Political Labour at Work

Abstract In 2021, the UK government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities claimed that institutional racism is a thing of the past. This statement came the year after global Black Lives Matter movements, sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in the US, challenged the enduring realities of police racism and state violence. In this concluding chapter, I argue that the discrepancy between the different understandings of ‘racism’ put forward by the government and social movement members respectively, encapsulates the key contradiction at the heart of this book: namely, the contradiction between the liberal anti-racism of those who claim that modern slavery is ‘post-race’, and the realities of state racism that continue to live on in the policing, safeguarding, and prosecutions of communities caught up in ‘county lines’. And yet, resistance is also possible. I return to three central narratives that have framed the book’s analysis: the perspective of Glodi, the first young man to be convicted of human trafficking charges in a jury-led trial concerning county lines; that of the mothers and other female family members who fight on behalf of the boys and young men; and that of the ethnographer herself. Across these different domains, we can see a kind of counter-hegemonic political labour at work that functions as an everyday, lived, bottom-up critique of the state’s liberal logic of salvation.