In it, Mukerjee paints a stark picture of Churchill’s indifference towards the famine in Bengal, which was caused by a perfect storm of bad decisions, chief among them the seizure of land from farmers and wartime trade policy. Several years ago, I read Madhusree Mukerjee’s Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II. I’m not going to do a huge breakdown of the book – it’s available fairly cheaply on Amazon and there are copies available in the Parkgate Road and Leighton libraries – but I do want to talk about one section particular. Part autobiography and part political statement, Natives pulls on threads from the last 400 years of history. Natives takes those pithy lyrics and expands them into a rich, compelling and educational work, one that’s really helped me to understand at least a part of what it means to grow up Black in the Western world. His lyrics are searing – grappling with issues that speak to the core of the Black British experience, the indifference and hostility of successive governments towards people of colour and how that trickles down into the public consciousness. When I heard a couple of years ago that he’d been awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford Brookes, I wasn’t surprised. I’ve followed Akala’s career off-and-on for the better part of 15 years at this point.
The book I chose to add to the library is Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire by Akala.
I’m Kit – I’m the Digital & Marketing Coordinator at CSU. We’d like to share some of the books that we’ve been reading with you, so you can hopefully learn along with us and maybe get a feel for how we’re approaching this important task. It was an incredible and challenging session for all of us, and really reaffirmed to us that antiracism isn’t something you can just do in training and consider settled – that learning needs to be an ongoing process.Īs part of our organisational learning, we decided we’d found a (small, but growing) library of books themed around antiracism, Blackness and allyship – a package of resources we can share amongst staff to ensure we’re all continually working towards the same goal & mulling over the same ideas. As part of our commitment to becoming an actively antiracist organisation, we recently had an amazing training session with Minds of POC – a consultancy run by young women of colour with a background specifically in students’ unions.
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