The business case for diversity initiatives, unconscious bias training, cultural sensitivity workshops, and more are some of the things that come under institutional focuses on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, known more commonly as EDI. These are then applied to numbers of protected characteristics named in the Equality Act 2010. In addition to EDI being difficult to measure, insurgents have spoken out against it, as it seems to have taken many for fools as a phantom limb of the Anti-Racism Industrial Complex. As white people co-opt and profit from concepts and traditions of thought that Black and Brown people created and developed. For example, “identity politics” was coined in the 1970s by the Combahee River Collective to talk about their experiences of classism, lesbophobia and misogynoir. Meanwhile, the term has been co-opted by the political right in their war against equality.

As a freelancer invited into organisations to “raise awareness” on issues pertaining to racial inequality and more, I am asked to do one-time events … but never long-term interventions that shifts the scales of power and privilege. On a basic level, institutions like schools and universities can say look how much we are doing while actually not doing anything at all. Those who lose are the students and employees from historically excluded backgrounds including Black, Asian, LGBTQ+, disabled and other violently exploited groups. So, EDI then claims to want to end inequality while actually upholding it.

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During the COVID-19 lockdowns, I read a poetry collection called Postcolonial Banter by Bradford-based spoken word poet and educator Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan. Her poem “Decentring Diversity” illustrates the issues with more Black/Brown faces in high places as somewhat being interchangable with anti-racism: “Just because they give you a seat at the table doesn’t mean they want you to speak at the table” (p81). As expected, this reaffirmed my own suspicions about the EDI agenda: simply having more Black and Brown people as managers will not solve our problems. Encouraging more Black and Brown people to inhabit these institutions to be part of the labour force, while well-intentioned, will not solve our problems when there is little want to change working conditions (i.e racism at universities).

As universities continue to exploit international students (i.e through extortionate tuition fees and precarious visas … in partnership with the Home Office), these same institutions employ EDI “initiatives” to protect these power structures. Meanwhile, Black and Brown asylum seekers drown at sea.

Having more Black and Brown faces in high places continues be a harmful tactic in EDI discourse, as we saw with their deployment in The Sewell Report. Here the UK Government – a white instituton – curated a panel of Black and Brown “experts” in their fields (but not in racism) to conduct an inquiry that told us institutional racism doesn’t exist. As the same government continues with its “anti-woke” nonchalance in its attacks on Critical Race Theory. I want to see more people that look like me in spaces I inhabit. But at what cost? As political commentator Ash Sarkar states, “I mean, this idea that all you need is brown faces in high places is just absolutely for the birds. […] That just because somebody shares some of your identity attributes, it doesn’t mean that they are going to be organising in your interests” (DDN, 2021).

Increasingly, organisations illustrate their “commitment” to Equality & Diversity by creating a diversity role within senior leadership for a Black or Brown person, only to leave this person unsupported. These staff members become tokenised and end up speaking through whiteness (as per #FloellaGate during The Coronation, and The Sewell Report). This is what happens when you project Black and Brown people into jobs within organisations, unsupported, in places that were not designed for us in the first place. Black and Brown people should certainly consider these roles if offered (and if in an emotionally healthy position to do so), but organisations need to support them. Otherwise, we are being set up to fail.

“The concept of diversity only exists if there is an assumed neutral point from which ‘others’ are ‘diverse.’ Putting aside for now the straight, male, middle-classness of that ‘neutral’ space, its dominant aspect is whiteness. Constructed by a white establishment, the idea of ‘diversity’ is neo-liberal speak. It is the new corporatized version of multiculturalism. It is about management, efficiency, box-ticking.”

Kavita Bhanot (2015)

When “diversity” is called for in organisations, it is useful to remember “diversity” is often just euphemistic language for marked difference, often Blackness and Brownness. In saying “diversity”, organisations are also telling us who institutions are designed by and who they work for. As scholar-activist Muna Abdi stated, “Diversity work is about manging the racial optics of a space. It is about bringing together people who are marked as ‘different’ into spaces that remain designed for those with power.”

In doing so, thus, some “differences” are then seen as neutral differences (i.e white; man; cisgender; ; heterosexual; neurotypical), and some are seen as Other (i.e Black; Asian; Muslim; woman; gay; neurodivergent; transgender). In giving specific groups power in a world that thrives on hierarchy and social order, historically excluded groups always lose … including racialised wo/men and people that reject all gender binaries. These groups are also some of the worse impacted by state-manufactured violence i.e how police departments treat some humans like objects to moved out of the way.

I really think we need replace “people who look like me” politics with “people who are structurally positioned like me”. “Looks like me” alone obscures way too much about class, as well as access to opportunities and resources.

— Emma Dabiri (@EmmaDabiri) May 5, 2022

Under the “protected characteristics” named in the Equality Act 2010, in concept being victim of racism should be threaded through all of them. i.e Black women who are more likely to die in childbirth than their white counterparts. This is a very specific experience situated under “misogynoir” (Bailey, 2010), where anti-Blackness and misogyny join hands – exclusive to Black women in their position as Black women. Since 2010, the Equality Duty has largely been understood by organisations as somewhat positive:

“The general equality duty therefore requires organisations to consider how they could positively contribute to the advancement of equality and good relations. It requires equality considerations to be reflected into the design of policies and the delivery of services, including internal policies, and for these issues to be kept under review.”

Public Sector Equality Duty

Within higher education, gender equality frameworks like Athena Swann continue to privilege gender over race (Bhopal and Henderson, 2021). One must ask why? In short, some academics would say that with white experiences as the default setting (even in women’s experiences of misogyny), there is no priority for Black and Brown women to be included. So, for Black and Brown people, “progress” only tends to happen within a white supremacist system when those interests are conjoined with the goals of whiteness. In Critical Race Theory, we call this “interest convergence” (Bell, 1980). With the logic of diversity as a euphemism for Black / Brown (Bhanot, 2015), these initiatives also continue to omit the role of colour-conscious racism. This recentres white people as the “common sense” or universal worldview.

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Often, I recieve emails from schools and others asking for EDI training; I don’t do EDI work, I do disruption work – with much of it challenging dominant power structures! EDI work in my experience has been about reform, not reparations: it has been about firefighting within institutions and managing acceptable levels of violence (i.e through resilience / “cultural sensitivity” workshops, and unconscious bias training … ugh).

In her thread about ‘unconscious bias training’, Muna Abdi also reminds us that this not something to ignore as a “tick-box exercise, it is a deliberate organisational decision and originally implemented to limit corporate risk. Furthermore, Muna tells us how it diverts attention from a needed focus on institutional and structural violence into a focus on individual violence between people.

Absolutely. EDI is about reform, not reparation. Until we acknowledge that White Supremacy is running through the veins of our education system via neoliberal ideology, we cannot start to become antiracist educators

— Shabnam Anam (@ShabsAnam) March 3, 2023

The Equality, Diversity and Inclusion agenda has been one of the biggest traps to hit education in decades. In March, I got into a discussion with a teacher on Twitter about this. Her tweet suggested that anybody against the EDI agenda’s concepts were probematic, when in truth there is a lot wrong with EDI because it doesn’t do what it says. And in fact, in being designed around giving institutions plausible deniability and limiting corporate risk it keeps the violence going.

In late 2022, I made a complaint about a university conference. The event was situated around anti-racism in education (or so it claimed), but the event reproduced racism and whiteness in different ways. I was horrified. What struck me is how “good white people” (Sullivan, 2014) had psyologically distanced themselves from “bad supremacists.” In my complaint, it reasserted how power works and that white “anti-racists” can be some of the most racist people to challenge. As Sara Ahmed writes, “To compain at the university is to be treated as ungrateful for the benefits you have recieved from the university: the freedom to make your own interpretation, the freedom to be critical, academic freedom” (p135).

For me, EDI has been about boxticking and efficiency, using the “racial optics” of Black and Brown people for university brochures, working groups, “race equality centres” and so forth, while campus police and security continue to harrass Black students. Universities draw on the language of EDI to encourage students and staff to study/work there: “non-performativity” (Ahmed, 2018: 333). But language does not translate to transforming hostile spaces into safe ones (better yet, less hostile … in academia, safe spaces do not exist for Black and Brown staff unless we make them ourselves). Thus the brochures, and other forms of marketing are used to create the appearance without action (Ahmed and Swann, 2006).

Or as Nirmal Puwar (2004) writes,

“In policy terms, diversity has overwhelmingly come to mean the inclusion of different bodies. It is assumed that, once we have more women and racialised minorities, or other groups, represented in the hierarchies of organisations (government, civil service, judiciary, police, universities and the arts sector), especially in the élite positions of those hierarchies, then we shall have diversity. Structures and policies will become much more open when these groups enter and make a difference to organisations.”

Nirmal Puwar

Too much and often, I see organisations framing their equality ‘commitments’ as diversity strategies sidestepping the violence of patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and cis-heteronormativity culture. In their bums on seats approach (also centring capitalism), they fail to recognise the violence of Equality and Diversity on the people they “intend” to help. We then see term like “decolonisation” used interchangably with EDI, when in fact they are more likely opposites; EDI keeps the violence going, decolonisation roots it out – literally attacks it at the stem! Intersectionality has also been used to give EDI more credibility or kudos, of course co-opted by white institutions trying to remain relevant.

“The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor” (p1).

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang

As useful as EDI may be to some, its ethos in large, conflicts with both anti-racist work and decolonisation as a practice. Frequently, EDI work within institutions avoids looking at racialisation, thus centring whiteness as sameness and avoiding systemic oppression altogether. It does the work of the corporate agenda, hence “nonperformativity” (Ahmed, 2006). In this lack of intentional work (also supported by universities), racial literacy is sidelined. The late Lani Guinier (2004) defines racial literarcy as “the capacity to decipher the durable racial grammar that structures racialized hierarchies” (p100).

The power of white supremacy illustrates that those not racialised as white are not able to bring their full authentic selves into a space. For example, in my experience at work – I am either Black or disabled – but simultaneously policed from being both. This is how whiteness maintains its power in diversity work because EDI only allows us to look at one identity position at a time. Whiteness, thus reproduces itself in spaces where it is also being interrogated (Ahmed, 2021: 158). When you question the questioning, and the thinking behind the questions, you are then placed under surveillance:

“… the [w]hite eye only, an eye that constantly has the [Black] … academic body – individual, collective, epistemological – under surveillance for any sign of trouble, any possibility of claim of racism to break the uneasy [w]hite [friendliness] of academia” (p59).

Shirley Anne Tate

Whiteness by care is still whiteness. Neoliberals would say relationships between humans are now transactional and purely economic in hope of monetary exchange. Violence by EDI is still violence. EDI keeps the violence going and is the neoliberal’s equality. It’s an empty gesture that gives institutions (like universities) plausible deniability and limits corporate risk. It is not the job of HR departments to look after employee welfare, but to limit corporate risk (i.e complaints about racism, sexual harrasssment etc etc). It just so happens the former informs the latter, and HR exists to protect reputational damage.

Indeed, EDI is full of empty promises that lumps the experiences of people whose daily lives are encompassed with being on the recieving end of extreme violence … with the same people who talk about this “journey of learning” we are all on … from a vantage point of privilege. The institutional equality agenda make me feel unsafe at work. Institutions enjoy talking up policy, but not the culture of terror that exists in the workplace. Not because of the dangerous potential of bad policymaking (though that also exists), but the dangerous potential of employees who fail upwards into unaccountable power.

“Things might appear fluid if you are going the way things are flowing. When you are not going that way, you experience the flow … [a]s a wall” – Sara Ahmed

When people are starving, it is ludicrous to me that money would be spent crowning somebody who would’ve been content being a tampon.

— Kelechi (@kelechnekoff) April 8, 2023

Whilst social media platform Twitter is routinely criticised for being a toxic cesspit of trolls, racism and discrimination, there is an opposing story: commentators like Kelechi have used their platforms to mock power. To the untrained eye, her tweet appears random but it is actually referencing #TamponGate – a scandal that was picked up by the British press in 1993 when Charles confessed to Camilla he wanted to “live inside” her trousers, joking that he might be reincarnated in the life after death as tampon.

Discourses to tampons aside, potential of solidarity and coalition in our shared trauma under the British Crown will be manifestly apparant this bank holiday weekend – just as it was during the scenes on social media during the Commonwealth Games, Jubilee and Queen’s Funeral. Black Twitter, Irish Twitter, and Indian Twitter alongside Scouser Twitter and Celtic Fans Twitter will probably be linking up. Edutainment and memes aplenty. With the long bank holiday weekend, I know other political commentators will take to Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and Tumblr to vent their frustrations.

Potential for coalition and solidarity presents itself in the deep space of the interweb. Under the thinking of the social media posts, there sits an exhaustion from groups that have long been exploited by the monarchy. Audre Lorde (1984) once termed racism and sexism as “grown up words” (p152) revisiting how victims often acquire the language to articulate their experience after the experience. In her blog post ‘Feminism and Fragility’, sociologist Sara Ahmed (2016) further states “Once we have the words, you are putting a sponge to the past: mopping things up, all that spillage.” So, this experience revisits the bit bitting at institutional violence and how actions become institutionalised by repeated behaviours.

As Bob Marley said

“So if you are the big tree
We are the small axe
Ready to cut you down (well sharp)
To cut you down”

Small Axe, (Burnin’, 1973)

Meanwhile, I must ask ‘did Tesco actually call [redacted] a [redacted]?

Tesco have entered the chat 💀💀 pic.twitter.com/OqM47JHBjk

— Tré Work (he/him) 🇬🇩🇯🇲 (@treventoured) April 21, 2023

Whilst the pomp of the coronation is absorbed into the brains of millions of people around the world, this is happening during a Cost of Capitalism crisis, paid for at the taxpayers’ expense. Sounds of abolish the monarchy can be heard around the world. I do wonder what Britain would like without this mafia institution. When you do start looking at these systems more closely, you begin to see how entangled the monarchy is with other institutions – police, prisons, and many more – including entities like Honours committees, the privy council and House of Lords too. To abolish the monarchy is also linked with other abolitionist narratives.

Like every other criminology blog entry, now let’s discuss Guy DeBord’s theory of ‘the spectacle’. ‘The spectacle’, said French Marxist Guy DeBord, is a system of domination that claims your attention and then your attention faciliates your subjugation. So, the irony is that even with my dislike of the monarchy – I’m doomed if I do, and doomed if I don’t talk about it – because within the advertised life of the spectacle, there’s nothing I can say that doesn’t make the spectacle stronger.

Meanwhile, the appeal of Harry & Meghan in this case act as a violent juxtaposition to a British public who in many ways still see “good” and “bad” royalty, not The Crown as a wholly imperialistic violent construct. To me things like coronations, jubilees keep us distracted. Even when trying to avoid such nonsense, our world has become so saturated by media. As Guy DeBord writes “There is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them, because they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse and the various forces organised to relay it” (DeBord, 1998: 19).

Anyhow, now as all of us are immersed in the spectacle, we may as well stay implicated. In the 1960s, it was possible to think critically. Now, being a philisopher just means you have watched Inception!

“Identity is not only a story, a narrative which we tell ourselves about ourselves, it is stories which change with historical circumstances. And identity shifts with the way in which we think and hear them and experience them. Far from only coming from the still small point of truth inside us, identities actually come from outside; they are the way in which we are recognized and then come to step into the place of the recognitions which others give us. Without the others there is no self, there is no self- recognition” (Hall, 2001: 30).

Stuart Hall, qtd in New Caribbean Thought: A Reader (Meeks and Lindahl, 2001)

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For many years, dominant narratives of Holocaust Memorial Day have been seen as interchangable with the remembrance of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. It is a day that until 2016, I never thought applied to me (as a non-Jewish person) because the pervading narrative I was taught in school, was that it was to remember the six million Jews. And though something need not have happened to you for it to matter to you, I know for many people that term ‘solidarity’ is lots easier when it is relatable. When we consider all victims of The Holocaust, people like me who sit on the faultlines of Blackness and disablement are included.

Though I have never experienced genocide personally, nor have I fled conflict, I do understand what it means to be a product of its survivors – as a descendant of enslaved people, I am the product of holocaust survivors.The framing of colonialism and enslavement as separate from the logic of genocide that allowed Nazis to kill relentlessly, is an example of what it means to treat the Final Solution as an exception. In truth what happened between 1933 and 1945 was the logic of empire imported into fortress white Europe (Andrews, 2022: 40). Perhaps it is true this may have been a first in Europe for white people, but this was usual for Black and Brown people in the Global South (i.e the Herero and Nama Genocide, 1904). Here, I also look to UCL’s Legacies of British Slavery, and the many thousands of enslavers who were compensated for their loss of human property. Furthermore, sadists like enslaver Thomas Thistlewood who raped hundreds of enslaved women in Jamaica. These discourses intersect with my own family history via Windrush Atlantic crossings, my great/grandparents being migrants from the Caribbean.

How odd it is that myself who others see as Black British exists in a state of identity crises, seen as rootless yet rooted, that I can be in Britain but not of Britain. Or as Anne Cheng (2001) writes “racial signification has always come into fullest play precisely at the intersection between materiality and fantasy, between history and memory” (p73). Then as disabled too, I am seen as another stranger, viewed through white supreamcy as not quite whole … I have been here before as a Black person and a disabled person who would have been doubly hated in Nazi-occupied Europe. Through intersectionality and history, I do not have the privilege of amnesia to forget the violent institutions of racial science and eugenics through which Black people and disabled people live.

In her 1990 book Black Feminist Thought, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins writes

“… distinction between knowledge and wisdom, and the use of experience as the cutting edge dividing them, has been key to Black women’s surivival. […] For most African-American women those individuals who have lived through experiences which they claim to be experts are more believable and credible than those who have merely read or thought about such experiences. Thus lived experiences as criterion for credibility frequently is invoked by U.S. Black women when making knowledge claims” (p276).

For me, as someone that is Black and disabled I have written essays and delivered talks that mesh lived experience with those readings. As Black people, we are more aware of our place as victims of colonialism and enslavement. Yet, I think there is less awareness of the fact that we were also victims of the Nazi Holocaust. In Britain’s Black communities, I do hear murmurs along the lines of “what about our Holocaust Memorial Day?” In truth, we actually already have the 25th March every year as ‘ International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade‘ (acknowledged by the UN, make of that what you will). However, it is not promoted by the state (for … reasons). Nonetheless, there is room for both … but what this also tells me is that many Black people do not see themselves in The Holocaust, which is something we can work on.

Yet, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust also tells us that an estimated 24,000 Black people lived in Germany in the 1920s. After the First World War, the French government sent 100,000 French troops to occupy the German Rhineland in 1920 and about 20,000 were from French colonies including Tunisia, Morocco, French Indochina and Sénégal. The presence of these Black and Brown soldiers in the Rhineland allowed the conditions for interracial relationships (despite anti-miscegenation laws) and these relationships produced many children of Mixed Heritage who the German state termed as the “Rhineland Bastards.” Many were later persecuted by the Nazis, that Robert Kestin says were reportedly taken to killing centres in 1937. As someone who is racialised as Black, I am constantly reminded of the estimated fifteen million victims of transatlantic chattel enslavement. Yet, I am told The Holocaust isn’t “our history” when in truth, it really is (for me, as a Black and disabled person, the Holocaust is as much my history as the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 and Stephen Lawrence).

As an autistic person with other neurotypes and someone who moves through the disability space, more of us do identify with The Holocaust and the victims because we were victims too as disabled people. In 1938, a man called Hans Asperger first labelled a group of children with distinct psychological traits under “autistic psychopathy” then in 1944 publishing a study which would only gain international traction in the 1980s. From then, the term ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’ gained notoriety as a diagnostic for what we call autism. Now, many autistic activists and advocates are rejecting Asperger’s as a label due to evidence that he also collaborated with the Nazis in the executions of disabled children under the Third Reich. The historian Herwig Czech documented this in a 2018 journal article in Molecular Autism. In addition, historian Edith Sheffer’s book Asperger’s Children builds on this, saying the original ideas of autism came from a society that was in fact anti-neurodiversity. This is also stirring a debate in disability justice spaces amid parents and families. Sheffer considers psychiatry in Hitler’s regime became part of an effort to categorise Nazi-occupied populations as genetically fit or unfit – where euthanasia killing programmes determined who lived and who was killed.

People like myself and many of my friends – who are autistic, ADHD, dyspraxic and so on – would have been viewed as incapable of social conformity and the idea of pure perfect people. And in the context of neurotypes like autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia etc etc, if you have it, the likelihood of someone related to you having it is significant. These neurotypes can be considered genetic variants and in a Nazi-occupied society, these hereditary neurotypes would have been viewed as defective under eugenics. Today, neurodivergent activist spaces are continuously discussing Applied Behavioral Analysis [ABA] (basically autistic conversation therapy). This is something that is promoted by organisations like Autism Speaks which has been called a hate group by autistic advocates and activists. ABA is seen as pioneering in countries like the United States and Australia, and it seeks to “cure” autistic people of our traits through behavioral therapy to make us more palatable in neurotypical spaces.

Discourses to Black British history frequently erase the disabled. As someone that is multiply neurodivergent, The Holocaust is a period of history that I identify with. For the first-year students doing CRI1007 (The Science of Crime and Criminals) where I am sure you would have looked at eugenics, I would bring you to consider the role eugenics played in Nazi-occupied Europe in not just framing the state-lead dehumanisation of the Jews but also Black people and disabled people (the latter included the mentally ill and what today we’d associate with neurotypes like Down Syndrome and autism). The stigma against neurodivergent people continues in a multitude of ways, and I still meet people reproducing ideas of our neurotypes as in need of a cure. Not something that ended with Hitler, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust – things that many still view as divorced from a current society. Yet, these ideologies of control that underpinned the Holocaust continue to do damage today.

In the now, autistic and neuro-minortised activists are fighting a culture in science and academia that is seeking to develop prenatal autism screenings. This is so prospective parents can have an abortion on the stigma of ‘autism being defective’. Neurotypes like autism are still viewed as a deficit, and these screenings are positioned as something that corrects so-called genetic wrongness or abnormalities. Daniel Kevles (1995) also describes eugenics as the science of “improving” humanity by exploiting theories of hereditary. Additionally, science journalist Angela Saini and disability rights activist Adam Pearson further tell us that “for more than a century, eugenics lead innocent people – the disabled, the poor, the non-white – to be segregated even sterilised in the name of science. It was a formative influence for Adolf Hitler and a driving force for the Nazi death camps” (Saini and Pearson, 2020).

We are history and history is part of us. Stuart Hall (2001) writes that “Identity is not only a story, a narrative which we tell ourselves about ourselves, it is stories which change with historical circumstances” (p30). My identity tied to Blackness and disablement is much changed when considering the positionality of Black disabled people during the Holocaust. Eugenics and racial science exist today to do harm: everything from the “subnormal” education scandal of the 1970s all the way to the treatment of the elderly and the disabled during the COVID-19 lockdowns, as well as Spectrum10k run by University of Cambridge. And there is a chance that if the genetic markers for autism existed in the mid-1990s when I was born, that I wouldn’t exist now. I like living and I think the world would be a lot less interesting without autistic and other neurodivergent people in it. The Holocaust, its history and legacy belong to all of us – and this should be uncontroversial, but of course there will be those who contest that fact.

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Please do come along to come along to Northamptonshire Rights & Equality Council’s Holocaust Memorial Day Lecture on the 5th February. I will be exploring some of what I have discussed above further. Free registration here.

Over the past months I have been asked “are you Team Harry & Meghan?” And the answer is no; despite having nothing personally against them as invidiuals, they are part of the establishment. As someone that identifies with many socialist beliefs (and socialism is not without its critiques), H&M represent everything I am against.

However, as there is no doubt they have suffered abuse at the hands of The Crown and media, it appears to me both were upset they were excluded from the Royal Family due to racism and other things. Yet, they would never challenge the monarchy within the frame of a white supermacist, imperialist heteropatriarchal construct” (hooks, 2006: 250). Still, they have never called the monarchy institutionally racist, and their dislike to racism appears personal not communal, revisiting the problematic notion that it only affects them. Their problem wasn’t about equality for all, only in relation to other royals. If Meghan had not been impacted by the UK’s brand of racism, I wonder if they would have been so outspoken about racism at all, something Harry seems to only have reduced down to ‘unconscious bias’ which seems to be all he knows!

By the by, many fans of H&M, like numerous journalists during the Jubilee, are still presenting themselves as bootlicking sychophants. Here, I see no space to have discussions that frame H&M as complicit in an imperialistic construct (the monarchy), but there are “nice” conversations framing them as passive victims of the media and The Crown. The dominant public narrative is one of fairy tale romance and sympathy to their struggle. Yet, what seems unclear is the public amnesia that these two are still members of the establishment, and living thousands of miles away will not change that. Particularly, responses to Meghan from Black Britain in many spaces is positive, but then remain uncritical of how more Black and Brown faces in high places will not change things. To “reform” the monarchy would be to reform empireland itself. It’s a fool’s hope!

My point is that she's talking about being treated equally within the context of royalty, who by virtue of nothing but the circumstances of birth enjoy an exalted status compared to everyone else. As I said, she's been treated abominably, but this isn't a fight for equality!

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) December 15, 2022

The docuseries Harry and Meghan also showed that the couple were willing to do the monarchy’s bidding overseas in order to avoid the British press (this presumably includes those wretched royal tours). What this shows me is both were willing to continue the legacy of an imperialist monarchy as long as media abuse stopped intruding on their lives. Harry showed a want to reconcile with his father and brother, but it was contentious. Even the fact both have kept their titles shows you where their alleigances sit and that one day, they will be “welcomed back.” For anyone that is pro-democracy, one cannot be pro-H&M when the monarchy still exists (one must choose). The racism Meghan experienced from the media and reportedly from members of the Royal Family is framed as an ‘unexplainable random’ occurence, not the results of centuries of colonial racism wired into the structure. Brown-skinned people being “included” into the white establishment simply reasserts the whiteness in place (Ahmed, 2012: 33).

Harry belongs to posse of privileged white men who have benefited from the spoils of colonial pillage and plunder. This is also someone who spent ten years in the Armed Forces – an institution that has long been envisaged through ‘orientalism and war’ (Smith, 2016: 68). The military was tool of violence throughout the British Empire and continues to be a tool of colonisation now … I find it difficult to see establishmentarians as activists, someone that continues to say they’re pro-monarchy and pro-military while “aligning” with the ‘liberal’ equality agenda. Though their story is interesting (I will be reading Spare), I must question if ‘celebrity activism‘ is the way. Celebrity is not freedom when it just raises the profile of the rich and famous. No less than when those celebrities are establishment and do not show a willingness to leave it. In fact, though the British media are brutal and have treated H&M appallingly, it does appear that if the media stopped and the monarchy came calling Meghan and Harry may go back!

I was also taken aback by the commentary from Black British public intellectuals in the documentary offering a critical analysis of the British Empire, but seemed to have lost steam when it came to linking that analysis to the monarchy itself including present-day Royal Family members. In one case, Prince Harry was referred to as “anti-racist” by author-journalist Afua Hirsch. What the fuck’s an anti-racist royal? This is a captialist institution made up of captialists! Meanwhile, the comment that Meghan looked like many of the people in Commonwealth (Empire 2.0) by historian David Olusoga sent my head spinning for fifteen minutes (insinuating she could reform The Crown). This is a deeply individual docuseries that goes no way to further the debate on race equality in the UK nor the toxicities of the media, but what it does is show how entrenched neoliberal ideology is.

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Neoliberal capitalism is defined by scholar-YouTuber Tom Nicholas (2019) as a “political ideology which holds that the primary bond between humans is … purely economic. All of our interactions … with other humans are neoliberal posits, driven … on self-interest.” American economist Milton Friedman (2002) continues that the ‘liberal’ part of the word is “a corruption of the term” (p6). More current discussions around neoliberal capitalism also tell us that the ‘liberal’ in that term is a misnomer (Friedman, 2002: 6), and it actually belongs to the Victorian-Georgian period, for the rich to spend their money how they want (Tom Nicholas, 2019). The H&M docuseries is a text that centres privileged whining with no want to link the formations of colonialism of yesterday to the racism that happens today. This was an individual docuseries centred around H&M’s experiences; this is fine and all, but what was more problematic was the exceptionalism. H&M appear not to be upset at racism in general, but that it is in fact intruding on their lives, somewhat revisiting of how individualism is part-and-parcel of our society.

@joris_explains

Replying to @fishy_hi Colonization is a SYSTEM of oppression and exploitation. Not just a punctual action. #britishhistory #ukhistory #unitedkingdom #colonisation #learnontiktok

♬ Aesthetic – Tollan Kim

It is very easy to be pro-Harry & Meghan when they have been painted as victims, but not all victims are blameless (no less than when they’re millionaires part of a colonising institution). Thousands of miles does not change that one day they may go back. If Harry & Meghan debacle has shown me anything, it has only revealed that colonial racism is endemic to Britain. Moreover, oligarchy is not being discussed in this context. ByLine Times editor Peter Jukes says “oligarchy is the combination of money and power, of the state and money and power.” H&M are complicit in an establishment where the few rule the many. In my opinion, the greatest threat to democracy is not just right-wing politicians, but also oligarchs. Plato believed that an exclusive group of rich people taking over was a threat to democracy, and we call this oligarchy. Whilst Harry & Meghan are allegedly among the popular royals, I also worry that their sympathy story opens the floodgates for them (especially Harry) to become The People’s Oligarch.

Public investment in Harry & Meghan as a symbol of British culture worries me. It is smoke and mirrors, and the monarchy benefits from their popularity; as individuals, H&M have had a rough go of it but they are part of a rat-infested institution. As long as H&M are seen as “good royals”, the British Crown benefits – because the monarchy is then seen as good. Regardless of in-fighting, the institution wins. Recently, we saw their sewage floating down the streets through the Jubilee, and colonial nostalgia following the Queen’s death. It accumaltes in stately homes; it gathers in schools forcing their students to stand for the national anthem and honour The Crown; it exists in the deluge of investment into the 2022 Commonwealth Games during the summer … pervading, as numbers of “activists” become knights of realm and Members of the British Empire [MBEs].

During a Cost of Capitalism Crisis (dubbed Living by media), we are being infected by royal propaganda as if ‘being royal’ is a normal thing. One way to solve this pollution of our bodies and minds is filter it out by educating people at every level on the history and present of this institution. There are no good royals, simply many shades of bad. I hold no ill-will to Harry & Meghan as individuals, but the Disney story metaphor that the docuseries projected overshadows another story – H&M as the layperson’s neoliberal and Prince Harry as the oligarch that everyday people will accept – the antithesis to men like PM Rishi Sunak, but covertly equally as damaging where the British monarchy is good for oligarch business, but not for working-class survival.

Now that the Queen has been buried, why not bury the institution? Britain has more foodbanks than McDonald’s restaurants and people act like a brown person in the royal institution will change things? Nonsense. You can’t EDI the monarchy. Throw it on the scrapheap. Nothing about the royal couple is anti-racist when they present themselves as capitalists. Eric Williams’ 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery shows the intersections between capitalism and enslavement, further to Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism and Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. In our anti-racism, anti-capitalism must feature. This power couple are capitalists, so I need someone to tell answer me this, “what the fuck’s an anti-racist royal?” This is diversity wearing the Benin Bronzes; it is EDI in a Gucci belt – celebrity activism “spectacularised” (DeBord, 1967), making the public look like mugs.

In his book Not the Chilcot Report, journalist Peter Oborne calls Britain a modern state with a medieval core. The treatment of Harry & Meghan is testament to this. Their punishment for complaining, for daring to say anything and speak out is deeply medieval in its logic. These incidents are treated as individual while those who complain are disciplined (Ahmed, 2021). What is the antithesis to monarchy? A British culture of equality driven by abolition and decolonial thought at its heart. If we actually took decolonisation seriously, we would see empire at home embedded in numerous ways – including we the public internally colonised at home while the police ‘maintain law and order.’

I really think we need replace “people who look like me” politics with “people who are structurally positioned like me”. “Looks like me” alone obscures way too much about class, as well as access to opportunities and resources.

— Emma Dabiri (@EmmaDabiri) May 5, 2022

With abolishing the monarchy, you then start to think about abolishing the House of Lords (filled with unelected officials of all colours and creeds who “make decisions” for us). This triggers me to think about the Cost of Capitalism Crisis – so much of what we are talking about and experiencing now, including asshole landlords and unaccountable power pervades through the monarchy, Harry & Meghan not excluded. And it seems to me, many of those who were criticising the monarchy last summer even up to the September when the Queen died, suddenly have lost their voice and have a deference to power when it comes to H&M. People I know to be staunch activists suddenly forget and become gugu-eyed and starstruck; Harry & Meghan have us in a chokehold.

By all means, both these figures are victims but that also does not mean they are not complicit in other ways. I have found, especially amid Black people who view them as “representation” – H&M are unimpeachable. The liberal left in my experience has been more problematic than the political right, blinkered, unable to see how “good” and “bad” individuals stop us from looking at overarching systems of domination. There are no good royals, but the fish rots from the head down (just many shades of bad and the bar of virtue is the floor). The appeal of Harry & Meghan is they are not William & Kate, Lady Hussey, or the late Queen and Philip. Royal in-fighting only does the work of the institution, framing H&M as good and William, Kate etc etc as bad – but nonetheless united in framing The Crown as legitimate. We need not give H&M more airtime, instead our time may be better used to look at things like The Crown, House of Lords, the Privy Council, Honours etc etc and challenge the legitimacy of the cage.

NB: I am not funny enough to have singlehandedly come up with the term “coup d’twat” to describe the current constiutional horror show. That honour belongs to Twitter, which I first saw referenced by the radical psychologist Guilaine Kinouani. At the moment, my Twitter and Facebook timeline is congested with memes and vines relating to the crisis at hand … and much of that I find is due to the notion if we do not laugh now, we will cry. In times of crisis, clearly we do not look to the politicians, the hedgefund managers or the corporates. We do look to the artists, and people that do make memes are artists (because not everybody can do it and do it well!). If it was easy, we would all do it!

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In criminology, it is impossible to look at situations like this and not be thinking of the bigger picture. It is very easy to stay focused on Boris Johnson who has made a career appearing as a non-threatening bumbling buffoon. At the same time he is accountable not to the people that voted for him, but the big donor money that sits behind the Conservative Party. If the prime minister has been pushed out (though we won’t know if he actually leaves until September … he may just do a Trump), it’s not because of his party but because oligarchs have seen that he is no longer useful and bad for business.

This comes attached to the erosion of public freedoms and a public historical amnesia of how hard our ancestors had to fight for the things we take for granted today.

Only two centuries ago my ancestors were enslaved on the islands of Grenada and Jamaica, and before abolitionists were fighting pro-enslavement MPs in Britain, the enslaved were leading rebellions across the Caribbean and at the point of kidnap in Africa. It is by some miracle I am with you now to tell these stories of disssent when so many Black people were killed from disease and hunger in the holes and hulls of European slave ships. With the prime minister “leaving” in September, I am more conscious of the wider system and how fascism arrives in tandem with people telling you to stop over-reacting.

The constitutional crisis we are in now is a coup d’twat built inside a wider prism of complacency. It claims there is “a time and place” to protest and challenge, and that is never all the time (when it should be). In the fights our ancestors had for freedom, we forget how hard it is to maintain that. It appears democracy in Britain begins and ends at voting every four years, and you must accept your lots in life in that four-year window. Within my sentient life now coming to my twenty-seventh year, my generation in the UK probably do not have living reference points for democracy beyond that narrow definition.

Most people believe they have no say in the forces that dictate their lives. On university campuses, it is increasingly clear that the voices of corporate senior leadership teams / governors are favoured more than lecturers and students. The Government has been criticised for its entanglements with oligarchy, but what about universities that focus more on individualism over community? The events since 6th July are being reproduced in various ways in education where neoliberal capitalism runs brigand. Out of touch senior leadership make choices on things they have no knowledge of and do not care about concerns of students if it doesn’t make them money. The concerns of lecturers get shafted too.

Meanwhile, senior leadership continue to leverage students as cash-cows while not taking decolonial approaches to education seriously. People that challenge the University in these ways get made into problems, and sometimes destroyed. For democracy to work, challenge must always be invited. This doesn’t stop with parliament but extends to all breathing institutions. At universities, when you disempower students they then feel they do not have the right to challenge information in class. This does not look like a democratic institution.

When academics challenge senior leadership teams only to be met with sour faces and gaslighting, you see there is no democracy no matter how much they strike – as the institution meets “troublemakers” (the complainers) with silence.

Boris Johnson will not see himself as a disgrace as he will always be part of that “canteen culture“, and you cannot judge someone to the standards that do not even see themselves in. Those same behaviours of not being accountable are in every institution. The only difference is as prime minister, is power. He is part of the gilded circle, leaving number ten in disgrace or not. These politicians have survived much much worse and will again. On both sides of the bench, there are too many millionaires who know nothing of what it means to be hungry and to do without.

Boris leaving is a smokescreen. Labour or Conservative the wider system is crooked and has been for years, all while there is a crisis of confidence in democracy in parliament and outside of it.

What can I, a cisgender man, say about abortion? I don’t really have an answer to that. But I do think it is vital that cis men do pick up some of the emotional labour. Recently, I have been talking to myself about Roe and hopefully this blog at the very least provokes questions. Increasingly, I have been made aware of the silence of cisgender men on Roe v. Wade while people from marginalised genders continue to pick up the emotional labour. Here, I aim to create what the late US senator John Lewis referred to as “good trouble … necessary trouble” to poke holes in the status quo.

Also, what could Roe v. Wade mean for us in Britain? The overturning of Roe situates the continued upholding of white supremacy through racial and gendered violence. First of all, in America there sits a racist enterprise that did not start with Trump (as convenient that would be to claim) but is centuries in the making. In his 1987 book The Birth Dearth, presidential advisor and author Ben Wattenberg wrote:

“The major problem confronting the United States today is there aren’t enough white babies being born. If we don’t do something about this and do it now, white people will be in the numerical minority and we will no longer be a white man’s land.”

At the time he wrote this, he was criticised as a white supremacist, as in the 1980s, the majority of immigrants moving into the United States were Black and Brown. In the book, he also claims 60% of the fetuses being aborted where white and if they could be kept alive, it would solve what he called “the birth dearth.” And what he was talking about is exactly as it sounds … eugenics.

In their 2021 essay ‘The Birth Dearth: The Sad but True Reason Why What’s Happening in Texas Right Now Shouldn’t Surprise You’, Ajah Hales writes

“Wattenberg peddled soft eugenics dressed up as concern for the economy and democracy across the globe. Becoming the world’s most powerful nation was, to Wattenberg, due to the efforts, values and contributions of white men, particularly Western Europeans.

Now the battle for control of white women’s uteri moved from a moralistic argument to a nationalistic one. I say white women because the reproductive organs of Black and other women of color were being policed in a totally different way.

While white women were encouraged to have babies, women of color were being forcibly sterilized and having dangerous forms of birth control pushed on them, sometimes through the use of financial incentives or time off of prison sentences.”

Over the past few days since the overturning of the Roe precedent, I have seen numbers of people (especially cisgender white women) posting memes and images of that ilk from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to depict a “new” dystopian present. It comes in the thinking of a “new” needed “feminist” reply to the overturning of Roe, as if the policing of people’s bodies only started now. Where was that support when Black women were asking in 2020 in response to the Murder of Breonna Taylor, and prior with the further murders of Black women by police? #SayHerName. Long story short, state violence that has always discriminated against the Global Majority, many white women are now seeing that what has frequently occurred in the long reach of colonial history, can also happen to them!

The use of The Handmaid’s Tale is offensive because the novel is basically, a study in whitewashing what happened to Black and Brown women historically in the United States, only then adapting it to white women’s lives in a fictional context. Only by applying it to white women, did a number of white people understand Black and Brown trauma, even more concerning that in a 2020 exit poll 55% of white women voters reportedly voted Trump. Furthermore, in America today it is also a crime for most ex-convicts to vote where this overturning of Roe will further disenfranchise many. Not just cis women but also transgender men, as well as many nonbinary and and intersex people. So, in many states now, access to safe abortions have now been criminalised. As Katie Halper said in a Double Down News broadcast,

“We’re still living in Trump’s America. Nothing has fundamentally changed, it’s just gotten worse. The policies Trump wanted to carry out are now being carried under Joe Biden’s watch.”

katie halper (2022)

The prevalence around guns and the policing of bodies (particlarly marginalised genders) takes me back to the ethos America was founded on – violence, violence, and more violence – where guns have more rights than sentient life. White terrorism continues in the 21st century just as it did 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. In 2022 at a Save America Rally, GOP congresswoman Mary Miller told an audience the overturning of Roe was “a historic victory for white life” bringing us back to The Great Replacement theory and a white fear of being outnumbered by Black and Brown people (that same fear could be argued to have been present in Enoch Powel’s 1968 River of Blood speech, further to changes to 1970s UK policing, as well as the implementation of the Nationality and Borders Act which could impact up to 6m people).

There is also a further Christian supremacy in the politicising of abortion to gain votes, and Christianity was historically the trojan horse for white supremacy. Intertwined with male supremacy (patriarchy … emphasis on white men here, but clearly not exclusively … i.e Black / Brown Conservatives and “nice white women“) this revisits what I like to call the Mad Men Thesis after the 2007 drama series set in the 1960s – discussing a patriarchy that asserted a woman’s place was to “serve” men, be it at work (doing the labour while men took credit) or home making house and raising children (while the husband took credit). These sorts of men also pushed values that protected their status (see phalluscentrism and what Laura Mulvey writes on the Male Gaze … misogyny in film), further to obsessions with holding power of over women.

This is in essence the boomerang movement of patriarchal white supremacy, as what frequently occurred in the domicile and / or global in/external elsewhere to Black and Brown people can happen to white people too if the state chooses! What’s been frequently said is that this sort of violence starts with us, but what gets missed is that it doesn’t end with us. For example, the Sarah Everard vigil was a stark reminder that police brutality that has long haunted Black and Brown people’s lives, can also impact the lives of cis white women even within their bubble of whiteness. Everyone who lives under the state is at risk of state violence depending on proximity (we have more in common than not).

However, in a UK context, it is interesting but not surprising to see many Britons othering the overturning of Roe v. Wade as an exclusively American issue when as we know all too well, where America leads Britain all too often follows. Whilst we most definitely should be in solidarity with our friends and colleagues in the United States, we must not get complacent in that textbook British exceptionalism. The overturning of Roe is fascism and fascism is also happening on British soil too. Since as of now, both the Nationality and Borders Bill (known as the Borders Act) and the Crime, Policing and Sentencing Bill (Courts Act) are etched into law. It doesn’t take much thought to see how a Roe v Wade situation could easily happen here.

In October 2019, Northern Ireland decriminalised abortion, but access to abortion is still precarious and abortion services have not yet been commissioned. And as Rachel Connolly writes “… the health minister Robin Swann, has refused to comply.” Amid the British state’s actions in criminalising asylum seekers and fostering a culture that seeks to normalise anti-trans violence (#RowlingGate) as the Tories continue to attack the rights of trans people as well, I hear a lot of this could never happen in Britain rhetoric. But it could happen in Britain and it is happening in Britain: anti-abortion laws are not only a gender issue but a human rights issue, where anti-abortion discourse harms on numerous grounds.

For example trans men and intersex people will also be impacted, further to working-class, the disabled and Black and Brown people. If what happened in America comes to Britain, the Tory horror show will grow darker while the National Health Service is auctioned off to the highest bidder … many of them American corporations where profits will be put ahead of people’s lives and wellbeing, as the NHS is victim of a forty-year stealth attack that started under Margaret Thatcher. With the NHS being sold off, how will those who rely on it be able to afford abortions, let alone access one, should they become criminalised too? And further plans to make “reforms” to the Human Rights Act, leave us in a vulnerable state of affairs. Britain is not America, but that “special relationship” appears in more ways than one.

Like the Borders Act as well as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, Roe v Wade didn’t just happen at random – and it also implicates far-right fantasies lead by Black and Brown conservatives as Nel Abbey tweeted: “The unspeakably dark side of having to work twice as hard and be twice as good to stand out” where Black judge Clarence Thomas revisits how white supremacy can come with a Black face.

During his confirmation hearing, he accused people of a “high-tech lynching” when he was accused of sexually harrassing Anita Hill. And as Katie Halper states, “one could argue without Joe Biden, Clarence Thomas would not be on the Supreme Courts today.” Yet, the Dems had ample chances to codify Roe into law but didn’t because … no backbone. As Obama stated in 2009, that an abortion rights law wasn’t a top priority. And really to sit at the table, you need (to varying degrees) emulate the master. As whiteness is as much exclusively about “being white” as patriarchy is as much exclusively about “being a man.”

America was a British colony for years and the US was founded on social discourses of industrialised rape via enslavement to create labour; kidnap of Indigenous children via white supremacist boarding schools; the enslavement of African children co-opted into the plantation economy, and restrictive immigration policies (such as the Chinese Exclusion Act 1882). Also, consider recently with anti-trans legislation being pushed through on multiple fronts, as well as sodomy laws that still existed in sixteen states as of 2020.

With the rolling back of human rights in Britain including on immigration and protest, we may then see future far-right attacks against reproductive freedoms that will hurt the marginalised worst of all. Just like in America, here in Britain we can’t vote our way out of this and we must make it “politically painful” (as Katie Halper says) for politicians to continue their middle-of-the-road politics. Call them Labour or Conservative, they will not save us and will leave us to rot in the gutter. More recently, unionists like Mike Lynch have proved a better opposition to the Tories than Kier Starmer (let alone Labour) symbolic of the power of working-class resistance in bringing political pain to a media class in cahoots with Government.

In the long reach of American history following and predating Reagan, social murder is commonpractice in the daily drumbeat we call structural violence. We lay naked in the synapse of crime and punishment, and the overturning of Roe is the latest iteration where what has been long-known by many Black and Brown people, many white people are now taking notice as it now impacts them where they sleep.

Under the rhetoric of anti-abortion, these people are pro-life until the child is born. But these same people will then support easy access to lethal weapons, where an AR-15 whose sole purpose is to kill has more rights than life itself. British exceptionalism has no place in this discussion because if a Roe comes to Britain and passes like in America, many of us are going to die. And you will never see the murderer.

As an educator, I have a conscious investment in the Education system. However, I’m also one of those people some would define as a “pracademic” (practitioner-academic) who still works within the fields he teaches about (in this context creative writing and history). Though with much of my writing having a socially scientific slant, I’m always thinking about education as a site of violence and liberation … most recently Child Q and the role of teachers possibly as police in disguise (at least in terms of thinking and culture). While I see arguments for removing police officers from schools, I wonder if that would do much … other than be a symbolic gesture. I do agree police shouldn’t be in schools, but the culture of policing is everywhere. The only thing that seperates police officers from others is the added state powers.

When Britons consider the problems with UK policing, I am uncertain if this stretches beyond the uniform to how some educators in schools and universities act like cops. Even after the Murder of Sarah Everard, there are many people who I have found struggle to contemplate that the main job of The Police is to uphold the status quo and that includes protecting property (i.e the streets) even if that means steamrolling The People from the streets (i.e protesters). Moreover, Child Q (a Black child) was brutalised by London Met in 2020 further discussed in a 2022 report while a Mixed-Race child (known under alias Olivia) was similarly brutalised in May 2022 strip-searched whilst on her period. There has since been a third victim shedding light on the extremities of London Metropolitan Police’s strip-search practices.

When I was a sabbatical officer at Northampton, I sat on a number of disciplinary panels where panel members questioned students with the same manner as a police officer. Considering these students were largely Black (in my experience) and the panellists white, these encounters always had very racist overtones. Talking to white students, the offenses Black students were punished for … white students would boast about even with staff knowing. Based on the 2011 census Black people are 3% of the population (the 2021 data will be different … whenever released). However, during my 2019-20 sabbatical year, investigated deaths after police contact were disproportionate (Andrews, 2016; IOPC, 2017/18). And while 3% of the population was Black, we also make up 13% of prisoners (Andrews, 2019: xxiii).

With many Black British students at Northampton from north and south London (where if you are Black, you are also at greater risk of being stopped by police), the fact these panel members acted like police simply adds harm revisiting the strained race relations between Black civilians and white institutions (including police, education, and healthcare). This also revisits the sociohistorical significance of the relationship between ‘white masters and enslaved Black people’ with the crimes of yesterday playing out today causing harm tomorrow. The recent Living Black report simply adds to that. And as an educator who does go into schools, I know policing does happen in classrooms whether those schools have police officers on site or not. As Carla Shalaby (2017) writes these students as:

“…the caged canaries, children who are more sensitive than their peers to the toxic environment of the classroom that limits their freedom, clips their wings, and mutes their voices.”

When I tell people (let’s be honest largely white people) that I am no fan of the Police, they often respond with individual positive experiences they have had with individual police officers as a way to silence my experience. Often along the lines of my dad’s a police officer and a good just man … how could you hate him? Silencing through “whataboutery” unwilling to acknowledge that race and policing has a British history to it that goes way back to at least the 1919 Race Riots. As historian James Walvin (1973) writes

“All neutral observers agreed that the black community was on the defensive and yet its members, in trying to defend themselves were arrested and prosecuted for their attempts at self-defence, while all but a handful of the white aggressors went unchallenged” (p207).

Generally, I need a very good reason to call the Police because I know even if you call them for help, they can turn on you (especially if you’re Black). I know if I call the Police to an incident, I am not only putting myself in danger but also every Black person in a two-mile radius in danger. Britain is not America and they do not have guns as standard issue, but we must also not pretended that violence begins and ends with guns. Yet, seemingly many white people I have spoken to seem to find it more difficult (in my experience) to consider the institution of policing and how that institution is violent and harms people (even post-George Floyd). Yes, Black people are disproportionately harmed but we must not pretend we’re alone in that. Whilst you can take police officers out of schools (and university … ahem), that ideology of discipline and control can still reside in staff when given power within spheres of influence.

The book Policing the Crisis (Hall and Colleagues, 1978) recognised a change in authoritarian measures levied against Britain’s Black communities that was largely done with public consent in the 1970s. The media took the role in narrating ‘social knowledge’ of street crime and created a mythology around the “mugger” which street crime was racialised against. Thus social anxieties around young people and “urban space” and young Black people (especially males) was viewed through. I see these social anxieties still playing out today as young Black children are policed in classrooms, not necessarily by police officers but by teachers maintaining “law and order.” This is further complicated by adultification where Black children are seen as older than they are – more “adult-like”, more “sexual”, more “mature.”

At a university level, I know this policing happens in housing and accomodation. Whilst as a sabbatical officer at Northampton between 2019-20, I spoke to Black students who had experienced racist incidents from Residential Life, and these students would not make complaints out of fear much in the same culture of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Jeremy Bentham’s “panopticon.” These students knew they were being watched and policed in different ways, but they could not point at the aggressor.

As Nirmal Puwar states

“There is an undeclared white masculine body underlying the universal construction of the enlightenment ‘individual’. […] In the face of a determined effort to disavow the (male) body, critics have insisted that the ‘individual’ is embodied, and that it is the white male figure … who is actually taken as the central point of reference. […] It is against this template, one that is defined in opposition to women and non-whites — after all, these are the relational terms in which masculinity and whiteness are constituted — that women and ‘black’ people who enter these spaces are measured” (Puwar, 2004: 141).

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When I was sixteen, I was one of those students that was excluded (put in internal isolation for three days for talking in class … definitely a disproportionate reaction to the misdemanour). And here, I know this experience is relatively mild in proxmity to many of my Black peers at other schools who were being punished multiple times a week (and others expelled). When many white people talk to me about school, the common denominator is that it was somewhere they felt relatively safe. Now, I get emails from Black parents of Black children and white parents of Black Mixed-Race children about racism in schools and how the schools don’t do anything. The policing of Black racialised bodies within schools is a further discussion to be had, and my community in Northamptonshire is not beyond criticism.

The frequency to which I hear Black students are punished at school and university is alarming, not surprising to see the the crossover between race and prison … as well as neurodiversity and prison where those who are seen to be “difficult” invading the space of the classroom are punished: “we have, then, a public execution and a timetable, they do not punish the same crimes nor the same type of delinquent, but they each define a certain penal style” (Foucault, 1975: 7). In this context, Foucault was talking about the man who pulled a penknife on King Louis XIV. The man was publicly drawn and quartered. He is then compared to the schedule of a prisoner in the House of Prisoners eighty years later. Two very different punishments but both ultimately damaging in different ways and products of different épistemes.

However, what I draw from this is how in today’s society, difference is punished, and there is a longevity and immediacy to the punishment. For example, the school-to-prison pipeline sees a figurative drawn-quartering of its victims that sees children through mechanisms of punishment all their lives. If they do manage to escape the prison system, that record is held over their head. Our tendency is to see medieval punishments as less humane than today’s punishment systems as if there is such thing as “progressive” violence. Yet, things like social murder (hostile environment; austerity; Cost of Living) can be compared to a slow genocide while things like the British Empire are relegated as historical relics (historical indeed?)

With the de/underfunding of the police over the last decade (Fleetwood and Lea, 2022), the greater threat sits in ideologies of control which can be picked up by anybody. Norman Fairclough (1994) argued power is “implicit within everyday social practices …. at every level in all domains of life” (p50). Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment is a another example. When ordinary people were given the simultative power of prison guards, that power went to their heads. Those who volunteered to be “prisoners” were subjected to that and some were traumatised. Except in schools, they are not volunteers. We do not actually need police in schools for the simulation of policing to be carried out, as teachers and other school staff can carry this out just as academics have done in my experience at university level!

The practices of prisons “… produces subjected and practiced bodies, “docile” bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an ‘aptitude’, a ‘capacity’, which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection” (Foucault, 1975: 138)

discipline and punish: the birth of the prison

Foucault also argued that since the 1600s, practices of pushing “obedience through discipline and routine” have pervaded through other spheres “as if they tended to cover the entire social body” (Foucault, 1975: 139). The dissemination of internal / external exclusions, detentions, reprimands, housepoints, praise for 100% attendance (as if students aren’t allowed to be ill?) For students with learning differences, neurodivergent (dis)abilities, physically disabilities, as well as those with mental-ill health (and more), this is also ableism practiced through the norms of the institution.

Schools prepare students for the workforce creating drones rather than full human beings. As someone that is also autistic, I remember my teachers centralising the ideas of “fitting in” and how I did not fit in with their aesthetic of existing in the world. There sits the epistemic violence where the mainstream knowledge of socialising children with other children becomes the be all and all. The routine of conformity culture and those who do not conform are disciplined and punished in various ways, where discipline to me in school was being forced to fit in (basically ABA [autistic conversation therapy]) and thus impeded my ability to construct my own identity as someone who is not neurotypical.

Ultimately because power is not exercised exclusively through physical dominance, but cultural dominance through the stories we tell and the images that get produced. We become institutionalised by the practices we have routinely been subjected to whether that be school or the prison, thus transforming ourselves – not into the best humans we can be as humans – but as “docile bodies.” Those of us that do put in the work of unlearning what we have been conditioned into are then stigmatised. We are seen as “agitators” and “trouble” as the institution protects itself. This unlearning is not bloodless and if we are to ever have a decolonial society, we must encourage and support those who go against the grain and the norms of our institutions. Not make examples of them (Ahmed, 2018; 2021).