From Complicity to Resistance

I wrote the poem From Complicity to Resistance in 2025, as a response to a growing sense of unease. It emerged from a moment that felt both intensely personal and deeply political: driving to work and seeing flags, slogans, and demonstrations that communicated a clear message about who belongs and who does not. While the poem captures feelings of fear, frustration, grief, and hope, it is not simply a personal reflection. Rather, it speaks to wider social, political, and institutional conditions that increasingly shape the lives of racialised communities in Britain.

The poem reflects many of the themes that have occupied my research, scholarship, and activism over the past two decades. Across my work on race equity in higher education, anti-racist pedagogy, co-creation, institutional racism, Islamophobia, and decolonisation, I have been interested in understanding how systems of power become normalised and how they shape everyday experiences of belonging, exclusion, and resistance.

At its heart, the poem is about complicity. It asks difficult questions about what happens when individuals, institutions, and governments remain silent in the face of injustice. Silence is rarely neutral. Whether in relation to racism, anti-migrant hostility, Islamophobia, misogyny, genocide, or the destruction of civilian lives in conflict zones, silence often functions as a form of consent. Throughout history, oppressive systems have relied not only on those who actively participate in harm but also on those who choose not to challenge it.

The poem situates contemporary hostility towards migrants and Muslims within broader structures of white supremacy and racial capitalism. These are not simply expressions of individual prejudice. They are produced and sustained through political discourse, media narratives, economic inequalities, and institutional practices. When migrants are blamed for housing shortages, refugees for pressures on public services, or Muslims for threats to national security, attention is diverted away from the structural causes of social problems. In doing so, racialised communities become convenient scapegoats for failures produced elsewhere.

These dynamics have become particularly visible within higher education. Universities often present themselves as spaces of critical inquiry, social justice, and academic freedom. Yet many of my recent research projects and writing have documented the tensions that emerge when institutions are confronted with ‘so-called’ controversial political issues. The suppression of protest, the use of injunctions, the cancellation of events, heightened scrutiny of certain forms of activism, and the reluctance to speak out on questions of human rights reveal the limits of institutional commitments to freedom of expression.

This is one of the themes explored in my recent work on academic repression and institutional silence. The question is not simply whether universities allow difficult conversations, but whether they are willing to uphold their stated values when doing so carries political or reputational risk. When institutions prioritise neutrality over justice, they risk becoming complicit in the very systems they claim to challenge.

The poem also reflects ideas developed through my work on Coloniality-Induced Continuous Trauma (CICT). Trauma is often understood as an event that happens in the past. However, for many racialised communities, harm is ongoing. Racism, Islamophobia, surveillance, exclusion, political hostility, and global violence are not isolated incidents but continuous realities. The psychological and emotional impacts accumulate over time because the structures producing harm remain active. In this context, trauma is not simply an individual experience but a social condition.

Gender is equally central to the poem. References to misogynoir and a new term I have coined, misogynislam, recognise that racialised women often experience intersecting forms of oppression. Muslim women, Black women, migrant women, and even some non racialised women who advocate anti- racism, are frequently positioned as symbols within political debates while their own voices remain marginalised. They are spoken about rather than listened to. Understanding these experiences requires an intersectional analysis that recognises how race, gender, religion, class, and migration status work together to shape lived realities.

Yet the poem is ultimately not about despair. It is about resistance.

Across my work on co-creation and anti-racist pedagogy, I have repeatedly witnessed the transformative potential of collective action. Students, staff, activists, trade unionists, community organisations, and scholars can create spaces where people feel heard, valued, and empowered. Through dialogue, critical reflection, storytelling, teach-ins, teach-outs, creative practice, and community partnerships, alternative futures become imaginable.

The final lines of the poem speak to this possibility. Resistance is not an individual act of heroism, but a collective process grounded in solidarity. The struggles against racism, Islamophobia, misogyny, coloniality, and injustice are interconnected. They require us to recognise our shared humanity and our shared responsibility to act.

The poem therefore moves from fear to hope, from silence to voice, and from complicity to resistance. It reminds us that social change has never been gifted from above. It has always been won through collective struggle, courage, and solidarity. In a time marked by division and uncertainty, perhaps the most radical act is to stand together and refuse to look away.

From Complicity to Resistance

Driving on my way to work, terror across my face

Flags displayed everywhere, I don’t recognise the place

In the name of Unite the Kingdom, EDL, or Britain First

My heart pounds so profusely, I feel it may just burst

Their hate for migrants, Muslims and shouting stop the boats

Protectors of our women, these thugs think they’ re top blokes

Union Jacks and St George, their proud flags white and red

With faces painted white and red, wishing I was dead

Tins in hand, making a stand, yelling go back to my own country

Feeling scared and petrified, this country’s oh so lovely

Rotten systems, break you down, and work on your destruction

Whilst universities join on in, imposing high court injunctions

Encampments banned and protests crushed, as part of deconstruction

Voices silenced, academic freedom stripped, it’s all a planned abduction

Elites get rich and gain control, stoking all divisions

The system of white supremacy, set up with such precision

Children murdered, schools no more, and people turn their cheek

Complicity and silence, how can they be so weak

Where has gone humanity?

This genocide is plain to see

Boycott, divest and don't support

The war machine that kills for sport

The white fortress of HEI1, for you it won't protect

It’s narcissistic structures2, it often goes unchecked

And how about our women, stand up for what is right

Their terrorised and categorised, and demonised as shite

You’re black, you’re brown, you’re white, or wear a scarf

Your thrown into their jaws, their teeth are very sharp

‘Misogynoir’ and ‘Misogynislam’3, women are oppressed

Assumed to be the ‘other’, your voices are suppressed

Now it’s Muslims, and it’s migrants, and the global majority

Next its unions, then academics, vanished is your authority

So speak out now and raise your voice,

The time is now, there is no choice

We learn from those who came before,

They fought so hard, forever more,

So don’t sit back and just ignore

These streets are ours, we must restore

Resist, fight back, and don’t accept

The lies, repression, please intercept

With teach ins, teach outs, and community partners

Navigate the system, we are indeed much smarter

Stand firm, be brave, go on and find ya peeps

It helps to share and talk and with our friends we weep

In unity together and all as one

In solidarity and connected, our time has now come.

We never forget all of those up above

It’s one struggle, one fight and it is all one love.

1 Shakir, S. (2025). No end and no beginning; race equity in higher education. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 44(1), 9-25.

2 Keval, H. (2024). Whiteness, Racial Trauma, and the University: Experiencing Whiteness in the University. SAGE Publications Limited.

3 Shakir, S. (2026). Navigating the margins: intersectional leadership, racialised labour and the politics of belonging in UK higher education. Gender in Management: An International Journal, 1-29.