Observing the protests against racism in the streets of the US, UK, Australia and elsewhere feels like watching not only a mass movement, but also a classroom, crackling with intellectual energy. For the movement on the streets is not just protesting against specific acts and omissions, it is also making connections and joining dots, insisting on seeing patterns where once there were only isolated facts and unhappy coincidences.
The protestors, many of them young and yet mature beyond their years, are making linkages between the history of colonialism and slavery and the structural racism which is its legacy. They are doing so despite, rather than because, their education has equipped them to make such connections. The street is their classroom because their classrooms have failed them.
It should not, and need not, be so. At Goldsmiths, over a decade ago – well before students began to raise the demand to ‘decolonize the curriculum’ – we began a process of overhauling the courses we teach. We introduced new courses that link contemporary movements and issues – including Black Lives Matter, the politics of statuary, and the numerous struggles against neocolonialism in the Global South – with the histories of conquest and colonialism that have made them inevitable and necessary.
