicate the very same oppression we are trying to change,’ Denise Drake told Peace News recently.

Drake is a trainer with Turning the Tide, a London-based…

1 November 2013Letter

I look forward to receiving and reading my copy of Peace News. It is always interesting, often challenging and non-parochial, so you do indeed produce something well worth having.

However, the last few copies had me really puzzled with the phrase ‘people of colour’. What do you mean? The peace camp report makes this somewhat clearer as do the letters and your replies. While understanding where you are coming from with this, I find it clumsy, precious and offensive.…

1 November 2013Review

Guardian Books, 2013; 178pp; £6.99

On 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King Jnr delivered his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC to an audience of over 200,000 marchers, calling for economic and racial justice for Black Americans and an end to segregation. Unbeknown to him, the justice department had installed a secret cut-off device in the sound system, so that they could turn off the speakers if they saw fit. Meanwhile, the Pentagon had 19,000 troops on standby.

Two…

1 September 2013Feature

Black leadership at Peace News Summer Camp

This year’s fifth Peace News Summer Camp was a satisfying, at times electrifying, five-day experience, bathed yet again in good weather and good humour.
The camp broke new ground in a number of ways. We moved to a new venue (in Diss, Norfolk); we invited international speakers for the first time (flying them in from Colombia and Egypt); we had an almost entirely new organising group, composed entirely of people of colour; and our presenters were mostly people of colour for the first…

1 September 2013Comment

PN co-editor Emily Johns reflects on difference and the difference it makes.

When I gave birth to my child, there he was, he was a boy! So different from me. If he had been a girl, I would have looked ahead at his childhood through the template of my own. I remember thinking: ‘Oh no, I don’t like football, I’ll need to get to grips with boys’ interests and needs’. I nevertheless gave him my dolls’ house furniture and found that he was his own person, didn’t like football anyway, and we did pretty well on gender, power and politics over the next 18 years.

But…