“To be neutral, to be passive in a situation,” the historian Howard Zinn tells us, “is to collaborate with whatever is going on.” If the history of black political struggle in the US – something Zinn, a white ex-soldier, actively participated in – teaches us one thing, it is that meaningful political change happens not just when black and brown people take a stand against racism, but when the wider society moves from being neutral to becoming actively anti-racist.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was one of the most formidable organisations in the fight for civil rights. It understood that change occurs when people are moved to action. Students in northern US universities, although sympathetic to the plight of black southerners, remained passive supporters, so the SNCC organised “freedom buses” for students to come and act as observers.
These students witnessed lynchings, attack dogs mauling protesters and fire hoses dislocating bones, and they transformed into active anti-racists. Enraged by what they had witnessed, these students wrote home to their parents, often passive opponents of the “riotous” civil rights protesters. On hearing of the injustices first-hand and in their children’s voices, many thousands became aligned to the cause, and the entire political climate shifted in relation to the demands of southern freedom movements.
In the wake of the death of George Floyd, we have statements of solidarity from politicians, corporations and even police forces, but these are mere gestures. To be anti-racist means to involve yourself directly in the movement to end racism, to take action. The first step toward becoming an anti-racist is reckoning with the fact that racism is systemic. As the scholar and activist Angela Davis remarks: “There is an unbroken line of police violence in the US that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery.” Race, as the Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe put it, is a “trace of history”, a tradition travelling through several hundred years and in part facilitating the birthing of the global north and global south.
The categorisations of race facilitated colonial conquests, enslavement and exploitative labour regimes – all engines of capitalism. Today, the political-economic setup of the global economy rests on the availability of a cheap, informal labour force, imperialist warfare, extractivism, the mass incarceration of racialised people and mind-blowing inequalities in educational attainment, wages, housing and healthcare. This deep entanglement of accumulation, dispossession and violence is what is meant by the term “racial capitalism”. For example, in 2016 the Byron burger chain was happily employing migrant staff, some of whom worked 50 hours a week on minimum wage, until it facilitated a Home Office raid to have them deported. Staff reported that Byron entrapped them in a fake-meeting-cum-sting-operation. Racism and capitalism are inseparable.
For these reasons, nearly all anti-racist mass movements worth their salt have recited tirelessly: ending racism, root and branch, would mean ending a global economic order predicated upon it. Anti-racism is anti-capitalist, and vice versa. There are no two ways around it. To be an anti-racist must demand a complete rejection of business as usual. An end to racism demands transformation of the global political-economic setup. This would mean paying workers fair wages across supply chains and ending the ethnicity pay gap, which flies in the face of the primary corporate objective of profit.
So how can you go from being a passive non-racist to an active anti-racist? Anti-racism is the fight to build a mass-participating anti-racist movement in the workplace, the street and the community. Beyond a protest, a donation, a social media post and a difficult conversation, there’s work to be done in tackling the many day-to-day issues underscored by racism. Learning is an essential part of this journey, so make a reading/listening/watching list and include the autobiography of Assata Shakur, of Malcolm X, of Claudia Jones, of Rosa Luxemburg, of Audre Lorde. Explore not just the imperial legacy of Britain and the US, but also the leaders who fought back, from Maurice Bishop to Amilcar Cabral to Thomas Sankara.
Tackling racism requires material changes in the lives of poor black and brown people. Material changes require us to make movements from moments: this is a huge political moment, now we must build a huge political movement. We must all become anti-racist activists, black, white, brown – all of us. As activists we need to work together, outside the state agencies, which are some of the principal purveyors of systemic racism, to meet the needs of black and brown communities in Britain.
Black and brown people are four times more likely to die from coronavirus than white people. Being an anti-racist activist means first of all taking up the fight for improved healthcare provisions and protective work equipment in these communities. Black and brown people are massively overrepresented in coronavirus-related searches, arrests and fines. To be an anti-racist means to fight against the sweeping new range of policing powers being used disproportionately against working-class racialised communities.
Criminalisation, gentrification, the “hostile environment”, the closing of local public services: these are all arenas of anti-racist activism. So, find your local anti-racist organisation; if it doesn’t exist then set it up. Every youth club, every school staying in the local authority, every saved estate, every anti-deportation and anti-raids group, every local police-monitoring group, will make concrete differences in improving the lives of racialised communities. When enough of these groups exist, are connected and can show solidarity with each other across cities and towns, then, and only then, will we begin to make inroads into tackling systemic racism.