From Love to Justice: Families’ Interrogation of Racial State Violence

Abstract

This paper explores how love, grief and kinship operate in families’ struggles for truth and justice following a death in custody of a racialised person in England and Wales. Racialised people are disproportionately vulnerable to dying in police custody. Family experiences following a custodial death are characterised by difficulty in obtaining information, delays in processes, a lack of responsiveness from authorities and an absence of resolution. Love, grief and kinship form the initial springboard for families’ legal battles for justice, with women often taking leading roles in demanding state accountability through legal action and community-based campaigns. While kinship ties have traditionally been understood in mainstream scholarship as closing off family units and mitigating against principles of egalitarianism and solidarity, families’ justice campaigns challenge this narrative. Families can become politicised in the course of struggle, forming alliances with groups proclaiming broader antiracist goals. This paper reveals the subversive potential of love, grief and kinship in struggles for justice in racialised death in custody cases.

Abolishing institutional racism

“…Anti-imperial politics puncture the liberal mythologies of Britain's selfimage by illuminating the racial order which its institutions of law enforcement uphold. 80 the racial violence and exploitation of imperialism is, of course, connected to the economic exploitation of Black people in postcolonial Britain, and the police, prison and border power which disciplines them. therefore, British institutions reproducing racism cannot be attributed to prejudiced individuals or biased policies, but to systems of domination necessary for these institutions to function as they were intended.…”