VIDEO: What is racism, and how do we over come it?
On Monday, 14 October 2019, Decolonising SOAS hosted a panel event entitled ‘What is racism, and how do we over come it?’. Below is the video of the event, as well as the event description and list of speakers.
Over the past few years, racism – and how we should understand it – has increasingly been debated in the public domain. Some conversation has been focussed on what actually constitutes racism, revealing a diverse spectrum of positions within the mainstream public debate and also amongst anti-racism campaigners themselves. However, within anti-racist circles, there has been little systematic attention to how implicit or explicit definitions of racism connect with strategies and tactics envisaged to overturn it. Is racism overcome gradually, through institutional reform and public awareness, or are more revolutionary, abolitionist tactics and strategies necessary? What are these different pathways, and how do they work? Are they mutually exclusive? Should the priority be broad alliance building or the cultivation of smaller, more committed groups? What is the role of education in anti-racist struggles? We bring together a number of thinkers from different areas of public life to examine the wide variety of ways racism can be experienced – including but not limited to anti-Blackness, Islamophobia and antisemitism – as well as to explore how success in anti-racist work can be achieved and what it looks like.
Speakers: Omar Khan, Director of the Runnymede Trust
Errol Francis, Chief Executive, Culture&
Yair Wallach, Senior Lecturer, SOAS
Speaker and chair: Meera Sabaratnam, Chair of the Decolonising SOAS Working Group