Now, I want to be really choiceful in my language and intention here. This is not a pity party. Nor is this easy to write, as someone who dedicates her life, practice, study and politics to the liberation and emancipation of African-descendent people. I’m digging deep. But my political commitments have always been wide enough to acknowledge that such liberation would necessitate freedom from all systems of oppression, and would render that which harms us all obsolete. Fascist leaders know this. That’s why they work so hard to conjure narratives and build systems that demand our segregation. They know that once grief is organised toward justice, their power dissolves.
Malkia Devich Cyril teaches us that grief is all the ways we process change. Every community, every person, every life force is in relationship with grief—because change is constant, and loss is inevitable. But grief is not simply private or individual. It is social, political terrain. What is key here is how grief is metabolised. Radical grievance is what happens when we make meaning out of loss and orient it toward justice. It’s the collective process of saying: something precious has been taken and the path forward is to transform that loss into repair, dignity and liberation.
But today, here in the UK and across the world, grief is being weaponised. On Saturday 13th September 2025, as I stood on Kennington Road in London, swarmed by EDL members waving their flags at me, a lingering thought consumed me — fascists and supremacists are working overtime to organise loss in the opposite direction. Towards isolation, hate, blame, disconnection, violence. They take the very real grief of poor and working-class white communities—towns gutted by deindustrialisation, families destabilised by precarity, health and futures eroded by austerity—and redirect it into grievance against migrants, Black people, queer people, Muslims, anyone who can be made scapegoat. And because grief carries a deep desire for connection and belonging, these narratives are working. The far right is providing coherence, ritual and story where the Left too often offers distance, ridicule, or silence.
In Britain, the landscape is especially stark. Working-class white distress is often caricatured (“chav” stereotypes), pathologised, or instrumentalised in the service of reactionary politics. At the same time, struggles over race and class are held apart in political and media narratives. “Left-behind white towns” appear in one discourse; “racial inequality” in another—rarely connected as part of the same system of dispossession. This is a fragmentation that serves capital and the Right. It keeps us from seeing how austerity, privatisation, borders and policing harm us all, though in uneven and racialised ways.
And grief here is not just about material loss—it is also about the perceived loss of identity. For generations, industrial labour provided not only wages but meaning. Mining, steelmaking, shipbuilding, and manufacturing were more than jobs: they were community identities, interwoven with pride, ritual and solidarity. To be a miner in South Wales, a steelworker in Sheffield, or a shipbuilder on the Clyde was to belong to something larger than oneself. These industries provided a cultural fabric—working men’s clubs, union halls, collective traditions—that tethered identity to place and to work. For many of those arriving here in Britain at the height of industry — coinciding with 1947 partition and Generation Windrush — navigating this culture was also key to survival against the tide of racial violence.
When Thatcher’s government closed the pits, dismantled steel and broke the unions, jobs disappeared—but so did this sense of self. Towns and villages were not only stripped of livelihoods but of the cultural infrastructures that gave life rhythm and recognition. What followed was more than economic crisis: it was a psychic rupture, a profound unmooring of identity. Many poor white communities have never recovered from that break, as partisan politics further entrenches harm, and the longing for belonging the rupture created has become fertile ground for fascists. They know that where industry once gave identity, they can now offer grievance. Where unions once gave solidarity, they can offer scapegoats.
I want to be clear about my language here. I am speaking directly about poor white folks and the lived experience of poverty, not simply “the working class.” In Britain, the identity of “working class” has stretched so wide over the last few decades that it no longer maps neatly onto material deprivation. Middle-class commentators now claim it through accent or heritage, while real experiences of poverty are obscured. I am talking about the people for whom precarity is not an abstraction: families surviving benefit sanctions and in-work poverty, households relying on food banks, communities where entire generations have been stripped of stability, security and dignity. It is this grief—both material and identity-based—that fascists are organising. And it is this grief that liberation movements must learn to organise otherwise.
And I need to be equally clear about something else: this is not my work to do. We need white folks to organise here. White folks who understand the system, who have studied alongside, marched alongside, posted Black squares, built credibility alongside and sought affirmation from Black and racialised leaders—especially since 2020—must now step into responsibility like never before. This is not the time to buckle and adopt Reform logics, nor for symbolic allyship. If we’re afraid, we must feel the fear and lean in anyway. The legitimacy, proximity and resources that middle class and white organisers, strategists, policymakers, activists and movement workers have gained from association with Black and working class leadership cannot remain abstract. They must manifest in action, in organising their own communities toward liberation.
Heavy on “liberation”. Make no missteps with the title of this piece — we need more than “talking to white people” or a redirecting of programmes to focus on the “left behind white communities”. Through these niceties and arbitrary binaries, we risk maintaining a perpetual reversal; a sustained paradigm of haves and have-nots; a deequilibrium that temporarily benefits a few but continually favours extractive power. To really contend with radical grievance is to orient with a politicised analysis of liberation. We are talking a rigorous, astute, multifaceted, systemic, (infra)structural, intersectional framing of liberation that grasps at the root of dispossession and class. Who is doing this work with poor white folks? Those also impacted by the same systems of oppression necessitated by racial capitalism?
Too often, Black leaders—especially Black women—are expected to provide the analysis, the solutions and the labour for escaping every crisis. At the same time, we are invisibilised, erased and silenced in countless ways. This extraction cannot continue. The only way forward is mutual responsibility. Time to step up.
This is why the question must be asked plainly: Who is organising poor white folks towards liberation? Who is speaking with them? Who is reorienting them towards liberation and providing a political, embodied and loving framing that grounds in realities and generative futures? Who is doing the work of listening to grief without shame, of transforming loss into radical grievance that points not at scapegoats but recognises landlords, bosses, and borders? Who is helping them within a broader coalition for liberation, weaving solidarities then across colour lines, refusing both pity and paternalism, but recognising shared precarity as the ground for collective power?
This is not about saving poor white people. It is about refusing to let fascism monopolise their grief. It is about refusing to cede the terrain of belonging, ritual and story to the far right. It is about course correcting and memory work that is rooted in truth without romanticising or rewriting history. It is about building infrastructures—unions, movements, civic and social infrastructures, cultural projects—that can hold the complexity of race and class together, and orient the pain of change toward justice.
We are living through a dangerous convergence: grief is abundant, and fascists are listening closely. Unless movements of liberation can take grief seriously, with white folks organising at the scale of their streets, neighbourhoods, communities, online groups —not just as personal sorrow but as political material—fascism will continue to grow by feeding on the losses of working-class white life.
The task, then, is not only to confront fascism, but to contest its claim on grief. To insist that the longing for belonging, the ache of loss, can be transformed into radical grievance. And to remind ourselves that liberation will not come from dividing struggles, or calcifying binaries, but from learning to grieve—and to organise—together.
“Left-behind white towns” appear in one discourse; “racial inequality” in another—rarely connected as part of the same system of dispossession“ BOOM!
As a black woman (in the US vs. UK), I also see the need for this. But not only will I say that it is not our work to do, I will also say THE CALL NEEDS TO COME FROM INSIDE THEIR HOUSE. We are outside looking in, flailing and shouting because we can see what is happening but they don't see us through the thick paned glass. Someone inside has to notice and speak up. So far only right wing/reactionary someones have had much success with it.
Thanks for sharing this Amahra 🙏 You get at a key issue that I have been discussing with people, particularly those that identify as “left”. That people don’t mobilise around abstractions like “capitalism” or analysis of “systems of oppression", they mobilise around felt grief and the promise of dignity. We’re facing these similar realities here in Australia with the rise of facism. All mixed in with the indigenous sovereignty movement and the amplification of identity and culture wars as discussions of treaty, land back and sovereignty surface in public discourse. A deeper picture that I have been metabolising is what a grief commons might look like? As in spaces (social infrastructure) where communities gather to process loss, tell stories, and transform pain into repair, solidarity, and imagination. Without being captured by an ideological agenda.