The summer of 2020 saw the largest black-led protests in UK history. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets across Britain, primarily focused on the ongoing problem of police racism. Britain had not seen black-led protests on this scale since the early 1980s, and this talk by Adam Elliott-Cooper examines some of the impediments to radical black action and thought during that thirty year period. The liberalization of black politics in the 21st century is analyzed through the language of diversity, hate crime, privilege and unconscious bias. These processes offer a window into how grassroots collective action against state power can be displaced by individualized policies which focus on racial prejudice. This talk goes on to argue that police brutality is always a point of antagonism that invests black social life with recurrent sites of contestation. In other words, policing is where moments flare up to shed light on other issues. These moments include specific case of police violence, but also the everyday forms of state power and control which criminalize black spaces, black lives and black cultures. It is this direct antagonism with the state that enables a more radical black politics to break away from the limitations of liberal anti-racism, culminating in protest movements like Black Lives Matter.

Adam Elliott-Cooper is Lecturer in Public and Social Policy at Queen Mary University of London. He received his PhD from the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, in 2016. He has previously worked as a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at UCL, as a teaching fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and as a research associate in the Department of Geography at King's College 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). Adam sits on the board of The Monitoring Group, an anti-racist organization challenging state racism and racial violence.

This talk is part of the student project "Afro and Indigenous Futures." Registered attendees will receive the Zoom link via email.