My new piece in the
@guardian
on why liberal antiracists - with their emphasis on correcting vocabulary, diversity training, and unconscious biases - are powerless against today's structures of racism.
My new book "What is Antiracism? And Why it Means Anticapitalism" is published today. You can order a copy from the
@VersoBooks
website, where there's currently 20% off the price of the hardback:
After 9/11, there were 3 ways of explaining Islamophobia in the US: 1) it was a spontaneous reaction to 9/11; 2) it was always present in US culture; 3) it was a function of the US-Israel relationship since 1967 - the view I took, along with scholars like
@ProfessorKumar
. 🧵
Racism is not about causing hurt feelings to a group of people because you said something that upset them. It is a power relationship organized through the state. The denial of the most basic humanity to Palestinians is a correlate of Western imperialism.
This is
@GhassanAbuSitt1
, a surgeon who is currently saving the lives of Palestinians in a hospital in Gaza. He's just reported that counter terrorism police have showed up at his house in the UK and harrased his family.
Today Jamil Al Amin turns 80 years old. In the late 1960s, he was famous as H. Rap Brown, the chair of SNCC and a leading figure in the Black Power movement. Now he is a political prisoner - held at a federal prison in Tucson - and largely erased from public memory. 🧵
@ProfessorKumar
The resurrection of anti-Muslim racism is directly related to the need of the US political class to defend Israel's mass murder in Gaza. Only by presenting Arabs/Muslims as inherently barbaric can the violence against them be justified.
@ProfessorKumar
Events this month have confirmed our analysis in the most awful way. Anti-Muslim propaganda and violence that had dwindled somewhat in the last few years, with the War on Terror no longer on the front pages, has returned quickly and forcefully.
Anti-racist training is the graveyard of struggle because structural racism doesn't care about your individual attitudes. Full text of this argument - a talk I gave on Friday at Goldsmiths College - is here:
@ProfessorKumar
The murder of 6-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume, and the attempted murder of his mother, in Illinois is the most egregious example. But so too are the FBI agents knocking on doors of Palestinians. The Israelis who call this their 9/11 are right but not in the way they are thinking.
My new book, out in June, is called "What is Antiracism? And Why it Means Anticapitalism"
It's a history of the different meanings antiracism has had, and why liberal antiracism doesn't work in the neoliberal age.
New academic article: "The racial constitution of neoliberalism." On Friedrich Hayek’s theory of cultural evolution and the failure of mainstream US and European Left scholarship to recognize the centrality of racism and colonialism to neoliberalism.
Three young Palestinian men, Hisham Awartani, Tahseen Ali and Kenan Abdulhamid, students at Brown and other US universities, were shot last night on their way to a family dinner in Burlington, USA. Their crime? Wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh. They are critically injured. And
.
@JeanneTheoharis
and I have a new piece in
@jacobinmag
that seeks to apply abolitionist arguments to the US counter-terrorism system. Rather than expand the "terrorism" discourse to include white nationalism, as many liberals are proposing, better to scrap it altogether.
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.
Whatever you think about
@jeremycorbyn
and anti-Semitism, this is just astoundingly wrong. To believe this, you would have to ignore outspoken political attacks on Blacks, Asians, refugees, Muslims by ministers of every government from Heath to May that have fuelled state racism.
Exclusive: Jeremy Corbyn is “an anti-Semite” and his “Zionist” remarks were the “most offensive” since Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood”, says former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks.
When the near-universal message proclaimed by the US establishment is that Israel’s mass slaughter of Gazan civilians is simply an act of self-defense against terrorists, it is inevitable that anti-Muslim racism will intensify. My latest for
@The_NewArab
The best book on anti-racism you probably haven’t read: a new edition of Sivanandan’s Communities of Resistance is out today with a preface by
@garyyounge
and an introduction by me.
I posted the transcript of my "What is racial capitalism?" talk that I did last week at the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discussing the anti-Apartheid struggle, Cedric Robinson, and Stuart Hall.
Tickets still available to hear Ruth Wilson Gilmore and me in conversation about my new book WHAT IS ANTIRACISM? AND WHY IT MEANS ANTICAPITALISM - at SOAS, London, on 13 July.
Over the last several months, I've been working with friends to think about what alternatives to the War on Terror a Labour government ought to pursue if it comes to power in the UK. Next Wednesday we're launching our report at an event in parliament hosted by Diane Abbott MP.
Kojo Koram and me made a video on WHAT IS ANTIRACISM? We talked about why liberal antiracism has proven powerless against structural oppression and what a radical alternative would look like.
An exceptionally stupid sentence in the NYT: "As the tectonic plates of Buddhism and Islam collide, a portion of Buddhists are abandoning the peaceful tenets of their religion." Terrible metaphor. And Buddhist violence in Sri Lanka has existed since 1950s.
London folks: I'll be in conversation with
@KojoKoram
at
@Foyles
bookshop later this month to talk about my new book "What is antiracism? And why it means anticapitalism." Come down! Tickets here:
Vught was a Nazi concentration camp in the Netherlands where my grandfather was imprisoned. Today the same site is a specialist detention center for Muslims. What does this tell us about racism? Read an extract from my new book at
@novaramedia
:
We’d learn more about the decline of public discourse if we figured out how a weird Trotskyist cult from the 80s called the RCP was able to reinvent itself as a network of far-right media provocateurs and corporate lackeys, like Munira Mirza
Another good piece on excellent website by Munira Mirza on the decline of Britain’s race debate. A must read for
@DavidLammy
who’s lately become an uncritical channeller of black anger/victimhood, changing nothing for the better
You say you object to the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Where in the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea do you think Palestinians should not be free?
The dystopian but logical outcome of the UK's Prevent policy: a nursery school in Brighton is admonished for failing to participate in the surveillance of four-year-old kids for signs of terrorism. More than 10 years of this bullshit is enough. End it now!
The Guardian's exclusive today about a secret
#Prevent
database is not really news if you've been paying attention to the issue. But glad it's getting renewed coverage.
@UKLabour
must commit to abolishing Prevent and deleting the database.
Normally, this would scream illiberal absurdity. Now, it is just the background noise of repression.
"Two women pictured at a pro-Palestinian march in London carrying photos of paragliders have been charged with terrorism offences."
Thread: Thanks to the probing of the DCMS committee and its report on fake news, it's now accepted the Leave campaign won the Brexit vote through playing “to the fears and the prejudices of people” on immigration, what I would describe more straightforwardly as racism. 1/11
Excited to see this out! A searing account of the traumatizing effects of British state violence and the struggle against it.
@RizwaanSabir
@PlutoPress
3/3 What Stuart Hall called in 1979 the Great Moving Right Show has been up and running again for the last few years. Yesterday’s extreme right is today’s center right. The norms of political acceptability keep moving.
On Enoch Powell, racism in the US vs UK and why liberals don’t have the answer when it comes to antiracism.
@AaronBastani
talks to
@ArunKundnani
Watch now📺 👇👇
The FBI named Rap Brown as one of five targets in the Cointel program of 1967. He was the first Black leader of the 1960s to face federal charges. Black Panther artist Emory Douglas painted him as “the man with the match.” Rap brown is a major reason why rap music is called rap.
When I interviewed Jamil Al Amin in prison two years ago, he told me that Black Power meant “we are not going to be a part of our own oppression in terms of how we see ourselves.”
Click here to support the campaign to free Imam Jamil Al Amin --->
Calling them "terrorists" is understandable but just expands law enforcement powers, feeding the structures that have been central to white supremacy. It's like asking white supremacy to police itself. Great piece by
@BayoumiMoustafa
in
@thenation
Representatives who voted to censure Rashida Tlaib, you say you object to the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Where in the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea do you think Palestinians should not be free?
Two days to go! Come to Foyles bookshop in London on Thursday evening to hear
@KojoKoram
and me talk about my new book WHAT IS ANTIRACISM? AND WHY IT MEANS ANTICAPITALISM.
More details and tickets:
My latest article: “Disembowel Enoch Powell.” Fifty years ago, British politician Enoch Powell set the template for a racist neoliberal populism that has reached its apotheosis today.
Listened to the BBC's stupid reanimation of Enoch Powell's speech, in which he dignifies racism with the words of Virgil. Then switched over to MSNBC to hear General Mattis praised for knowing Cicero and Thucydides. Like the classics somehow render bombing and racism legitimate?
My article on how working-class nationalists provide an alibi for deadly immigration and asylum policies that our neoliberal leaders want to pursue anyway. There is no culture war over immigration in the normally understood sense, just a hidden class war.
If there's one thing we should have learned about anti-Muslim racism in the last twenty years, it's that defences of "liberalism" have been central to it. In this context, a certain kind of liberalism is not the opposite of racism but its premise.
Labour has often deliberately misunderstood Boris Johnsons's article on the use of burkas – it wasn't racist, it was a nuanced defence of liberalism.
You can read the original article here:
@Spectraliser
@guardian
The point is that what worked to make some progress on the personal level in the past won't work any more on either the personal or structural levels, so yes we do need to draw a line and criticize liberal forms of antiracism.
CVE policies have gone global, from Finland to the Philippines. And all the problems they bring have been globalized with them. In a new report, co-authored with
@drbenhayes
and published by
@TNInstitute
, we expose the human rights consequences.
I’m tempted to say: we told you so. Those of us who have written about Islamophobia and the War on Terror over the last 15 years and have warned repeatedly of Aimé Césaire’s lesson: that imperial violence carried out abroad comes home in the form of domestic fascism. 10/11
In New York next week, I'll be introducing my new book on antiracism, in discussion with
@TejNagaraja
and Paula Chakravartty. Hosted by NYU's Dept of Social and Cultural Analysis. 6pm, Tues Dec 12 at NYU.
More details:
When Zionists see a literature festival as an act of violence, the word “intifada” as genocidal, and wearing a keffiyeh as a threat to civilization - this is what I call the FRAGILITY OF THE COLONIZER. My latest for
@The_NewArab
Thread… The US foreign policy establishment is pushing a new set of national security narratives. One narrative is the threat of China, the central focus of this week’s NATO summit. Another is domestic extremism, on which the White House this week published a new strategy. 1/23
Commissioner of Metropolitan Police says out of 3k “subjects of interest” who are monitored by police/Mi5, *all* are “Islamist” & zero are far-right. “The extreme right wing volume isn’t something we’d normally talk about in terms of no. of individuals” |
@TOAK19054
@ProfessorKumar
The demonization of Arabs works alongside the demonization of Muslims. And in any case all racisms legitimize violence beyond the group ostensibly targeted. Anti-Black racism legitimized mass incarceration but around half the people in US prisons are not Black.
To be an antiracist means supporting the Palestinian struggle against Israeli colonialism and apartheid. I'll be speaking about why this Saturday in New York City at the first conference of the new Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Register:
In 1971, Rap Brown accepted Islam while jailed in New York and later became the Imam of a Muslim community in Atlanta. By the 1990s, he was one of the most important leaders of Muslims in the US as the emir of the American Muslim Council.
New article by me:
"There is no culture war over immigration in the normally understood sense. Rather, there is a strange and hidden class war being fought out on the terrains of race and culture. At stake is the very definition of the working class"
In the 1990s, surveillance once again intensified against Al Amin. In 2002, he was wrongfully convicted of killing a cop in Atlanta. Like 1000s of other Muslims in the US prosecuted as “extremists” in the years after 9/11, there was little chance of a fair trial.
On Saturday Feb 6, I'll be speaking on a panel on "Connecting Abolitionist Struggles: Settler Colonialism, Mass Incarceration, and the War on Terror," in commemoration of the Quebec mosque shooting. Details at:
In an extract from my new book "What is Antiraicsm?" published at
@theleaduk
, I cover the conference that gave birth to “identity politics” and the radicalism of the most important Black leader there, Jamil Al-Amin.
Spot on analysis by
@KojoKoram
in the
@nytimes
today comparing Liz Truss to Enoch Powell: . Powell was both a racist populist and the first neoliberal politician, as I argued 4 years ago in
@DissentMag
"Rather than redefine security in terms of health, we are now likely to see health redefined in terms of security." From an essay I've written for
@ROAR_Magazine
...
A. Sivanandan wrote "Any struggles of the oppressed, be it blacks or women, which are only for themselves and then not for the least of them, the most deprived, the most exploited of them, are inevitably self-serving and narrow and unable to enlarge the human condition…(1/2)
What is Islamophobia? An expression of the violence of empire. What causes it to exist? Short answer: racial capitalism. Hear more in my lecture this Monday lunchtime at the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights.
Crucial piece by
@NishaKapoor07
in
@RedPeppermag
on the UK's new Nationality and Borders Bill and the use of biometric ID tech to carry out the "granulated" demise of citizenship.
Too often, we on the left imagine racism as external to the neoliberal project. I've learnt a lot from
@profdavidharvey
, Wendy Brown, Wolfgang Streeck, and
@paulmasonnews
but I think their accounts of neoliberalism are limited for this reason.
This is happening on Thursday. I'll be talking about my current research on how we can develop an analysis of racial capitalism from South African precursors, Cedric Robinson, and Stuart Hall.
"Mutulu Shakur is dying in prison. He is one of thousands of people – predominantly Black and Brown – who are seriously ill behind bars and asking for release." Essential article on the campaign to free Mutulu Shakur, by the wonderful
@snidelines
The hypocrisy of James Comey is staggering if unsurprising. Where was his "higher loyalty" when he signed off on torture in 2003? He is "morally unfit" to work at any level of government, let alone be elevated to the status of national conscience.
@schanmalik
@ProfessorKumar
Isn't that a more eloquent version of 2) above? Agree with you that Islamophobia is racism. The question is what drives it? If the answer is: it exists because the US has always been racist, then that does not explain anything specific about anti-Muslim racism.
As me and others have pointed out over the last three months, US campus DEI policies have helped Zionists by making antiracism all about feelings rather than material oppression. Glad this argument is now being made by
@EdgeofSports
in the
@thenation
.
Help end the government's unofficial gag order on Jamil Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown): sign the open letter demanding academics and journalists be allowed to interview him in prison: (You don't have to be an academic or journalist to sign.)
The debate on
@jeremycorbyn
and anti-Semitism is, among other things, about the silencing of the Palestinian voice (that is what the full IHRA definition would do). Months of radio, print, and television news coverage and this, I think, is the first contribution by a Palestinian.