power

Eurovision Has Been Co-opted

| Sheree

Photo: Jens Büttner/Getty

I was brought up on the Eurovision Contest. We would gather together at my mum’s with food and drink, and sing along to every song even though we didn’t know the words.

It was an occasion of celebration and fun. We laughed and cried, argued and commiserated.

Whenever I think of Eurovision, I automatically think of my mum. But I can no longer hold Eurovision close to my heart. I cannot continue to support this institution any longer as it has become co-opted by Isreal.

Within hours of Russian invading the Ukraine in 2022, it was banned from Eurovision. Why hasn’t the same happened to Israel?

We have to ask the question what is happening behind the scenes? Especially when last year Israel received the biggest support from the public vote when we know that the genocide in Gaza is not supported by the majority?

Nemo, who won Eurovision in 2024, probably the last time I watched Eurovision, has returned their trophy in protest at Israel’s inclusion. As well as the 1994 winner Charlie McGettigan(from Ireland) returned their trophy in protest too.

There is something rotten in Eurovision.

There is no music that can cover up the atrocities that are happening to the Palestinians. No amount of music can justify a genocide. There is no stage that should platform genocide and apartheid.

Spain, Slovenia, Iceland, Ireland and the Netherlands are boycotting this year’s Eurovision because they cannot continue to ignore the genocide in Gaza.

No Music For Genocide has an open letter which states :

We refuse to be silent when Israel’s genocidal violence soundtracks and silences Palestinian lives. When children in Israeli prisons endure beatings for humming a tune. When all that’s left of nearly every stage, studio, bookshop and university in Gaza is piles of rubble, under which slaughtered bodies still await recovery and proper burial. 

As artists, we recognise our collective agency – and the power of refusal. We refuse to be silent. We refuse to be complicit. We call on others in our industry to join us. And we stand in solidarity with all principled efforts to end complicity in every industry.

No stage for genocide. #BoycottEurovision.

Consider signing the letter and standing with Palestine here.

Irish TV, RTÉ, will be broadcasting the 1996 episode A Song for Europe , Father Ted as Ireland boycotts Eurovision in protest against Israel’s inclusion.

It’s a funny episode which I won’t mind watching as Father Ted and Father Douglas perform their song My Lovely Horse. I’ll not spoil it by telling you how many points they get!

Slovenia are planning to air documentaries under the theme of Voices of Palestine.

These countries boycotting and showing their condemnation of Israel and support for Palestine is what more countries and people should be doing, and I don’t use ‘should’ lightly.

One more point, the Father Ted episode is satire. The Irish put them into Eurovision because the song was so dreadful that they hoped they wouldn’t win again so that they wouldn’t have to foot the bill for hosting the next year’s contest.

Ireland has won the contest 7 times, and back to back wins in 1992 and 1993, is said to nearly have bankrupted the country as they had to host the concert again and again.

For me this is a clear indication of Eurovision, the non disqualification of Israel, the lack of calling out the genocide all comes down to money and vested interests.

To start living how I want the world to be

| Sheree

What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?

I’ve been noticing how my work/ being has been reactive. There’s been a sense of scarcity and time urgency that’s been guiding my thoughts and actions. There’s been a hopelessness. Because some incidents are out of my control but which have impacted me. There’s been feelings of not being appreciated, feeling a lack of trust and working without purpose, moving away from my core values and moral compass.

I might have been using food or drink to numb my way through the shit. Through the ‘work’, not allowing myself to feel and be present. Really present to all the feels.

Do you feel me?

I know I need to take a step back and really look at the life I’ve been living. This is the only life I have and cannot be relived. I have a deep desire to change the system. To abolish the system and live otherwise.

And yet in order to change the system, I have to change my life, how I live my life. The way / how I live has to reflect the way/ how I want the world to be.

What does this mean in reality?

How I am just as much as what I do within the system will have an effect on system change. I have to be living my life with intention and purpose. Making sure I’m living my values, that I’m not compromising my integrity. That each decision I make is coming from that place of love and trust and hope.

That I’m not shutting down but open to togetherness but also trusting my gut that when I say ‘no’ it’s not from a place of malice but from a place of capacity and boundaries.

I’m learning, I’m sharing and I’m growing. Alone and in collaboration.

And I’m feeling and shifting into the practice and recognition that this is coming from a place of love and care rather than exhaustion and pain.

Small steps. Small acts. Small makes up the large. Small scales up to large.

I’ve got to be practicing the world I want to see now in my own life. Daily. Practice.

Love not hate.

Cooperation not competition.

Conversation rather than condemnation.

More care less harm.

More listening less violence.

The turn towards Mother Nature rather than against her.

A recognition in the value and worth of every human being regardless of race, class, gender, religion, ethnicity, age, sexuality, body type and body and mind abilities.

Spiralling towards consciousness

| Sheree

This is why my favourite pattern within nature, apart from the wave, is the spiral. Again and again, experience shows me how we may feel that we are going around in circles doing the same things, making the same mistakes and never learning or moving forward.

But I beg to differ. I believe life’s journey is a spiral. Each year we go around, and it may feel as if we’re not moving. We’re not making any progress or making our mark. But I see it as coming back around over similar track but we have changed. Through the movement of time and experiences and knowledges, we’ve changed since the last time we were in this spot. It’s not the same spot. Things have shifted. and so we’ve changed. We’re not right back at the same point but moved further into the spiral. Not in a hierarchal way, , ascending or even descending, but more of a going deeper, more connected and centred movement of the journey.

Each rotation in the cycle, in the spiral throws up more learning and more insight that if we’re paying attention we can use on our life’s journey with more consciousness, connection and joy.

I share this because I’ve just recognised how I’ve moved through the spiral this year to come to further understandings and wisdom.

This time last year, preparing for anti-racism facilitation, I was reading What White People Can Do Next by Emma Dabiri.

It was from reading this slim volume of wisdom that I fell into ‘solidarity’ is needed within the anti-racism movement. In fact I started using a anti-racism is anti-capitalism. Solidarity between oppressed and marginalised groups in society is the way forward.

I went on a journey from here, maybe a spiralling into despair, as I searched for a group or organisation to be a member of, in solidarity across different sections of society. I was looking into the communist party, unions, anti-racism organisations, trying to find a place where I could belong and be in solidarity with others.

In my search, I found racism and sexism, individuals and groups still perpetuating the racial capitalist system. Still working with hierarchies and the unconscious bias that they were better than me, than they knew more than me therefore should control me.

I become demoralised and retreated. I put away my radical thoughts and ideas, convincing myself that it was better to be alone and true to my ideals than compromise and waste my time explaining or highlighting blind spots to so-called comrades.

And then these part few days, solidarity has raised its head again but through a different door. Through the door of abolitionism.

Ours is a fight against powerful systems of violence and terror.

 In recognising the interconnectedness of systems of state violence, abolition can be the basis of a new solidarity: one that acknowledges specific experiences of violence in particular communities, whilst building a unified, internationalist resistance.

Abolition doesn’t understand the concept of solidarity as an airy-fairy call for different oppressed groups to ‘just get along’. Solidarity is a vital strategic response to the prevalence and ubiquity of state violence. 

Abolition Revolution by Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean

As we have witnessed in the recent council elections, with the surge in the popularity of Reform. This isn’t because this party has set out a manifesto of policies that will solve the issues of poverty, unemployment, economic crisis, the state of the NHS, the policing in our schools and stop crime such as rapes and murders. No this party, it just playing out the age out trick of creating the ‘enemies within’. The ‘enemies within’ can carry all the responsibility for what’s wrong within British society today. The immigrants, the refugees, the gangs, the nasty women, the people with darker skin who are innately hardwired for crime. The general public, usually predominately working class white people, can blame others, other oppressed and marginalised people for all the woes of society. Smokescreens and mirrors, instead of people coming together, across class, race, gender, sexuality, religious lines, in solidarity and challenging racial capitalism and state control and violence which are geared towards keeping the majority of people in poverty at each other’s throats instead. While a few, usually white cis-gendered men, retain wealth, control and power.

I say Reform, but the present ‘Labour’ government operates the same way. They’re all apparatus of the State working to keep power and control through violence and terror in the hands of the few.

 So for them the problem is not the historic experience of racism and the legacies of slavery and colonialism: it’s Black ‘gangsters’ on our streets. It’s not disinvestment from and neglect of working class communities: it’s Syrian migrants in our hospitals. It’s not military and imperial domination of vast swathes of the world: it’s Muslim extremists in our schools. Constructed ‘enemies within’ like these provide a constant justification for the use and expansion of state violence in order to maintain control; they tie people’s lived experience of the world to divisive narratives that weaken the collective consciousness of ordinary people. – Abolition Revolution by Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean

I see the value of solidarity now, in building power in the direction of marginalised groups because it weakens the State’s power and control which is based on divisive narratives that weaken the collective consciousness of everyday people. The marginalised and oppressed.

Now maybe if I had this knowledge, last year, cycling and spiralling looking for my tribe, I might have stuck it out a little longer. Allowed our differences and bias to take a back seat because I believed we were working together across solidarity lines. Maybe.

This year though, with another trip around the sun under my belt, and another spiral deeper into my learning, I believe my solidarity within these groups would have still faltered as within and outside of these groups because they are not spurred on from the foundations upwards and onward with an abolitionist revolutionary thought and praxis.

I see now that these groups are looking toward reform rather than abolition. They are satisfied with tinkering with the edges. Gaining small concessions rather than a total overhaul. It’s like asking for and being satisfied with a more comfortable prison cell as a demonstration of change in how the State handles inmates instead of defunding/ abolishing the prison industrial complex all together.

I see that now as I continue to spiral towards consciousness, again and again. Onwards.

The Alabama Solution

| Sheree

What was the last live performance you saw?

It’s Friday night you all.

Good drink and food, feet up and TV binge time.

But hold up, something ain’t right.

Nothing I’m flicking through is feeding my desires. Nothing is filling the void of just wanting to switch off and forget my troubles. Pap TV is what I usually call it. The stuff that renders me brain dead.

And then I happen upon The Alabama Solution. This is how I be sometimes. I feed an itch, a curiosity.

I shared the other day about my abolitionist tendencies. Well this Oscar nominated documentary is furthering those occupations.

Man oh man, this documentary hard hitting. And I dare anyone to watch it and say those inmates deserve the inhumane treatments, the injustice they receive in prison. I dare you.

There is a tendency to think people who do the crime should do the time and deserve everything that comes their way. They’re in prison so must have done something to be there and what befalls them in there, well they had it coming.

They be evil. They be degenerate. They be monsters. Lock away, throw away the key. We say.

This indoctrinated, conditioned response to crime and punishment, criminals makes us, the general public, no better that the ‘monsters’ we are condemning. That we are putting away and not caring about.

They be human beings, with flaws, vulnerabilities dealing with issues with no help from anyone else.

No chance of redemption or rehabilitation because they are left to rot. Or are exploited, farmed out as cheap or free labour.

This here documentary The Alabama Solution explores the lives of the incarcerated. The viewer gets to see what it’s really like in the prisons in Alabama. How they are beaten and killed and no one is held to account.

What is remarkable is that these men are behind bars, classed as the underclass of society, the forgotten people, not by their families I may add, but they still manage to coordinate a mass strike across all of Alabama’s prisons in protest of the treatment they receive behind bars. In a peaceful way , they are demanding that their human rights be recognised and that the Federal Government steps in to compel the state of Alabama to treat their prisoners right, with respect and dignity.

Prisoners from all backgrounds, 20,000 strong refuse to work as slave labour anymore in 2022.

They downed tools. They rationalised that instead of meeting violence with violence they chose to hit them where it hurts, in the economics/ money, rather than hit them in the mouth.

Straight away the Governor was trying to break the strike. After a couple of days, rationing their food. Prolonging feeding for up to 14 hours a day and then when they did feed them just small amounts of food. But together the men shared the food they’d been stocking piling . As a community they came together to make sure no one starved. There was unity. Unity never see like it within prison system as it suits the system to have them fighting each other. Divide and rule. Divide and conquer.

But together, standing together strong, there’s power there and that’s dangerous. And has to be suppressed.

How come we, the general public, the majority not behind bars haven’t been able to organise a strike? A withdrawal of our labour to bring the system to a stop?

One of the main spokesperson for the prisoners, Robert Earl, who had already been beaten to near death for being an activist for prisoner’s rights and lost the sight in one eye for it, was taken from his cell in a head lock and taken to solitary confinement.

Again a similar tactic is being used, a tactic used from time in the Civil Rights Movement for example, cut off the head of the movement, the leaders and the strike will fold.

And you think it would happen, as the prisoners are vulnerable, no one can see what goes on behind closed doors. No one listens to them as they are criminals, they lie and are untrustworthy. Right?

They’re murderers and rapists. But that doesn’t happen. As this action, this strike is more than one man. Someone else steps in to take th baron, to keep rallying the cry that the strike continues until the demand are met.

And the demands are not unreasonable demands. They’re not asking to be all set free. They’re asking to be recognised as human beings with rights. To be respected and protected from violence within prison. Violence from the guards who are supposed to be supporting their rehabilitation.

But how are you gonna rehabilitate anyone if you’re beating on them?

I must go back and complete my watch of this programme now and see how the strike goes. However, this strike was in 2022 documented in The Alabama Solution documentary which was a decade long project of capturing the conditions in prison by the incarcerated cell phones.

I’ve just read that the 3 main instigators of this strike, including Robert Earl, have been placed back into solitary confinement as of January 2025 in retaliation for their activism and standing up for the rights of incarcerated citizens. And probably because of their involvement in the documentary.

You see what I did there. Citizens, human beings, not criminals. The language we use is part of our conditioning. Language is power. And I refuse to continue to use such dehumanising language in reference to people who are incarcerated. They are still people with needs and wants, desires drams, pain and sufferings.

Solitary confinement. No contact with family. This is an abuse of power behind bars. Out of public view and no reasons are given for these movements/ punishments. Solitary confinement is a form of torture. It is not a safety and security issue to the individual but it is an abuse of power by the authorities and highlights what a vulnerable position incarcerated people are in when behind the pros walls. This is another example of the denying of human rights.

There is talk of another strike happening this year, the withdrawal of labour. This can only mean that conditions have not improved within the Alabama Department of Corrections prison facilities. So I already know the ending, what the conclusion of this documentary will be. But I will watch it to the end.

Not as a spectator in the spectacle but as a witness for these incarcerated citizens as they, by any means necessary, attempt to get their voices, their issues, concerns and fears outside of those walks. The least I can do is watch and listen and share.

I Won’t Vote

| Sheree

Do you vote in political elections?

Oakmoss lichen is a sign of clean air quality in an area.

There’s a smear campaign against the current leader of the Green Party of England and Wales is Zack Polanski. It’s argued that Polanski, a Jew, is being anti-semitic because he’s arguing that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza against the Palestinian people.

I was brought up on the argument that people died so we could have the vote. So we must vote.

Reform are running on the slogan is if you want to get rid of Starmer, Vote Reform.

It’s a privilege that many people around the world do not have. The right to vote. The right to have their say.

Many people are turning away from Labour because they’ve moved towards the right in their rhetoric and handling of immigration. And the cost of living is sky high.

Rain or shine, day and night, I would walk to my polling station and mark the box next to the red rose with a bold ‘X’.

The Conservative Party, known for its racism and classism, old school boy elitist network, has broken records with being the first political party in the UK to have a Black Woman as their leader.

My pooling card came a couple of weeks ago with the instructions to turn up to vote with photo ID.

Millions of people go to the polls today to decided on the councillors to control their neighbourhoods.

Voting on empty promises.

Voting on empty reforms.

Voting on different names but representing the same arsewipe policies.

Voting on keeping things as they are.

Voting on keeping the rich, rich and the poor, poor.

Voting cannot vote this away.

The tools we are given, granted and offered cannot build anything new.

The voting system was never meant for us to achieve any gains or resemblance of power.

Voting changed nothing.

W.E.B. Du Bois, disturbs the tale that all of our ancestors died for the right to vote. Du Bois echoed Parsons decades later in 1956, writing in a piece titled “I Won’t Vote,” “There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.” – W.E.B. Du Bois, “I Won’t Vote,” The Nation, October 20, 1956.

I no longer believe in the voting system. I no longer choose to uphold the system. I choose to refuse.

Creative Fugitivity Practice In Community

| Sheree

What do you do to be involved in the community?

I’m been expanding my reading of late. I’ve just become a member of the Abolitionist Futures Reading Group which is focusing on abolition, obviously.

Reading in community, sharing ideas and thoughts which are probably considered radical, revolutionary to the majority is so refreshing and affirming.

It makes me feel less alone in my way of thinking and {BEING}. It gives me hope that there are alternatives to the current system and that together we can get there.

Abolition, might be associated recently with prisons, or defunding the police, and closing detention centres.

But abolition is much more than this. Started with the aim of abolishing Transatlantic Slavery, abolition of prisons has been there since the inception of prisons themselves. Abolition is revolutionary because in order to decarcerate the Prison Industrial Complex not only does the whole of society have to change, be overhauled not reformed as that just wouldn’t work, but we also, the people have to change.

The world has to change at the same time as the people within this world change. We have to move away from the indoctrinated belief that prisons and the police, state terror more like, are the only means of deterring crime and criminals. Which jus isn’t the case.

We have to stop focusing on the individual ‘evildoers’ who deserve the harshest punishments for whatever crimes they committed, to taking an honest look at our societies and cultures that have forced people to commit such crimes ( or in a lot of cases no crimes being committed but still punished with prison sentences.)

I’m talking about poverty, economics, drug abuse, race, class, sexuality, isolation, migration etc.

To reiterate, rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society.

Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition. – Angela Y. Davis

Me reading, thinking and becoming anti-prisons, anti-establishment, becoming an abolitionist is just the next step on this journey of fugitivity, via black anarchism. And I’m so pleased and relieved that I don’t have to walk this path alone. I have a community around me as support.

Re-engaging with Fugitive Feminism

| Sheree

How would you improve your community?

I applied to Arts Council England for a Developing Your Creative Practice grant mid 2025. It was unsuccessful.

Undeterred, I resubmitted it under the project grant scheme. I was notified of being successful just before Christmas 2025.

Practicing Creative Fugitivity is its name, and it involves researching fugitive practice. It also involves reading in community Fugitive Feminism by Akwugo Emejulu.

A study circle of women of the global majority.

When did you first learn that you were a non-human?

The question that opens the first chapter of the text Fugitive Feminism.

A question that hits me in my gut with its open, blatant honesty and curiosity.

A question which niggles at a truth that I’ve not wanted to face up to as it would mean that I’ve spent a lifetime trying to demonstrate, prove, live up to an unattainable category of being human.

Human as a category was never created to include someone like me within it.

Human = Whiteness

Human v Non-Human

You can’t have the light without the dark.

All constructs to create hierarchies. A hierarchy where white, EuroAmerican, able bodied, middle class, cis-gendered, college educated and suburban men reign supreme. Superior.

Conceptual Other. No Humans Involved. The Lack of the Human.

Black women. Outside. Out Outside.

Our exclusion determines the borders/ boundaries of the human.

But consider this …

If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression.

Combahee River Collective

Where the excitement lies for me and others, is once we realise that Black women cannot be human, then with the support of this book in community, let’s consider what if ‘human’ cannot and should not be reclaimed?

Speculate. Speculation. Speculative.

How might we divest from the human?

That the non-human Other actually decentres the human. Move beyond human to something otherwise.

Something else.

Becoming ( something else).

Thinking of how to be/ how to live beyond the binary of human v non-human could produce the means of improving our community/society/our planet.

Centring the human ( v non-human/ othering all else) has got us into the shit we’re facing now in terms of ecological disaster.

Finding a way to decentre the human, divest from what this concept / construction means and how it operates has to be the way forward.

Fugitive Feminism is the doorway into another way of being. A portal into an alternative world built upon the Black Feminist politics of liberation.

The path ahead is not clear or defined. It’s slippery and ambiguous. It’s experiential and experimental. Yet full of possibilities. Caring not harmful possibilities.

Speculative. Suggestive. Spacious.

And it starts and continues with the act of refusal. Refusal of the way things are right now.

Refusal of being defined by others to fit into their definition of humanity ( whiteness).

Refusal of being extracted and exploited for the benefits of a few.

Refusal of being non-human.

Refusal of being outside of humanity.

Refusal of the whole concept of human/whiteness/ fascist.

Refusal of these limitations when i, we, i and i can be something else beyond humans.

WHY DOES SCIENCE KEEP FINDING WAYS TO EXPERIMENT ON BLACK BODIES?

| Sheree

Tiago_Fernandez/iStock

Reading Bone Rooms by Samuel J Redman, which starts off documenting the beginning of the frenzy to collect bones in the 1800s, especially Native American bones, as a means of establishing pseudoscientific ‘evidence’ to support the racial hierarchy, I am hit by the continued disregard/ disrespect/ lack of recognition of the humanity of black and brown bodies. History is littered by these practices one example being the transatlantic slave trade.But it would seem that history continues to repeat itself and we as a civilisation have failed to put in place safe guards against these atrocities happening again and again.

Has there no just been Holocaust Remembrance Day and the rally call always that we will not let this happen again, and yet we stand by and allow it to happen again and again within our lifetimes because we, and the establishment, pick and choose who’s life is more valuable and recognised and willing to fight/ stand up for. Usually black and brown bodies are not protected and usually there is no up roar in our blatant and deliberate destruction .

I come here today enraged and saddened as hear about the case of the USA funded , Danish scientists medical study on Guinea-Bissau newborns around the hepatitis B vaccination.

Within the UK, newborns are given the hepatitis B vaccination within 24 hours of birth as it is proven to lower the paediatric contraction of the disease. There is no cure for this disease which is life threatening. But does not pose a threat here or any of the western countries because of this preventative medicine as birth.

In December 2025, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made the announcement that they were stopping their country’s hepatitis b vaccination programme for newborns as there was worry about the effectiveness and safety of such vaccinations. Bearing in mind that the programme has reduced new infections, with up to 90% effectiveness in preventing perinatal transmission when administered at birth and 98% immunity for infants, resulting in decreased liver cancer and mortality.

Why this change of policy? Robert F Kennedy, and the Trump administration.

Then just two weeks later, there is the announcement that the USA will fund Danish scientists in Guinea-Bissau to carry out the medical study on newborns around the effectiveness of the hepatitis B vaccination.

Over 14,000 babies involved where half would be given the vaccine within 24 hours of birth and the other half had the vaccine withheld until 6 weeks old.

1 in 5 people in Guinea-Bissau are infected with hepatitis B far more than USA, Denmark etc. This country is one of the poorest in the world. Why run tests on a vaccine that they know works in reduced the contamination of the disease. And why if there’s concerns about the vaccination why not carry on this study on American babies or Danish babies?

Guinea-Bissau has not asked for this study to take place. This is ‘medical’ colonialism.

The effectiveness of the vaccine has been proven so why carry out further tests that they know will endanger the lives of newborn babies? Will probably plunge the country into further poverty and disease, suffering and deaths related to hepatitis B.

This is just another example happening now of a foreign ( white) state/ power/ institution acting as if they have a god given right to exploit, extract, experiment on black/ African/ brown bodies? As if our lives do not matter as we are just disposals.

That our only value upon this earth is to further the will/ need/ wants/ lives of white people.

This sickens me. This is a policy, funded by fascists, to deliberately murder African babies. Why? Because they think they can. Because they have done so before. Because we live in a system where whiteness reigns supreme.

History does continue to repeat itself and whiteness finds new ways to justify the same harm. Or is the harm getting worse?