By A. SIVANANDAN
To mark the sad death of Basil Davidson, a long-time member of the IRR and member of Race & Class Editorial Committee, we reproduce below the editorial in the 1994 special issue of the journal.
‘When Race & Class was breech-birthed from Race, in the palace revolution that overthrew the empire loyalists who ran the Institute of Race Relations twenty years ago, its features were still undefined and its future unformed. All that those of us who were engaged in the hard graft of bringing out the journal knew was that if, as our first editorial stated, we wanted to think in order to do and not think in order to think, then we had to get rid of the arid scholarship of an editorial board that for long had set the tone and tenor of Race. What we did not know then was how much more tenacious academics were in holding on to the privilege of privatising and rarifying knowledge than were the capitalists in holding on to power. Some of them even insisted that the appointment of the editor who in the reconstructed Institute was to be elected by the staff must remain in their gift. In desperation, we sacked the lot (as the blank inside cover of the April ’74 number would testify) and looked beyond academia to see who could help us harness learning to liberation. And our eyes fell on Basil Davidson and Thomas Hodgkin and Malcolm Caldwell and Ken Jordaan and, later. Eqbal Ahmad and Orlando Letelier.
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