The Anti-Statement

In the wake of the public lynching of Dr. Jason Arday (may he rest in power) and the increase of far-right marches across the country ARM has had several requests for comment and public statements. As an anti-racist organisation, formed by a coalition of prominent anti-racist organisations we understand why people would look to us to respond to current events. Particularly when these events are the various expressions of racist violence that, by design, harm and attempt to intimidate our communities. The very communities we not only represent but are made up of.

As this was not the first time we’ve been asked to make public statements in the light of racist violence (the racist pogroms in Belfast, the Unite the Kingdom march, only to name a few) we thought it would be a good time to share clearly what we believe our role is, our position toward the current culture of public discourse, the areas where there is room for growth for us and where there isn’t and where this is how we will operate, on principle, going forward.

For those who won’t read the full piece, we summarise the following here:Our focus as an organisation, as a movement, is to put our energy and very limited resources toward building spaces of transformative organising across the UK. We do not, at this stage, see our main role as ‘shaping public discourse’.  Many of the organisations represented by our core team (BLM UK, Maslaha, Migrants Organise and Right to Remain) do add to public discourse in well-thought out and important ways – we will continue to amplify their work as and when appropriate.

With that said, we’ll dive a little more deeply into the considerations that have gone into why we will not become (even as resources hopefully increase) a statement producing organisation.

The institutionalisation of organising – we are not a charity

ARM is not a charity. We are not part of, nor want to be part of the non-profit industrial complex. While we will have to navigate it at times – to resource the work, to connect with others whom we might at times go into coalition with – our aim is not to become a professionalised organisation. ARM is a movement. ARM is the local groups forming all across the country shaped and led by local people meeting needs and building power in their local communities. ARM is not centralised – while the core team provides resources and frameworks as well as clarity on what it means to be an ‘ARM’ group – our local groups operate autonomously.

ARM is not looking to become an organisation ‘run’ by professionalised staff or focus on funding for the sake of funding.

Yes, resourcing our movements is important and ensuring the work is sustainable is too, but in this era of professional activists and ‘organisers’, we want to do something different. Something that has been done by many before us and is currently being done by many others around the world, we just don’t see that on social media as those whose work inspires us are often not the people we talk about or who get their flowers for the liberation work they do day in and day out. Therefore, we will not and are not able to put our very limited resources in reacting or responding to everything that happens in the world around us by ways of putting out statements. We are focused on the role we believe ARM has in our movements.

The current culture of ‘public discourse’ and on doing things differently

The current culture of public discourse will have us believe that having a perspective or view on something,  is as important, if not more than doing the actual work. Since the infamous black squares in 2020, we have seen how often sharing something on social media can be experienced as 'doing the work'.  We believe that this is a distraction. We understand that some are looking for statements to interpret any given incident or to find out what to do next. However, we don't believe it is our role to respond to every far right or racist incident through messaging. Rather we focus our energy on creating spaces where people know what to do next because of the strategic and empowered community they are a part of. Yes, narrative shift is important, and we do recognise that we will have a role to play in this at times. Whether it’s political education and providing resources and maybe even at times taking a public stand, we absolutely believe that there can be value in public declarations that can rally people. However, that good-faith engagement in public discourse is not what we’re seeing at the moment. The sensationalism and reactive nature of social media means that too many of us, including those of us who want to work toward a dignified society for all, can spend too much time speaking into the void, yelling at each other and comparing notes on who has the better take.

There is an African Proverb, often attributed to the Yoruba tradition, that says, ‘Times are urgent, let us be still’.

This sentiment is in direct opposition to the dominant white supremacist, capitalist culture. This culture rewards immediacy over reflection, pausing or tending to our grief and will have us believe that the only accurate response is to immediately externalise our experience by sharing our opinions and doing something for the sake of it, often to avoid the difficult feelings our experience brings.

This is a culture we are actively seeking to opt out of every day, even in light of the fact that we all have to navigate it. At ARM we take the exhortation in this proverb seriously. We believe that our movements have, and we include ourselves in this, too often moved at the pace of the oppressor, thinking we can outrun them. The very famous quote by Audre Lorde ‘the master’s tools won’t dismantle the master’s house’ is so often taken out of context here, when really it is speaking to exactly this. We might at times use whatever tools are at our disposal (including the ‘master’s’ as have many of our ancestors) but we will move at a different pace, we will not move with the master’s frameworks and energies.

To us, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist (insert all the other words we love on the left) movement, is one that doesn’t just work toward something different but works differently. It is a movement that opts out of white supremacy culture whenever and however it can, that interrogates not just the what but the how. A movement that values fugitivity, that doesn’t have to be on the platform and in the spotlight all the time. A movement that has a secret language, that is strategic and with that powerful. So no, we won’t always react or respond to or even feel the need to ‘shape’ public discourse. We view our role as building the infrastructure for our movements and want to create spaces locally and nationally where we come together in person, where the infrastructure we are building can hold our collective grief and anger in the face of ongoing racist and state violence, where we can be with each other and alchemise our pain into action.

On demands on Black and Global Majority Leaders and organisers

Finally, ARM is Black and Global Majority led. This means that most of the people moving ARM forward nationally and locally are themselves disproportionately affected by racist and state violence every day, both directly and indirectly.

We refuse to be dehumanised in this work. When Jason Arday passed as a result of said violence, many of us were deeply affected, triggered and needed a moment to recover. And we encouraged that. Not just in the spirit of organising differently and because of our stance around public discourse in general but also because we will not sacrifice our humanity along the way. The very forces and systems that lynched Jason, that dehumanised him to the point of unprecedented media onslaught, are the same forces that sneak into our movements when we demand superhuman performance from those with platforms and when we assume an inanimate organisation where there are real people experiencing the world in just as many real ways as everyone else.Yes, we can absolutely expect things from those who are positioned as leaders in our movements – we can and should expect accountability, a willingness to grow, self-reflection, all of that. What we can and should not expect is for our leaders to not be human as they often sacrifice more than we might ever know for the work of our collective liberation. So even when we come with expectations, justified as they might be, it is worth pausing for a moment and considering the humanity of the people we’re engaging in.

We understand that some of our comrades racialised as white in the movement were also looking to us to say something after Jason’s passing because they’ve been told many times that there are moments where they should not take up space and yet they were itching to say something. They wanted us to make a statement so they could reshare our words, rather than fill the gap with their own thoughts and with that take up said space. We encourage those who felt this to sit with some questions: Why did you feel the need to say something straight away?

On where we will continue to build and grow

With all this being said, we do believe that creating spaces for our communities to come together to grieve and lament are crucial. Where we could we provided those spaces internally to folks without big social media fanfare after Jason Arday’s passing. We also created space for this in light of the byelections earlier this year and see this as an area we want to continue to build and grow, together with everyone who makes up ARM. As we grow capacity, we will dedicate more resources to the care of our communities in this particular way and all those who organise with ARM so we can build consistent spaces for care. Not just when something that makes the headlines happens, but regularly for all of us as we know racist and state violence don’t take a break for our communities. We encourage our local groups regularly to think about this at a local level and we will share what this looks like nationally and how to access this via our local groups and to those who have signed up to our newsletters.

We truly believe that the path to liberation requires the strategic, principled and disciplined work of transformative organising in our communities and we will put all of our effort into this work going forward.

To get involved in this work with ARM, head to www.antiracistmovement.org to find out how.

In solidarity

The ARM Core team