A conversation about institutional racism and the mobilising of whiteness in the UK with sociologist Adam Elliott-Cooper.
How have certain types of crime been racialised in the United Kingdom? What are the colonial origins of institutional racism within the British police force? And how has whiteness been mobilised to divide different communities across Britain? Samira Shackle spoke with Adam Elliott-Cooper, sociologist at Greenwich University, whose book, Black Resistance to British Policing, was published in May this year.
A conversation on racism, identity and social movements in the United Kingdom that explores how common conceptions around the particular attributes of certain communities have developed.
Hosts: Alice Bloch and Samira Shackle
Exec Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Danosongs
Image artwork: Ed Dingli
Transcript:
Samira Shackle:
Hi and welcome to With Reason. I’m Samira Shackle. And I’m Alice Bloch. And With Reason is brought to you from New Humanist
magazine and The Rationalist Association. This podcast is where we
catch up with people whose work and ideas challenged dogma and lazy
thinking. It is the space to reflect on reason and unreason, debate and
criticism.
Alice Bloch:
And something we’ve explored in every series of With Reason
so far is racism and inequality, the reality of it and stories of
resistance to it. Back in series one, Jason Arday told us all about
growing up in the 90s and about the contradictions of the so called cool
Britannia era. That was the decade in which the black teenager Stephen
Lawrence was murdered, and in which the McPherson report concluded that
the investigation into that killing had been marred by professional
incompetence, institutional racism and a failure of leadership. More
than two decades on from that report, despite some changes, racism and
policing all too often appear in the same breath, something highlighted
by the Black Lives Matter movements, both here and in the US. And
indeed, elsewhere. Samira that’s something you’re discussing with your
guest today, the sociologist Adam Elliott-Cooper. I’ll leave it to you
to tell us more about him. And I’ll be back at the end for a catch up.
Samira Shackle:
Yeah, so Adam is a sociologist at Greenwich University. And in his new book, Black Resistance to British Policing,
he looks at the activism that made things like Black Lives Matter as
possible. But he also approaches racism as something that goes way
beyond the interpersonal level. So this idea of one individual being
racist and discriminatory against another. Instead, he argues that black
resistance confronts an entire global system of racial classification
and exploitation and violence. So it’s a sobering read, it highlights
the links between imperial cultures colonial war and contemporary
racisms, plural. But it’s also hopeful, but gets inspired by experience
too. So before digging into that historical structural side of things,
Adam told me first about how his time spent working with young people
actually brought him to writing about policing and resistance in the
first place.
Adam Elliott-Cooper:
So I
guess the book begins in 2011. And in 2011, I was working as a youth
worker in Hackney in northeast London, where a lot of the work we were
doing with the young people, there was educational workshops, and things
like that. But I was always really interested in the more social
activities that we could do with the young people that could explore
different kinds of social or political issues. Sometimes I was invited
into a youth club and asked to do a workshop on how to deal with a stop
and search or police misuse of power. But a lot of the conversations
often extended to why the police operate in the way they do, what the
history of policing is, what the wider context is, but sometimes will be
put into one workshop in a school about the history in the context of
policing. But a lot of the young people wanted to always know about,
okay, but what can we practically do? How can I deal with when I’m being
stopped and searched? How can I challenge misuse of police power. And
so I began to realise that policing was this issue, which not only was
something which a lot of young people engaged with, but it was
simultaneously something which better enabled people to understand the
existing social order, and the historical context in which it emerged,
but also enabled people to come up with practical solutions to challenge
the existing social order.
SS:
Interesting.
So you said that was in 2011, which was also the year of the London
riots 10 years ago. So those started in Tottenham, in the north of
London, actually, where I live. And I think the way that’s been sort of
cemented in the national memory is a story of looting and disorder and
mayhem. And this idea, I think, particularly of local communities really
losing out from a kind of rampage of looting. But that’s not how you
see it, is it?
AEC:
No, I think that
because of this experience I had with working on these issues relating
to policing of all of these young people, I kind of saw what took place
in 2011. Maybe it could take with a different kind of perspective. I
mean, 2011 was the year in which a reggae artist called Smarty Culture
died during a raid on his home. It was the year in which we saw one of
the largest community protests in Birmingham following the death of a
young black man called Kinsey Burrell. And of course, the riots that
began in Tottenham was sparked by the police killing of Mark Duggan. But
what also of course, took place in the years leading up to it was a
massive escalation in police searches using a power Code Section 60,
which enables the police to stop and search people without requiring any
reasonable suspicion. And so, while a lot of people were focusing on
the destruction and the harm that was caused during those rebellions,
for me, I was also thinking about the destruction and harm that had been
caused by the forms of policing harassment, violence, arrest assaults,
which was the prelude to those disturbances in which I think are
problems which haven’t been ameliorated at all in the years which have
followed.
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