Siva’s aphorisms

We are here because you were there (on post-colonial immigration)

One death is a death too many (on deaths in custody)

Black is a political colour, not the colour of our skins (on anti-imperialist/anti-racist struggle of the ’60s and ’70s)

The violence of the violated (on the black uprisings of 1981)

The market corrupts, and the free market corrupts freely

The personal is not political; the political is personal (on ‘identity politics’)

The function of knowledge is to liberate (on Race & Class)

We think in order to do (on Race & Class)

There is no socialism after liberation; socialism is the process through which liberation is won (on the Tamil liberation movement)

There are two racisms: the racism that discriminates and the racism that kills (on race/class dynamics)

Who you are is what you do (on identity)

Don’t give me crutches after breaking my legs; just don’t break my legs (on Lord Scarman’s positive discrimination recommendation 1981)

Exclusion is seldom the measure of a child’s capacity to learn, so much as the teacher’s refusal to be challenged (on school exclusions)

Small Government is big business; Big Society is no society (on Tory policy)

There is no such thing as your children and my children. Children are the measure of our possibilities; how we treat them is the measure of our humanity. The moment we categorise them as foreign is the moment we lose both (on detention and deportation)

The fight against racism cannot be reduced to a fight for culture

The whole purpose of knowing who we are is not to interpret the world, but to change it

The people we are writing for are the people we are fighting for (on writing simply)

Market education produces functionaries, a liberal education produces visionaries

Once culture was a class construct; today class is a culture construct (on the information society)

If those who have do not give, those who haven’t must take.