Our London: Aaron Bastani, Ash Sarkar, Liz Fekete, Adam Elliott-Cooper & Jumanah Younis

This focus panel on race and racism was recorded at Foyles, Charing Cross Rd, 23rd March 2016 at the second in the Our London event series in collaboration with Compass and co-hosted by Novara Media.

One of the greatest aspects of living in London is its diversity, but at the same time the city is striated by racial politics. In London, as throughout the UK, people from BAME groups have been historically much more likely to be in poverty than white British people, as well as suffer from housing deprivation, homelessness and inferior access to healthcare and education. Meanwhile, racist violence is on the rise, with state racisms against ‘Muslimness’, an institutionally racist police and the ‘extreme centre’ of the British political elite enforcing tensions between race, class and nation in a context of increasing immigration and numerous global crises.

In response to all of this, Novara Media, Verso and Compass will be co-hosting a panel that focuses on living in London and some of the intersecting oppressions that increasingly define it. Novara Media's Aaron Bastani chairs the panel and is joined by Jumanah Younis of Sisters Uncut, Ash Sarkar, also from Novara Media, Liz Fekete, Director of the Institute of Race Relations and author of the forthcoming Fault Lines (Verso, 2017)and activist and academic Adam Elliott-Cooper.

We remember those who died in police custody and ask: What does it mean to call London a multicultural – or even a post-racial – city in the context of neoliberalism? What is the relationship between race and class in the city in 2016 and how should mayoral candidates be responding to these issues?