Barbara Harlow – insistently against the stream
This week, the IRR publishes a memorial issue of Race & Class celebrating the lifework of the late Barbara Harlow, Solidarity here and everywhere. Barbara Harlow, a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin described as ‘a critic of both the world and the…
IRR statement on Stansted 15 verdict
IRR vice-chair Frances Webber comments on the stansted 15 verdict, a trial where laws designed to deal with terrorist threats at airports have been brought against human rights defenders. The crime of endangering airport security, under the Aviation and Security Act, was designed to deal with terrorist threats at airports…
The Windrush scandal exposes the dangers of scaremongering about ‘illegal immigrants’
The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) publishes today a background paper showing how the injustices meted out to the Windrush generation are not anomalies but the logical result of an immigration system that, over many years, has weaponised the idea of ‘the illegal immigrant’. How can people who considered themselves…
Stealing C. L. R James
The October 2018 issue of Race & Class brings together pieces on racialising domestic violence, #Grime4Corybyn, the rebranding of C.L.R. James for a neoliberal era and memorial tributes to A. Sivanandan. Jessica Perera, who is currently assisting research at the Institute of Race Relations, explores how Grime artists in the…
The past in the present
Past oppressions are written into our statues, our architecture and our walls. This special issue of Race & Class brings a new perspective to reparatory history. ‘We are, at this moment, witnessing an eruption of active memory’, say Anita Rupprecht and Cathy Bergin. Resistances mobilised around Confederacy statues have provoked…
Police database spreads institutional racism
The IRR welcomes Amnesty International and The Monitoring Group’s recent reports on the racially discriminatory nature of the Metropolitan Police Service’s Gangs Matrix intelligence database. The fact that the Information Commissioner’s Office has launched an investigation into whether the Metropolitan Police Service Trident Gangs Matrix breaches the Data Protection Act…
Are the experts on radicalisation getting it wrong?
What, asks the April issue of Race & Class, has happened in policy and academia to the concept of ‘radicalisation’ that Arun Kundnani analysed in a pathbreaking piece, ‘Radicalisation: the journey of a concept’, some six years ago? In a far-reaching survey of published articles and commissioned government research over…
Reinforcing neoliberalism?
How, asks the January issue of Race & Class, are the principles of neoliberalism reinforced through the racial dimensions of governance, the criminal justice system and the media? Elizabeth Jones, assistant professor of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville, explores the prolific imposition of fines and fees on urban…
A. Sivanandan 1923 – 2018
A. Sivanandan, the Director Emeritus of the Institute of Race Relations and founding editor of Race & Class has passed away. The Institute of Race Relations would like to thank everyone who has sent tributes and messages of condolences following the death of A. Sivanandan on Wednesday 3 January. As…
EU member states, in criminalising humanitarians, are feeding Europe’s far Right
The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) publishes today research showing that EU member states are using laws, aimed at traffickers and smugglers, to criminalise those acting out of humanitarian motives. The rhetoric of EU politicians and its border force, Frontex, may be fuelling far-right extremism, it IRR warns. It has…