This is a copy of the speech Pragna Patel made at the opening plenary of Summat New. Many thanks to Pragna for attending and putting such thought into your words
Leeds for Change – Summat New – 8 November 2014
What is stopping us from winning? And how can we overcome? Barriers to social justice campaigning and how we can tear them down.
Hello everyone. It is a pleasure to have been invited to this important event and to share some thoughts on how to address the very challenging question that is being posed: What is stopping us form winning?
I have to say, it is really heartening to see the resurgence of varied social justice movements including feminism in the UK and indeed around the world. It is positive to see throngs of ordinary people, young people, women and others come out on the streets to protest and campaign for justice, democracy and human rights in all sorts of contexts, but the question is are we connecting these struggles and are we learning anything from the past about ways of doing political resistance that is both inclusive and uncompromising on the principles of equality and justice for all?
I think a key part of the struggle for the future is to know and understand our past histories. This is very important in teaching us how to overcome barriers without creating new ones. So, I thought what I could usefully do today is to go back to the beginnings and history of SBS as well as visit some of our current pressing concerns to see if there is anything we can learn about creating solidarity and alliances, a necessary precondition for building alliances in order to overcome.
SBS has always organised autonomously as a black feminist, anti-communalist, anti-racist and progressive organisation. We began our political life under the all consuming shadow of Thatcherism but we were also at the same time, a child of the GLC and one of its many beneficiaries. Given the many silences in the late 70s on race and gender within a range of social movements, we felt the need to organise as an autonomous feminist organisation whilst calling for the various diverse progressive groups to simultaneously build progressive alliances and coalitions.
In the late 1980s, feminist and anti-racist political movements were in full swing on many fronts. Campaigns against police oppression, racial attacks and for equal pay, better working conditions, the right to abortion and for shelters for victims of domestic violence were all in full swing. But black feminism was also knocking hard at the door of dominant strands of feminism challenging it to divest itself of its ethnocentric gaze and take account of the experiences of black and third world women. We tried to show how the processes of race, class and gender intersected and had differential impact on women from different social and ethnic groups both nationally and internationally. For example, we challenged dominant feminist understandings of the family and state by demanding the need to also look at the impact of racist immigration and nationality laws, police stop and search practices, virginity testing of Asian women, forced sterilisation of women in the third world and many other issues. We argued that these were also political priorities for feminism. Similarly, we challenged the anti-racist movement to divest itself of its male gaze and to look at the ways in which racial violence and institutional racism led to similar but also different experiences for black women.
At the same time we located ourselves within a broad Left socialist feminist tradition although at the same time, we challenged them on grounds of both race and gender.
More than anything, we took our black political, secular feminist identity for granted. Even though it was contested, at the height of black feminist and anti-racist struggles, black secular identity was accepted as a unifying identity which enabled us to forge connections and solidarity that transcended divisions of class, ethnicity, caste and religion, especially within black and minority communities. We have always maintained that identity and coalition building are closely connected because the identity we choose to adopt can limit or increase the potential for alliances. I think this remains a key message for us in these troubling times.
When I look back at the history of SBS’ activism, I have to catch my breath – we were involved in such a heady mixture of what was in essence horizontal coalition building both within and outside our communities on a range of issues. We campaigned for all women to be free from violence: we stood on picket lines with Asian women striking for equal pay and better working conditions, marched in protests against police brutality and racist immigration controls, took part in black delegations to the mining communities and to Northern Ireland and occupied Camden Town Hall in support of Bangladeshi homeless people. What drove us was the desire to be a part of a wider Left democratic, emancipatory project.
I don’t want to paint a romantic picture of the nature of solidarity that existed but these were genuine attempts to forge alliances between the different struggles in which we were involved. Progressive alliances which at least from our standpoint, tried to confront, not just state oppression, but also those internal divisions of power within our communities which led us to question notions of community and community representation.
So what happened to the promising platform that we built?
Trying to be a part of a broad Left coalition in the present climate has become more and more difficult at least for some of us. There are shoots of optimism – we are witness to the resurgence of activism locally, nationally and globally on a range of issues from struggles against the rape and sexual violence of women to the impact of neoliberal and neoconservative politics, some of which we have tried to connect with, (For example, working with UK Uncut to occupy Starbucks to highlight cuts in legal, welfare and women’s domestic and sexual violence services to organising ‘From Delhi to Southall’ protests in Southall in support of women’s resistance against rape in India and in the UK) but there are also some real dangers and pit falls that we have to navigate along the way.
Unlike the 80s and early 90s, what makes the ground beneath us so shaky is that new forms of religious identities have become the counter hegemonic frameworks of resistance to racism, neo-liberalism and imperialism and that makes coalition building that much more difficult. In the context of the WOT, many on the Left have accepted without question the use of religion as the key definer of political identity in minority communities. Many social movements have actually embraced and given space to religion and religiosity in their movements without questioning their values. This is as true of feminism as of other social mobilisations. But what we are then left with is the growing acceptance of religious identity politics and with it an increasing gap between movements for social justice and movement for gender equality.
The Left has joined hands with the Religious Right in minority communities (noticeable in the Stop the War coalition) and this poses new dilemmas as the gains that we have made are increasingly under threat not only from the State but also from new forms of political resistance that have uncritically embraced the religious right, whose power and influence in our communities has grown.
It has been said that the promotion of faith-based alternatives to welfare is a classic case of coalition building on the Right, but I ask what happens when coalitions on the Left embrace the Religious Right in ways that are naive at best and opportunistic at worst? Another question that has been posed: When the Left embraces the Right does it not stop becoming the Left?
As secular, progressive feminists, we have found ourselves increasingly isolated and bereft of allies that we could once count on for support. Incidentally, it was the Rusdhie affair which provided the catalyst for religion and political identity and resistance to become inextricably intertwined.
Our communities have undergone a through process of communalisation. (recognised only according to religious identities) Spaces opened up by the State in pursuit of austerity and neoliberal objectives has allowed the Religious Right to posit themselves as providers of welfare services and as arbitrators of justice. The religious right has penetrated all levels of society and with consummate ease use the language of anti-racism, human rights, equality, and discrimination to promote an essentially intolerant, misogynist, homophobic and anti democratic politics. And they carry their authoritarian if not fundamentalist agendas into other state and civil society forums including Left forums, where they are uncritically accepted as being the authentic voice of the communities they claim to represent.
The battle for justice
In the last five years or so in the UK, for example, SBS has increasingly been preoccupied with one key question above all else: how to access justice on behalf of the most vulnerable. Of course, access to justice has always been a central concern, given that we have long recognised the law as a key site of feminist resistance.
But the struggle to access justice has reached now reached crisis point. The ever widening shadow of neo-liberalism and the continuing rise of fundamentalist religious identity politics has left us struggling on two interlinked fronts. First, we are compelled to resist cuts in legal aid from a huge range of civil and criminal matters and directly linked to this, we are compelled to challenge the increasing privatisation of justice and state adoption of a ‘faith based’ approach to address minority issues.
Some examples of this include attempts by the UUK to legitimate gender segregation in universities if external speakers so wish when addressing public gatherings – which we successfully challenged using the equality legislation and through political campaigning in collaboration with One Law for All, and others despite cries of Islamaphobia by many on the Left, including feminists.
The other example is the Law Society’s attempts to ensure adhere to what it thinks is its diversity and equality policies which has involved producing guidance to all solicitors in the UK on how to draw up Sharia compliant wills (whereby women only receive half of a male heir and children born outside of marriage do not qualify. Indeed, the guidance is part of a wider programme of training courses developed by the Law Society to encourage ‘Sharia’ compliance in relation to the question of family, children, property and financial settlements in minority communities.
[Since making this presentation, under pressure, the Law Society withdrew its controversial guidance and issued a public apology. See http://www.southallblacksisters.org.uk/law-society-withdraws-sharia-wills-practice-note/ ]
Contemporary social movements including feminism has a lot to contend with. We need to link our struggles without shying away from the need to develop a democratic emancipatory politics that is capable of facilitating coalitions that are secular, cross racial and transnational against patriarchy, global capitalism and religious fundamentalism. But we must stop separating off each of our struggles for fear of complicating and diluting the struggle. As Barbara Ransby, a black female historian and activist of the civil rights movement in the US once said: we don’t dilute by forming coalitions. We grow in strength.