In the summer of 2024, in response to horrific attacks on and killing of nursery school children in Southport on 29 July, approximately 29 riots broke out across the United Kingdom. Those riots were ultimately triggered by false claims that the Southport attacker had been a Muslim asylum seeker. The truth was that he was born in Cardiff to Christian parents. These riots targeted racialised people as well as immigration centres, asylum hotels, mosques, businesses owned by racialised people, and refugee support offices; people were subject to physical attacks, and buildings were damaged.
The intelligentsia, including the media and political commentators, while mostly agreeing that the violence was regrettable, were generally unable to engage with (or in some cases even mention) the significant role racial injustice played in eventuating and underpinning the violence. In essence, the public and some of the intellectual analysis of that historical moment did not account for racial violence as the inevitable outcome of a history of fostering racism through structural projects. Furthermore, the analysis of the racial violence was often unable to step back from the presumption that racial categories are objective or scientific. Instead, the cause of the riots was often reduced to “legitimate concerns” about immigration.
2025 (year of the flag) saw a noticeable rise in “anti‑immigration” protests, particularly in the UK and parts of Europe. In several cases, protests escalated into disorder or clashes, while counter‑protests and broader debates about racism and misinformation also grew. Against this backdrop racist events increased, unmatched by any official attempts to address the root causes. For example, there was a 6% increase in race-hate crimes, and religious hate crimes targeting Muslims surged by 19%.
Since the summer of black squares when everyone seemed very concerned about racial justice, it has become apparent that racial justice remains an elusive dream in this present world. I remember during the summer of 2020, seeing a tweet from one of the usual brigade saying that ‘race relations’ have been ‘put back years’ due to Black Lives Matter protests. I suspect for the Twitterist, ‘race relations’ means some sort of comfortable silence in which the unjust suffering of people who are not White is kept out of the news and out of his/her consciousness. If you are the sort of person who thinks in terms of ‘race relations’, then any action directed at actually ending racism will entail acknowledging racism and is therefore going to dent your feelings of comfortable ‘race relations’.
So where are we now? What exactly should we focus on now in questions of racial justice? And again, no, the answer is not acknowledging privilege, black squares on social media, performative kneeling, banning episodes of Fawlty Towers, etc. No. There needs to be a proper reckoning with societal violence and its sectors that wield state tools of immediate and slow violence. We also need to acknowledge which violences are unmournable – whose deaths do not ignite collective outrage. Ultimately, we must call into question what we as a national or global society place the most value on. What part of society do we put value in? Brutal order or true justice? Everybody needs to take greater responsibility for the ways in which state-sanctioned, state-enabled and state-supported activities lead to ‘group differentiated vulnerability to death’. I mean, after all, we keep on being witnesses to executions and attempted executions and slow and swift violence – George Floyd, asylum seekers’ hotels, Palestine, Yves Sakila… we keep on being made to bear witness to group-differentiated vulnerability to death. Witness to racial violence.
I have been burnt out. I am still burnt out. I think I will always be burnt out. So, I am making better use of my boundaries and my time. Reclaiming my time. Reclaiming me. In this work that is concerned with ‘group differentiated vulnerability to death’. And in the quietness, I have thought of breath, confinement and mortality. I have thought of futility. Of silence. Of value. Of greed. I have reflected on how we have been talking about ending racism in the same way for as long as I have been alive. I thought of how far we have NOT come. I use a lot of historical analysis in my work, and you may be surprised at how similar ‘not racism’ sentiments, which were expressed hundreds of years ago, are to what we hear now. On questions of freedom from slavery and colonialism. On having the freedom to vote. On all questions of freedom. It is amazing how far we have NOT come.
‘How much justice is too much?’
‘I am not personally responsible.’
‘I agree with your struggle, but not the way you choose to wage it.’
‘Wait
A
While.’
‘Be
Patient’
‘Progress. Takes. Time.’
They all mean:
Justice only comes tomorrow.
And today never becomes tomorrow.
Racism is a thief. Of breath. Of peace. Of time.
Time we could spend doing other things. Laughing. Dancing. Living.
Lives that never will be lived. Dreams stolen before they are fully birthed. Thief.
In some ways, despite my bouts of idealism, I have come to accept that maybe the world will never change; maybe racial injustice/violence is something we will never truly destroy. And to some extent, I can actually live with that. I can live with that. But what I do know is that I cannot live with myself if I do not try to do something to bring an end to injustice. So, I ask you, if you are reading this, what are YOU prepared to live with? What version of yourself do you want to be remembered on the other side of this babbling brook? When your silence finally comes, what will you leave behind? As we live through tomorrow’s yesterday, what future do we want to give to those who will walk these same paths tomorrow? Will they still ask the same questions and respond to the same violent silences and loud violences? Or are we prepared to live today in such a way that tomorrow’s children will never say, ‘We were witness to lynchings and attempted lynchings, slow and swift racial violence’? Because the children are always ours… every single one of them.
*Margaret Thatcher during a January 1978 interview on Granada Television’s World in Action, as Leader of the Opposition. The full text of the statement from which the quotation is taken:
Well now, look, let us try and start with a few figures as far as we know them, and I am the first to admit it is not easy to get clear figures from the Home Office about immigration, but there was a committee which looked at it and said that if we went on as we are then by the end of the century there would be four million people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan here. Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture and, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in.
So, if you want good race relations, you have got to allay peoples’ fears on numbers. Now, the key to this was not what Keith Speed said just a couple of weeks ago. It really was what Willie Whitelaw said at the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, where he said we must hold out the clear prospect of an end to immigration because at the moment it is about between 45,000 and 50,000 people coming in a year. Now, I was brought up in a small town, 25,000. That would be two new towns a year and that is quite a lot. So, we do have to hold out the prospect of an end to immigration except, of course, for compassionate cases. Therefore, we have got to look at the numbers who have a right to come in. There are a number of United Kingdom passport holders—for example, in East Africa—and what Keith and his committee are trying to do is to find out exactly how we are going to do it; who must come in; how you deal with the compassionate cases, but nevertheless, holding out the prospect of an end to immigration.
