In the second of the #ReconstructionWork series, ‘Parliamentary Politics and Grassroots Organising’, David Lammy and Amina Gichinga discussed how best to effect political change through grassroots activism and the parliamentary system, whilst taking into consideration the role of community, culture and theories of change.

Find out more about our #ReconstructionWork project here.

Speakers:

After being elected for the 7th time as the Member of Parliament for Tottenham in December 2019, David Lammy was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Justice. He became the first black MP to hold the Justice post, either in government or opposition. This appointment concluded a busy year for David, who has fought for justice on behalf of the Windrush Generation, spearheaded the struggle to resist Brexit, campaigned for a humane immigration system, sought to protect vulnerable teenagers from surging knife-crime, re-applied pressure on the Government to compensate the victims of the Grenfell Tower Fire and continued to expose racial bias within the British criminal justice system. These are just some of the issues that David explores in his recently published book, Tribes, an exploration of both the benign and malign effects of our very human need to belong.

Amina Gichinga is a musician, a speaker and a community organiser. Amina became disillusioned with the elitist environment of parliament in her teens and turned to grassroots activism in Newham, where she’s always lived. Wanting to demonstrate a radical approach to how party politics could be done differently, she stood as Take Back the City’s GLA candidate for the City and East Constituency in the 2016 Mayoral & London Assembly elections. Since early 2018 she has worked as an organiser with London Renters Union, organising with local tenants in Newham & Leytonstone to harness their collective power. Amina combined her love of music with her dedication to social justice and founded Nawi Collective, an all-black women and non-binary femmes choir, in 2017.

I
What does it Matter?

“…you don’t worry about dirt in the garden because it belongs in the garden, but the moment you see dirt in the bedroom you have to do something about it because it symbolically doesn’t belong there. And what you do with dirt in the bedroom is to cleanse it, you sweep it out, you restore order, you police boundaries, you know the hard and fast boundaries around what belongs and what doesn’t. Inside/Outside. Cultured/Uncivilised. Barbarous/Cultivated, and so on.”

– Stuart Hall discussing anthropologist Mary Douglas and her ‘matter out of place’ theory¹

I remember an empty seat next to me on a crowded train. I remember walking easy in a quaint French village before being interrupted by the wrinkled nose of a passerby; tu viens d’où, alors? reminding me that foreign follows me like an old cloak lugging around my neck. I remember the breeze in Kerry’s voice telling me, I don’t like the really dark black people, but you’re alright, the way horror grew in my chest like ivy that day (its leaves have still not withered). I remember Year 6, the way my teacher shuddered at a picture of my profile. How I first understood revulsion without knowing its name, tucking my lips into themselves to make them smaller, if only for a little while. I remember the pointing, questions of whether I could read whilst holding a book, being looked at too intently to be thought beautiful but blushing all the same. I think this is a love, but the kind we have been warned to run from. It owns a gun, yet will not speak of its terror; obsessive in every curl of my hair, the bloom of my nose, the peaks and troughs of my breath. I’d tell you who I am, but you do not ask for my voice. You’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you?

II
Hostile, a definition:

Bitter; windrush citizen: here until your skin is no longer needed
Cold; migrants sleeping rough will be deported
Malicious; Yarl’s Wood is locking away too many hearts, will not let them heal
Militant; charter flights, expulsion as a brutal secret in handcuffs
Warlike; the threat, the swarm, the takeover, the Black-Brown invasion
Inhospitable; send them to Rwanda
Resentful; immigration is, after all, a very ’serious problem’
Unwilling; to see the truth in one another
Standoffish; do not fall in love with the wrong passport
Unwelcoming; the number of refugees dying to reach you
Afraid;
Afraid;
Afraid;

***

how long must we make a case for migration? recount the times it has carried this country on its neck so this nation could bask in the glory of its so called greatness? how loud should we chant our stories of beauty of struggle of grit? write all the ways we are lovely and useful across our faces before we become a hymn sheet singing of desperation? what time left to find a favourite cafè and a hand to hold? to lie on the grass in the park and spot clouds whose shapes remind us of the things we’ve lost? the loves we can’t get back?

III
and so, a riot, and so the beast

The riots. August 2024. Did I dream it? The rage, the terror, the fire?

Already, it’s being remembered as the riots of the ‘far right’. Far away – like a beast on a leash scowling in the distance. But I’ve seen riots, routine and much closer. Riots on my tv screen in racist debates over who gets to be here, riots in politician’s mouths, chewing and spitting immigrants out like a dirty word. A riot to my presence in the rooms I walk in and out of, protest to any sign I’m here, surviving, even experiencing joy. After all, the rule, no necessity, is that we must always be on the losing end of life. The idea that actually everyone could survive and experience joy, is supposedly a fairytale for the naïve. Instead, we remain trapped in the game of it- someone must win and another lose.

Weeks, even days, after the fury of the race riots, all of its wrath was shoved back into a box. The beast, clawing and wailing in the struggle, muffled by the pleasantries of nothing to see here! racism is in the past! because we’re all very civilised around here, right?

Eventually we left our houses once again. Funny how we knew what to do, how we’ve been rehearsing for emergency and violence every day in the before and after. This is the silent trade-off of what it is to live here, to exist within a spooling well of anger, unchecked and always brimming beneath the surface, hot and ready to boil over, flip the box wide open.

The rioters claimed enough was enough, to stop the boats, that something has to end

And I wanted to ask them, what? What is too much? Whose boats first descended where? What has to end, and where did this all begin? Trace it to its exact point.

Whose story are you telling? At what point did you get lost? Trace it to its exact point. Meet me there.

I know the truth to these questions means nothing. White terror is an inheritance, and the need to assert dominance over others, an heirloom that is passed on and on and on. Those who accept it, must do so faithfully, despite any truths or pleas to change.

I wanted to tell the rioters of the time they’re wasting, that they can’t hate us on the way to their own happiness. That what degrades us, degrades them – we are bound to one another whether any of us like it or not, and maybe, just maybe the thing that oppresses you, oppresses us too. That the violence and rage within them, can be fuel for something else, something good.

IV
Who are we to one another: a dirty secret

Here’s the thing we forget as we age; we’re not so different. Yes, there are some people whose clothes will never start a riot, those who will never know the grief of having a face made synonymous with a thug (the trauma of this deserves its own word). It is true that the things we experience are wrapped up in the life we are given. But when it comes to who we are, down to our most intimate core, aren’t we all just a bit lonely, scared for the storms to come? Asking questions no one truly has answers for?

Consider this; many of us did not want to get up this morning, some of us couldn’t. There is that dazed place we all inhabit seconds before fully waking that has no border, needs no passport. When the temperature drops to a chill, a body becomes its own shelter, shoulders round into a cave protecting itself. Some of our worse fears will come true, others won’t. We are all still chewing on words we wish we’d said to someone, somewhere, and longing to swallow back the ones we’ve said in temper. A first love will make our bodies speak languages we didn’t know we were fluent in and we all carry the heaviness of loss. How did we forget that we’re all deeply connected on some level?

Every day my phone scrolls through a news feed of angry people drunk on their ability to put others back in their place. There is a growing army of the righteous who tell us that there is a correct language to speak, an exact way to love, one acceptable altar to pray on. That falling out of this line means the terror of brute force is to be expected.

I watch a video of a man on the top deck of a bus screaming at another with a boiled kettle rage. He is all fist, spit in your face, my-grand-dad-didn’t-win-the war-so-your-kind-could-piss-it-all-away. I’m not sure it matters who the person on the receiving end of this venom is. In the video he is a chilling quiet, the kind many people of colour will recognise. It is a calculated silence, the kind where you are bargaining for your survival (and this too needs its own word). It does not matter whether he has a job he works hard at, the taxes he does or does not pay, if he tips generously, whether he is kind. That’s the point, isn’t it? Racism does not look for nuance, only the audacity of our skin.

I wonder if with a different lens these two could be lovers, could be sitting next to each other as strangers on the same top deck. They’d realise they were listening to the same music and how this one track makes them each feel a particular kind of giddy as the bass drops, how as the bus jolts a headphone would fall from each ear and they would turn to look at each other and they would smile.

V
What words have been left for us?

Words tell lies. This is difficult pill to swallow for a writer, but it is true, I think. We’ve inherited childish terms that shape the way we interact with one another. The words Black and White are at their heart nonsensical, a carrier of symbols and signs artificially packed with history and too much meaning. And yet, still, these labels are seared onto our backs. How we ourselves are living in a language that equates our colour to a shipwreck where all hope is lost. It is, after all, a dark time. Blackness, with all its pain and apparent innate knowledge of knife crime and squalor embedded under its skin, stands with its back to whiteness, which in turn, knows fresh air and the best schools to get into. How boring, but these terms of reference are as scorched in our minds as a national anthem. How then, should we come to understand ourselves with the language we’ve been given? To find meaning and truth in words that are the scraps of the dictionary?

Give us back our tongues and we’ll give you an answer. It may not be a sound you’ll recognise but it will be ours, all ours.

 

***

   

The Audacity of Our Skin was originally commissioned by Counterpoints Arts as part of the Who Are We festival at the Tate Modern in 2018. This revisited version was commissioned by the Stuart Hall Foundation in 2025, supported by Comic Relief.

¹ https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Stuart-Hall-Race-the-Floating-Signifier-Transcript.pdf

SHF DPhil Scholar’s Caetano Santos talk ‘Haitian immigrant artists in Brazil: diasporic negotiations of belonging and citizenship, cosmopolitanism from below and the political aesthetics of migration’, presented at the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholars and Fellows event on 7th February 2020.

Our third Annual Public Conversation pursued the theme of Resistance through multiple lenses. The event, which took place on Saturday 8th February, welcomed special guests; multidisciplinary artist and designer Bahia Shehab, journalist and author Jack Shenker, investigative journalist Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi, sociologist Yusef Bakkali, and jazz pianist and composer Nikki Yeoh. The afternoon was chaired by Professor Ethel Brooks. Watch a selection from the day’s sessions: – Keynote from Jack Shenker 00:00:04​ – Discussion panel with, Yusef Bakkali, Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi and Jack Shenker, chaired by Ethel Brooks 00:30:33​ – Stuart Hall Foundation Chair Gilane Tawadros, introduces Nikki Yeoh 1:25:50​ – Performance from Nikki Yeoh 1:26:43​ www.stuarthallfoundation.org