5 - Anti-racism, Participation, and the Transitional Public Sphere

Summary

This chapter considers the growth of what we characterise as a transitional public sphere that bridged the private domains of individual struggles against racial attacks, racist practice, and far-right politics with the public domain of mainstream politics. Struggles against racism have often shared an ongoing ambivalence about the imperative to raise profile and move from the margins to the centre of political debate. The need for political autonomy and agency sits, at times, in tension, with the need to build broad alliances and political efficacy. Campaigns demand profile but are always liable to charges of co-optation. The struggle for unity over racial dilemmas sits alongside recognition of the pluralities of intersectional struggles in gender, class, sexuality, diverse ethnicities, and religious faith that at times cross over with linked considerations of legal status of migrants and refugees. In this context, the emergence of a transitional public sphere of antiracism in the 1980s and 1990s is considered through a detailed analysis of this sphere of political action.