Abolishing institutional racism

Introduction

In the year 2020 racial politics in Britain experienced two significant, yet contrasting, interventions. The first, the Black Lives Matter protest movements sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in the US, challenged police racism and state power. Demonstrators attacked symbols of the British Empire and made demands for defunding and abolishing policing. This forced the press, politicians and the general public to contend with the colonial roots of racism and community-led alternatives to police and prisons. The second intervention, the government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED), denied the existence of institutional racism in Britain. Bolstered by Conservative politicians committed to fighting a ‘culture war’, the Commission and its supporters sought to close the discussions opened up by the protests earlier that year.

An important question arises from these very different political interventions: how did two political mobilisations, analysing institutional racism at the same time, in the same place, come to such different conclusions? To answer this question, we need to explore the contrasting interpretations of institutional racism which have influenced these opposing approaches to the issue. On the one hand is the original definition that emerged from the anti-colonial and Black Power politics of the 1960s. ¹ On the other is the more liberal interpretation which became mainstreamed in Britain following the Macpherson Inquiry into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. ²

These divergent framings of institutional racism will be examined by first focusing on critiques of institutional racism articulated by the Black Power movements of the 1960s and ’70s. From the US context, I will look at the landmark text Black Power: the politics of liberation, which coined the term. ³ Next, I will turn to Britain, analysing the newspaper of the Black Unity and Freedom Party (BUFP), Black Voice. Both these case studies demonstrate the links these movements made between institutional racism, capitalism and colonialism, as well as anti-racism, socialism and anti-imperialism. I will then turn to the more liberal interpretations of institutional racism which have influenced state-sanctioned commissions. This will involve outlining some of the critiques of Macpherson’s interpretation of institutional racism, utilising contemporary contributions to Race & Class ⁴ and from those directly involved in the Stephen Lawrence Campaign. ⁵ These three areas of anti-racist critique – state power, capitalism and colonialism – are not necessarily new in themselves. ⁶ However, I intend to demonstrate how all three can be used to explain the emergence of two contrasting analyses of institutional racism that arose in 2020.

In the final section, I will consider how the two paths taken by critics of institutional racism provided the basis for oppositional interventions fighting over the terrain of anti-racism in the 2020s. The protest movement, in its most radical iteration, confronts British colonialism and demands defunding the police and an abolitionist future. These demands are, I will argue, a consequence of racism’s endurance twenty years after Macpherson and an attempt by younger activists to apply Black Power and anti-colonial politics to the issues and opportunities before them. ⁷ On the other end of the political spectrum is the government Commission which claims institutional racism is a thing of the past, making Britain ‘a model for other white-majority countries’. ⁸ Here, we will see how Macpherson’s liberal interpretation stripped institutional racism of its colonial foundations and embeddedness in capitalism and state power. This enabled an ahistorical and depoliticised set of data, demonstrating racist outcomes across Britain, to be interpreted any way the Commission and its government allies saw fit.

Black Power and anti-colonialism

Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and Charles Hamilton coined the term ‘institutional racism’ in 1967 in their landmark publication Black Power: the politics of liberation. ⁹ Institutional racism is most simply defined as the process through which an institution produces racist outcomes. Writing in the US context, they use the analogy of the colony to explain how and why these racist outcomes arise. While Black people in 1960s America do not constitute a colony in the literal sense, they argue that the racial hierarchies of colonialism, and the power used to enforce those hierarchies, are applicable to US institutions. The authors critique capitalism in America, which sees Black workers paid less and working under worse conditions than their white counterparts. They analyse the political power wielded by a state that enforces racist laws or neglects the needs of Black communities. These patterns, the authors argue, reflect the racialised exploitation and violence in colonies like Rhodesia and South Africa. Connected to this are the social outcomes of institutional racism – forms of racial oppression – which were also seen in formal colonisation. Poor housing conditions and high infant mortality rates are among the forms of state neglect which contribute to, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore would later put it, Black people’s vulnerability to premature death. ¹⁰

One of the reasons the colony analogy is useful is because the US itself was founded as a settler-colonial slave colony. This colony developed political institutions which maintained the racial hierarchies that its economic and social system relied on. Therefore, forms of racist violence, exploitation and neglect which it facilitated historically, and which continue into the present, are not a failing of the political, economic and social system – they are operating as intended. In other words, rather than racism representing a defect in the system, it in fact characterises the normal functioning of US institutions. Thus, the analogy of the colony is crucial – it historicises institutional racism to demonstrate that racist outcomes are the norm, not an aberration. Additionally, this colonial context reaffirms racism’s primary functions – to reproduce a racialised order across politics (state power) and across economics (capitalist exploitation). It is the historical, political and economic context in which institutional racism operates that also aided Britain’s Black Power activists in drawing connections between colonialism and racism in the twentieth century.

Britain’s Black Power movements used the parallels between racism and colonialism in ways that were, while interrelated, different from their US counterparts. Organisations like the Black Panther Movement, Black Liberation Front and BUFP were at the forefront of radical critiques of racism, capitalism and imperialism. These militant Black organisations were connected to the anti-colonial struggles in Africa and the Marxist-inspired workers’ movements across the globe. ¹¹ In the 1950s and ’60s, British Black radicals challenged Britain’s informal ‘colour bar’ which was enforced by street-based racisms, often with the tacit approval of police. ¹² Later campaigns included educational projects and movements challenging police and border power. ¹³ Yet, operating concurrently were state-managed approaches which sought to monopolise anti-racist practice, to the detriment of these radical grassroots movements.

The first Race Relations Act was passed in 1965, outlawing overt racial discrimination in public places. The first person to be prosecuted under the Act, however, was Black Power activist Michael X. ¹⁴ Following demands from anti-racist lobby groups such as the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), the Act was amended in 1968 to include employment and housing. ¹⁵ By 1976, it had been further extended to incorporate discrimination in education and the provision of goods and services. Crucially, the 1970s also saw the government establish a number of organisations tasked with promoting racial equality and challenging discrimination. These official commissions and parliamentary committees made proposals which positioned the state as the key driver of anti-racist change. ¹⁶ Unsurprisingly, their close relationship with the state aroused criticism and ridicule from Britain’s Black Power movements. One of the ways they spread their critiques of state-managed anti-racism was through newsletters, magazines and papers which were distributed in community spaces and on street corners across the country. ¹⁷

Black Voice, the newspaper of the BUFP, ran a series of articles attacking the state-led anti-racism which was growing in influence in the 1970s. The headline of a lead article, ‘The travelling circus comes to town’, ¹⁸ illustrates how seriously it took the anti-racist credentials of the new Parliamentary Select Committee on Race Relations. The BUFP took aim at the ‘bourgeois committee’ for supporting a police force which commits ‘atrocities against the working-class section of society and especially against black working-class people’. ¹⁹ It argued that a police racism, which was rooted in British colonialism, would continue unabated if the liberal reforms for diversity drives, police complaints tribunals, cultural training and control of ‘certain publications’ were implemented. ²⁰

The publications of concern to the select committee were, of course, those being distributed by Black Power collectives like the BUFP, that considered capitalism and the state to be the drivers of racism. This Black Power critique of racism was considered a threat to the legitimacy of government-sanctioned anti-racism and state power more generally. This was illustrated by the harassment of sellers of Black Power newspapers and the setting up of a Black Power desk in the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch which monitored and disrupted their activities. ²¹

The training the committee proposed involved sending officers to Britain’s colonies and former colonies in the Caribbean to study ‘West Indian culture’ and ‘police techniques’. Improving the policing of postcolonial migrants in Britain by learning policies and practices from colonial police forces was a strategy that would continue for decades. ²² Indeed, the threat of the colonial ‘boomerang’ ²³ was not lost on the BUFP. Rather than learning about Caribbean cultures, policies and practices, the BUFP considered the trips to be part of a project that sought to bring colonial policing to the British mainland. Yet, it maintained, ‘one wonders why they have to travel so far to find solutions to problems which have their roots in and among their own society and ranks’. ²⁴ In other words, for the BUFP, the racism of colonial policing in the anglophone Caribbean forms part of a series of interconnected British institutions.

The BUFP vividly articulates the connections between colonialism and racism in its searing critique of proposals for more Black police recruits. Titled, ‘A tool of racism’, the article claims that ethnic diversity in policing will not only do little to reduce police racism, but will strengthen the legitimacy of a racist police force and dampen movements of resistance against it. By drawing parallels with British colonialism, the authors argue that

In order to rule India, the British used Indian troops under British officers. The same thing was done in Africa and in the West Indies. In this, British colonialists were able to fool people into believing that native troops were better than English troops; it also had the desired effect of quelling the rebellious spirit of the people. ²⁵

In other words, Britain’s diversity drives were not new and progressive, but a tried and tested colonial policy which was being reintroduced to the British mainland. The effects of these reforms would both improve the image of the police among members of the public and undermine more radical grassroots movements against police racism. While British racism emerged from colonialism, Britain’s Black Power movements took inspiration from anti-colonialism. This better enabled groups like BUFP to historicise institutional racism in its colonial context, as well as demonstrate how it became material through capitalist exploitation and state power.

Like Carmichael and Hamilton’s analysis of the US, British racism is best understood through the prism of colonial exploitation, political control and class cleavages. Britain was established in 1707 as a state which already held colonies, with racial hierarchy being a fundamental part of how it governed. Thus, while Britain is not a white settler colony like the US, it has been, since its inception, an imperial state. The violence of exploitation, resource extraction and land dispossession was rationalised by racial hierarchy, as was the social and political power Britain held over colonised populations. The British state, and its institutions, have therefore always used racism to reproduce a racialised imperial order. ²⁶ Framing Black people as essentially violent, deviant and/or criminal means that racism is a fundamental part of the professional ideology of British policing. ²⁷ Like the US, we can consider racism in Britain to characterise the normal functioning of its institutions, rather than racist outcomes representing an outlier or fault in an otherwise non-racist system which can be rectified by a committee of government experts. However, this crucial detail in the analysis of institutional racism was set to be sidelined in the 1990s, as the British establishment sought to capture and contain the demands of Britain’s community-based anti-racist movements.

Liberal capture: the ‘failings’ of Macpherson

In the 1980s, a new generation of Black youth rebelled against police racism, with uprisings across England confronting the police head-on. The subsequent report into the disturbances led by Lord Scarman was generally dismissed by Black community-based activists. While his report conceded that there were some individual officers with prejudicial views, he rejected the idea that the police were institutionally racist. ²⁸ But by the late 1990s, Britain’s anti-racist movement found an unlikely ally. In 1993, a racist attack in south London resulted in the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Investigators were accused of ignoring evidence and potential suspects, while criminalising the victims and their families. The subsequent inquiry was chaired by Sir William Macpherson, a former lieutenant colonel in the British Army and a retired High Court Judge, not known for his commitment to anti-racism. But the community-led Stephen Lawrence Campaign set its sights on ensuring that police racism was exposed not just in the Lawrence case, but across the institution.

The Campaign filled the inquiry’s public gallery with community supporters who made themselves active participants – releasing public statements independent of the Lawrence family. They organised public meetings and demonstrations, drawing international support from former Black Panther David Hilliard and anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela. ²⁹ Sir William Macpherson eventually accepted that institutional racism in policing meant that the whole organisation required change. The Stephen Lawrence Campaign thus became more than about bringing Stephen’s killers to justice. It developed into a movement which took on both racial violence on the streets and the racism of state institutions. This was the victory that radical anti-racists had been waiting for – police racism could not be dismissed as a few ‘bad apples’, bigots who could be disciplined or dismissed. The Macpherson Report published seventy recommendations, with the explicit intention of transforming policing in Britain.

The police were on the back foot, struggling to defend themselves from a campaign which had pushed public opinion in favour of the inquiry’s findings. ³⁰ This was an opportunity for the country to develop its understanding of racism as state-led and structural, and for racist institutions to be subjected to scrutiny and substantial change. Yet, despite the optimism which accompanied this victory, progress was short-lived. The Macpherson Report, while identifying institutional racism in policing, fell short in three key areas. First, Macpherson provides no historical context to institutional racism. This implies that racism arose not from colonial history, but from a multi-ethnic present. The second area is its total neglect of capitalism in facilitating racialised divisions of labour exploitation, a key incentive for the emergence and reproduction of racism. ³¹ Third, is the report’s lack of engagement with politics and state power, a problem which has been stressed by contemporary academics and campaigners. ³²

In stark contrast to the Black Power politics of activists on both sides of the Atlantic, the Macpherson Report dehistoricises racism. Racism is stripped of the histories of how it was used to rationalise colonial dispossession, exploitation and extraction. ³³ Policing was a crucial component of the colonial power which regulated its racial order. Colonised populations, framed as violent, chaotic, deviant and/or lazy, were both the antithesis of, and a threat to, Euro-modernity. ³⁴ Policing does not simply emerge as the physical enforcer of labour regimes and sociopolitical stability in the colony. It also represents the law, the institutional embodiment of the morality, justice and national identity of the imperial state. ³⁵ Thus, the racialised order and exploitation of the colony is morality and justice. Any attempt to disrupt this order is interpreted as a violent, or potentially violent, threat to the integrity of the nation, and must be disciplined with a greater violence – that of the police.

Macpherson’s historical vacuum is filled with an explanation of institutional racism that simply constitutes the sum total of individuals’ ‘prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping’. ³⁶ This reflects popular assumptions that racist ideas and practices emerge through an unexplained spontaneity in white people living in a multi-ethnic society. ³⁷ This leaves Macpherson stuck between deciding whether racism is the product of intentional or unintentional racists, rather than a historically constituted system of exploitation, violence and control. Thus, many campaigns against racist police violence made demands based on these assumptions. Individual officers were to be educated or disciplined in order to remain professional when ‘doing their job’ and stop ‘failing’ in their role to protect people in Black communities from violence or harm. ³⁸

The second problem lies in the Macpherson Report’s lack of engagement with the political economy of racism – racial capitalism. One of the key motivations for reproducing racism is that it enables capitalism to maximise profits and expand across the globe. Capitalism is one of the ways in which racism becomes material – racial hierarchy shapes how workers are differentially exploited, disciplined or rendered surplus. Specifically, dispossession, enslavement, indenture, wage labour and other forms of differentiated exploitation under capitalism are shaped by racial regimes which are constantly shifting to serve the interests of capital. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore states, ‘all capitalism is racial from its beginning – which is to say capitalism that we have inherited, that is constantly producing and reproducing itself – and it will continue to depend on racial practice and racial hierarchy’. ³⁹ Examples of racial capitalism in the present include the differential exploitation and dispossession of peoples across the Global South and the mistreatment, expulsion and incarceration of migrants by Britain. ⁴⁰ This has important implications for how institutional racism is addressed, determining both the role of capital and the institution responsible for protecting capital: the police.

Macpherson’s decontextualisation thus further entrenches the myth that the role of policing is to dispassionately enforce laws which do not favour any particular individual or group. The report only concedes that there exists in Britain ‘public bodies as well as private individuals which are unwittingly discriminatory against Black people’, thus leading to institutional racism. ⁴¹ In other words, the Macpherson Report does not frame individual prejudice as one of the outcomes of a racist system of exploitation and control, historically constituted by colonialism. Rather, it frames individual prejudice and racial bias as psychological or moral deficiencies, which then lead to otherwise objective and fair institutions reproducing racism. Specifically, the report’s definition inverts that of Carmichael and Hamilton by making prejudice the prerequisite to institutional racism – in Macpherson’s world, the tail wags the dog.

The clearest flaw with the Macpherson Report’s definition of institutional racism is its thin critique of the state. The BUFP warned its readers in the 1970s that the state could not be trusted to tackle racism, as it is integral to racism’s power. Examples included the Immigration Acts, which are likened to a ‘Slaves’ Charter’ designed to better enable the control and exploitation of Black people in Britain. ⁴² Indeed, despite citing Carmichael and Hamilton, who similarly frame institutional racism as a form of state power, ⁴³ Macpherson denies the notion that laws and policies are racist. Rather, the report argues that it is in the application of policies that institutional racism arises. This clears politicians and policy-makers of reproducing racism through legislation such as border controls which target racialised minorities. ⁴⁴ This leaves the government ‘facing both ways’ – implementing policies which reproduce and deepen racism, while leading initiatives which claim to combat racial inequality. ⁴⁵

It appears that Macpherson had been influenced by the Racial Awareness Training (RAT) which had gained popularity after the 1981 riots. RAT was developed in the US during the 1970s and was pushed by central and local governments across Britain, which claimed it would reform the cognitive processes which led to police officers enforcing laws in a racist manner. Macpherson reflected RAT’s approach, which was based on a misinterpretation of racism: ‘though it connected racism with white institutions, nowhere did it connect the institutions themselves with an exploitative white power structure’, thus severing ‘institutional racism from state power’. ⁴⁶ This was brought into sharp relief when the police were compelled to engage with community-based anti-racist activists. Gus John, for instance, former contributor to Race Today ⁴⁷ and part of the Stephen Lawrence Campaign, was commissioned by the Home Office to assess the racial awareness training of police following the Macpherson Inquiry. In his official assessment, John concluded that the entire initiative was a ‘costly and wasteful exercise’. He later wrote that this is because the ‘police and the state [are] inseparable partners in institutional racism’ and therefore ‘[t]o expect that Macpherson was going to have any impact upon how the British police treated Black people was to fail to understand the British state and its institutions’. ⁴⁸

John was not alone in his critical appraisal of the limits of Macpherson, yet anti-racism was stuck in a bind. The movement wanted justice for the victims of racial violence, but their only avenue for justice was via a reworking of state power. Naturally, they demanded fresh legislation against racism and an overhaul of policing, subjecting them to Freedom of Information requests and the Race Relations Acts for the first time. Yet the question still remained as to how individual officers could be held accountable by commissions which were controlled by the Home Office, or the police themselves. ⁴⁹ For many campaigners, the recommendations did not go far enough. Police stop and search should have been limited, argued the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, but it was instead expanded by the government, with the added provision of recording the use of this power. ⁵⁰ As Sivanandan lamented, the Race Relations Act was to be applied to officers proven to overtly discriminate, but no provision was made to challenge stop and search powers which disproportionately targeted Black youth. ⁵¹ Advocates of the Lawrence Campaign also focused on the police’s refusal to effectively implement Macpherson’s recommendations while defending the term institutional racism, which came under sustained attack from a rightwing media now panicking that the inquiry they’d championed had gone too far. ⁵²

Nonetheless, community-based anti-racism had won an important victory over the police, mainstreamed critical discussions of institutional racism and was affecting policies across every area of government. Yet it was hard to see how safety could be improved for Black communities in a way that did not rely on a racist state passing anti-racist legislation, to be enforced by an institutionally racist police service. In other words, it was unclear how Black communities could simultaneously challenge racist state institutions, street racism and violence, when the first of these was being relied on to challenge the latter two.

Liberal failure: the forward march of the racial state

Five years after the Macpherson Report’s publication, police racism had already begun to intensify. While diversity drives, equalities training and consultancy committees proliferated, policies which targeted racialised categories of crime, including drug dealers, ⁵³ gangs, ⁵⁴ terrorists ⁵⁵ and illegal immigrants, ⁵⁶ expanded. When the Conservatives retook power in 2010, the trend continued. Following the 2011 riots, David Cameron declared an ‘all-out war on gangs’, ⁵⁷ and the ‘hostile environment’ agenda for migrants was launched a year later. ⁵⁸ In 2015, the Prevent policy, which sought to identify signs of ‘violent extremism’ mainly in Muslim communities, was relaunched. ⁵⁹ By 2020, new legislation was being introduced which sought to deepen these forms of racist police power, further criminalising the lives of Gypsy Roma Traveller communities, groups challenging police searches and street protest. ⁶⁰

The ever-expanding carceral state was doing little to reduce street racism: following the 2016 referendum which led to Britain leaving the European Union, recorded instances of racially motivated crimes increased by around a third. ⁶¹ The results of the escalation of carceral politics were stark: police powers for tackling gangs, immigrants and terrorists saw the police become increasingly militarised. ⁶² They were given more powers to impose injunctions which restricted civil liberties, ⁶³ and to monitor and spy on suspect communities, ⁶⁴ all of which expanded their capacity to arrest, charge and incarcerate. The prison population almost doubled between 1993 and 2019, with racialised minorities making up nearly a quarter of all incarcerated people, despite constituting less than 13 per cent of the population. ⁶⁵ Immigration detention centres, categorising some incarcerated people as ‘foreign nationals’, and regular deportations became a common feature of Britain’s border regime. ⁶⁶

Deaths at the hands of police also continued unabated. In March 2011, reggae artist Smiley Culture died when police raided his home, and a young Black man in Birmingham named Kingsley Burrell died after being restrained by police during a mental health episode. In the summer of that year, Mark Duggan, a young Black man, was shot dead by police in Tottenham (north London), sparking protest and four days of civil unrest across England in which over ten thousand people took to the streets. ⁶⁷ In the years that followed, Sarah Reed, ⁶⁸ Jermaine Baker ⁶⁹ and Mzee Mohammed ⁷⁰ were among the Black deaths at the hands of the state which sparked particular outrage.

The abolitionist ideas gaining traction in the US became more influential across the Atlantic. While the Black Lives Matter movement had, by 2020, developed into a national protest movement, the campaign had emerged seven years earlier. In the second term of the Obama presidency, liberal anti-racism was failing more spectacularly than ever, with America’s first Black president unwilling to adequately confront police killings. It had never been clearer that Black representation in institutions of power was not going to bring about the ‘hope’ and ‘change’ it promised. ⁷¹ It is within this radical critique of the Obama moment that the abolitionist politics of campaigns like Black Lives Matter began to proliferate. ⁷² The demand for control over the police had collapsed among the Left and was being replaced by critiques of mass incarceration popularised by Michelle Alexander, ⁷³ alongside calls for prison abolition from scholar activists such as Angela Davis, Beth Richie, Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. ⁷⁴

Anti-racist activists growing up in a post-Macpherson Britain, in which a consensus on institutional racism in policing had been normalised, were surrounded by a plethora of organisations and initiatives that sought to address this racism. But like the promises made by Obama, the recommendations and hopes of post-Macpherson Britain rang hollow. As veteran anti-racist campaigner Suresh Grover remarked, ‘we are seeing the emergence of a younger generation . . . [that] have learnt that the gains that should have been made have not been made’. Grover notes that ‘they are willing to grapple with the nature of state racism . . . using different tools’. ⁷⁵ Demonstrations in solidarity with protests in Ferguson, New York and Baltimore shut down major shopping districts in 2014 and 2015, and the families of those killed by police in Britain attended these actions, drawing connections between racist state violence in the US, Europe’s borders and the UK. In 2016, Black Lives Matter UK organised a shutdown across four British cities protesting racist state violence, prisons, borders and climate breakdown. ⁷⁶ As the ‘migrant crisis’ swept the Mediterranean, with people fleeing war, climate change and economic underdevelopment dying, destitute or incarcerated on the shores of Europe, the movement against borders rose in popularity. ⁷⁷

Yet, while these actions drew national headlines and stimulated a national conversation about policing, it was the police killing of George Floyd in America which would culminate in both the largest protests and the mainstreaming of conversations about defunding as a means to abolishing police and prisons. ⁷⁸ Liberal anti-racism was tinkering around the edges of a racist state, pushing against a tide of racialised forms of exploitation and violence. It was clear that anti-racism training, accountability committees and diversity drives were insufficient in tackling state racism – we should perhaps be unsurprised, therefore, that a generation who grew up under the failures of these liberal reforms would look towards a more radical politics.

Retreat from the centre ground: from anti-colonialism to abolitionism

We have seen how Black Power politics links resistance to police racism with wider struggles against capitalism and imperialism. I will now outline how abolitionism in twenty-first-century Britain draws on the radical politics of Black Power and anti-colonialism in the twentieth century. In doing so, I will also underline how these interconnected schools of thought provide the antidote to the failings of liberal anti-racism generally, and those of Macpherson specifically. Understanding racist state violence as a historically constituted disciplinary tool necessary for the reproduction of imperial power is crucial for movements challenging police racism. The statue of Edward Colston, a slave holder in Bristol, a city built on the triangular transatlantic trade, was torn down by Black Lives Matter protesters in the summer of 2020. In the same wave of demonstrations, activists gathered in front of a statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University, challenging the wealth generated from settler-colonialism in southern Africa. Winston Churchill’s statue in London’s Parliament Square, representing Britain’s most celebrated prime minister, was daubed with ‘was a racist’ at a Black Lives Matter mobilisation. ⁷⁹ These actions, as well as the wider arguments articulated by the movement, force Britain to contend with how its economy, culture and political institutions are all steeped in colonial racisms. These racisms are therefore not an irregularity to be fixed, but a historically constituted norm which must be dismantled if racism is to be challenged.

This highlighting of colonial history is a crucial aspect of the politics of these movements because it counters the ahistoricism which legitimises the liberal institutions and the Macpherson Report. Historicising institutional racism means it cannot be reduced to poor and discriminatory practice by individuals, but rather a historically constituted set of interests based on racist exploitation and control. Anti-imperial politics puncture the liberal mythologies of Britain’s self-image by illuminating the racial order which its institutions of law enforcement uphold. ⁸⁰ The racial violence and exploitation of imperialism is, of course, connected to the economic exploitation of Black people in postcolonial Britain, and the police, prison and border power which disciplines them. Therefore, British institutions reproducing racism cannot be attributed to prejudiced individuals or biased policies, but to systems of domination necessary for these institutions to function as they were intended. The violence of policing, manifested both in the spectacular and the mundane, ‘reveal[s] the seeming exception as, in fact, the rule of rule’ when viewed in its colonial context. ⁸¹

Abolitionist critiques of policing also situate racism in its political and economic context. Thus, in addition to historicising racism, situating the struggle against racism as resistance to state power and capitalism is crucial for abolitionists. Black Power in twentieth-century Britain linked racist policing to Black unemployment, substandard housing, the Immigration Acts and schools for the ‘educationally subnormal’. By 2020, demands to end ‘austerity’ cuts to services and welfare, the ‘hostile environment’, school exclusions and white curriculums, accompanied the demands to defund the police. ⁸² These demands targeted the everyday manifestations of exploitation and harm, through which the power of capital and the state reproduced racism. These calls to erode state power simultaneously address the material antagonisms experienced by Black people, and implicitly discredit liberal attempts to empower state institutions as the agents of anti-racist change. They are, it is worth noting, part of a long-term vision which seeks to replace the capitalist economy with a socialist one.

This approach rejects the kinds of state-approved training rolled out by governments in response to Macpherson, and instead demands an anti-racism from below. This involves drawing on Black Power movements which connected policing to capitalism and imperialism, and prison abolitionism premised on the transformation of all other sites of contestation. In other words, radical Black movements have long sought to confront the very nature of the racist state and racial capitalism, through grassroots organising and revolutionary visions. ⁸³ But the movements which have arisen from abolitionism in twenty-first-century Britain have used revolutionary politics to clearly articulate how the erosion of violent state racism must be coupled with empowering community-led alternatives to police and prisons. Thus, community infrastructure such as youth services, mental health provision, shelters for domestic violence survivors, or trade and renters’ unions, can do more than improve the material conditions of oppressed peoples or provide spaces for radical organising. Their empowerment improves community safety, making people less likely to come into contact with the criminal justice system, thus eroding society’s reliance on institutions of violent control. ⁸⁴

Abolitionist politics do not limit resistance to policing to a direct confrontation with state agents. It is also a vision that incorporates community-led forms of care and safety in order to reduce society’s reliance on police and prison power. ⁸⁵ In other words, the legal battles, protest and urban rebellion which are most often associated with Black resistance to policing are just one aspect of abolitionism. The building of community infrastructure, which all too often is not associated with eroding police power, is fundamental to abolitionism. ⁸⁶ It is therefore explicitly a politics of care, safety and community development, as well as of antagonism, confrontation and revolution. One example of this is the wave of youth projects which are arguing for fewer police and more community infrastructure as the only solution to reducing harm and violence in working-class Black communities. ⁸⁷ This brings people and organisations into the campaigns against police, prison and border power who may have otherwise considered themselves on the periphery of, or unconnected to, these struggles. Abolitionism makes resistance to police, prisons and borders central to radical anti-racist struggle because it incorporates all forms of community-led organising in its vision. ⁸⁸

In the face of this wave of radical anti-racist resurgence, the rightwing Conservative government cobbled together a Commission led by arch-conservative Tony Sewell, famed for blaming racial inequality in education on the feminisation of Black boys. ⁸⁹ Taking Macpherson as its starting point, the Commission’s report claimed institutional racism is ‘used too casually as an explanatory tool . . . lead[ing] to insufficient consideration of other factors which are also known to drive such differences in outcomes’. ⁹⁰ The Commission claimed that Macpherson’s findings were no longer relevant, yet it is Macpherson’s liberal definition of institutional racism that enabled the Commission to fill this vacuum with its own interpretations. Specifically, Macpherson analysed race outside of historical, economic and political contexts, while the government’s Commission manipulated this logic to argue that racial inequalities can be explained away by adding context. However, state power, capitalism and colonial history did not form part of the report’s framing of racial and ethnic disparities. Geography, income and culture became the primary frames of reference. Crucially, they were not considered factors which worked alongside racism to help us understand it, but instead operated instead of racism, to prove its purported irrelevance.

But the government and its appointed commissioners on race and ethnic disparities were too late to turn back the tide. Across the media, the report was criticised for poor methodologies, crude assumptions and lack of engagement with civil society. ⁹¹ The government’s attempt to reclaim anti-racism as its domain had failed to win over the mainstream, with abolitionism changing the terms of the debate. While the liberal press investigated further what prison abolition means, or what defunding the police might look like, politicians were forced to affirm their rejection of the proposal. ⁹²

For a younger generation of activists, the criminal justice system is no longer a potential partner in anti-racist struggle. Eroding our reliance on the police through community-led infrastructure is as crucial as the popular mass mobilisations which take to the streets. Abolitionism offers both a revolutionary internationalism in its political vision, as well as a practical set of principles which connects to the everyday organising efforts of community activists. While the future of this radical set of political formations remains to be seen, its diagnosis of the problems we face and the alternatives that need to be built are clearer than ever.

Conclusion

It is impossible to predict the future direction of racial politics in Britain, despite radical Black politics being a regular feature of Britain’s racial landscape since mass migration in the post-war period. What is clear, however, is that the sharper end of state violence – policing – is the consistent impetus for popular Black resistance. Policing is generally more visceral and visible than the slower violence experienced through unemployment and exploitation at work, poor housing and education, or unequal access to healthcare and other vital services. The indignity of street searches or raids, the fear of violence and the frustration of neglect all mark the power policing has over the lives of everyone, but particularly the Black working class. Its violent humiliation is captured by photographers and news cameras, smartphone footage and stories recounted – they are often immediately shocking, but in hindsight, rarely surprising. Yet radical Black politics in Britain does more than capture the popular sentiment against policing to organise resistance against this institution. Through its demands and its actions, it also uses policing as an avenue to better contextualise racism, both historically and in the present time, while also connecting police racism to other forms of injustice.

Liberal institutions were able to capture anti-racism for over two decades, as they appropriated the language of institutional racism from the Black Power movements. The limited definition used by the Macpherson Inquiry diluted the radical Black politics which put institutional racism on the political agenda, reducing it to a problem of individual bias, ignorance and lack of diversity. These liberal interpretations of institutional racism dehistoricised racism and detached it from capitalism, imperialism and state power. The subsequent rise of state-approved anti-racist initiatives can neither ameliorate nor conceal the always violent nature of the racial state. These liberal approaches were thus rejected by the radical currents of both the Black Power movements of the twentieth century and the abolitionist movements of the twenty-first.

At the end of the decade, when Black Lives Matter progressed from a network of activist groups to a national protest movement, activists could confidently assert: the UK is not innocent. Highlighting the ongoing racisms of British policing demonstrated beyond doubt the failings of liberal reforms for representation and training. The radicalism of the Black Lives Matter movements used imperial history and contemporary racial inequities to contextualise police racism as not an aberration, but business-as-usual in postcolonial Britain. Thus, the more radical iterations of the protests of 2020 were not just challenges to policing, but also to racial capitalism, the system for whose defence is the primary function of policing. It is the common experience and the visibility of racist state violence that makes policing both the impetus for militant Black rebellion and the avenue through which a revolutionary vision can be most vividly articulated. Regardless of their intentions, no liberal reforms can substantially ameliorate the racist nature of police, prisons and borders. This leaves the radical politics of Black Power and abolitionism as both the consequential and the necessary response to racial governance in Britain and beyond.