Coming of Age : 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism

Avtar Brah
How did you become political?
I was born in India, but grew up in East Africa, so I’m really a Ugandan Asian. From Uganda
I went to University in the USA, and it was during my undergraduate days, when I was
studying in California, that I really got involved in politics. This was during the time of Black
Power movement and feminism was just beginning to take off the ground, so it was really
at Davis, University of California, that I started to get involved with student politics. I was
engaged with anti-racist politics on Davis campus. Politically, they were exciting times. For
example, there was the Free Angela Davis campaign. We went on demonstrations and I
remember going to Oakland for an anti -racist demonstration, and that was the beginning
of my awareness of what was happening to black Americans. It was a very different situation
for Asian students in those days, I am talking about the late 1960’s and early 1970s. We
were, I would say, orientalised but that was different from what African Americans had to
contend with.
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