Sudbury, "Rethinking Anti-violence Strategies, Lesson's from the Black Women's Movement in Britain"

In this piece, the Southall Black sisters challenge our ideas of U.S.-centric racial formation. Because of organizing in Great Britain was primarily around working class struggle + different relationships to the colonizer within Britain, black is defined differently than the U.S. context. Writing this blog post directly after sitting with Mohanty's work helped me 'see' the sorts of coalition building and feminist praxis that Mohanty envisioned. My reaction to this text was more visceral, perhaps because of the detailing of each case, my own personal and familial connections to Southall, Eastham etc. This reading became a reminder for me how racial formation function so differently outside of the U.S. context, so the traditional triangulation of desis within the US translates so differently in the UK. For example, I think of how in the US, the model[ed] minority was constructed post-1965 to triangulate a new immigrant group against marginalized communities within the US (mainly Black and Latino), to the point that in contemporary organizing  many South Asian American students do not consider themselves 'people of color'. Yet, in the UK, there's a different understanding of colonial legacies between Black and Desi communities. Still, from my personal experience, within the desi community within the UK there is so much weaponization against each other (Hindu vs Muslim vs Sikh, the ideas of pitting different nation states against each other).

A question this text left me with was, what is the difference between antiviolence/nonviolence?
I think it's such an important political distinction to think about. It reminded me of Arundhuti Roy's argument, "If you're an adivasi[tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation." (6/5/2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/05/arundhati-roy-keep-destabilised-danger)