Political Blackness is a term that is both debated and misunderstood today. You may have heard of the term through trade union membership. Many unions still use Black in its political sense to group racialised members, referring to people of colour, or those who are minoritised or othered on racial or ethnic lines. You might also remember the Labour Party Black Sections. In both cases, the use of ‘Black’ as a political umbrella stemmed from grassroots activists of colour who developed Black politics in twentieth century Britain. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, political Blackness became a powerful force for many racialised activists – whether from African Caribbean, South Asian, African diasporic or other non-white migrant backgrounds. It acted as a unifying theoretical framework allowing them to carve out their own social movements at a time when existing organised labour and trade unions often excluded them. But is political Blackness still relevant today?
While the essence of solidarity among racialised communities is crucial for a shared socialist vision, there are significant challenges. In the case of South Asian communities, the prevalence of anti-Blackness makes it feel difficult to claim this identity on political lines, while our community often rejects Black cultures in personal or communal spaces. In addition, adopting aspects of Black identities can sometimes feel like an appropriation of struggles that are not universally shared – like specific histories of enslavement, and current-day racisms that are unique to people with African Caribbean and other African diasporic heritage in contemporary Britain.
Understanding the specific history of South Asian Black politics highlights both tensions and possibilities for antiracist solidarity today. Whether or not South Asian activists were Black in theory was very often ambiguously understood both within and outside of radical activist circles throughout history. The specific story of Southall Black Sisters (SBS) offers important lessons and limitations of South Asian political Blackness in practice. SBS is a South Asian women’s group formed in 1979 and one of the community organisations I research in my work on South Asian community activism in twentieth century Britain. While SBS successfully used political education to foster antiracist unity and solidarities for the purpose of raising consciousness, it has been unable to develop a long-term movement in which South Asian women could work together with women from other racialised backgrounds. SBS has instead focused on supporting South Asian survivors/ victims of domestic violence since around 1984. For some activists who created Black political identities in the twentieth century, including women in SBS, the core tenets of Blackness ideas still resonate today. The practice of fostering solidarities among racialised social movements and educating communities about shared experiences of racism are important legacies for the present.
SBS was formed in 1979 as a Black feminist collective made up of mainly South Asian women. These women initially met informally to discuss their shared experiences of racism and sexism. They decided to formalise their movement after the Southall police riots in April 1979. During these riots, National Front (NF) demonstrators targeted Southall, a centre for South Asian migration to Britain. The police supported the NF and brutalised local residents who were peacefully protesting against the NF demo, resulting in the death of Blair Peach, a local teacher, who was part of the peaceful protest.
This flashpoint event took place just three years after the racist murder of a local young adult, Gurdip Singh Chaggar, whose case was seen by antiracists in Southall as both societal and judicial racism. In response to this, Southall Youth Movement (SYM) formed in 1976 as a grassroots antiracist organisation made up of second-generation men. SYM and many other young and politically engaged South Asian people in Southall felt that the existing Indian Workers’ Association of Southall (IWA Southall), a large and locally important first-generation socialist and antiracist movement, had not done enough in the wake of Chaggar’s death.
However, according to SBS, neither of these organisations valued women on equal terms with men. SYM developed a hyper-masculine militancy, and IWA Southall reflected the patriarchy of Southall’s wider South Asian community, marginalising women who wanted to get involved. At the same time, SBS women also struggled to find a place within the white-dominated Women’s Liberation Movement. Facing marginalisation from both within and outside their community, SBS was formed to create a space for young politically engaged women to meet, make their voices heard, and discuss strategies for organising. SBS built on existing political ideas about racial capitalism – a broad political theory that acknowledges the centrality of racialisation in the process of the development of modern and contemporary European and global capitalism. They developed an early form of intersectionality, informed by their lived experiences as women of colour dealing with racism and sexism. SBS, therefore, had to be antiracist, socialist and feminist.
Although SBS was mostly made up of South Asian women, the movement always operated under the ‘Black’ political banner. This banner symbolised the movement’s theoretical foundations. Black political identity signified a commitment to anticolonial, antiracist, and socialist politics, developed through lived experiences following migration to Britain. When migrants from the Caribbean and South Asia arrived in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s, they were often forced to take low-paying jobs regardless of their class and educational backgrounds. Through these experiences of racialisation, alongside daily racist encounters, community activists organised, forming groups such as the British Black Panther Movement, the Black Unity and Freedom Party, and the Indian Workers’ Association of Great Britain (IWA GB). In these spaces, Black political theories and identities were developed, which were unique to the British context. This Black political identity was intended to unite racialised migrants from different nations and regions of the (former) British Empire.
Those who organised as Black focused on socialism and antiracism to combat inequalities in housing and education, police brutality, racism in trade unions and in daily life. Black activists sought to inform their communities about anticolonial issues across the globe to stay connected in solidarity with international movements. Organising as Black told others what your movement stood for, and reflected a particularly radical socialist stance in the context of twentieth century Britain.
In its early years, 1979 – 1984, SBS drew from this recent history, focusing on several social issues that came under this Black banner: state and police brutality against racialised people; racism in healthcare, education, and housing; immigration laws; and developing community consciousness on international anticolonial movements. Though SBS gave women a radical space to organise away from the local first-generation movement, IWA Southall, the SBS’s Black identity drew on historical South Asian political Blackness in other parts of Britain. First-generation male activists in the IWA GB and the Black People’s Alliance (BPA) had been developing South Asian Black politics in the 1960s. This activism focused more on engaging other working men in the South Asian community to participate in organisational socialism and on-the-street demonstrations, but shared the aim of raising political consciousness.
Through speaking and writing, women in SBS shared their opinions on the intersections of race, class and gender. The women of SBS were second-generation migrants who had grown up in Britain. It was therefore important for the group to learn how their life stories connected to broader histories and movements across the globe and to share this knowledge with other racialised (mainly South Asian) women in their local community. To do this, SBS held meetings and created a ‘Southall Black Sisters Newsletter’, which members contributed to with articles and poems exploring international, national and local issues. These included reporting on women’s activism across the globe and Black feminist groups across London. By holding meetings and sharing resources within the oppressive context of 1970s and 1980s Southall, SBS’s meetings and newsletters were themselves forms of political activism that allowed SBS women to develop their own consciousness and ideas about socialism, antiracism and anticolonialism. This approach to political organisation still resonates today.
Its early campaigns centred on the slogan, ‘Struggle not Submission’ to fight against gendered violence. This slogan was addressed to activists in IWA Southall, SYM, and the broader South Asian community in Southall, particularly those who were socially conservative and patriarchal within the home. The slogan told the community that SBS women would not submit to patriarchal violence. Instead SBS supported women who were survivors/ victims of domestic abuse and violence in Southall and West London more broadly. SBS also drew on the above-mentioned Black politics of IWA GB and the BPA by developing connections with other Black women’s groups through the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD).
In 1981, for example, SBS women took part in the OWAAD Study Group at the Brixton Black Women’s Centre. Here, they spoke about the practical limitations of South Asian and African diasporic heritage women working together. They said that in theory unity between racialised women from different backgrounds was essential in fighting racism in Britain, reasserting their commitment to political Blackness. They also emphasised the importance of teaching their communities about each other’s struggles facing the triple oppression of race, class and gender, to raise political consciousness and foster solidarity. SBS and the Brixton Black Women’s group shared experiences of sexism within activist spaces, and police brutality towards their broader racialised communities in Southall and Brixton.
Yet, they also explained that unity and solidarity were much more difficult to achieve in practice. At the 1981 OWAAD Study Group, SBS representatives shared experiences of running a shelter for racialised women who faced domestic violence at home. They stated that it was difficult for the women in the shelter to get along ‘because of cultural differences’ (or perhaps prejudices). Although this illuminated the potential for racism between different ethnic and migrant groups, it also underscores the importance of political education in deepening solidarities. For SBS, educating local South Asian women about the struggles of other racialised women across Britain and the globe was a useful tool for political education, but community organisation was more effective when targeting the specific needs of different ethnic groups.
When reflecting on this today, particularly given the prevalence of misinformation, education remains a crucial tool for mobilising communities and fostering solidarities. My research into SBS and other twentieth century South Asian socialists has taught me that political Blackness was not just an identity that developed on the basis of shared experiences and histories, but was an actively chosen socialist, antiracist and anticolonial framework. SBS used this to develop a unique Black feminist framework to empower women in Southall’s South Asian community through increasing their knowledge and understanding of wider struggles of racialised women in Britain and across the globe. Using education to develop and sustain political consciousness and self-advocacy is something activists can learn from in the present.