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

By the time we met them, Southall IWA was huge, and wealthy and out of touch with the
younger generation. Yet, it was once a leading organisation, and achieved a lot. And it is sad
that when you look at the white left, the SWP and ANL they have books, pamphlets, website,
and yet when you look at our community, there is nothing. Its political history, its legacy
is slowly disappearing, nobody has written about it, and this is perhaps why we had no
direction. When we only have white people’s history, rather than our own history we don’t
know what the rules of engagement should be. As a young person growing up in Southall
back then we had a series of encounters growing up, and when we did something they labelled
us, and we had the whole media and state apparatus tell us we were just gang members,
its something that still happens today.
Are you less political as you get older?
As you get older you get more political in the sense that when you are young you don’t
have the range of vocabulary of words to really articulate things, but now now have the
words, It’s not that I could see things when I was younger, but now I have more words, but
the danger is that you just talk and become part of the system, because that is what the
system wants you to do, just speak and not actually change anything. In some sense as you
get older you can end of deskilling yourself by losing touch with the real issues. I try to do
this by still speaking to people in Southall in Punjabi mostly, this helps maintain some sharpness
and connection.
it still makes me realise that sometimes you can get more change by hurling a brick
than by keep going to meetings. that sometimes community leadership is best achieved
through less knowledge and understanding of the establishment. SYM was powerful because
we thought differently and didn’t want to listen what others had to say, this was both
its strength and weakness.
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