Anti-Racism's Lightbulb Moment: Institutions, Reform and Radical Change

About this event

In 2020, anti-racist protests swept across Britain, with activists challenging state and institutional racism. In the same year, the UK government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities rejected not just the radical demands of Black Lives Matter protesters, but even liberal analyses of institutional racism in policing.

This talk given by Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper, Lecturer in Public and Social Policy at Queen Mary University of London, examines how these two political interventions, analysing the same place at the same time, arrived at such divergent conclusions.

Dr Cooper introduces a third party, the ‘independent’ commissions which occupy the liberal centre ground. They have attempted to satisfy the left by adopting terms like institutional racism, while also appeasing the establishment right, by changing little of Britain’s unequal racial landscape. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this balancing act has satisfied neither party, resulting in a surge in both radical anti-racism at the grassroots, and hardline rejection of racism by the right.

Adam Elliott-Cooper is a Lecturer in Social and Public Policy in the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. His first monograph, Black Resistance to British Policing, was published by Manchester University Press in

May 2021. He is also co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021).