Milan Rai
As the world reflects on the 20th anniversary of the terror attacks in Washington DC and New York, we face a choice. We can try to understand what motivates people to carry out jihadist attacks, which might give us a chance of preventing them from happening again. Alternatively, we can close our eyes and refuse to discuss possible causes, which rules out the possibility of effective preventive action – which means more people will die.
Here in Britain, there is a sort of secret…
On 25 June, Britain’s supreme court set an important legal precedent when it ruled that protesting can be a ‘lawful excuse’ for deliberately disruptive action that obstructs the highway. It made this ruling as it confirmed the acquittal of four Christian anti-arms trade campaigners.
The case dates back to the 2017 DSEI arms fair in East London, when Chris Cole, Henrietta Cullinan, Joanna Frew and Nora Ziegler were arrested (while locked-on to each other in pairs) on the ‘No Faith in…
Yemen continues to suffer the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, according to the UN, with half the population going hungry and hundreds of thousands of people on the brink of famine.
A dramatic fall in the value of Yemen’s currency, the riyal, has only worsened the situation, while peace negotiations drag on without an end in sight.
Britain’s response to Yemen’s suffering has been to worsen the crisis, not just by supporting but by joining in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.…
I’m writing this as we’re approaching the first anniversary of the killing of George Floyd, and I’m thinking about racism and anti-racism and solidarity.
There’s a thing that a lot of activists call ‘being an ally’ or ‘allyship’. What this means is that you’re not the target of a particular oppression, but you want to challenge that oppression and be actively on the side of people who are the direct targets of that oppression.
So, for example, there was a wave of solidarity…
Last autumn, PN ran a survey asking peace activists how they had responded to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprising of the summer. I was deeply impressed by the wealth of constructive actions that people had taken in the previous few months. (PN 2646 – 2647)
It was clear that, for many people, the death of George Floyd and the massive protests that followed, had been huge events.
I remember the white person who wrote: ‘I thought there were virtually no black…
Maddie is on a street stall in her town centre on Hiroshima Day, 6 August, wearing a placard and handing out leaflets about the atomic bombings. Every so often, someone stops to argue. Sometimes Maddie can’t get a word in edgeways ...
Passerby: You should be ashamed of yourself.
Maddie: Excuse me?
Passerby: My granddad would have died if we’d listened to people like you.
Maddie: Was he a …
Coming to the end of a long and fascinating conversation about Black Lives Matter UK, I asked Adam Elliott-Cooper what parts of the history of UKBLM he was most proud of, as a co-founder.
Adam answered: ‘One of the things I’m really proud of is that one of the things that the movement has done is the mainstreaming of questions of abolition and defunding the police.
‘Whilst previous generations demanded enquiries and inquests, or democratic control over the police, or community…
There is a powerful case, both on moral grounds and out of pure self-interest, for the rich nations of the Global North to ensure that everyone on the planet receives publicly-funded tests, treatments, and effective vaccines, free at the point of delivery: the People’s Vaccine.
Otherwise, the global population will continue to breed dangerous variants of the virus that might threaten even people who’ve been vaccinated, for reasons explained below.
On 17 February, the UN…
Ian Haney López starts this fascinating and important book by describing his struggle to persuade (older, overwhelmingly white) trade union leaders and racial justice activists (mostly young women of colour) – all in the US – of the need for a cross-racial class fight for economic and racial justice.
Trade union leaders are easier to persuade. Right-wing politicians have used racist appeals to get white people to elect governments that have attacked working-class people. It’…
I hope that you found the Whiteness issue useful. I have one more thing to say to white readers, to folk who want to prioritise anti-racism.
If you are a white person who aims to be in this for the long haul, then you may need to dig deep and find some ways that you personally can benefit from the rooting out of racism.
White US philosopher Shannon Sullivan ends her thought-provoking book on White Privilege by pointing out that there are problems with white people…
Many people seem very attached to the idea that ‘the Romans were white’ – and that ‘Britain before the Second World War was an entirely white country’.
This is a still from a video, Roman Britain, which is part of a BBC educational series called The Story of Britain. In 2017, this BBC animation led to national controversy when a right-wing commentator objected to the picturing of a Roman commander as black. …
This issue of Peace News is a ‘no blame, no shame’ zone.
African-American psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum has written: ‘Prejudice is one of the inescapable consequences of living in a racist society.
‘Cultural racism – the cultural images and messages that affirm the assumed superiority of Whites and the assumed inferiority of people of color – is like smog in the air. Sometimes it is so thick it is visible, other times it is less apparent, but always, day in and…
There’s no way of getting away from it. This is a special issue about white people, about how white people came to be white.
That doesn’t mean this issue is just for white people.
My goal in this issue is actually to help ‘de-centre’ white people, to help all of us have a better framework for seeing whiteness by seeing white people more at their proper size and status in the human story. Well, in a few thousand words, it’s more about pointing towards how that…
One time, back in the 1980s, when I was hitching at the bottom of the M1 motorway in North London, a car pulled over for me, late, as if the driver had not been intending to pick anyone up and had made the decision at the last minute.
I ran up the slope with my rucksack and my sign, and I crouched down by the window. The driver, an East Asian man, peered out and asked me: ‘Are you Chinese?’
I had to say, reluctantly: ‘No, I’m Nepali.’
He hesitated a second, and then…
