Splintered Sisterhood: Antiracism in a Young Women's Project

Abstract

For most of the eighties, I worked at a feminist youth project in London. Our 'client groups' were local working-class young women between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five, the majority drawn from the area's largest ethnic minorities, Irish, Afro-Caribbean and Asian. This is not a description of the Project's work - much of it stimulating and rewarding for workers and young women involved - but a subjective account of the ways in which our activities and thinking bore on the subject of race. My main purpose is to contribute to a critique of multiculturalism, the dominant form of antiracist activity in the Project and elsewhere. 'Multiculturalism', the caring professions' view of Black people from without, and its more radical sister 'identity politics' (the mainspring of political activity coming from within one's sense of an oppressed self) have been strongly influential principles across the left and feminism throughout the eighties in Britain. The Project considered itself an integral part of the women's movement, and our work was bounded by the parameters of feminist thinking on race issues and their perceived connexion with the question of gender. I write with the benefit of hindsight, in the wake of the furore over the publication of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. The left in Britain has been thrown into confusion by the recent confident displays of religious fundamentalism in a large part of the Asian community. To judge by those who are prepared to support demands to 'Ban the Book', support for Muslim religious leaders who assert the right to speak for 'their' community has come from a wide spectrum of political opinion. It has been left largely to the right-wing press, like the Daily Mail, and extreme right-wing organizations like the National Front, to confront the fundamentalists directly. There are significant exceptions, however. Gita Sahgal, an Asian feminist and a founding member of Women Against Fundamentalism, states that: 'Fundamentalism has been the