 Hello, I'm Polly Russell, leader curator of Unfinished Business, the Fight for Women's Rights exhibition here at the British Library. It's a pleasure to welcome you to this evening's event. This event is such an important part of the programme. If there's one thing that feminism has to learn right now, it is to listen to this conversation about the role of anti-racism in the fight for gender equality. And I am so happy to welcome the award-winning science journalist, Dr Angela Saini, and her guests, the Cambridge scholar, Priymbarda Gopal, author and podcaster Layla Saad, and one of America's best-loved poets, Nikki Giovanni. Hi everyone, welcome to this afternoon's panel discussion, including everyone watching via the Living Knowledge Network. I'm Angela Saini, I'm a science journalist, and my two most recent books challenge false stereotypes around gender and race. This event accompanies, as Polly's just explained, the British Library's new exhibition, Unfinished Business, which I encourage you all to see. There is a long way to go for feminism, but it's a road that's made even longer when we fail to accept that equality is not just for some, it's for everyone. And historically, women of colour and indigenous women have been marginalised sometimes by women's movements in the West that have prioritised certain needs and narratives that have spoken about women as one group, but in reality have treated some women as secondary. Reconciling this gulf and building a movement that includes rather than excludes then is the unfinished business that we're going to be talking about today. And to do that, I am absolutely honoured to be joined by three truly remarkable thinkers and writers. Nikki Giovanni is among America's most brilliant and influential poets and one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 living legends. She's a university distinguished professor at Virginia Tech and her many awards include the first Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award and the Carl Sandberg Literary Award. Her latest collection is called Make Me Rain. Leila Saad is a writer and podcast host who many of you will know by her bestselling book Me and White Supremacy. The book followed a digital work book of the same name which was downloaded by close to 90,000 people globally within just six months. As an East African, Arab, British, Black, Muslim woman who grew up in the West, Leila sits at this beautiful intersection of identities. Priam Vada Gopal is professor of post-colonial studies at the University of Cambridge. Her recent book Insurgent Empire, Anti-colonial Resistance and British Descent examines the rich traditions of challenging colonial rule. Her dossier of white hot hatred collected responses to the online debate this year around Black Lives Matter. So welcome to you all. I just couldn't be happier to have such a wonderful panel with me. Now for the audience, there will be a good chunk of time at the end for you to ask your questions. You can submit them via the question function which is at the bottom of the screen. But first, I want to kind of address the elephant in the room really. We're coming to the end of this truly extraordinary year in so many ways. But for Nicky I want to ask you about the George Floyd killing and the global outpouring of support and action that was seen around Black Lives Matter. Do you feel this has changed the conversation? What has it been like for you? I don't think I've changed the conversation. I think Black Lives Matter. The three women who were in fact talking to each other, which I don't understand, they don't let me discuss, they don't let me touch any of these machines. But they were texting, I think it was, or emailing each other. And one wrote together and said, you know, Black Lives Matter. And somebody realised, oh, we need to use that. And they did. And of course the murder of George Floyd did go all around the world. But if we go back some 50 years, a little bit more than 50 years, the murder of Emmett Till went around the world. And a woman named Rosa Parks said, no, I'm not going to give up my seat. And that went around the world. So I think Black American women have done our fair share. It doesn't mean that we're sitting down and not doing anything else. It just means that we are continuing to fight against the, for lack of a better word, the cowardness of what is being called white supremacy because there's nothing supreme about having to kill people in order to hold your position. There's just nothing supreme about that. It's coward. They are cowardly. Donald Trump, of course, is one of the big cowards of the world. And we can go back just a few years. Hitler was one of the big cowards in terms of Germany, Mussolini. Because when you have to kill people in order to hold your position, it's a cowardly situation. And I think as a song by Rita Franklin says, let's call this song exactly what it is. I think it's time that we call them exactly what they are. There's nothing supreme about being white. There's something very cowardly about it. And I mean, one of the themes of today's event is also feminism and patriarchy. In what ways then does patriarchy and racism then meet and affect people's lives uniquely? You're asking me? Yes. Yeah, Nicky. Sorry. I'm sorry. Three brilliant panelists here and I was sure. I think that there's nothing as dumb as patriarchy. And I think that the animal world from which we have evolved knows it best that there's a season that we have. And it's called mating. And women recognize, okay, it's mating season, whether you are a penguin or whether you are a robin or whether you are whatever you are. Whatever you are, there's a mating season. And you mate and the women go and have the children, have the babies, have whatever they do. And the men just go away, which is pretty much what they should do. The best father on earth, of course, is Father Penguin because he's the one that takes care. When she lays the egg, he's the one that picks up the egg and puts it in and keeps it warm. He doesn't know if that egg was the one that he had anything to do with it or not. He doesn't know if the egg is alive or not. But during that whole gestation period, he's the one that keeps it alive. And he hopes that when the time comes, that egg will be alive, it will be open. And I think that humans ought to learn something from Father Penguin because I think otherwise humans are going to do the kind of thing that they do. They end up beating their wives. Look what men do to women. They beat their wives. The wives say, well, I don't want to be beaten anymore. I've been living with you for all these years. It's not going to happen. And they say, well, if you leave me, I'll kill you. It's if that makes sense. And we've seen white men get in their automobiles as they did in Charlottesville and run their car into a group of white women and murdered white women. We've seen them in one of the most awful murders, a woman named which a lot of people don't know, Viola Louisa from Detroit. And she went down when John Lewis led the march across the Edmund Pettisbridge. She went down to help people. She went with her car to drive back. And one of the clansmen in the car, in a car drove up beside her. They knew that she was a white woman. There's no mistake in her and pulled out his gun and shot her in the head. He murdered her. And so when people talk about, you know, we're white men and we really love our women, you got to be insane to think that that's true because look at the way they treat them. And Layla, just coming to you, I mean, there are so many complicated intersections here when we talk about patriarchy and white supremacy. For you then, how does this how does this confound social justice? How do we build social justice movements that take into account all these different factors that make people vulnerable in so many different ways? I think, you know, patriarchy and white supremacy are absolutely interconnected. I was recently, just before we started the panel, I told you all I was reading Ruby Hammett's new book, which is brilliant. And I really recommend everyone go to read it. But it really helped me understand the historical context of the way that white supremacy has been constructed to specifically uphold and maintain white male power. And that everyone else, whether it's white women, black women, black people, indigenous people, people of colour, are pawns in that game to keep white male power in power. And so in order to, you know, deconstruct this dismantle white supremacy, we have to also look at patriarchy. And of course, you know, Bell Hooks has always talked about the interconnection of all of these systems together, right? Capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, they are all linked together. And, you know, this year, I've been researching and writing the young readers edition of me and white supremacy. And so this is a book that is for 10 to 14 year olds. And unlike us adults, they don't have necessarily the context of colonialism. They don't have the context of where all of these racist ideas come from. And so when you look at the history of colonialism, the way that white people, specifically white males, white men, colonised the world, and the reasons that they did it for and the ways in which they did it, you cannot separate patriarchy from white supremacy. They are interlinked. And so, you know, even when we think about feminism, so I talk about white feminism in the book, even white feminism is about upholding white patriarchy, or trying to come into a sense of equality with white patriarchy. And so unless we are able to look at these clearly, we will keep replicating the same systems again and again and again. I want to come back to you on white feminism, but I think that's a perfect point at which to go to Priam Vada, because can you give us an overview then of why these things are interlinked through your understanding of colonial history? How is patriarchy and white supremacy really completely intertwined? Well, I mean, I think that any historical phenomenon rests on multiple axes. So colonialism was a project which was about wealth creation and profit creation, the extraction of resources, the enslavement of people, drawing out free labour and then making profits out of that, bringing resources from parts of the world to the metropole to Europe. It involves patriarchy certainly in the ways in which it envisaged a certain kind of elite white man going out into the world and penetrating it as it were and making it his own. It's no accident that large parts of the world from North America to Africa were presented as virgin lands awaiting in a sense sexual possession. So the language of profit creation and the language of wealth creation and the language of patriarchy have been intertwined from the start. But I think we also need to understand that colonialism interacts when it goes out into the world with other systems of oppression. So it interacts, for instance, in South Asia with cost and interacts with structures of feudal rule in Africa. It interacts with different kinds of collaboration in Latin America and North America in Asia. So the thing is that no system can be understood as simply about race or simply about class. Race class, gender, sexuality, caste, these things interact and they create different kinds of lethal cocktails depending on where you are and that's one reason our politics can't be single issue based either because oppression is always a nexus of different kinds of if you like hierarchies. I mean also during the colonial project there was also the encounters with different systems of thinking about gender or sexuality. What did colonialism do to that kind of, I mean did it bring a European way of thinking about gender and human difference and sexuality? I think it depends on which context you're talking about. I mean there are certainly contexts where a particular kind of binary heterosexual European patriarchy prevailed. But I think we have to be quite careful about making generalisations and saying oh the European model went out there and it replaced more progressive understandings of gender. It did in some cases. It certainly narrowed the spectrum of sexuality in some places. In some places like for instance Kerala in South India it interfered with family structures and it replaced for instance matrilineal family structures with the Victorian family ideal. But I think we need to be careful about suggesting that there was always a kind of a conservative retrograde European presence which harmed the more progressive prior presence. Very often one kind of patriarchy that is European patriarchy interacted very well with other kinds of patriarchy and other kinds of sexual hierarchies and often again as I said created a lethal cocktail. Certainly the European model of family and marriage and sexuality and about a Christian model influenced parts of the world in the colonial encounter. But again I think it is it is rather more complex than it is sometimes made up to be. Layla, then coming to you in the history of western feminism or feminism, feminism's within the west there are there have been splits, there have been issues here particularly I mean if you look at the suffrage movement in the US in the late 19th, 30th, 20th century sometimes it was very racist. There were even some of the pioneers of the of the suffrage movement like Susan Biantoni were willing to throw black men and black women therefore under the bus for their own rights. Yes actually you know it is an African American topic that is referred to to make that great context but we'll say with regards to how that plays out globally you know it's not just it's not just an an American issue where that happens you know this idea of that there is one single feminism that we're all working together that we're all facing this one single type of patriarchy at many white women who don't want to look at racism and white supremacy and their part in it would like us women of color black women to sort of have a sense of amnesia about our history with them and with the world and to say yes we put our race aside we don't want to identify with any other part of ourselves except our gender in order to be with you in this struggle and you know I will never not be a black woman and I will never describe myself as a woman black I'm a black woman and that will always be my identity you cannot separate them from one another and I think one of the greatest frustrations for us in this time but also for women of color indigenous women black women throughout history has been this idea that we can do that or that we or that if we were to do that that we would be treated the way that they are treated both by them and by white men and so it's important to understand that while there are these ways in which we are impacted by patriarchy in similar ways having white privilege will always be a source of protection and ease and safety women of color will never have and do you think there is an acceptance within white women in the feminist movement now given Black Lives Matter that this is something that they do need to address do you feel more included in the movement now than perhaps previously? I don't necessarily seek to be included in the movement it's not something that I feel like I should be you know that a little space should be made for me to squeeze myself into I think that black women and women of color have always been fighting for all rights right and that the least among us those who are experiencing the most oppression if we are liberated if we have freedom then everybody has freedom so I don't I definitely see that there are more white women who are more willing to look at the intersections of all of these identities but by the same token I think that there are many white women who want to pay lip service to that concept but don't really want to do the work to look at themselves first and their place in this they are more comfortable talking about this theoretically or intellectualizing about it or talking about it as a concept but not looking at how it impacts them in their life and therefore how they are impacting the people of color in their own lives. Niki, what are your thoughts on what Layla has just said? Excuse me I think it's very interesting I am very proud of Black Lives Matter and I'm not a feminist and I hope that I wasn't invited here under that sort of rubric that somebody said oh I think Niki's a feminist I'm not and I mentioned Viola Louiso because I appreciated the fact that she left her family and came down from Detroit and helped with this with the freedom movement she helped with John Lewis she gave up of course her life we know that we know that other white women have been murdered we know that there is a whole story about I'm here in Appalachia and we know that there's a story of white women in Appalachia who put their quilts out in their homes so that the escaping slaves could follow the trail I'm living actually within walking distance of the Appalachian trail and that's that's good I I guess my problem with this whole thing is I I'm so tired of talking about white people I think it's time that we started to to think about what is it what is it that we that we want done what is it that I want in my life what is it that that we as Black women want in our in our lives and I think that that a lot of that has to be discussed because we're always discussing what white men have done well if you don't know that they're cowards and fools I don't know when you're going to learn it so I can't teach it to you so what I want to do is say to if I had which I don't a daughter I would say to her you know you have to be free that's that's what's important not you're never going to free them when when Donald Trump was uh sold he didn't I was about to say but he wasn't elected the Russian stole that election when that happened I received a phone call from one of the major newspapers and they said what would you like to say to the Donald Trump and I said not a damn thing why am I going to talk to Donald Trump I know he's the devil I am a Christian so I'm going to agree with Jesus on this one get the behind me Satan I got nothing to say to Donald Trump I'd be a fool to think that I can say something that's going to make him change his mind or learn something I am not ice cube who it should be and probably is at this point incredibly embarrassed that he went up saying I have a plan that I want to share with Donald Trump for Black Americans what kind of sense does that make we live on a small planet it's a round planet we're third planet from the yellow sun and I think that that's that's the kind of thing that sort of needs to be we need to be treating we need to be teaching people that all we are is earthlings and if we're lucky we're going to evolve if right now I was talking about what my five dollars would do but my bet is that that humans are on their way out it's a waste and if if if there would be a God whether you believe or not I'm not into that and my if my phone rang right now and it was God you Nick is God and I just want to you know get your opinion you think we should continue with with with human beings or not I'd have to honestly say God I think you tried but it hasn't worked so close it down and let's see if we can go to another galaxy let's see if we can do something else because this isn't working and we can talk about it we can write about it and it's a lot of things that are interesting but it's not working as long as we continue to have as our focus what white men who we do recognize as cowards we do recognize exactly what they are but nobody wants to say that we do recognize and I mentioned Trump because Trump is such an evil son of a bitch we do recognize that he is a traitor to this country nobody wants to call him a traitor everybody wants to say oh he doesn't understand Donald Trump has sold this nation out we recognize that there are other people other places who cannot walk out into the street without covering their faces because we say well the men can't that you know you have to cover your face you have to cover your hair we just can't let you go go walking out in the street because men get excited if men don't know what to do with their penises that's not my problem that's their problem well I just want to remind the audience at this point that you can submit questions ahead of time and in fact I encourage you to do it if whatever you're hearing is provoking you to think like it's provoking me to think then please type in your questions and send them along and I want to come to you pre-invader to I mean the irony from what Nikki was talking about the irony of having in some western countries these leaders who are so clearly damaging for women who do damaging for women and damaging for the cause of anti-racism and yet often equality is framed as this kind of western ideal to be to be exported to the rest of the world how do we reconcile these things well I mean equality is a human impulse equality is something that all cultures have theorized whether in the form of a dominant idea or whether in the form of resistance equality is absolutely not a western idea western societies are by no means equal not just in gender terms but in terms of class in terms of race in terms of religion in terms of you know sexuality these are not equal societies so it's kind of absurd to present equality as a western idea all societies have tyrannies and all societies have subversive resistance practices which are about justice and equality so in my life you know whether as as a feminist or whether as an anti-racist and indeed as someone who challenges caste hierarchies I've never seen this as something that I learned from the west there are plenty of traditions on the Indian subcontinent to which I can affiliate as as Nikki just said we don't have to constantly be looking or doing our what we do in relation to what what white men do or don't do I think that is that is correct at the same time I think it is quite important to recognize that cultures interact and that there are no sharp boundaries between cultures and what I talked about in insurgent empire my most recent book is the ways in which you know practitioners of equality from free from slaves to abolitionists to white abolitionists influenced each other and learned about equality from each other and inspired each other to fight for equality so I'm quite interested in both non-western traditions of justice and equality but also the ways in which cultures interact and learn from each other in a global frame I would also say here one thing which is that yes the white man as a as an abstraction is a coward is a an oppressor but equally all societies and all cultures have other kinds of identification and we do need to be careful to understand that the white man who dominates in the form of someone like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson is a particular kind of white man from a particular kind of class background from a particular kind of wealth formation from a particular kind of very disgusting form of heterocentric patriarchy so you know as an Indian woman from an uppercast Brahmin background I have to also the critical gaze that I cast upon white men I have to turn back upon my own formation and upon Brahmin men and the tyrannies and injustices that belong to the societies that I come from so I think you know we do need to slightly perhaps complicate the picture of both tyranny and resistance and equality because these are things that are not owned by any single culture and we have to kind of find a way of framing them in alliances with other people. The full and Halo coming to you now and I mean you have your feet in so many different worlds and I just want to I mean sometimes it can feel especially for me living in London right now in Britain it can feel that a lot of energy is poured into tackling things like the gender pay gap here and you know the issues that we are facing on the ground in Britain but of course women all over the world are facing so many of their own battles not least in the Middle East and do you think that there is enough recognition of that and solidarity between nations when it comes to these social justice movements? I guess I want to echo what Priya has just talked about in terms of you know it's complicated and cultures are interacting with each other in these different ways but I guess what I'm really struck by oftentimes is this idea that western culture, western news, western context is the blueprint that is then put onto every other culture that we need to compare it to and you know when so much of the news is dominated for example right now with the elections in the US there's so much other news going on around the world that is equally of importance that is equally impacting people of all races and genders in various different ways and so you know I think as somebody who has a very multicultural or kind of background I have this I often am able to sort of zoom out and both zoom back in and see the interconnections between these different you know variabilities but also see how each one is unique in its own context you know you can't for example enter like you can't compare the movement for women and feminist movement feminisms in the Middle East to western feminisms they come from different contexts they are fighting different forms of oppression they may be they may be the same generally speaking but they have different histories and so one of my biggest frustrations I know has been this idea of when people don't necessarily know that I'm a Muslim and then come to find out that I am you know they'll use Islamophobia and the fact that I'm a Muslim woman as a way to say well you're oppressed or well you don't know anything you know because you come from this oppressive background and I'm like you don't you don't know anything about Muslim history and women's history in the Middle East for you to say that but it's just a way again that Western history and Western culture is used as the standard that everyone else is supposed to compare themselves to and I just I just think it's it's so important for people in the West to be able to understand yes you may be seen as culturally the superpowers of the world but that was by design right that was created it's not biologically true it was created in that way and as much as you may want to say or try and focus on all the best parts of you and say Black people people of color African people indigenous people are somehow behind and need to catch up like you designed it that way right and there's so much that can be learned from the feminisms outside of the Western context so I just think it's really important for people to not to really learn how to de-centre whiteness in their own minds I couldn't agree with that more can you give me one or two examples then of the of the feminist movements that you see in other parts of the world doing things that are inspirational to you yeah so I would say you know one of my one of the reasons that I'm so involved in this kind of work is actually because of my religion because social justice I feel is very baked into justice is a part of Islam it's what gives me the motivation it's what it's where I source that power from and when we look at Islamic history some of the most powerful women in Islam were women some of the most powerful people sorry in Islam were women and I and I get um you know the way that white supremacy feels women is as oppressed is as you know they don't have a voice they can't say anything they don't know how to do anything but in fact our history tells the complete opposite of that and so being able to learn context outside of outside of a Western context I think is just is just really really important Nikki just coming to you then you you said earlier that your question does your faith also inform the way that you feel about these I think there's somebody else in that room who wants to have a voice then coming to you then Priam Varda how would you respond to what Layla's just said it's absolutely right to say that struggles are very specific and just in the way in which we would not want to make an abstraction of the white man necessarily I think feminism we know is is not a single agenda a single kind of campaign I mean I my own engagement with feminism was very much in the subcontinent it was very much fueled by different kinds of imperatives and different kinds of goals but what is important and interesting is that is that feminism is is not a single terrain it's not you know one kind of issue structured around gender so for instance although I came of age in the Indian women's movement which is very very vibrant just as you know liberal white feminism has had to be challenged in India the women's movement for all its complexity and sophistication has been rightly challenged by Dalit women because it's very very uppercast in and in in how it presents itself the feminism itself is is not beyond challenge and it's never a single thing and it is constantly about contestations and struggles and about changing itself in response to changing exigencies today for instance we know that just as black people in the United States are you know murdered with with a degree of impunity we know that Dalit women in India are raped by uppercast men with a degree of impunity and it is impossible therefore to say that there is a single kind of Indian feminism it really depends on caste class context religion as Laila just pointed out these things are fluid changing and context bound so I think it is quite important to say what what Laila just said which is that we you know these things don't share an agenda in either space or time so then Priam Vada is it is it impossible to speak about one women's movement that is it is that just a nonsense well I think it is impossible to say the women's movement I think that alliances can be made I think there is shared common cause to be made any movement whether it's on race or whether it's on gender or sexuality can only make common cause and identify common terrain but there is no kind of prior commonality there is no single woman around whom we can go here as though that contact that was you know self-evident the definition of woman also changes both with space and time and I think as I said we have to be all movements have to be subtle and responsive to historical changes. Nicky what are your thoughts on this and what Laila and Priam Vada just said? I do apologise for my dog she's very protective and when anybody walks down the street she she gets crazy and so I'm sorry if she's disturbed us I was I'm very interested I don't I don't I guess I'm very unhappy at this particular time in my life I think I'm older than everybody on the panel I'm 77 I recommend growing old but I think that that we cannot change everything and we're not going to bring everybody together to change everything I am I am very fond of and very proud of black American women there is there has been no movement of anything that black American women have not been an essential part of I think of Jane Adams who you may or may not know she was married to the Adams and she's the one who said in this you can look up she's the one who said to John don't forget about the women so when he went down to help build the constitution not saying anything about that but when he went down to build the constitution it was Jane who would try to remind him he tried to get it in but he didn't but my point was in my point is they own slaves because everybody owns slaves at that point and I can't help but but imagine that the woman in Jane Adams's kitchen who was doing the cooking and the cleaning was said to her and I miss Adams don't forget about the women and we have seen what black women have done and what we have continued to do when we look at I mentioned it earlier not that anybody cares but I mentioned the the Montgomery bus boycott I mentioned Rosa Parks it was the women who got up before dawn who fixed lunch for the men so that they could continue the boycott without having to come back home for lunch so that they could walk to work so that they could take care of themselves it was it's always been the women and it was the women and I think it's just incredibly sad when and there were there were problems in in the entire African continent but we're looking at West Africa and there there were wars that were going on white men did not go into communities and and and steal black people didn't the war and we've done that with everybody we've done that with uh anybody here is a a Palestinian we've done it everybody we have stolen people we're doing it with the brown people now and we steal them and they brought those people that they stole who's going to be actually my ancestors and they sold them to Europeans who sold them to what's going to be Americans but and this was my point it was the women who had to make that adjustment now the women could have gone crazy because a lot of a lot of people did but black American women found a way to talk to each other because there's no language as you all know there is no African language the language is is different in in the on the continent of Africa as it is on the continent of Europe so they had to find a way to talk and it was the women and we can't get over that who found the song that is going to become the spiritual and this is how they held themselves in their community together so I'm very fine of what black women have done I am very proud that Pope Francis has decided that as he put it love is love has decided same sex marriage is fine by him I'm very proud of him because it's not I'm not a Roman Catholic by the way when I say I'm a Christian I grew up in the Baptist church I identified that because I live in America and if you can't identify some kind of way then nobody knows who you are has nothing to do with it I'm very proud of the most I'm I'm not unproud of any of it but I'm very proud that the pope has finally decided it's time to put picking on same sex marriage or same sex love and I don't know that he's doing it because what he needs more people in the church I don't know why but I'm very proud that he did it and I know that these are all steps that he's been taken and I'm I'm proud of what we're back to I am proud of what black Americans have done because that's all that I can really do I know that Martin Luther King you remember when Martin got out of jail letter from Birmingham city jail it's wonderful beautiful and you know that when he was finally released from jail he went to India somebody here he went to India because he wanted to study what what what's his name I've done for the yeah I'm sorry thank you and he wanted to study that and I'm glad Martin went I'm thrilled but Martin is not he's just not me I'm just I'm just a poet in a small but no I mean that you have to know who you are I'm not going to change the world so if I do any bit of traveling and stuff I'm not going to it's not going to involve me in a way that that makes a big difference but I know that I'm also not going to stand and watch somebody get murdered as we watched three men of various races actually murder we watched them watch a white man murder George Floyd I'm not going to stand and watch somebody get murdered now that may cost me my life I hope not but I'm not going to do that all I can do though is find the words because that's all I I'm just a poet and many of us are being forced are being encouraged or something to you know you've got to change the whole world you can't just do what you can do I think all we can do is is what we can do that one step those don't don't don't or as there's an old african-american spiritual it's called climbing jacob's ladder we are climbing jacob's ladder every round goes higher and higher and I think that that's important so now we're getting the these statues of the confederates who are traders knock down and I think that's that's incredibly wonderful I hope that we get rid of the trader who has stolen the White House I hope that we take these steps but that doesn't mean that the western world that I grew up in is right it just means that this is where I am and all I can do is try to get rid of Donald Trump and and and Pence and and all of those racist Nazis who have tried to to steal our nation but as a black American I know one thing if white Americans women and men don't do their fair share the nation's lost and as a black person I'm going to say well you lost it as I just said if God called and said Nicky should we keep it I'm going to say no if if white people in America don't do their fair share then lose it what what the hell do I care I have come through it I have been through it we have come through slavery we have come through segregation we have come through lynching so there there's a limit to what I'm going to do it's time and I am a woman but it's time as a woman that white women stepped up I'm sick of their whining I look at Donald Trump those what so-called rallies and those women are there and they're oh Trump we're for Trump well then goodie for you that bitch they just put on the supreme court she had seven children I don't believe in abortion well I'm glad she doesn't I do so let her have her seven children I don't want seven children but all I can do is not have seven children that that's that's going to be the extent if I had a daughter which I don't and I would be delighted I would be delighted to have a daughter because I think daughters are the best things in the world and if she came to me and said mom I'm expecting I don't want to have this child she would have an abortion because there's not a black woman in America that doesn't know how to get an abortion for her daughter now I don't know about anybody else in the world but I know if you want an abortion find a black woman because we all know how to get rid of anything you don't want we can do that we can also help you keep it and love it it goes either way but I'm just I'm I don't I'm probably not making sense and I probably made everybody angry you paint a very evocative picture Nikki and Layla so we're going to go to questions soon but Layla I just want to come to you then finally I mean Nikki paints this very evocative picture of at the birth of the American constitution here is Abigail Adams telling John Adams don't forget the women remember the women do you think this is what women of colour are having to do now is look to their nation and say remember us well I think I think we've been saying it all along I think we've always been insisting that we are here that we deserve to live in the fullness of our humanity that we deserve full dignity I don't think that this has ever been something that has been a side issue it's always been front and centre um so yeah I think for you know and even in in that um in in what Nikki was sharing you know when that that refrain of don't forget the women we know which women were meant by that you know and which women were excluded from that and yet still we have always been here insisting that we deserve to be here we deserve to live in the in the fullness of our humanity and we'll continue to do so right I'm I'm listening to everything that that Nikki is saying and I'm I'm so it's just it's bringing up so much for me because I've really been wrestling this year personally with how do you have hope in a time like this and how do you keep moving forward and there are so many reasons to lose hope and I definitely found myself in a place personally in a place of hopelessness and um kind of what what's the point you know people have been working for so long I have these posters behind me of some of my you know personal um heroes Maya Angelou Octavia Butler Audrey Lord Tony Morrison Nikki were definitely one of them and when I told my kids that I was going to be on this panel with you they were very very excited for me um I you know you each one of you just bringing so much of your true self your authentic self and sharing that with the world and like you said all I can do is what I can do and I'm so glad that you are here doing what you can do and it makes me look within myself again and again and say what is it that I'm here to do what is it that I am here to bring um I do have a daughter I have two children my first born is a daughter she's 11 my son is six and one of the things that pulled me out of my personal hopelessness and I owe them to keep moving forward I owe it to them to keep helping to build a better world I will not do it from a sense of naivety about as Nikki said the cowardliness of white supremacy I will not do it from a sense of trying to convince white people that I deserve to be uh to to live in the fullness of my deserve to live from that place I will do it by speaking the truth living as I am without apology not waiting for anyone else to recognize my value or my worth and continuing to say look this is what I'm here to do I'm a teacher I'm not a poet I'm a teacher I'm here to teach I will teach you what you don't know about yourself what you may not recognize the history that you may not be aware of I will teach you techniques for looking within yourself and ways to think critically about the system of oppression that we live with that favors some people above another privileges some people over others so that we can have a better world but regardless of when this change happens if it ever happens I will always continue to live in a way that reflects the truth of who I am and what it means to be a black woman and I will teach my children the same whether or not white people as a collective ever fully get there wonderful thank you it's such a pleasure listening to all three of you so we've got lots of questions from the audience here I just um there's two that are related one from the hand Jane one from Michael Sulu and they ask why are in brackets mostly white people so afraid of the words white supremacy and how do you convince people that it's not about white people plotting the murder of people of colour and Michael Sulu's question is related to this he writes there is a lot of discussion around the language that is used in this area being divisive it also seems like it is intentionally misused or misconstrued to what extent do you believe a change in vocabulary would help progress equality or equity I'm going to come to you first preinvader because on social media you've been very active and sometimes you yourself have seen your use of words being rounded upon and people attacking you as a result of it how do you feel about this well I mean the to begin with the first question I find that you can't even say the word white that that itself it creates kind of waves of shock and it's featured as problematic that you identify something to be connected to whiteness or white supremacy but the reason there is such a recoil of course is that any system that is so powerful that it need not name itself does not like to be named because to be named is to be called out so while it's you know perfectly normal to talk about black people or brown people or women of colour or black women it's not that common for whiteness to be named not not just named but also described precisely as an insidious invisible system the real mark of power is the power to be invisible because you you are everywhere you need not name yourself and that's why you can talk about race as much as you like and nothing happens until you start to talk about whiteness the second question I didn't really understand whether it was being suggested that people who are anti-racists are using divisive language and therefore they should come up with a different kind of vocabulary the point is this the divisions already exist we live in a deeply hierarchical and conflictual racial geography so there's no point in saying the language is divisive the point is that the division already exists and what the language tries to do is to identify these divisions and speak about how we might overcome them but it's not as though the onus is on anti-racists to change their language or to tone down their analysis so that those in power feel comfortable that's not how change happens. Layla, how do you feel about that? Yeah 100% I agree I have a book called me in white supremacy so I very strongly advocate calling a thing a thing and naming it for what it is I don't see how we can even begin to understand what it is if we are afraid to name it or are we are offended to name it I think it's so important to name it for what it is to understand what it is when we hear it and to like Param Vada was saying to identify whiteness for what it is you know so often people want to confuse that we're talking about the literal whiteness of their skin now we're talking about whiteness as a construct as a system as an ideology as the condition that we that we live in and we as people of colour and black people know the very intricate and intimate ways that it operates both on a day to day level and an institutional level so we are the best people to say this is how it works this is how I experience it day to day this is how I've seen it affect and impact other people it has to be named this idea of on this conversation of is it the right words or is it the right way to say it I strongly feel is a distraction it is a way for us to get away from doing the work that needs to be done and Nikki I mean your work is words how important is the language here what what are your thoughts I couldn't I think that that that the women who are speaking before me are absolutely right you have to name whatever it is you have to name it and it's been being on the panel I must thank everybody for for being here with me I don't think I did it and I do have manners but one of the things that that I think we overlook is how long as we have evolved language has evolved and we and I say we because I'm human and I walk on two legs but we have been killing people for centuries for the words that they use and I mentioned Jesus because that's just something that I grew up in in in in that culture I'm a Christian but we murdered Jesus not because he did something but because he said something we murdered Socrates but we also murdered people that we don't know because they tried to tell people let's look at we were talking let's let's let's look at it let's call this song exactly what it is we murdered people when they find the words that say to other people this is the change that's needed and this is the truth that has to be told we murdered a president he wasn't all that nicer guy we murdered John Kennedy blew his head off and his wife I don't know if anybody you can see my hand but Jackie reached out when they when the bullet she reached out and she carried to the to the hospital a piece of his skull which let the doctors know oh he's gone and they had to call it they had to call his death I must send the jack Kennedy was was any great guy I'm just saying he was listening to the words and people were saying to him this has to stop it has to stop that you're shooting us it has to stop that you're lynching us it has to stop and jack was listening so we blew his head off it's very interesting that nobody's blown Donald Trump's head off it very interesting to me because I think that that well they always say that if you don't know what the devil looks like it's because you're right you're running with him that's an old expression and I think a lot of people don't nobody blew his head off then he has to be the people blowing he has to be a part of the group that are blowing heads off because we're seeing too many people dying I know you're not supposed to say things like that but I'm not threatening the president I'm just saying I'm I'm amazed that nobody threw his head off that's all and on that note I just want to quickly state that we are hearing some views of course on American politics from Nikki and the others and I have to just be clear that they don't represent the views of the British Library so please don't come at the British Library around this I think it's very important and I mean just again this is another question around language but also around definitions because I think language and definitions are so important when it comes to social justice movements and in trying to frame a lot of what we see and Naomi asks how would each of the panellys define feminism and how can you fight for equality and not be a feminist I want to come to you Nikki because you've already said that you don't call yourself a feminist no and I don't because they have made a well as far as I see and I can be very much wrong it has become a group a cult a thing and so somebody else said it but the everyday life that we that we lead the everyday things that we have to do nobody's saying this this is racist or this is anti-racist there's a book club and it's wonderful and the book that they're reading is how to be an anti-racist and so some of the people actually in the book club are saying well I don't have to be an anti-racist I don't have to work hard to not be a racist well if you don't then that means you're racist and everybody gets upset about that the racists don't want to admit that that maybe I am I don't to me feminism has become a club you know it's a sorority you can put the clothes on and and get together every Thursday and have a drink it's a club and unless and until we're willing as someone has said to deal with ourselves and maybe my world is shrunk I live in a small world I'm I'm I'm just a poet and I'm in a small state and I'm teaching at a small school but as I see my world shrink which I don't mind it shrinking as long as I can at least do whatever it is I think I do I just I'm amazed that we're making feminism the next thing we know when we get rid of white supremacy we're going to be talking about feminism and it's going to be like oh now we have to deal with that but it's always going to be something about white people it's never going to be something and and I'm glad you have a daughter I think daughters are really wonderful and and I think that that I think we don't we don't let our daughters know how we feel I know that when our mothers need something they call us I know mine did but we we don't we don't we don't pride ourselves we had a football we have a football coach here at Virginia Tech I could not believe he said that who was giving an interview after he had called a bad game because when the when the team loses it's a coach's fault and he'd called a bad game and he said you know everybody knows I wanted a son and I thought you damn fool you're sitting there with people who have gone out on a field and gotten injured somebody running into them and your response to all of that is everybody knows I wanted a son what kind of sense is that and so it it it bothers me that we don't let our daughters know how much we value them what they mean to us how how not not just that we love them because I think daughters probably know they're loved but but the value of having a daughter of having a friend of having someone my grandmother and I used to cook together of having someone you can make biscuits with I still can't make biscuits but I remember grandmother and I remember grandmother trying to teach me the value of a daughter and maybe that's a part of what is also bothering me I'm not in a particularly bad mood today it's not one of my better days but it bothers me that we don't value our daughters that when you have a daughter nobody says oh that's a good idea well I have to say you know in my family the reason that we are three sisters is because my mum was urged to keep having children so she would have a son she never had a son in the end but um a priymbada in Indian culture this certainly is an issue this kind of son preference in in a number of cultures this son preference then that aspect of feminism this is women also wanting sons this is mothers also wanting sons how do we kind of fight that insidious cultural nature of how deep rooted patriarchy well I mean any any system of injustice requires our collaboration it also often requires the consent of those who are being oppressed so it in in and not just in India beyond India women are often deeply complicit in patriarchy so how do we fight it I think this is the point that any any fight for justice involves and I think this has been said involves self-reflection involves reflection on how we came to be who we are and how we can change ourselves alongside other people so yeah there is no way whether it's anti-racism or whether it's feminism to not look at yourself I think where I can I agree with Mickey is this I think one of the problems is that feminism in its mainstream incarnation has become that kind of very corporate middle class white or upper caste lean in feminism where it is it does seem often clubbish and it does seem often very narrowly middle class in its interest I think fighting against patriarchy can't happen alone it has to happen in conjunction with fights for economic justice racial justice sexual justice past justice so we we're just we're reaching the end now here I really wanted to hear from Leila I'm so sorry that I want to very quickly if you can very briefly just put in your final thought that would be amazing yeah I just um some thinking about Nikki and how she said she doesn't identify as a feminist and I think a few years ago I did identify as a feminist I don't necessarily now not because I don't believe in feminism um but because in my own analysis of what it means to be a black woman what it means to be a Muslim woman right I'm like so what is my definition of feminism and what does it mean to me personally I think it's the same with using the word anti-racist and saying I'm an anti-racist you know I don't think that that's a thing that you can be I think it's it's a practice that you can have but it's not necessarily an identity that is who you are and so I think feminism is something that I see as a practice and my definition of it is that it includes all genders people of all you know abilities people of all gender identities and that and people of all races obviously and that if it doesn't include everyone then it's not feminism and so that's kind of how I see it as opposed to something that I identify it's me it's something that I think is a practice that based on our identities and the way that we're impacted by patriarchy and white supremacy we'll have a different way of approaching wonderful thank you so much it's been a pleasure to listen to all of you and I just have to be clear again that the British Library does not endorse the views of individuals contained in this debate of course thank you so much to our wonderful guests and thank you to the audience for tuning in and again please do check out the British Library's exhibition unfinished business the fight for women's rights it's beautiful and thought-provoking and again my deepest heartfelt thanks to three wonderful women who are able to join us this afternoon I'm so grateful to have listened to you thank you thank you thank you thanks everyone take care