1/ This is going to be a bit of a thread. I grew up in the Britain of the 70s/80s, it was a time when the NF was marching on the streets & racist violence & murders were an every day occurrence. Like many of my generation my home was attacked, redpepper.org.uk/bame-activists…
2/ I carry scars from racist attacks, and experienced the collective trauma & anger of a community fighting for the right to live free from attack. That experience made me a life long anti-racist & gave me a burning hatred of injustice everywhere. As we fought for the right to
For the right to defend our communities in the face of State violence, neglect & politicians who played the race card for electoral reasons. That experience made me an internationalist, the suffering of people be it in South Africa, Palestine, Chile or Nicaragua felt as much my
4/ my fight as much as my own. My politics was one of politically black, one that saw black not as the pigment of my skin but of the collective experience of all those who suffered racism, colonialism & injustice. We worked to create unity between our communities refusing to
5/ Create hierarchies of oppression. We learnt about fascism, the Nazis and felt the pain of the Jewish community as our pain. We understood that racist immigration policies against black communities started with racist immigration policies against the Jewish community. That the
6/ the racism spouted by the Mail was an echo of the racism targeted against the Jewish community. As black activists we built solidarity with the Jewish community & on every protest those we knew understood what solidarity meant, at a time when sections of the left were failing
7/ us were comrades such as @JewishSocialist Throughout the 80s& 90s we physically fought the fascists. I worked for one of the most important grassroots anti racist organisations in the country - Newham Monitoring Project. We helped thousands of families & organised countless
8/ family campaigns around racist murders & police violence. From Newham 7, to Sahitharan, from Tower Hamlets 9 to Ibrahim Sey, to Stephen Lawrence & Jean Charles de Menezes - there wasn’t a single major campaign that we were not involved in. I was fortunate to be elected Chair
9/ of NMP. We helped to make the State recognise institutional racism when it & every major political party refused to. Through out it we also stood with the Palestinian people in their fight for justice as we did against South African apartheid. We were staunch opponents of
10/ of anti-semitism and took on reactionary elements in our communities who in opposing Israel propagated anti-semitism. Our mantra was ‘none of us are free until we are all free’ and that our unity with the Jewish community against racism & fascism in the UK was unconditional,
11/ as was our solidarity with the Palestinian people against Israeli oppression. The recent concerns of Jewish people about the rise of anti-semitism is valid, for its embedded in British society as is racism against black communities. No one should ignore any communities
12/ concerns or fears. And neither should we create hierarchies of what is acceptable racism. Today islamophobia, racism against Roma, anti-black racism is brushed aside by political commentators & the media as if to say our lives don’t matter.
13/ Through out all those years there were a handful of politicians who never refused our request for help, stood with our anti-racist campaigns when we were called extremists, they marched with us, and would respond night or day to any request from a family in need. One was
14/ one of them was @johnmcdonnellMP & the other was @jeremycorbyn . To now see Boris Johnson who has openly peddled racism - who called us ‘picaninnies’, who wrote about niggers & coons, who normalised hate speech against Muslim women - be acclaimed as anti-racist whilst those
15/who spent their lives in the fight against racism & fascism smeared as racists is utterly grotesque. I hope & pray that in this election every one who hates racism, fascism, anti-semitism & white supremacy will listen to our voices and reject the politics of bigotry & hatred.
16/ the politics of Trump & Bannon, the walls & fences of Orban & Salvini, the anti-migrant xenophobia of Farage, and will refuse to allow the UK to join the far right axis of Modi, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Trump & Orban. For there is no doubt that those of us who wear our passports
17/ on our faces and the scars of racist violence on our bodies fear the election of a Boris Johnson with every bone in our bodies. Please don’t let racism be normalised & don’t throw us under the bus in the interests of those creating artificial hierarchies of racism.
