AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We’re continuing our conversation with British photographer and activist Misan Harriman, an outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights. His photographs of the Black Lives Matter movement went viral, and he became the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of British Vogue.

There’s a new documentary about Misan Harriman, about the importance of protest and taking a political stand as an artist. Directed by Nigerian British filmmaker Andy Mundy-Castle, it’s called Shoot the People.

AMY GOODMAN: In this clip from the documentary, Misan talks about racist violence in the U.K.

MISAN HARRIMAN: What I’ve learned is that human beings can be monsters,
much scarier than the monsters that were supposed to be under your bed. We are capable of, I think, even frightening the devil. I’ve learnt that. I’ve seen it.

REPORTER: Riots involving hundreds of far-right, anti-immigration protesters have erupted in several towns and cities.

MISAN HARRIMAN: But those monsters are still, and always have been, in the minority. In general, people have a goodness in them. And sometimes that needs to be fed, almost like a plant, so it can grow.

The images we have all seen of horrific, racist attacks have been chilling. And the truth is, those racist riots started right here.

UNIDENTIFIED: Save the Children call for a ceasefire in Gaza and Israel.

MISAN HARRIMAN: Apathy is lethal. I am politely begging all of us, whether we have 50 or 50 million followers. We can carve out a future that our children deserve to inherit.

We’re here to stop genocide, and that’s why Aaron Bushnell self-immolated.

UNIDENTIFIED: Aaron understood that through this one act of self-sacrifice, he could stun the world into action.

UNIDENTIFIED: We have to stand up for generations of young Black people. They don’t have to suffer the racism that we had to suffer.

MISAN HARRIMAN: Politicians need to say it is the racists who are not welcome. It is the racists who have not integrated into 21st-century Britain.

This is London at its best. This is a London that I know and love. That’s my job, really, to amplify important moments like this. Look, I was in the Oscars four days ago, and I can tell you that this is more important than anything that I was attending in California. This is the work. This is the bearing witness.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s an excerpt of the new film Shoot the People, about our guest today, Misan Harriman.

I just came from Belfast, from Docs Ireland. And, I mean, what has happened there in the last weeks, the horrific anti-immigrant violence, with the burning of cars and apartments, people being chased, immigrants, when a number of them were recruited by unions to come to serve in hospitals, home healthcare. Can you talk about the rise of far-right violence in Britain?

MISAN HARRIMAN: The rise of far-right violence is really an algorithmic push and the oligarchy, that own a lot of the newspapers in Europe, scaring mainly, I call them, broken boys in men’s bodies, men that have valid reasons — why industry have left their towns, why there’s, you know, bad healthcare, unemployment — but they look for the answers in the wrong places from men of privilege who are coming in yachts, pointing at the broken Brown and Black bodies that have run away from the worst folly of man to find a new life.

And also, we need to look at the colonial aspect of it. I love that phrase, you know, “We are here because you were there.” And, you know, what I love about Belfast and Glasgow and Brighton recently is that there has been anti-fascist protests that have far outnumbered these broken boys in men’s bodies. There are way more people that believe in community than the division that our newspapers and our algorithms are telling us, including Elon Musk, who —

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, Elon Musk — 

MISAN HARRIMAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — retweeting people like Tommy Robinson.

MISAN HARRIMAN: Tommy Robinson.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain who he is —

MISAN HARRIMAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — to a global audience.

MISAN HARRIMAN: I wanted to give a very quick example of how bad it’s got in England. My children are mixed-race. They have curly hair. Thank God I wasn’t there on the day, but my wife was in a children’s playground, and a white man, elderly white man, walks up to my wife and goes, “Oh, those two little girls are beautiful.” And my wife was like, “Yeah.” He goes, “Their hair, it’s lovely.” And my wife was like, “Thank you.” And then he takes one step closer to her, and he says, “If I could turn them upside down, I would use them as a broom.” Broad daylight, to my children, in an affluent part of the south of England.

This is — this is how emboldened people are, because they are in an echo chamber of confirmation bias and arrested development, specifically on X, where you can call me a monkey or say deport me or give me death threats, which is all things that I receive daily at this point. And you have other people that say “yes.” And it’s a combination of bots and human beings that normalize this.

But hope lives in the community that I have documented. I have documented former fascists, men, part of the patriarchy that I complain about, who still have their tattoos, that have gone on a journey of unlearning and realize that they were told to be afraid of somebody that looks different to them, that loves differently to them.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, do you think — I mean, you said that a few of these protests, that were much larger than the far-right demonstrations, and so on. Do you see, ultimately — I mean, obviously this is — you are not — can’t predict what’s going to happen. But do present trends, to you, suggest that it is that group that will be triumphant, ultimately?

MISAN HARRIMAN: Without question. We are — the violence and the unpredictable nature of the world as we see it is a sign of late-stage capitalism in an empire. The bread and circus show of the Roman Empire has been repeated and repeated again for all of us to see. The difference is, we live in a borderless world where our parents’ generation didn’t have the ability to know that we are not the only ones that believe that there shouldn’t be a man that makes a million dollars a minute, right? No one wants to be Mr. Bezos. No one wants to rent Venice for their wedding. We want all of our children to have the same right to have a breathable Earth. And it’s the only Earth — I don’t know the last time you checked — that we have. We want violence not to be the only resolution to us disagreeing with each other. And I don’t think anyone would have thought it would have exponentially grown in the way that I have seen it grow, whether it’s Barcelona, Belfast, Dublin, Johannesburg. I was in Johannesburg in the documentary. That used to be an all-white university, in my lifetime, and now there are people that look like you, me and Amy learning. So, hope lives in community.

AMY GOODMAN: Misan, I wanted to ask you about another issue you champion. You advocate for the neurodivergent. You yourself identify as neurodivergent. If you can talk about what that means and what you bring up in public conversation?

MISAN HARRIMAN: Yes. So, I’m — I describe it as neurospicy, so on a multitude of spectrums. I struggled at school. I failed just about every exam I ever took. And for a big part of my life, I was ashamed in how my mind worked. It wasn’t until meeting my wife, and she, I would say, fell in love with all the parts of myself that I was ashamed of, that I allowed myself to believe that maybe I could have a point of view.

So, now I’ve got to the place I’ve got to at 48. I want every mother and father and every child that has a beautifully different mind to know that that mind may be the solution to so much of the ills of the world, whether that mind holds a pen, whether that mind becomes a carer, an activist, a filmmaker. Having a different perspective doesn’t make you less than. It adds to the community. And many First Nation people always appreciated the neurodivergent. Many genocided people always understood the fluidity of the mind and gender. And I think we need to remember from our past, instead of the binary view brought from the Bible and the sword of colonialism.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: But what do you think — what do you think this perspective enables? What do you see that perhaps other people aren’t able to see, or perceive that other people aren’t able to perceive?

MISAN HARRIMAN: Well, I would lose my mind if I did nothing. So, I lock myself in the bathroom most days, so my children don’t see me weep. A child in Congo taking his or her last breath so we can have a new phone every September is not something I can accept. Hind Rajab, knowing that — her temperature proved that she was alive, and they knew and continued to take potshots at her. Fatima Hassouna, a photographer like me, having herself killed, and most of her family, including her pregnant sister, is something I will not accept. What is happening to Lebanon — and Nigeria has a long relationship with the Lebanese people — is something I am not willing to accept. It is the same kernel of saying, “I want everyone to be treated equally,” that I believe doesn’t matter if you’re left-leaning, right-leaning, center. You, as a human being, have to ask yourself: Are you comfortable with the primal rage of man being the only answer to what we do?

AMY GOODMAN: We’re moving into Juneteenth, which is a very new federal holiday in the United States, when enslaved people in Texas learned two years after the Emancipation Proclamation that they were free. You have covered the Black Lives movement for years. Talk about your images, taking pictures, and also the zone you move into. I mean, the film shows it so beautifully, shooting the people, as you pick up that camera and frame people.

MISAN HARRIMAN: I just take a deep breath, because my respect for the African American community, in particular, the resilience and the fortitude of this specific group of people, I don’t think is understood. And on Juneteenth, it needs to be understood.

They used to dig divots in the ground, so the pregnant slaves could have their bellies in the divot, so the back could lay flat for the whip to crack. George Stinney Jr., George Stinney, the youngest human being to ever get the electric chair, was so small that he had to sit on a Bible so they could electrocute him. So, as we celebrate the Knicks, a predominantly Black team, we need to understand it is a miracle that the African American experience is where it’s at. There’s work to do. But, you know, on George Floyd’s memory, he was lying in his own piss, asking for his mama, as the men who vanquished him had their knees on his neck, and he was still calling them “sir.”

So, as an African man, from the outside watching and learning and reading everything, from the work of Langston Hughes to the imagery of Gordon Parks, Juneteenth is a reminder of the fortitude, resilience and the more than matter. Black lives matter, but they are worthy, they are needed, and they are loved. That’s what Juneteenth means to me.

AMY GOODMAN: You said Gordon Parks changed your life.

MISAN HARRIMAN: Oh my god, his work photographing the Fontenelle family for Life magazine showed me what poverty could be, unfiltered. His civil rights work — and, of course, he’s a filmmaker, as well. He made Shaft. And I think of the opportunities that he didn’t even have that I now do, and I have to make sure that my camera is a sword and shield for those that do not have a voice.

AMY GOODMAN: What did it mean for you to be on the cover of British Vogue, your photograph, the first Black photographer?

MISAN HARRIMAN: It took 104 years. And I think, you know, that’s a testament to Edward Enninful being a Black editor-in-chief, so he understood that, you know, someone from a different lived experience can also do the work. But it asks the question: How on Earth did it take 104 years? Because Black men and women have been holding the camera for as long as a camera has existed. And it’s a reminder of looking further afield. And if there is a merit-based human that has the ability, that looks differently to you, but you know he or she can do the job, then, for God’s sake, give them a shot.

AMY GOODMAN: Misan Harriman, we thank you so much for joining us in studio, Nigerian British photographer, social activist, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, the board chair of London’s biggest art center, the South Bank Center. A new documentary about him has opened in New York and Toronto. It’s called Shoot the People. To see Part 1 of our discussion, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.