Resisting racial police warfare through radical history
Soundings - Print ISSN 1362-6620 - Online ISSN 1741-0797
Volume 2024 Number 87
Resisting racial police warfare through radical history
Jasbinder Nijjar pages 105‑116
DOI: 10.3898/SOUN:87.05.2024
Abstract
This piece foregrounds the critical role of historical knowledge in animating and determining contemporary strategies to resist institutional racism and militarised policing. Modern (neo)liberal myths about the post-racial and non-martial character of policing in Britain rely heavily on historical erasure. This is evidenced by recent policy-based drives to enforce ‘impartiality’ and ‘inclusion’ when teaching history in schools. A resulting politics of forgetting renders invisible the routinised and normalised status of racially determined forms of militarised policing, thus enabling contemporary expression of racial police warfare to be downplayed as exceptional, marginal and aberrational. Southall Resists 40 (SR40), a community-led project in Southall, West London, challenged such forgetting by publicly narrating Southall’s history of racism and resistance in a way that showed how it speaks to the now. The historical work of SR40 unsettles hegemonic myths about the police as an ‘impartial service’.
To cite this article
Jasbinder Nijjar (2024) Resisting racial police warfare through radical history, Soundings, 2024(87), 105-116 . https://doi.org/10.3898/SOUN:87.05.2024