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

Asian women’s groups to the national body, and that is gone too.
But yes, the history is not written so young people can’t identify with it, there aren’t
that many resources, so people don’t engage with it, but this needs to be tackled especially
in our schools, and within the curriculum. In some ways, the relative success of the Asian
groups undermines the radical politics in some sense, some people might gravitate towards
a unified black history and think this only happened in the 70s and 80s, yet forget the
Stephen Lawrence campaign which still resonates today, or more recently, the Rotherham 12
campaign.
Finally, how has your activism changed as you get older?
In terms of your thinking you become more radical as you get older, both radical and
angry, because you see things not changing as much or as fast as you would like them to.
I am now involved in the editorial collective of the journal Feminist Review, and I am on the
board of Feminist Review Trust. This keeps me quite busy alongside my academic work. As
you get older your thinking becomes more acute, political commitments stronger, and you
become clearer about priorities. But the situation is so dire at the moment, not just in Britain
but globally too. But I see hope in intersectional politics, and in emerging movements for
social justice.
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