Racism and anti-racism in the United States: contesting 'the new Jim Crow'
Speaker: Prof Tithi Bhattacharya, Purdue University, US
Tuesday 15 May 2012, 5.30pm, at Runnymede Trust, 7 Plough Yard, Shoreditch, London EC2A 3LP. Nearest tube: Liverpool Street
The murder of black teenager Trayvon Martin in a gated community in Sanford, Florida made international headlines. Academics and policy-makers who argued that America had arrived at a ‘post-racial’ society, in which race played little role in determining social practice, had to scramble to explain how this killing fell within the law.
In this seminar Tithi Bhattacharya explores two simultaneous trends in political developments in America - increasing racialisation of law and civil society from above and the beginnings of a new era of anti-racist struggle. Following Michelle Alexander and her analysis of The New Jim Crow*, she argues that the killing of Trayvon Martin has become the 'rule' in the context of the US state and its relationship to people of colour.
What made this murder an 'exception’ - prompting large anti-racist marches across the US - is the recent rise in mass resistance, including the emergence across the US of the Occupy Movement. Tithi Bhattacharya examines the intersection of these two forces - the American state from above and the new mass movement from below – and the potential outcomes for anti-racist struggles in America.
* The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander (New Press 2010)
Organised by Runnymede Trust and the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees & Belonging (CMRB) at UEL.
Further information available in the attached Flyer: Seminar – the ‘new Jim Crow’.
