Northern Ireland and the crisis of anti-racism

Rethinking racism and sectarianism

Chris Gilligan

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526116611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Intolerancia religiosa, persecución y conflicto

Racism and sectarianism makes an important contribution to the discussion on the 'crisis of anti-racism' in the United Kingdom. The book looks at two phenomena that are rarely examined together – racism and sectarianism. The author argues that thinking critically about sectarianism and other racisms in Northern Ireland helps to clear up some confusions regarding 'race' and ethnicity. Many of the prominent themes in debates on racism and anti-racism in the UK today – the role of religion, racism and 'terrorism', community cohesion – were central to discussions on sectarianism in Northern Ireland during the conflict and peace process. The book provides a sustained critique of the Race Relations paradigm that dominates official anti-racism and sketches out some elements of an emancipatory anti-racism.

1

Introduction

Anti-racist theory and practice has been in crisis for more than a quarter of a century. By the end of the 1980s the emancipatory anti-racism of the 1960s and 1970s had been contained. The anti-racist movement had become fragmented and some elements had become incorporated into helping their respective states to more effectively regulate society. For others, the struggle for human freedom became displaced by identity politics. This crisis of anti-racism was linked to, and in part was an expression of, setbacks for wider projects of human emancipation.

To many people involved in officially endorsed anti-racism the reality appears to be far from one of crisis. It appears as if the period since the end of the 1980s has been one of continuing success for anti-racism. Crucial aspects of White supremacy – most notably, official racial segregation policies in the USA and the colonial domination of people of colour by White Western powers – had been consigned to the history books. Anti-racism, not racism, is now part of the ideological outlook of Western states. This historic shift can be seen in anti-discrimination laws and in the self-description of Western societies as multicultural. The election of Barack Obama, an African-American, to the most powerful position in global politics – president of the USA – appeared to demonstrate the success, not the crisis, of anti-racism. Some scholars and commentators have argued that the election of Obama is a manifestation of broader shifts in attitudes. Some argue that we are at the dawn of a post-racial world.¹

The success of official anti-racism, however, has been at the expense of the emancipatory dynamic of the anti-racist movement. It has also often been at the expense of racialised minorities. In the USA Black males are six times more likely than White males to be incarcerated in prison. There are, as Michelle Alexander, the Black civil liberties lawyer, points out, ‘more African Americans under correctional control today – in prison or jail, on probation or parole – than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began’.² It is shocking that, 150 years after the abolition of slavery in the USA, there are more Black people deprived of their liberty than was the case under slavery. It is shocking that under the presidency of Barack Obama the job security and housing security of the average African-American has deteriorated. It is shocking that under the Obama presidency the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency has removed more immigrants than were removed under his predecessor, George W. Bush.³ In Europe too, states have shown little regard for human life when the human beings in question have come from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In 2015 and 2016 thousands of migrants died in the Mediterranean as a consequence of Fortress Europe immigration controls.⁴ In the UK tens of thousands of migrants are interned in immigration detention and removal centres every year (in 2015 alone there were more than 30,000 human souls incarcerated), these detainees are almost exclusively from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.⁵ This disjuncture – between the institutionalising of anti-racist policies and the continuing oppression of racialised minorities – is a crucial dimension of the crisis of anti-racism.

The issues that confront anti-racists have also changed in the decades since the 1970s. In the 1960s and 1970s the issue appeared to be relatively straightforward; racism involved the oppression of people of colour. In the twenty-first century things look different. In Europe today, most people of colour are no longer foreign-born immigrants; they are born and socialised in European countries. They are part of the fabric of their societies and have a public profile in national football teams, as television celebrities, as novelists, commentators, journalists and musicians.⁶ In many European countries today, and especially in the United Kingdom, concerns about immigration are as likely to be directed at White East Europeans as they are at people of colour. Since the 1990s, and particularly since the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the Western military interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq, much anti-racist activity has been focused on the issue of Islamophobia.⁷ All of these complications – the blurring of colour as a marker of racial discrimination, hostility towards White foreigners, the adding of religion into the mix – have contributed to the crisis of anti-racism.

The wider social context that informed emancipatory anti-racism has also changed. In the 1960s and 1970s ‘Third World’ anti-colonial movements fought for the freedom of colonised peoples to govern themselves. These movements influenced, and were influenced by, emancipatory anti-racist movements in Europe and the USA. Today, after the end of the Cold War, those who fight against Western imperialism are more likely to be nihilistic anti-Western Islamists (such as Boko Haram in West Africa or Daesh in the Middle East) than they are to be traditional national liberation movements (such as the Kurdistan Workers Party in the Middle East or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in South Asia). In the 1960s and 1970s Western governments often characterised anti-colonial struggles as terrorist campaigns (remember that Nelson Mandela, the leader of the African National Congress, was once derided as a terrorist).⁸ In the 1960s and 1970s anti-racists often opposed the characterisation of anti-colonial movements as terrorism. They argued that these were liberation movements. It is not possible to make the same argument in the twenty-first century. Daesh, and many other anti-Western organisations, lack any emancipatory impulse. They are terrorist organisations, not freedom fighters. This wider context compounds the crisis of anti-racism.

The anti-racist struggle has not been helped by the muddled nature of a lot of anti-racist theory. There is a lot of confusion that afflicts anti-racist thinking. The distinction between ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ is one that has troubled the study of racism since the 1970s.⁹ There is, for example, still no consensus on whether they are different words for the same thing, or different, but related, phenomena.¹⁰ Some activists and theorists champion multicultural policies as a welcome recognition of the value of cultural diversity and a bulwark against White supremacy.¹¹ Others view state multiculturalism as a collection of inherently conservative policies that racialise public life.¹² There is now a widespread recognition among radical anti-racist scholars of a need to rethink anti-racism.¹³ This book is an attempt to contribute to the rethinking of emancipatory anti-racism.

Northern Ireland and rethinking anti-racism

There are a number of reasons why Northern Ireland is an important location for rethinking anti-racism. From the perspective of Northern Ireland there have been a number of changes in recent years that have created a need to develop emancipatory anti-racist theory and practice. The peace process of the 1990s led to a transformation of the governance of the region. The 1998 Peace Agreement, which formally brought an end to more than a quarter of a century of violent conflict, created the architecture for this new system of governance.¹⁴ A new, devolved, power-sharing government was established. New legislation on equality and human rights was passed and new quangos to monitor the implementation of this legislation – such as the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) – were created. The issue of tackling ethnic diversity and inequality was placed at the centre of government, with the most important ministry, the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM), being charged with responsibility for this policy area. The new government has been active in developing policy and practice aimed at tackling racism and sectarianism. This activity has been given an impetus by the rapid growth of a ‘foreign-born’ section of the population (from less than 2 per cent in 2001 to more than 4 per cent in 2011).¹⁵ The development of anti-racist policy, however, has gone alongside a rise in reported incidents of racially motivated crime. The problem of sectarianism also continues to plague the region. The fact that sectarianism persists – after a peace process that has been heralded around the world as a success – suggests that there is a need to critically examine the issue. The fact that some have described Belfast as the ‘race hate capital of Europe’ suggests that there is a need to critically examine this issue as well.¹⁶

Robbie McVeigh, a long-standing anti-racist and anti-sectarian activist, draws attention to the need to rethink anti-racism in Northern Ireland. He notes that there has been a convergence between the issue of sectarianism in Northern Ireland and racism in the rest of the UK. This convergence can be seen in ‘the rise in and focus on Islamophobia and “institutional religious intolerance” … recognition of anti-Irish racism, particularly in England and Scotland, the focus on the overlap between anti-Irish racism and anti-Catholicism in sectarianism in Scotland’. ¹⁷ He argues that the further development of anti-racism in Northern Ireland is held back by ‘the exclusion of sectarianism “from the mix”’.¹⁸

The corollary of McVeigh’s argument is that there is a need to include sectarianism in the mix when thinking about anti-racism in the rest of the UK. The need for anti-racists in England, Scotland and Wales to consider Northern Ireland – with its ‘religious conflict’ – is more obvious today than it was in the past. The lack of engagement with Northern Ireland on the part of anti-racists is a problem, but it is a deeper problem than simply the need to consider the ‘religious dimension’. Northern Ireland has rarely featured in discussions about racism and anti-racism in the rest of the UK, the Republic of Ireland or elsewhere in Europe. With very few exceptions – McVeigh being a notable one – the conflict in Northern Ireland was not considered to be relevant to the issue of racism.

There have been thousands of academic books and journal articles written about the conflict in Northern Ireland. One scholar has even suggested that, ‘in proportion to size, Northern Ireland is the most heavily researched area on earth’.¹⁹ The majority of these books and articles, however, tend to ‘consider Northern Ireland in isolation’ from the rest of the world.²⁰ Even when the region is included in comparative studies it is almost invariably compared with other situations of violent conflict – such as South Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans or the Basque Country – rather than with other parts of the UK.²¹ It is not just that there are very few attempts to compare the region with other parts of the world; Northern Ireland is often not even considered to inhabit the same intellectual universe as the rest of the world. As one scholar has complained, ‘the academic study of the conflict in Northern Ireland has been, to a great degree, insulated – intellectually interned, to coin a phrase – from influences and debates at work in the wider academic world’.²² Despite the fact that Northern Ireland is part of the UK, it is rarely included in academic studies of the UK.²³

There is a strong tendency to treat Northern Ireland as ‘a place apart’, as a part of the world that is so peculiarly unique as to defy conventional analysis. Commentators and academics talk about Northern Ireland as a colonial situation in the heart of Western Europe. Others characterise it as a region of ethnic conflict, and for others it is the religious dimension to conflict that makes the place so strange. There is some truth in these views. These perceptions are, however, prejudiced in the sense that they present Northern Ireland as an aberration. They present the region as if it is not like a normal Western democracy. This view conveniently obscures the fact that Northern Ireland is not an independent country; it is a region of the UK. Since its founding in 1921 it has been governed, directly or indirectly, from Westminster. If Northern Ireland is a strange place, unlike other Western democracies, then the UK cannot be considered normal. If Northern Ireland was a movie character it would be the mother in the movie Psycho, and the UK would be Norman Bates. We are led to believe that the mother is a deranged and violent threat who needs to be locked away, isolated from normal society. In reality she is Norman’s bad conscience which is repressed in order to maintain the façade of normality.

Scholars, journalists, politicians and others are not wrong when they say that Northern Ireland is unique. It is different. But this is no excuse for studying it in isolation. There is nothing unique about being unique. Everywhere is unique. Everywhere has its own unique configuration of different elements. Northern Ireland is different from the rest of the UK, and from the Republic of Ireland. The UK is different from the Ukraine, the United States and Uganda. No two places are exactly the same. This is true of places within Northern Ireland, and between pla...