Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

The myth of grabby immigrants does, however, work to serve a particular agenda. These are the interests of those who are invested in

We must ask why politicians only ever approach class and poverty issues when it is in relation to whiteness. When race isn’t mentioned, working-class people aren’t considered deserving of targeted policies at all.

Instead, it shifts the focus of the problem on to black and brown people. The immigrants. There is a scarcity mentality.

It is extraordinary to see how Nick Griffin’s rhetoric about an embattled white working class has been subsumed into the mainstream less than a decade since his political peak. The class privilege of middle- and upper-class people in Britain is not challenged when we focus on the plight of the white working classes.

In this case, building housing out of reach for working-class people meant that it was out of reach for black people.

Instead, when we think about inequality, we are encouraged to think of both race and class as distinct and separate. They’re not.

At the time of their research, the foundation found that just 20 per cent of white Brits were living in income poverty, in drastic comparison to 30 per cent of black Caribbeans, 45 per cent of black Africans, 55 per cent of Pakistanis and 65 per cent of Bangladeshis. The report also found that a disturbing 50 per cent of black and minority ethnic children were living in poverty.

Because we are a nation that loves to think of itself as the underdog, it wasn’t surprising that a 2016 British Social Attitudes survey found that 60 per cent of the British public identifies as working class. The most interesting part of the survey was that 47 per cent of those who considered themselves working class were actually in managerial and professional jobs– hardly working class at all.

That angry black women appear to emasculate men is sexist because it makes assumptions about the characteristics of men that inevitably limits the scope of their humanity. To believe in emasculation, you have to believe that masculinity is about power, and strength, and dominance. These traits are supposed to be great in men, but they’re very unattractive in women. Especially angry black ones.

There is a difference between saying ‘we want to be included’ and saying ‘we want to reconstruct your exclusive system’. The former is more readily accepted into the mainstream.

After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don’t wish to be assimilated into the status quo. I want to be liberated from all negative assumptions that my characteristics bring. The onus is not on me to change. Instead, it’s the world around me.

I have always loved feminism’s readiness to viciously rip into the flesh of misogyny, to stick its chin out defiantly and scare the living daylights out of mediocre men. But it needs to be the whole package, to take into account every aspect of what writer bell hooks called ‘the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’.

It needs to recognise that disabled people aren’t inherently defective, but rather that non-disabled people have failed at creating a physical world that serves all.

Far from shutting down debate, incorporating the challenges of racism is absolutely essential for a feminist movement that doesn’t leave anyone behind. I’m not sure our most popular versions of feminism are currently up to that task.

Feminist activists would be foolish to ally with political forces that only ever speak in defence of women when there are Muslims to bash.

‘I’m sick of living in this world built for the needs of men! I feel like at best, I can fight it, at worst I have to learn to cope in it.’

Each time a celebrity stakes her claim on feminism, a little bit of the stigma surrounding the word is shattered.

In 1969, she explained, American civil rights activist Frances Beale wrote a pamphlet called Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female. Later, the Third World Women’s Alliance created a newspaper called Triple Jeopardy.

This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.

If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?’

The courts would say if you don’t experience racism in the same way as a [black] man does, or sexism in the same way as a white woman does, then you haven’t been discriminated against.

In black feminists, we used the word intersectionality to talk about the crossover of two distinct discriminations– racism and sexism– that happens to people who are both black and women.

A lot of white women in feminist spaces couldn’t understand why women of colour needed or wanted a different place to meet, so they would find ways of subtly undermining the self-determination of those who chose to organise separately.

It was Audre Lorde who said: ‘If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.’

‘When feminists can see the problem with all-male panels, but can’t see the problem with all-white television programmes, it’s worth questioning who they’re really fighting for.’

It has always been about the redistribution of power rather than the inverting of it.

Your life chances are still drastically influenced by your race and class.

Power and wealth in this country is still concentrated in very few, very white hands, and power never goes down without a fight.

There is an old saying about the straight man’s homophobia being rooted in a fear that gay men will treat him as he treats women.

There is talk of fairness, without acknowledging what is already unfair.