Towards Anti-Racism
The Organisational Development and ED&I team have now launched a new ‘Anti-Racism Resource’ that is now available to staff and students across the University.
TOWARDS ANTI-RACISM:
These books help us to imagine ways of dismantling racism and thinking about structural causes and solutions to racism.
Jayan Nayar, Associate Professor, suggests The Groundings With My Brothers, by Walter Rodney:
"Rodney's Groundings is an important example of what it means to think unapologetically from the position of 'Blackness', not just to bemoan the histories and actualities of racism and racialised global exploitation as a matter of critique, but to think and act against the prescribed and the permitted. It is no doubt historically grounded. Many of its positions and historical assumptions require re-examining in light of the evolution of global capitalism and the transformation of the social contexts of 'race' and its intersections with class and gender. It also necessitates a critical rethinking of the very category 'Black' as it pertains to the global structuring of domination and subjugation. But this makes it all the more important as a text in that it challenges us to take-on the burden of thinking the implications of change in the contemporary. It is significantly not writing that seeks mutual lament about being the victim of racial oppression but rather demonstrates and demands taking responsibility, with all the implications this involves, towards revolutionary action.”
Valerie Ann Mathews-Lane, our Careers Consultant, and Sunil Chudasama, our IT Learning and Support Officer, both recommended Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, which defends positive discrimination and challenges all of us to confront racism if we are to root it out.
"Sunil thought that the collection of essays is great for the way it looks at race relations in Britain today by explaining the history and the systemic issues we currently have. For a book on such a heavy subject, it’s an accessible read.
Lastly, I suggest Ibram X Kendi’s book on how to be an antiracist:
“This book is part memoir, part social commentary and manifesto. It speaks out against the word “racist”, which has been rendered meaningless, freezing people into inaction. Kendi argues that we shouldn’t be afraid to foreground the more activist term “antiracist” – as opposed to “not racist” – as an essential addition to our national vocabulary in order to fully address racial inequality. In the last chapter, he writes passionately about his diagnosis and odds-defying treatment of stage-4 colon cancer. “What if we treated racism in the way we treat cancer?”