KCL UCU Racism Statement

KCL UCU sends its solidarity and support to Unite UCU members, the Black Members Standing Committee (BMSC), and Black UCU members who over the past few months have revealed the realities of institutional racism in UCU. Even as members have spent countless days on picket lines striking to create a more racially just education sector – institutional racism has not been confronted in-house. Now UCU faces the prospect of its own workers going on strike during its annual Congress and Sector Conferences – at the very moment UK higher education is being brutally restructured. Enough is Enough.

The abolition of institutional racism in UCU will not be achieved through plans handed down from the very structures riddled with racism – but through the active participation, funding and backing of those who are experiencing racism in the highlighting and implementing of the necessary changes within the union. We demand that the UCU General Secretary and UCU management negotiate with our colleagues and fully meet their demands.

We also send our support to the BMSC who have been internally censored on the issue of Palestine. The issue of racism cannot be domesticated or separated from imperialism – racism discriminates in the workplace but it also kills at the border, in police stations and within occupied territories. Not only should we expect that Black members be able to speak freely in UCU – but the BMSC highlighting how the struggle for Palestinian liberation and the fight against anti-Palestinian racism transform our own labour struggles cannot and will not be silenced.

The Palestine solidarity movement is not just an isolated moment of international solidarity with the oppressed and union comrades but is a movement built on ongoing engagement with the connections between racism, imperialism and capitalism. There simply can be no serious anti-racism within UCU – even with just pay and working conditions – if our pensions and employers are directly, or indirectly, funding, supporting, or legitimating the killing of people under racist apartheid abroad.

It was disheartening to see the UCU General Secretary endorse measures that would regulate the speech and potentially victimize UCU members seeking Palestinian liberation. We should have no truck with antisemitism, Islamophobia or any other form of racism in UCU – we should also refuse to play different forms of racism off against each other or create a hierarchy of racisms.

We call on UCU to get its anti-racism act together now! This should be through rejuvenating anti-racism within its own structures and amongst its own members and supporting boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns in relation to our education sector’s links with murderous imperialism, settler colonialism and racism in Palestine.

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