Race & Class

This article examines two cases of state funding cuts to the most prominent and active Arab community organisations operating in Canada, the Canadian Arab Federation and Palestine House. It contextualises the cuts within broader ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ debates imbued with anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism and the silencing of Palestine advocacy efforts; arguing that the shift to a neoliberal multiculturalism, emptied of anti-racist politics, along with the construction of national identities around a set of western ‘core values’ has advanced a marginalising politics that demarcates a ‘civilisational’ border which excludes Arabs, Muslims, and by extension Palestine solidarity. Curtailing freedom of expression, partly through funding cuts, thus becomes a key mechanism for disciplining dissent in racialised communities.

This essay examines US empire in World War 2 and showcases how the American war was based on the extraction of colonial labour. It focuses on builders laying infrastructure and supply lines for the Pentagon in the colonial world – in the Navy Seabees, Air Transport Command and Army Corps of Engineers – to retrieve the history of the planet-spanning, trans-colonial system of labour and transit that Americans established during this period. They called this system ‘the five highways’. They knew its crucial labourer as the ‘native’. Across the wartime archive, the ‘native’ appears in these accounts, the author argues, as the trace of US settler colonialism, a resource continually renewed for imperial projects in the mid-twentieth century. Histories of racialised labour in colonial settings, meanwhile, followed the five highways home, linking the creation of a global racial capitalist US market during the war to the country’s abundant postwar economy and built environment.

In August 2014, police officer Darren Wilson shot unarmed Michael Brown, sparking months of protests in Ferguson, Missouri and other American cities and capturing worldwide media attention. This article presents a critical discourse analysis of Fox News Channel’s segments from August 2014 to March 2015. It systematically uncovers themes and larger discourses within five major areas: blaming black victims in the characterisation of Michael Brown and his shooting death, blaming black leaders, blaming the black community, attacking the black protesters and their movement against police brutality, and discrediting attempts to address issues of racism as the ‘politics of racial division’. Several major emergent discourses include: the criminal black (wo)man, blaming the victim, projection of racism on minorities, denial and counterattack, minimisation of racism, redistributing responsibility, personal responsibility, and deadbeat dads and unwed mothers. The author argues that Fox News in perpetuating these racist discourses helps to obstruct the addressing of racism in the criminal justice system.

In 1971 a young teacher was sacked from a London East End school after publishing a book of poetry written by its working-class pupils who acutely observed the sights and people’s struggles around them. In an unprecedented move, the school children and those from neighbouring schools went on strike to demand the reinstatement of their teacher. That teacher, Chris Searle, who went on to be one of the most radical and internationalist educationalists, has begun to write his memoirs in terms of the way poetry influenced him and he, in turn, used poetry as part of his educational practice. This is an excerpt from the memoirs which gives his account of life at Sir John Cass and Redcoat School, the publishing of Stepney Words and the way in which the public reacted to it. It reflects the history and changing nature of working-class London and the influence, in practice, of cultural tensions thrown up by ‘the 1960s’.

This is an edited version of a keynote speech to the annual conference of the Archives and Records Association 2016 in which a leading black British cultural curator, using the concept of ‘reparative histories’, charts his own involvement in and knowledge of recent milestones in black cultural heritage intervention in the UK. Referencing the London Mayor’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage, the museum world’s marking of the ‘2007 bi-centenary of the Act abolishing the Atlantic slave trade’ and the significant ‘No Colour Bar’ archive and art exhibition of 2015, he challenges archivists to understand the issue not as the need to simply ‘include’ Black experience, but to allow Black agency in the making of the record.

Research by the Institute of Race Relations into over one hundred incidents of racial violence reported in the mass media in the month after the EU referendum indicates that the ‘spike’ in such attacks has to be understood in terms of the racist climate created not just during the clearly nativist referendum debate, but also in the divisive policies and programmes of successive governments preceding it. The politicians and police chiefs, who have recently condemned the violence, analyse it in terms of already given media frameworks about ‘hate crime’: bigoted individuals are to blame; this is a law-and-order issue not a socially based problem – thus avoiding any responsibility for the creation of state racism. The research also reveals the central role of the police, at the expense of community groups’ or victims’ voices, when the media decides an attack is newsworthy.

Roma in the Czech Republic (as in a number of other European countries) are, in the public imagination, ‘social parasites’ who do not work, are not interested in working and opt for life on benefits instead. This article, based on ethnographic research in the city of Ostrava, reveals the contrary. Roma workers clean the streets and trains, fix the city’s road infrastructure, dig up roads and replace water and gas pipelines. One reason for the ‘invisibility’ of Roma work is that officially it does not exist. For much of it is carried out without an employment contract and is informal. Roma labour in Ostrava is highly racialised and Roma as a group constitute a significant part of the ‘reserve army of labour’. This does not mean their total exclusion from the labour force; rather it involves highly unstable, socially insecure and often physically dangerous forms of labour.