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From: Adam Elliott-Cooper <[log in to unmask]>
New Article and Lecture on British Anti-Racism.
Antipode RGS Keynote 2023: Decommissioning Anti-Racism: Police Power, State Capture and Black Radical Traditions.
Adam Elliott-Cooper
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-UxKKBMMNM&ab_channel=antipodeonline
In 2020, anti-racist protests swept across Britain, with activists challenging state-led reforms to policing as they made calls to defund the police. In the same year, the UK government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities rejected not just the radical demands of Black Lives Matter protesters, but even liberal analyses of institutional racism in policing. This lecture examines how these two political interventions, analysing the same place at the same time, arrived at such divergent conclusions. I intend on doing this by introducing a third party, the “independent” commissions which occupy the liberal centre ground. They have attempted to satisfy the left by adopting terms like institutional racism, while also appeasing the establishment right, by changing little of Britain’s unequal racial landscape. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this balancing act has satisfied neither party, resulting in a surge in both radical anti-racism at the grassroots, and hard-line police, prison and border policies from government. The resolution of these tensions won’t just shape the fate of Britain’s racial landscape, but the terrain upon which all political struggles are fought.
Abolishing institutional racism. Race and Class Volume 65, Issue 1 Adam Elliott-Cooper
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03063968231166901
In 2020, anti-racist campaigns mobilising under the banner of Black Lives Matter challenged liberal reforms to policing as they made calls to defund the police. In the same year, the UK government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities rejected not just the radical demands of Black Lives Matter protesters, but even liberal analyses of institutional racism in policing. This article examines how these two political interventions, analysing the same place at the same time, arrived at such divergent conclusions. This is done by tracing critiques of institutional racism from the Black Power movements of the 1960s and ’70s, through to the more liberal interpretations of institutional racism following the 1999 Macpherson Report. It goes on to argue that the failings of Macpherson provided the impetus for the political developments of 2020. The dearth of political, historical and economic analysis by Macpherson helped embolden the government to denude interpretations of data on racial inequalities as constituting institutional racism. Simultaneously, the endurance of police racism in post-Macpherson Britain has served only to underline the necessity for more radical demands in challenging institutional racism. The author argues that this has spurred on present-day activists to draw on the radical Black Power politics of the twentieth century to complement their abolitionist demands.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03063968231166901
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