From All Different – All Equal to Black Lives Matter: an Introduction
Gavan Titley
Racism does not stand still
Racism produces certain people as populations, and produces these populations as problems. We can see it at work in the question, posed in different ways and styles in European politics, when the lives of certain people are subject to endless public debate – What do we do about them? We can also see it at work in its very denial, in the insistence that socio-economic inequalities, labour market marginalisation, exposure to police violence and political scapegoating have nothing to do with race. It’s their culture, it’s their values, it’s their religion, it’s their upbringing, it’s not racism. Through loud politics and silent processes, racism places limits on, and inserts forms of violence into the lives of countless people in contemporary Europe.
Youth organisations and activists have a long history of opposing those limits and forms of violence, and of working to change the conditions, relations and attitudes that sustain them. Sustaining this opposition, and working for better futures, requires constantly renewing our understandings of how racism works in our societies: how it manifests itself in the economy, in social relations, and in political processes; how it intersects with other forms of discrimination; how it varies from context to context; how it is dominantly understood, and consequently frequently denied, in European societies. The aim of this addition to the Education Pack All Different – All Equal is to provide resources for this renewal of our understandings. There is nothing unusual in this, as it is the constant challenge for anti-racist activism and education.
Perhaps because he worked, for a short while, in a car factory in Detroit, the African-American activist Malcolm X frequently used a four-wheeled metaphor for describing the working of racism in US society – “Racism is like a Cadillac, they bring out a new model every year” (Lipsitz 2006: 183). The new model rolls off the production line, its shiny new features and technical improvements celebrated in advertising, but with its basic mechanics and dynamics largely unchanged. Racism, Malcolm X is suggesting, takes shape in our societies in an analogous way, shifting in how it organises social relations, in how certain populations are produced as “the problem”, and in how such processes of racialisation are culturally expressed and politically legitimated. The humiliation and hurt racism produces hums away, under the bonnet, but racism, because it is historical and political, changes in form and manifestation. Consequently, as he frequently argued, we cannot combat racism with “yesterday’s slogans and analyses” (ibid).
Some decades later, in the early 1980s, the Sri Lankan writer and activist A. Sivanandan reflected on how the anti-racist struggle in the UK had changed since movements first took shape to combat the prejudice, exclusion and violence faced in the 1950s by Afro-Caribbean and Asian workers who had migrated “... when a war-torn Britain needed all the labour it could lay its hands on”. That the focus and aims of struggle had changed, and must change, he argued, should not be too surprising, because “racism does not stay still”. Sivanandan’s astute phrase makes much the same claim as Malcolm X’s, but it is worth reflecting on the rest of his sentence. It does not stay still because it “changes shape, size, contours, purpose, function – with changes in the economy, the social structure, the system, and above all, the challenges, the resistance to that system” (2019: 63-4). Racism, because it is historical and political, also changes shape because of the political responses to it. The important histories of anti-racist and emancipatory struggle featured in these two anecdotes are proof of that.
The Education Pack today
This addition to the Education Pack is still happy with yesterday’s slogan – “all different – all equal” remains an important statement of fact and value. However, it takes seriously the challenge posed by these activists and thinkers to renew the ideas and approaches we use to understand, educate about, and combat forms of racism. It does so in a context that is inevitably quite complex, as it seeks to address youth workers and activists across national contexts. In this transnational perspective, racism takes similar but also different shapes. More precisely, racisms in Europe relate to and sustain each other, while also being given often quite divergent political expression (e.g. every European nation-state has a border politics that designates some “non-European” people who migrate as undesirable, as a “problem population”, but who that “migrant population” is, and the specific ways in which they come to constitute a problem, varies considerably in different countries).
No one resource can respond with sufficient and particular depth to this complexity, but of course this is the same challenge that the Education Pack faced. This new section "Combating racism in Europe today" seeks to tap into that same participative spirit that characterises the non-formal education of the Council of Europe’s youth sector. As a complement to the revised section "Key concepts and rationale" and "How to use the activities", it offers a series of short essays as the basis for reflection and translation, for thinking about anti-racism and non-formal education in your situation and reality. The choice of contexts discussed in these short pieces is also not comprehensive, and in an international setting this may run the risk that those contexts mentioned are perceived as more important or less important, or even more or less racist. This is not the case. Rather, the contributions are shaped by thinking about the past in which the Education Pack was produced, and the present that demands its revision and re-orientation. So, let us look back, and evaluate, but also look forward, and speculate.
All Different – All Equal to Black Lives Matter
The All Different – All Equal campaign of 1994-95 was conceived and launched in the immediate “post-Communist” era, during a period when membership of the Council of Europe was expanding significantly, and where the political hopes vested in an expansive vision of a “reunified” Europe rubbed up against the brutal realities of ultra-nationalism and resurgent forms of racist politics. Today, in a contemporary culture saturated in instant reaction and the irony of endless memes, the slogan “all different – all equal” may seem somewhat naïve. In this context, it stated a simple principle that could provide a starting point for youth work responding to the consequences, for example, of lethal conflict and expansive nationalisms in the Balkans and Caucuses, and political violence and oppression in Cyprus, Spain and Northern Ireland.
The campaign took shape in relation to the Council of Europe’s plan of action against racism, xenophobia, Antisemitism and intolerance, adopted at a summit in Vienna in 1993, with the Assembly recommendation on “the fight against racism, xenophobia and intolerance” requiring “... that an active education and youth policy, stressing action to combat intolerant, racist and xenophobic attitudes, be introduced or reinforced as a matter of the utmost urgency”. Young people and youth organisations were centrally understood as important political actors in this combat, and the Council of Europe youth sector, noted for its co-managed structures, was seen as a space that could bring together relevant youth groups, organisations and networks. The Education Pack was developed to provide input to the campaign; “educational activities must form the basis of the Campaign if it is to have a lasting effect, and across Europe there is a need for accessible educational materials to support this process” (1995: 10).
The 1990s - the context of the Education Pack
The Education Pack, in its emphasis on the problem of ethnocentrism, directs its users to reflect on the exclusionary dynamics of nationalism. At the same time, its approach to intercultural learning was also keenly attuned to important changes in the political articulation of racism in this period. In other words, it was shaped as a response to a moment when racism most certainly did not stay still, and was given stark expression in the resurgence of organised far-right activity, encompassing both boots on the street and suits in the television studio.
The early 1990s witnessed a resurgence of violent far-right activity, symbolised by, for example, deadly attacks on asylum-seeker residences in Germany. It was also a period when the far-right sought to re-make themselves politically. Thus, “third wave”, post-fascist electoral parties came to prominence in Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium and the Nordic countries, energising anti-“immigrant” racism and providing an animating space for Antisemitism and antigypsyism. However, they did this in a particular way, focusing on the problem of culture and cultural differences, and attempting, not always successfully, to mark out their difference from the supremacist racism that suffused the fascisms of the first half of the 20th century.
In late May and into June 2020, the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, USA, brought hundreds of thousands of protestors to the streets of countless US cities, rallying under the slogan “Black Lives Matter”. As these protestors grappled with the reality of the Covid pandemic and the intensity of reactionary police violence, protests and vigils also intensified globally. Demonstrations of sorrow, anger and solidarity multiplied across Europe. At the same time, these demonstrations were also collective acts of translation, of demands for a reckoning with forms of systemic racism within European societies and polities. Some snapshots illustrate this.
In France, protestors made an explicit connection between police violence in the United States and police violence in France, which has also led to the death of many young people of colour in the last years. (See the interview with Rokhaya Diallo.) In so doing, they were also drawing attention to the impunity often enjoyed by police accused of violent crimes against young people who are socially stigmatised for their presumed “ethnic” identity and the deprived urban areas they come from. In Greece, anti-racist marches connected Black Lives Matter protests to the conditions endured by asylum seekers at Europe’s heavily policed and militarised border. If a policeman could kneel for so long on George Floyd’s neck, knowing he was being filmed, it must be because he felt he had good reason not to fear the consequences of killing an African-American man. Similarly, if a political bloc like the European Union can leave people in misery at its borders without fearing any damage to its claim to stand for human rights, it must be because “migrants” are considered less valuable, and more expendable.
Many protests, in this way, translated Black Lives Matter’s anti-racist surge across space; others also did so in time. In the UK and Belgium, activists drew attention to the unquestioned public presence of statues and memorials for those who directed and profited from the slave trade. They called for a reckoning with this colonial heritage not only because it symbolises the appalling racist hierarchies of the past, but because this history continues to shape, in important if complex ways, forms of racism, and local and globalised inequalities, today. Similarly, anti-racist activists in the Netherlands intensified their struggle against Zwarte Piet – Black Pete, St Niklaus’ mischievous little helper. These protests opposed the practice of white people wearing a black face not solely because is a cultural practice that emerges in popular culture during the colonial period, but also because the majority refusal to see it as anything other than “innocent” captures the difficulty that people of colour have in speaking about racism in the society.
The significance of BLM
This proliferation of protests and actions was notable for number of reasons. The first is that it connects forms of racism and scales of action – the inequalities of the global system, the operations of border security, racist policing, social marginalisation, and cultural disdain. Secondly, they connect struggles. While the Black Lives Matter slogan has emerged in the context of the struggle of African-Americans against police violence in the United States, it has been globalised in ways that provided a rubric for the shared opposition to differing forms of racism, and the dehumanising work they do, without diminishing the particular dimensions of anyone. Finally, these protests centrally involved young people of colour and white people acting in anti-racist solidarity, and were led and organised by a wide range of autonomous movements and networks, some established, and some taking shape through the protests. This rapid growth in activism and organising is a particularly important point of departure for this addition to the Education Pack, as it aims to make connections between the “traditional” forms of youth work and non-formal education that have shaped anti-racism in the European youth sector, and some of the ideas, approaches and sensibilities that the expansive impact of Black Lives Matter has brought to the foreground.
A round-table discussion with youth workers and activists, conducted as part of the development of this resource, reflected the extraordinary impact of the Black Lives Matter moment across Europe. Many new movements were born, animated by urgency and militancy – “let us fight against people who are using racism against us”, as one participant summarised – and also by new alliances and solidarities between young people subject to differing forms of racism, and those mobilising in solidarity with them. This mobilisation had important consciousness-raising consequences; for some, “... what happened was that some youngsters realised for the first time that they were victims of racism ... and this realisation enabled them to develop a reaction”. Others experienced forms of solidarity they hadn’t previously enjoyed; it “... lifted the pressure from individuals, making it a community responsibility now”.
At the same time, the extent of the attention and intensity of the response drew out important challenges and contradictions of anti-racist struggle. The globally-circulated footage of a black man’s cruel – and almost casual – murder was a source of incalculable pain (and indeed, activists have long debated the traumatic and dehumanising cost of circulating images and footage of racist murder). As one youth worker reflected, “it was really painful to see people who look like you be brutalised in such a manner for the whole world to see”. Furthermore, at the same time, the sudden mainstream attention also jarred with the constant political reality of the denial of racism, a denial that was a constant feature of years of personal experience and political activism. And so, the experience of suddenly “being listened to” was ambivalent and unsettling, as “the people that never listened now place you as experts, mainly to reduce their own guilt”. Thus, many youth workers and activists of colour and minority background found themselves expected to “educate everybody”, regardless of the strain this placed them under. This is the kind of complexity, manifest in different ways across contexts and experiences, that youth work will need to engage with in taking anti-racist and human rights education forward.
The Education Pack – Section "Combating racism in Europe today"
This new section "Combating racism in Europe today" is a complement to the sections sections "Key concepts and rationale" and "How to use the activities", but it is a different kind of text. It does not propose educational methods and exercises, which section "How to use the activities" does. As with section "Key concepts and rationale", it addresses concepts, theories and ways to reflect on current realities, but it does not do so with the same breadth of coverage or level of development. Instead, it provides a range of reflections that introduce ways of connecting current thinking about racism and anti-racism to the resources and spirit of the Education Pack as a whole.
Part 1, ‘Confronting racism: denial and resistance’, is comprised of three texts that grapple with some of the difficulties of understanding racism in Europe today, when racism is so often regarded as a marginal phenomenon, or a bad hangover from the past. The seek to address two interconnecting problems – the realities of being racialised – made into the problem, and also of struggling to name racism the better to oppose it, particularly in the face of the widespread denial of racism.
Part 2, ‘Understanding racisms: change and continuity’, includes two texts that explore forms of racism that have taken new and intensified shape since 1995. The first is anti-Muslim racism, which has become endemic in Europe over the last 25 years. However, because it appears to focus on a religious identity, it is often puzzling as to why it counts as racism. The second is an example of the numerous ways in which people who migrate into Europe can be racialised as “migrants” / asylum seekers – that is, as a homogeneous and unwanted population of “non-Europeans” – through apparently neutral legal and institutional processes.
Part 3, ‘Anti-racisms: future youth work responses and directions’, is made up of three texts that focus on youth work and youth responses to racism and related forms of discrimination. They affirm the importance of youth participation, while also introducing some ideas and approaches that can help think about intersectionality in society and in young people’s lives. The future of the intercultural learning approaches that have developed from the Education Pack are also considered.
References
Lipsitz G. (2006), The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Temple University Press.
Sivanandan A. (2019), ‘Challenging Racism: Strategies for the ‘80s’, Communities of resistance: writings on black struggles for socialism, London, Verso.
