Safety Now: communities against racism and Islamophobia

We can’t wait for a distant future in which racist violence and intimidation are no more. Planning and dreaming for that future, and betting our hopes on it, is not enough: we need safety now.

From hostile marches around the UK, to attacks in Glasgow and Edinburgh, emboldened racism, fuelled by biased media and government discourse, have left communities feeling increasingly unsafe. In the face of such threats, immediate, tangible measures are needed.

Taj Ali is the author of Come What May, We’re Here To Stay, which tells the story of how British South Asians organised against racism in the past and how they continue to fight in the present. In this panel he joins Katucha Bento, anti-racist disruptor, Senior Lecturer, artist and director of RACE.ed at the University of Edinburgh, for an exploration of how anti-racist communities of care and safety answer the current moment on their own terms.

This panel is sponsored by RACE.ed at the University of Edinburgh

Our speakers:

Dr Katucha Bento is a Black feminist, anti-racist disruptor, educator, artist, Candomblé practitioner, and auntie. She currently serves as Senior Lecturer in Race and Decolonial Studies and Director of the RACE.ED Network at the University of Edinburgh. Her roots are in the Brazilian Black Movement and samba circles, giving her the compass to work with quilombos in Brazil, Black presence in Britain, and radical love as anti-racist praxis. In 2020, she co-founded the Free Afro-Brazilian University (UNAFRO). In her work with Black epistemologies, specifically Black feminisms, Afro-surrealism, and queer subversive language, she seeks to promote an ethics of care and power to the people.

Taj Ali is a journalist and historian. He is the former editor of Tribune and regularly appears as a commentator on the BBC, as well as contributing to the Guardian, Al Jazeera English and others. In 2025 he set up Anti-Racist Radar, an organisation that monitors and reports on racist attacks in the UK. For his work on hate crime and Islamophobia he was chosen as a finalist for the 2026 Orwell Prize.