One Liberation is Bound to Another: Beyond Liberal Shortcuts
Date: 5 May 2026
Time: 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: Sociology Seminar Room
Across the globe, racialised communities face vehement hatred and violence as governments mount attacks on progressive politics around race, gender and sexuality. But why, in such urgent times, has anti-racism retreated into forms of identity politics that often locates the problem of racism in individual (white, male, able) privilege or considers solutions through individual obligation? Throwing up a wall between black, brown and white people undermine the potentials for solidarity and radical change.
Fourty years ago, ‘RAT and the degradation of black struggle’ was published about the dangers of reducing racism to attitude solved by awareness training. In his path-breaking critique, Sivanandan emphased institutional and state racisms that have given rise to racist attitudes and impoverishes and demonises the most vulnerable. Continuing on this legacy, Aouragh calls for a new politics that does not leave the exploitative white power structure intact and instead brings different oppression together in shared unity. Her proposal for a ‘radical kinship’ is forged along internationalist politics and grassroots solidarity. Drawing on Sivanandan’s approaches, she argues that organising around shared experiences that are grounded in collective praxis challenges cultural essentialism which in turn produce hierarchies of oppressions. The condition is to seek out the common denominators for coalition-building, to restore the intellectual links between ‘the Left' and 'Blackness’ and to promote ‘practical engagement’. Without flattening subjective differences, sharing experiences and vulnerabilities opens up the transgressive realisation that one liberation is bound up with the other.
Speaker Biographies and Research
Biography: Aouragh, Miriyam | University of Westminster
