Islam’s hostility to human values ​​has long been the main reason why many of its followers have left it to become atheists. But, amid the far-right riots carried out in Britain earlier this month, it seems that some ex-Muslims have forgotten the motivation that drove them to become apostates in the first place. Do we oppose Islam out of sheer, mindless hatred, or do we hate it because it is hostile to humanity?

Some ex-Muslim atheists have shown their support for far-right figures such as Tommy Robinson and have encouraged anti-Muslim bigotry. In addition to that, they have promoted the violence perpetrated by the far right across the UK. This support is often based on the argument that the ‘demonstrations’ only target Muslims.

This position is based on misinformation. As we have seen, the riots went beyond targeting Muslims to include refugees and people of colour more generally, those who work in refugee support centres, and the police. But even if this position was accurate, it would still be bigoted and inhumane in itself.

‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which many if not most ex-Muslim atheists support as an alternative to Sharia law, begins thus: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’ The word ‘dignity’ is placed before the word ‘rights’ for a logical reason: human dignity serves as the basis for human rights. The concept of dignity recognises that all human beings have a special value that is inherent in themselves—not acquired—and therefore deserving of respect, without exception, simply because they are human beings.  In other words, you cannot talk about human rights if these rights are limited to certain people and denied to others.

To support bigotry against Muslims is to strip Muslims of their human dignity, which means that Muslims will not enjoy the same rights as everyone else. And this is exactly what you support when you talk about the right of white English people to ‘security of person’ while supporting riots that are trying to take away the right of Muslims to the same. In supporting the far right, these ex-Muslims show themselves to be non-secular, non-humanist atheists.

The far right and Islamism: two sides of the same coin

The far right bases its hatred of others on a sense of superiority that has no scientific basis. They believe that being white and/or Christian makes them inherently better than everyone else. Isn’t this exactly the same justification Islamists use for persecuting ex-Muslims and others who don’t fit into their narrow view of the world? Islamists see themselves and their worldview as superior and unchallengeable, and this is the basis on which they persecute women, gays, atheists, non-Muslims, and secular Muslims. The far right does exactly the same: they target those who are not white and/or Christian because they believe that they alone are worthy of respect.

Far-right ideology is not a cure for Islamism. Rather, it feeds it. When a far-right extremist calls for bigotry against Muslims, he/she encourages Islamists to respond with their own bigotry—as we witnessed in Birmingham on the night of 5 August. Supporting the far right to oppose Islamism feeds an endless cycle of bigotry and terrorism. It is unfortunate that some of us ex-Muslims contribute to this cycle, which only strengthens the very people, whether Islamist or far-right, who seek to destroy us.

A better approach: secular alliance against extremism

The cure for reactionary Islamism is not through an alliance with the reactionary far right built on a shared fanatical bigotry against ‘Muslims’, but through an alliance between secular atheists and secular Muslims. This would be a useful and humane alliance built on the values ​​advocated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: dignity, freedom, and rejection of extremism.

As ex-Muslim atheists seeking to build more humane societies, we must work to build bridges of understanding and coexistence between all religious and ethnic groups. We must unequivocally reject any form of fanaticism and violence, whether it comes from Islamists, far-right extremists, or anyone else. Taking a stand against far-right extremism and being a voice for justice and equality reflects our principle of rejecting extremism. Those who stood with the rioters showed that their problem is not with extremism as such but with Muslim extremism only.

For a better world free from hatred

Given that a large proportion of us ex-Muslims are refugees from the Middle East and North Africa, it is shameful that some of us are complicit in the attempted destruction of the democracies in which persecuted people like us seek refuge. Promoting far-right ideology threatens refugees like us. Moreover, far-right ideas are categorically opposed to the fundamental democratic ideals ​​of freedom, equality, and justice—the very values ​​that we as ex-Muslims felt the lack of in our countries of origin, leading us to flee by air or sea to places which stood up for those values. In other words, allying ourselves with extremists, some of whom call for the return of a ‘white and Christian’ England, undermines our own rights and interests as atheists in the UK.

The post The far right and ex-Muslims: ‘The enemy of my enemy is not my friend’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

When Forster officially announced Seven Shoulders and its premise on Twitter/X, he was skewered on all sides. White people disguising themselves as black is passé and will provoke offence and indignation whatever the reason may be. Many black people, in particular, responded negatively because they felt that they were the best qualified to discuss the reality of being black. They also felt that they didn’t need a white Canadian man to don a synthetic afro wig, wear coloured contact lenses, and put on brown-coloured Maybelline foundation (specifically, mocha shade—because ‘I figured it was best not to get too ambitious’) to find out whether racism still exists in America. 

Forster follows in the footsteps of other ‘journalistic blackface’ practitioners, on whose example he rests very heavily: he cites Ray Sprigle, John Howard Griffin, author of 1967’s Black Like Me (which he particularly admires), and Grace Halsell, author of 1969’s Soul Sister. All of them went incognito as ‘black’ to try to enlighten a largely ignorant and indifferent white America on the reality of the pervasive racism faced by black Americans, whether under the oppressive Jim Crow apartheid regime of the South in the 20^th century or the unofficial but ubiquitous racism that black communities endured across Northern cities during the same period.

Even though journalistic blackface has already been done three times, Forster ‘felt [he] had no choice’ but to anoint himself as the heir to this tradition. Moreover, he proclaims that he is sui generis because he is ‘the first person to earnestly cross the color barrier in over half a century’—and he is especially unique because he is the first person to do so in a post-Rodney King, post-Barack Obama, and post-George Floyd America. This claim isn’t strictly true, as there have been reality TV shows from this century setting up social experiments where whites have been disguised as blacks and vice versa to see what life is like ‘on the other side’ of the racial divide. 

Nevertheless, Forster doesn’t advertise Seven Shoulders as a moralistic screed. Instead, it’s a book that ‘prioritises methodical language and comprehensive analysis over emotional fervour and moral condemnation’ and he is the right person for this task because he is ‘inclined to describe rather than admonish.’

Unlike Ray Sprigle, who ‘ate, slept, traveled, lived Black’ (‘I lodged in Negro households. I ate in Negro restaurants. I slept in Negro hotels and lodging houses. I crept through the back and side doors of railroad stations’), Forster doesn’t embed himself within predominantly black communities. He doesn’t attempt to live a social life as a black man. No, the way Forster seeks to ‘taxonomize’ American racism (which, he says, can be divided into various categories, including two oft-conflated ones: ‘macro-level racial disparities’ and ‘institutional injustice’) is to pose as a hitchhiker on the sides, or shoulders, of seven different roads across the US, ‘first as a White man, and then again as a Black man on the following day.’

He claims this hitchhiking experiment is an accurate way to ‘taxonomize’ contemporary racism in America because it ‘exposes real sentiments that might otherwise be concealed… It reveals how [Americans] act when nobody is telling them how to act.’ It reveals another category of racism: the ‘interpersonal’ type.

The problem with this is that this isn’t the America of the Beatniks, where hitchhiking culture was a lot more prominent than it is today. And it is rather shallow to make sweeping judgements on a topic as broad and intricate as race in America on the sole basis of a limited hitchhiking experiment—which is why the pompous statements peppered throughout the book are so jarring. For instance:

[N]obody has an experiential barometer with respect to race… nobody except for me… [You] may say that I haven’t lived enough Black life for my barometer to be useful. Say what you will. My barometer is better than anyone else’s. 

Or: 

I am a visionary writer who wants to demystify race in a way that is creative, compelling, and beautiful.

For all the vim and haughty rhetoric Forster deploys, Seven Shoulders is as underwhelming as it is superficial. This is disappointing in its own way, as I was slightly intrigued by the premise. Instead, I encountered a book that was confused and incoherently written. Publishing a chapter that actually contains the line ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to say in this chapter’ doesn’t exactly instil confidence in you as a writer, ‘visionary’ or otherwise.

Though the journalistic blackface was unnecessary, not to mention silly, there might perhaps have been an interesting, if provocative, book investigating the textures and dynamics of race in America in the 21^st century from a considered first-person view. Ray Sprigle and John Howard Griffin in their ethnographical studies at least spoke to black Americans and collected testimonies of their experiences of racism. The closest Forster comes to anything like this is a pedestrian interview with two unnamed black politicians (whom he interviewed as a white man) who were clearly unaware of what project their remarks were lent to. 

Most of the commentary surrounding Seven Shoulders has focused on Forster’s use of blackface and thus the gravamen has been missed. He claims that in America today, instances of institutional racism are ‘extremely [he repeats this word over several pages in case you didn’t get it the first time—yes, really]…difficult to identify, and outward demonstrations of interpersonal racism are also a vanishing phenomenon.’ 

This thesis very much rhymes with that of Dinesh D’Souza’s 1995 book The End of Racism and other arguments from American conservatives. In other words, Forster isn’t as original and avant-garde as his bumptious pronouncements would have us believe. Forster concedes that what he calls ‘shoulder racism’, based on what we might call unconscious bias, might occur in certain circumstances—but says that it is not a pressing social problem.

He also notes that he was perceived differently by the homeless when he was white compared to when he was black: he was constantly asked for money by homeless people (of whatever colour) as a white man, yet he wasn’t pestered by anyone for money as a black man, which I find believable. But that is the extent of the depth he arrives at when contemplating how whites and blacks may be perceived differently within society. 

Whatever your opinion on whether Ray Sprigle, John Howard Griffin, and Grace Halsell were ever justified in engaging in journalistic blackface, one cannot deny that, in service of the cause of racial equality, they made sincere efforts to understand the reality of the racism that plagued their time. In contrast, Forster’s efforts in Seven Shoulders are an unserious and not even entertaining attempt at gonzo journalism. It feels like it was written in an unhinged frenzy, without any serious understanding of the complicated subject it broaches, and it makes bold claims and states tendentious conclusions based on a flimsy ‘experiment’ that a bad YouTuber could conduct.

As a black man—technically mixed race—I’m not even offended. I have thick skin and a broad back, so it takes a lot to make me cry. Besides, to be offended or hurt by Sam Forster’s gimmick I would have had to have taken it seriously. I do agree with Forster that most of the books currently written about race, whether by blacks or whites, are ‘tremendously boring.’ Alas, his is the latest addition to that pile. 

Related reading

Race: the most difficult subject of all? Interview with Inaya Folarin Iman by Emma Park

Two types of ‘assimilation’: the US and China, by Grayson Slover

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

Linnaeus, Buffon, and the battle for biology, by Charles Foster

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch

Can sentientism save the world? Interview with Jamie Woodhouse, by Emma Park

David Tennant, Kemi Badenoch, and the ugly sin of identity politics: a view from the right, by Frank Haviland

The post Gimmick journalism and race in America: review of ‘Seven Shoulders’ by Sam Forster appeared first on The Freethinker.

Folarin Iman was criticised in 2019, when the Free Speech Youth Advisory Board she helped to found, and which would ultimately become Free Speech Champions, was reported in the Guardian to be an ‘astroturfed’ front for the Free Speech Union, founded by the right-wing journalist Toby Young. In the 2019 general election, she stood (unsuccessfully) as the Brexit Party candidate in Leeds North East, gaining 1,769 votes. Last year, she became a presenter at the newly founded GB News, which has been criticised for its right-wing bias and its approach to free speech.

In 2020, she founded the Equiano Project, which describes itself as ‘a forum to promote freedom of speech and open dialogue on the subjects of race, identity and culture.’ In 2021, she was appointed as Trustee on Youth Engagement at the National Portrait Gallery by Johnson’s government. The Guardian and the Art Newspaper were quick to draw attention to this appointment, because of her association with GB News.

Folarin Iman is now no longer involved with GB News or the Free Speech Union, nor a member of any political party.

I met her over coffee in the Blue Boar Pub, Westminster. We discussed the origins of the Equiano Project, what ‘racism’ means, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the problems with ‘decolonising the curriculum’. Other topics included her path to where she is now, her British-Nigerian roots, and whether she still thinks Brexit was a good idea. The interview also raises the question of which orthodoxies – on the left and the right – can be criticised by whom. Comments are open below.

~Emma Park, Editor

How would you describe your childhood or teenage years – were there any defining moments?

I grew up in Kent, but for the first two years of secondary school, I went to a private boarding school in Hertfordshire. I left halfway through Year 8 because I was homesick, so there was a panic to get me into a new school. I ended up going to one of the local comprehensive schools, which was a culture shock. For sixth form, I went to a grammar school. This had a big impact because it made me reflect on how your social, cultural and economic status shape your sense of what is possible for you.

Boarding school kids all believe that they can achieve anything – and they are right. With many of the other [state schoool] kids, their expectations and ambitions were less, even though they were intelligent and capable. Going to several different schools, I also had to start again repeatedly in terms of friends, so I was used to being the outsider and trying to persuade people that I was coming from a good place. Also, my mum has always been political. She has been involved in campaigns in the UK. My father is also Nigerian, but I have not spoken to him for ten years.

What is your mother’s take on things politically?

She is small-‘c’ conservative. She is a British Nigerian, but contrary to what people might expect, she is not an evangelical Christian, but an atheist, so she is very independent-minded. Mum got us debating, discussing and thinking independently. She worked really hard in multiple jobs to send me and my sister to a good school. That has shaped my thinking about the importance of hard work, not making excuses for yourself, and not seeing yourself as a victim, even if there are things that you are being victimised by.

My mum was born in Nigeria, but I have only been to Nigeria twice. Despite that, I still feel connected to it. I love the music, a lot of the history, elements of the culture – not all. I see myself as British Nigerian, even if I do not speak the language. I have spent time studying Yoruba. I think it is part of the experience of being a first or second-generation immigrant, of trying to locate your place in the world.

Do you have any religious beliefs?

I would describe myself as agnostic. I have never had a practising religion. I grew up around evangelical Christians, but I studied Arabic at university, so I spent a lot of time around Islamic culture and lived in Morocco.

What has your path been from university to where you are now?

Originally I thought that I would go into Middle Eastern foreign policy. But I started university in 2015, and those years, 2015-18, were a huge, angry time politically. Trump came to power, Brexit happened. The populist movements, the campus free speech debates – it seemed like an important time to participate in the public conversation.

Once I left university, my first job was working for Index on Censorship. I was a project manager, where I was able to create a free speech project from scratch. I met journalists and writers, and spoke at events.

During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, I felt a moral responsibility to present a different perspective. What was being presented as unquestionable about British society and the experience of being a black person in British society did not reflect my experience, or that of my family, or of all the people that I knew. I had a small platform and decided to start writing about these things. And to my excitement, it got picked up.

In 2019, you were the Brexit Party candidate for Leeds North East. Do you still think Brexit was a good idea?

I did not actually vote for Brexit. I did not vote in the referendum either way, because I was in two minds. On the one hand, I supported the principle of greater sovereignty and democracy, but I was worried about the people that were leading the Brexit campaign and whether or not their vision of what Brexit meant reflected the kind of society that I wanted to live in.

Once we voted for Brexit, I did believe that it was imperative to implement it. That is why I stood for the Brexit Party. That surprised people, because I was a young person. I would probably get my head chopped off by my friends and colleagues if I said that I had Brexit regret. I do not know if Brexit was a good thing, or at least, I think there is a lack of discussion about what we need to do to make it work.

Where would you place yourself on the political spectrum?

This may surprise people, but I see myself as a bog-standard liberal. All the positions I have taken, contrary to popular belief, have been from a liberal standpoint. To me, Brexit was a question of sovereignty and democracy, which is a liberal argument. I have criticised identity politics because it contradicts the liberal ideals of colour-blindness, individual freedom of conscience and autonomy.

But isn’t GB News a right-wing platform?

It is probably true to say that there is a disproportionate number of people right of centre who present and appear on GB News. However, they are committed to platforming different viewpoints and oftentimes people on the left will just not go on, which is unfortunate. For example, Owen Jones and Aaron Bastani have been invited, but will not go on. That only perpetuates the type of people that are there.

If you are someone that critiques the orthodoxies, you may just have to accept being labelled right wing. I know many liberal-minded people on the centre left who are called ‘right wing’ because they defend free speech. That is unfortunate, especially when we live in an ecosystem of ‘guilt by association’.

Why did you found the Equiano Project, and what are its aims?

I founded the Equiano Project in 2020. It was something that I had been thinking about before the Black Lives Matter movement. But it became urgent then, because we were being told that all black or ethnic minority people felt that Britain was a fundamentally racist society and that race and racism were really the primary way in which they viewed the world and related to each other. That was just not true. The Equiano Project was founded in order to host a series of discussions and debates about these issues: decolonising the curriculum, whether liberal ideals can inform solutions to questions of racism, whether we need a new narrative on race, and the causes and consequences of racial disparities.

The first event was entitled, ‘Is it time to forge a new narrative about race?’ It was a success. Speakers included a wide range of people, but all committed to liberal ideals. After that, it expanded. People would ask us to speak at schools and cultural institutions like museums and galleries, and try to navigate the complex cultural and moral questions that people were grappling with about race, due to the public pressure to be seen to be doing something. We continue to open up the space to discuss these issues from a wide range of perspectives.

Who is the project funded by?   

We have only been funded by individual donations from ordinary people. That is where all of our money has come from.

Have you received much backlash over this project?

Surprisingly, no. I think that is because I have been careful to involve diverse perspectives, to understand where the viewpoint I disagree with is coming from, and to counter that in as nuanced a way as possible.

What is ‘race’, what is ‘racism’? How are they related to each other?

My idea of being anti-racist is to abolish race. ‘Race’ is the categorisation of human beings into biologically distinct subcategories. That is what we are doing when we see each other as permanent, distinct races and treat each other differently as such. The problem with contemporary anti-racism is that its proponents take race to be real in an important sense. They see different identity groups as having intrinsic meaning. They attribute meaning to white identity, and they reverse-attribute meaning to black identity by seeing it as morally superior and innocent, and ‘whiteness’ as a force of domination. I do not attribute meaning, positive or negative, to any racial category. I believe in the goal of achieving a colour-blind society.

‘Colour-blind’ in what sense?

In a political sense: that we should not treat each other differently from a political standpoint on the basis of race. It is equality in the true sense of treating people equally. That does not mean that we cannot recognise our distinctiveness. I am proud of my Yoruba heritage and it has a history, a culture and a legacy that has meaning to me. I do not need my self-esteem or my identity affirmed by the state or by the education system. When you enter society, you enter into something that is beyond race: a sense of citizenship, something universal, a shared civic community where we participate as equals. That, to me, is democratic. We are all capable of entering into it, and we all should have the ability and capacity to shape it.

How would you define ‘racism’?

‘Racisim’ is prejudice and discrimination against people based on their real or perceived race, and also the attribution of morality or moral values based on someone’s perceived race. Even the statement that ‘whiteness’ is a force of domination I would class as a form of racism, just as I would class the discrimination in employment against a black male as a form of racism. Having simple definitions is really important for us to be able to understand what these problems are.

You recently did an investigation into the trend in schools to ‘decolonise the curriculum’. Could you say a bit more about that?

‘Decolonisation’ is the removal of a colonial power from the state governance of a particular country. Decolonising has nothing to do with the extent to which certain ideas or ways of behaving are or are not influenced by a previous colonial power. The attempt to expand the definitions of colonisation and decolonisation is damaging. For example, if an African society, such as Nigeria, thinks parliamentary democracy is a good thing and it works better than the earlier system of clans and chiefdoms, that is not colonial, that is them making a judgement using their own agency. The attempt to attribute huge sections of modernity to colonialism in a pejorative sense is deeply corrosive to the intellectual, political and moral development of African-descended people.

The liberal ideals of free speech and democracy are based on the moral principle that we are capable of weighing up competing arguments and coming to our own conclusions. We are moral agents. If you believe that those ideals are white only, you are effectively saying that only white people are moral agents. That is a deeply racist and morally objectionable way of thinking.

The kinds of things we are seeing young kids being taught at school are pernicious.

What schools have you been looking at for your investigation?

They were state and private schools across the country. At the Equiano Project we get emails from parents on a regular basis, and even dissident teachers, who are worried about what is being taught. Other organisations describe experiencing the same thing: curriculum materials that promote a form of racial essentialism, a narrow, simplistic idea of society. One of them was that ‘racism started when white people decided to oppress black people’. For a kid, that is very confusing – it is open to misunderstanding and even to a sense of insecurity and self-loathing. All of this is being done in the name of anti-racism. But I think we have gone a long way from knowing what our foundational values are. We are morally confused.

How should these issues be discussed at primary school?

They should not be discussing them at primary school. What we need to be doing is promoting values that we all agree with: being kind, treating people as you want to be treated, not judging a book by its cover. These things do not racialise kids.

The Equiano Project invokes the values of ‘freedom, common humanity and universalism’. Can these values unite people across the political spectrum and around the world?

Yes. It was these values that won out in the 1960s civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, like Frederick Douglass before him, argued for our common humanity – so as to render racism absurd from a political standpoint. People forget that in America there are still people alive today who lived through segregation, or who remember how, in Britain, you would once be spat at on the street if you were mixed-race. Nowadays, racism is highly socially taboo. By and large, people feel like they belong. That is due to the ideal of common humanity, not because of identitarian activism.

When you make blanket statements and seek to homogenise race, and try to funnel everyone’s experience through that single lens, it is divisive, because that is not how people see themselves. People are complex, with a web of desires, relationships and interests.

Have you ever experienced racism yourself?

Of course. There is not a single ethnic minority person in this country who has never experienced racism. But did it define me? No. Did it completely traumatise me? No. If someone shouts the ‘n’ word at me, I actually feel more sorry for them. But has it happened a lot? No.

 What is critical race theory and what is your view of it?

Critical race theory is an academic school of thought with many serious scholars, like Kimberle Crenshaw, Derrick Bell and Richard Delgado. It emerged in the 1980s as an attempt to explain why there was still de facto racial inequality in America, when there was de jure equality and segregation was illegal. This school of thought attempts to understand this disparity by arguing that liberal principles, such as equality under the law, freedom of expression, and colour-blindness, are not politically neutral or universal ideals, but are couched in white Western racial superiority, and their application reproduces inequality. They argue that racialised power structures shape outcomes.

But I think they are wrong. To suggest racism is permanent or inevitable is a cynical and pessimistic way of viewing the world.

How far does politics come into your role as Youth Engagement Trustee in the National Portrait Gallery?

As a gallery that is about history, there are debates at board level about who we consider important, and what we say about those people portrayed in the gallery. These debates reflect the debates going on in wider society around contested history. Some people want us to emphasise that empire is a moral evil, whereas others may take a different approach.

My argument is that we need more history, not less: the past is as complex as the present. Whilst there are examples of great triumph and bravery, there are also examples of extraordinary suffering and brutality. All of those things tell us about our humanity, and therefore we should keep them all. That is an honest approach to history. I am not for removing portraits or being too moralistic in how we describe them. We should all be able to make up our own minds about the actions of certain people.

Is it appropriate to judge the past by contemporary moral standards?

I do not think the present should be made hostage to the future or the past hostage to the present. For all we know, in fifty years’ time we are going to be judged as morally reprehensible for factory farming. Our ancestors probably knew a lot of things, and were probably more interesting and smarter than us in different ways. They had the Enlightenment – we probably have a counter-Enlightement! I do not believe in projecting our contemporary moral values onto the past and then attacking the past for not meeting our present moral expectations.

In the project which became Free Speech Champions, the Guardian reported that some of the students originally involved left because they said it was too close to the Free Speech Union. What is your response to this? 

Free Speech Champions is still going strong. Many of young people that are involved in the project are now working for magazines and newspapers. In the early days, the question of how to create free speech in such a politically heated climate, for a generation who have only ever associated free speech with harm, was a difficult challenge. Ultimately there were different views about what constituted free speech. I tend to take the broadest view of free speech, whereas other people have differing views, and that led to some of them not wanting to continue. Some of the people who originally left have since changed their minds and have participated in some of the project’s events and initiatives.

Is there a problem for a free speech movement like yours, that you may not be able to include enough people on the left?

Out of all of the young people in FSC, a minority are on the right. That is partly because the right has a problem with free speech. This is that, by ‘free speech’, they often mean ‘my free speech’ – ‘I want to say what I want on race,’ ‘I want to say what I want on gender.’ But actually, free speech as an ideal to expand open enquiry, for experimentation, for exploration, does not always attract people on the right.

For me, free speech is about liberal culture and liberal ideals. It is an open question how far many conservatives subscribe to those ideals. In FSC, most of the young people are politically homeless. There are several from the old left – the Bennite left; others are disaffected liberals. Unfortunately, if you defend certain things, someone is going to label you right wing. But you have to keep standing up for what you believe in.

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The post Race: the most difficult subject of all? appeared first on The Freethinker.