Republished from the Ella Baker School of Organising’s website
19/08/2020 – #BlackLivesMatter
This session looks at; the history of racism and the invention of whiteness, the inequality of outcome experienced by the Black community in the UK today, and asks ‘how can we act to effect real, lasting change?’
Community Bridging, the lessons from the battle of Cable Street
In 1936, when Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists sought to march through Whitechapel, the beating heart of the Jewish East End, the community turned out in their hundreds of thousands to oppose him. They formed a human barrier that the police could not breach and the march was abandoned. How was this unity between the areas diverse communities built and sustained, and what can we learn fro this when facing narratives of division today?
20/08/2020 – Intersectionality
For many years there was an artificial division between ‘identity’ and ‘class’ politics and a ferocious dialogue of the deaf between people holding polarised views. Then Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor of law and a seasoned civil rights activist argued that it was not ‘either/or’ but that oppressions and exploitations exist simultaneously and that rather than being purely cumulative in their effects, they are capable of interacting in a way that multiplies their impact.
This session celebrates her insights and explores how intersectionality can be a tool for understanding how we make change.
