Historically, most of Britain’s policing hasn’t taken place on the British mainland – it has taken place in its colonies.
“Racial governance has been fundamental to British policing for centuries.”
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Adam Elliott-Cooper. Elliott-Cooper is Research Associate in Sociology at the University of Greenwich. His book is Black Resistance to British Policing.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Adam Elliott-Cooper: Black politics in North America and Western Europe is currently in the aftermath of one of the largest Black protest movements in its history. While many are familiar with the US struggles against policing and state power, Black Resistance to British Policing seeks to internationalize our understanding of these movements. This is done by thinking through the history of colonial policing, and its legacies.
Historically, most of Britain’s policing hasn’t taken place on the British mainland – it has taken place in its colonies across North America, the Caribbean, Africa, South/South East Asia and Australasia. Colonial projects of chattel slavery, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, extraction and exploitation required policing, from militias repressing slave uprisings to counterinsurgency operations battling anti-colonial movements. These forms of colonial control have meant racial governance has been fundamental to British policing for centuries. The book therefore begins the story of Black struggle against British policing in the colonies of the Caribbean, demonstrating how radical Black politics is necessarily anti-imperial and internationalist.
It is in this context that contemporary movements against policing on the British mainland are situated. It enables readers to make international, as well as historical links between different radical Black movements against state power. Crucially, the book encourages readers to think about Black Lives Matter as a necessarily international movement against capitalism and imperialism, as well as racism.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
First, that British racism stretches back further than post-war migration and beyond the shores of the British mainland. Imperial cultures and policies, as well as colonial war and policing are used to highlight connections between these histories and contemporary racisms. This can be seen in both the racist ideas, images and stereotypes used to justify and rationalize policing, but also the actual strategies and tactics of policing in Britain, much of which mirrors the colonial policing which came before it.
Secondly, I hope readers will see the connections between black liberation movements in the 20th century and 21st century rebellions, campaigns and protest. Drawing links between histories of resistance and different kinds of black struggle against policing is vital, I argue, if we are to challenge the cutting edge of police and prison power which harnesses new and dangerous forms of surveillance, violence and criminalization. Specifically, I hope readers will leave with a better understanding of how radical Black politics in Britain was forged in the rebellions, labour movements and anti-imperial campaigns in Britain’s colonies. It is this anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism which enables us to both better understand racism, as well as forging the international links of solidarity crucial to dismantling it.
Thirdly, I hope readers will leave with a strong, or stronger, commitment to police and prison abolition. The liberal reforms of diversity, training and accountability have failed spectacularly over the course of the last twenty years, and the book argues that abolitionist movements are the predictable consequence of such failures. Finding non-police solutions to harm and violence enables us to connect protests and rebellions against policing, prisons and borders with community infrastructure, labour movements and healthcare provision. The revolutionary vision of abolitionism encourages us to build alternatives while eroding oppressive structures that offers hope in a political environment riddled with despair.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
The prime target of critique in this book is liberal anti-racism – a politics of representation which has failed oppressed communities across the globe. Few failings have been as clear as Black Lives Matter emerging during the Obama presidency. In Britain, the Conservative government have put together the most ethnically diverse cabinet the country has ever seen, and among the most authoritarian reforms in recent history. Such patterns of course mirror the representational politics in postcolonial nations, as neocolonial governments reproduce imperial power relations. This failure of a politics of representation is equally true for police and prisons, where diversity, training and accountability has been the mantra of liberal reformists. The book demonstrates how these proposals do not simply fail oppressed peoples, but further legitimize institutions of violence by creating an illusion of progress.
Connected to this critique of liberal anti-racism, is the language of privilege, unconscious bias and micro-aggressions. These discourses reduce racism to individual actions, thoughts and prejudices, de-historicizing racism, separating it from the economic power of capitalist exploitation and state (or state sanctioned) violence. This has enabled multinational corporations and entrepreneurs to brand themselves as agents of anti-racism, offering a range of products from advertising campaigns, representation drives and implicit bias trainings. Like other liberal reforms, such efforts not only make little difference to racialized inequalities, but legitimizes the capitalist and state-led structures of power that both reproduce and rely on racism.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
The first intellectual the book engages with closely, is John La Rose. He was a trade unionist, writer and teacher in colonial Trinidad, and later a radical publisher, poet and activist in Britain. His article in the radical Black magazine Race Today, titled ‘We Did Not Come Alive in Britain’ is of particular interest to me. La Rose punctures the myth that Black resistance to British racism began on the British mainland, rather than the colonies. He identifies the way racism was experienced by Britain’s colonial subjects, through worker exploitation and state violence, and how these experiences shaped the radical Black politics of the organizations established in postcolonial Britain.
Angela Davis is also a crucial thinker for the concepts which frame the book. Her analysis of Black feminism, prison abolitionism and anti-capitalist internationalism are all integral to the book’s theoretical foundations. First, Davis is among the Black feminist scholars which provides a radical analysis of Black women’s movements against state racism, as well as how racism and patriarchy frame Black men as violent criminals. These two aspects of Black feminism are crucial for framing the ways Black women lead campaigns against deaths at the hands of the state in Britain. The Black feminist analysis of patriarchy is equally crucial for understanding how police, prison and border power is rationalized through racist tropes such as the gangster, terrorist and illegal immigrant.
Stuart Hall’s postcolonial Marxism is hugely influential to understanding the role that racism plays in the expansion of police power, as well as the cultures of resistance which challenge it. Hall’s concept of the ‘moral panic’ whereby capitalism’s crises are displaced by a perceived ‘law and order’ crisis, fueled by racist nationalism, is as relevant today as it was in the 1970s when he co-wrote Policing the Crisis. Hall’s work adds additional conceptual grounding the Black feminist analyses of racist criminalization, speaking to the rise in racist authoritarian nationalisms in the second decade of the 21st century.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
While the language of global revolution associated with Black Power and anti-colonialism in the 20th century is a term seldom used today, the politics of abolitionism provides us with a renewed revolutionary vision. The promise of Third Worldism in the midst of the Cold War may have experienced successive defeats, but the rise of the state’s carceral power has shifted the focus of radical Black politics towards dismantling these systems of violent control. There are many differences between the visions of global revolution in the 20thcentury, and the international abolitionist visions in the 21st, but I would like to focus on one: abolitionist reforms.
Abolitionist reforms are gains which erode the power of the state or state-sanctioned system of violent control, while simultaneously building community and grassroots infrastructure which can provide safety, health and harm-reduction. These reforms better enable us to breakdown the barriers between reform and revolution, by thinking through the ways in which we can chip away at the power of the imperialist/capitalist state. This is not done to reform it into the welfare state capitalism associated with Western Europe in the 20thcentury, but towards community-led alternatives to state power and capitalist exploitation.
Thus, while abolitionism is a utopian vision, in which police and prisons are made obsolete, attaining that vision requires building towards it. Stronger trade unions and renters unions improving jobs and housing can make people less likely to come into contact with the police. Community-led mental health provision, addiction services, youth services and support for survivors of gender-based violence can improve public safety without the coercive power of the state. These, and other grassroots projects are therefore crucial for building effective resistance to racist state violence. Thus, abolitionism challenges us to bring in organizers who may not otherwise consider themselves to be part of resisting state racism, to the very center of it, as integral as the more easily recognizable rebellions and protests against policing which we associate with Black Lives Matter.
Roberto Sirvent is editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
COMMENTS?
Please join the conversation on Black Agenda Report's Facebook page at http://facebook.com/blackagendareport
Or, you can comment by emailing us at [email protected]
The second National Black Radical Organizing Conference will convene in Indianapolis, Indiana, from May 30 through June 1. The conference theme is “Base-Building for Collective Power.” We are joined…
Liberals continue to condemn anyone who didn’t support Kamala Harris and the latest iteration of neo-liberal treachery. Black people are told to stand down when there is a fight worth waging.
The Israeli state’s starvation campaign in Gaza—backed by the U.S. and Europe—is a livestreamed genocide. As malnutrition ravages children and the West vetoes ceasefires, the 'rules-based order'…
“This is not high-way robbery; it can be better called international burglary.”
The U.S. increases pressure on Burkina Faso through military propaganda, as Africans rise to protect the developing project.
