In response to recent attacks on Jeremy Corbyn concerning “Anti-Semitism”, the British Labor Party leader sought to appease Zionist organisations in an op-ed in the Guardian (3 August 2018) in which he disavowed the notion that “Zionism is racism” as an old-fashioned and misplaced Lefty idea. At the same time, liberal Zionists, who are critical…
One hundred years ago today, the British judiciary presented the Empire’s most expressly and egregiously racist justification for the land dispossession of indigenous peoples. As Zimbabweans go to the polls next week, no matter which way they turn, they continue to pay the price for it. On 26 July 1918, the Judicial Committee of the…
Why Brexit is the culmination of a British national project which weaponises imperial amnesia and nostalgia. Brexit sold the country a dream; ostensibly a project built on anti-migrant sentiment, it also invoked delusions of grandeur, rooted in reanimating the glorious days of imperial rule and global British hegemony. Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit speech announced…
This post is an amended version of remarks read at a rally organized by Cornell University’s Black Students United (BSU) on September 23, 2016. Students gathered to protest the recent police shootings of Tyree King, Terence Crutcher, and Keith Lamont Scott. It is reposted here with the kind permission of Black Perspectives. Sisters and brothers: I’m…
Over recent years there have been significant advances in scholarship on the history of international law. Critical histories, including feminist, Marxist and most productively Third World perspectives, shed fresh light on the history of the discipline and its political frame illuminating contemporary international law in important ways. Amongst the small pond of critical international lawyers,…
Last year, following the terrorist attack in Nice, I met a European friend and colleague at a conference in Milan. I asked him how his Palestinian boyfriend was, a lovely man I have grown to care about. My colleague visibly upset informed me that his boyfriend has had a series of mishaps: a few weeks…
For some time we have been witnessing the rise of racist nationalism and fascism in many parts of the world. In Europe and North America, significant elements of both the Brexit and Trump campaigns propagated explicitly racist ideals, albeit to varying degrees. Whether you understand Brexit and Trump as having triumphed despite or because of…
Following Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide victory as leader of the Labour Party, MFJ have sent him this open letter… Uniting the struggles against racism and austerity: Amnesty for all immigrants without secure legal status; End immigration detention; Abolish the anti-Muslim Prevent strategy; Stop mass deportation charter flights. You have now won the Labour leadership with increased…
On 9th of September the Society of Legal Scholars invited the conservative British politician Michael Gove to address the dinner of its annual conference. In opening his talk, Mr Gove commented: ‘I feel rather like the grand wizard of the KKK giving an address to the AGM of Black Lives Matter.’ On Sunday 11th September,…
Our TV screens and social media feeds are saturated with images of police brutality towards African Americans; the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling among the most recent. While visual proof of police violence towards African Americans is not new — as images of the 1935 Harlem race riot reveal — it is now…
Brexit is a disaster we can only understand in the context of Britain’s imperial exploits. A Bullingdon boy (Oxford frat boy) gamble has thrown Britain into the deepest political and economic crisis since the second world war and has made minority groups across the UK vulnerable to racist and xenophobic hatred and violence. People of…
The run up to the EU referendum has shown Britain for what it is. Woodwork: the washed-up bracken of the British Empire, and the ugly flotsam of its legacy of racism. This week Jo Cox, a pro-immigration Labour MP was brutally murdered by a man who shouted Britain First as he killed her and who…
Institutional racism: “The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.” (The Macpherson report,…
2015 UK General Election: Did voters defy the polls because of deeply rooted ideas about masculinity, race and political power? As I walked along the pavement early yesterday morning to get the papers, under the heavy grey sky, cussing the cold temperatures and contemplating all that a Tory majority will mean for the next five…
Pursuing Assata Shakur is not about Assata Shakur at all. It is about holding on to the fiction of an inherently fair justice system, denying the continuity of institutionalised racism over the life of a young country, and affirming an investment in carceral forms of social control. My skin is black/ My arms are…
Criminality cannot account for what Michael Brown’s ‘lawful killer’ describes. Only monstrosity can. The [police] chief was informed that a hitherto inoffensive negro was running amok in a cocaine frenzy … Being fully aware of the respect the negro has for brass buttons, the officer went single-handed to the negro’s house for the purpose of…
Excessive legality can make the racialised live in a world that has been slowed down, made dysfunctional and even unbearable.We rightly celebrate that we live in a society where law and order prevail. The capacity to follow established rules allows for the smooth operation of the many necessary transactions that make up our everyday life.…
Birkbeck Annual Law lecture, London 25 October 2013. This is an unofficial transcription from an audio recording available at the Backdoor Broadcasting Company. They say that freedom is a constant struggle. They say that freedom is a constant struggle. They say that freedom is a constant struggle, O Lord, we’ve struggled so long we must…
It is to be hoped that most readers of Critical Legal Thinking who enjoy a passing acquaintance with twentieth-century history or the writing and activism of Angela Davis, will recognise Eric Heinze’s article ‘Angela Davis’s Racism‘ for what it is: a pompous and purblind character-assassination, whose ignorance of history and political bad faith make old…
What might we have thought about high-profile personalities flying into Alabama or Mississippi in the 1950s—white figures meeting with white governors, white mayors, white police chiefs, to openly cheer those states’ ‘equitable solutions’ to social problems? Such visits certainly took place. Surely we would have to call those visitors overtly racist, or else wilfully ignorant,…