“…you don’t worry about dirt in the garden because it belongs in the garden, but the moment you see dirt in the bedroom you have to do something about it because it symbolically doesn’t belong there. And what you do with dirt in the bedroom is to cleanse it, you sweep it out, you restore order, you police boundaries, you know the hard and fast boundaries around what belongs and what doesn’t. Inside/Outside. Cultured/Uncivilised. Barbarous/Cultivated, and so on.”

– Stuart Hall discussing anthropologist Mary Douglas and her ‘matter out of place’ theory¹

I remember an empty seat next to me on a crowded train. I remember walking easy in a quaint French village before being interrupted by the wrinkled nose of a passerby; tu viens d’où, alors? reminding me that foreign follows me like an old cloak lugging around my neck. I remember the breeze in Kerry’s voice telling me, I don’t like the really dark black people, but you’re alright, the way horror grew in my chest like ivy that day (its leaves have still not withered). I remember Year 6, the way my teacher shuddered at a picture of my profile. How I first understood revulsion without knowing its name, tucking my lips into themselves to make them smaller, if only for a little while. I remember the pointing, questions of whether I could read whilst holding a book, being looked at too intently to be thought beautiful but blushing all the same. I think this is a love, but the kind we have been warned to run from. It owns a gun, yet will not speak of its terror; obsessive in every curl of my hair, the bloom of my nose, the peaks and troughs of my breath. I’d tell you who I am, but you do not ask for my voice. You’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you?

***

how long must we make a case for migration? recount the times it has carried this country on its neck so this nation could bask in the glory of its so called greatness? how loud should we chant our stories of beauty of struggle of grit? write all the ways we are lovely and useful across our faces before we become a hymn sheet singing of desperation? what time left to find a favourite cafè and a hand to hold? to lie on the grass in the park and spot clouds whose shapes remind us of the things we’ve lost? the loves we can’t get back?

The riots. August 2024. Did I dream it? The rage, the terror, the fire?

Already, it’s being remembered as the riots of the ‘far right’. Far away – like a beast on a leash scowling in the distance. But I’ve seen riots, routine and much closer. Riots on my tv screen in racist debates over who gets to be here, riots in politician’s mouths, chewing and spitting immigrants out like a dirty word. A riot to my presence in the rooms I walk in and out of, protest to any sign I’m here, surviving, even experiencing joy. After all, the rule, no necessity, is that we must always be on the losing end of life. The idea that actually everyone could survive and experience joy, is supposedly a fairytale for the naïve. Instead, we remain trapped in the game of it- someone must win and another lose.

Weeks, even days, after the fury of the race riots, all of its wrath was shoved back into a box. The beast, clawing and wailing in the struggle, muffled by the pleasantries of nothing to see here! racism is in the past! because we’re all very civilised around here, right?

Eventually we left our houses once again. Funny how we knew what to do, how we’ve been rehearsing for emergency and violence every day in the before and after. This is the silent trade-off of what it is to live here, to exist within a spooling well of anger, unchecked and always brimming beneath the surface, hot and ready to boil over, flip the box wide open.

The rioters claimed enough was enough, to stop the boats, that something has to end

And I wanted to ask them, what? What is too much? Whose boats first descended where? What has to end, and where did this all begin? Trace it to its exact point.

Whose story are you telling? At what point did you get lost? Trace it to its exact point. Meet me there.

I know the truth to these questions means nothing. White terror is an inheritance, and the need to assert dominance over others, an heirloom that is passed on and on and on. Those who accept it, must do so faithfully, despite any truths or pleas to change.

I wanted to tell the rioters of the time they’re wasting, that they can’t hate us on the way to their own happiness. That what degrades us, degrades them – we are bound to one another whether any of us like it or not, and maybe, just maybe the thing that oppresses you, oppresses us too. That the violence and rage within them, can be fuel for something else, something good.

Here’s the thing we forget as we age; we’re not so different. Yes, there are some people whose clothes will never start a riot, those who will never know the grief of having a face made synonymous with a thug (the trauma of this deserves its own word). It is true that the things we experience are wrapped up in the life we are given. But when it comes to who we are, down to our most intimate core, aren’t we all just a bit lonely, scared for the storms to come? Asking questions no one truly has answers for?

Consider this; many of us did not want to get up this morning, some of us couldn’t. There is that dazed place we all inhabit seconds before fully waking that has no border, needs no passport. When the temperature drops to a chill, a body becomes its own shelter, shoulders round into a cave protecting itself. Some of our worse fears will come true, others won’t. We are all still chewing on words we wish we’d said to someone, somewhere, and longing to swallow back the ones we’ve said in temper. A first love will make our bodies speak languages we didn’t know we were fluent in and we all carry the heaviness of loss. How did we forget that we’re all deeply connected on some level?

Every day my phone scrolls through a news feed of angry people drunk on their ability to put others back in their place. There is a growing army of the righteous who tell us that there is a correct language to speak, an exact way to love, one acceptable altar to pray on. That falling out of this line means the terror of brute force is to be expected.

I watch a video of a man on the top deck of a bus screaming at another with a boiled kettle rage. He is all fist, spit in your face, my-grand-dad-didn’t-win-the war-so-your-kind-could-piss-it-all-away. I’m not sure it matters who the person on the receiving end of this venom is. In the video he is a chilling quiet, the kind many people of colour will recognise. It is a calculated silence, the kind where you are bargaining for your survival (and this too needs its own word). It does not matter whether he has a job he works hard at, the taxes he does or does not pay, if he tips generously, whether he is kind. That’s the point, isn’t it? Racism does not look for nuance, only the audacity of our skin.

I wonder if with a different lens these two could be lovers, could be sitting next to each other as strangers on the same top deck. They’d realise they were listening to the same music and how this one track makes them each feel a particular kind of giddy as the bass drops, how as the bus jolts a headphone would fall from each ear and they would turn to look at each other and they would smile.

Words tell lies. This is difficult pill to swallow for a writer, but it is true, I think. We’ve inherited childish terms that shape the way we interact with one another. The words Black and White are at their heart nonsensical, a carrier of symbols and signs artificially packed with history and too much meaning. And yet, still, these labels are seared onto our backs. How we ourselves are living in a language that equates our colour to a shipwreck where all hope is lost. It is, after all, a dark time. Blackness, with all its pain and apparent innate knowledge of knife crime and squalor embedded under its skin, stands with its back to whiteness, which in turn, knows fresh air and the best schools to get into. How boring, but these terms of reference are as scorched in our minds as a national anthem. How then, should we come to understand ourselves with the language we’ve been given? To find meaning and truth in words that are the scraps of the dictionary?

Give us back our tongues and we’ll give you an answer. It may not be a sound you’ll recognise but it will be ours, all ours.

***

The Audacity of Our Skin was originally commissioned by Counterpoints Arts as part of the Who Are We festival at the Tate Modern in 2018. This revisited version was commissioned by the Stuart Hall Foundation in 2025, supported by Comic Relief.

¹ https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Stuart-Hall-Race-the-Floating-Signifier-Transcript.pdf

For the 8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation, the Stuart Hall Foundation welcomed political theorist, writer, activist, independent curator and political educator, Prof. Françoise Vergès as the keynote speaker. Taking place on Saturday 17th May at Conway Hall in London and online via livestream broadcast, the event inaugurated our 2025 programme, In Search of Common Ground.

Vergès’ keynote, titled ‘There Will Be No Future Without Seizing the Present’, considered how we might think across difference to construct a life-affirming politics in times of poly-crisis. The writer and activist posited that building common ground is building transnational solidarity, and urged against despair: “Let us think defeat as a chapter in the long fight for liberation and freedom.”

The keynote was preceded by a video excerpt from Stuart Hall’s Race, The Floating Signifier (1997) and an introductory address from SHF Executive Director Orsod Malik. After the keynote, Vergès was joined by Mohammed Elnaiem, Director of the Decolonial Centre, for a discussion and audience Q&A which further considered how we might understand Hall’s thinking on “a politics without guarantees”. A video recording of the keynote, discussion and audience Q&A will be published in the coming weeks.

The event also featured the premiere screening of ‘The Audacity of Our Skin’. Featuring poet and essayist Selina Nwulu reading her newly revisited version of the titular work to camera, the filmed performance was shot and edited by videographer Alice Kanako and commissioned by the Stuart Hall Foundation supported by Comic Relief.

Following the event, attendees were invited to congregate at an informal reception, where they discussed ideas with programme contributors and with each other. Plant-based South Asian food catered by Goodness Gracious Feast and drinks from the bar were made available, while Newham Bookshop held a stall with titles related to the programme on offer.

Skin Deep hosted a pop-up library at the back of the hall, continuing their efforts to make space for creative thinking in service of and beyond racial justice. The library of liberatory texts offered attendees the opportunity to relax and flip through back prints of the Skin Deep magazine, pick up their latest issue and delve into their sources of inspiration.

Supported by Comic Relief, the Hollick Family Foundation and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, in collaboration with Conway Hall, Words of Colour and Pluto Press.