Political Racism

Brexit and its Aftermath

Martin Shaw

• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781788215084
• eBook ISBN: 9781788215107
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Political Racism conceptualizes a distinctive form of racism – intentional, organized hostility mobilized by political actors – and examines its role in the Brexit conflict and in the rise of a new nationalist politics in the UK.

In a compelling analysis the book argues that Powellite anti-immigrant racism, reinterpreted in numerical terms, was combined with anti-East European and anti-Muslim hostility to inform the Vote Leave victory. This type of racism, which has a special significance in societies where racism has been delegitimized, is shown to have further shaped the form of EU withdrawal and also the government's post-Brexit policies.

1

CONCEPTUALIZING RACISM AND POLITICAL RACISM

Racism cannot be weaponized because it is already a weapon. … Racism can, however, be deployed. It may galvanize, distract, deflect, distort, scapegoat and marginalize. It is an incredibly effective tool for dividing people and giving a sense of superiority to those to whom you have nothing material to offer.

Gary Younge (2019)

In arguing that racism was a major driver of Brexit and the transformation of British politics in the 2010s, this book proposes an interpretation of racism in general which may be new to some readers, as well as a distinctive concept of political racism. Racism is an obviously contested idea, in the double sense that there is no clear consensus on its meaning and application and that the differences about it matter in social and political conflict. It is also a relatively recent idea: Mark Mazower (1998: 103) dates racisme in French to the early 1930s, but its English equivalent only took over from the now quaint-sounding “racialism” around 1970. The use of the harder-sounding “racism” to describe racial hostility emerged in the Western world, therefore, long after “race” became a prominent feature of social relations and power in the world empires of European states, and only at the tail end of what Dirk Moses (2002) calls the “racial century” between 1850 and 1950 during which racial hierarchies achieved their most rigid forms. Indeed, it was only after racist political ideologies achieved extreme impacts in Europe itself during the Second World War, rather than in the colonized world where these had been obvious for centuries, that the modern critical idea of racism truly came into its own. Only then were the ideas of race which developed in the previous period – distinctions between human groups through biological and cultural differences and the discrimination and cruelty which accompanied them – deeply and widely contested within Western societies. Priyamvada Gopal (2019: 209ff.) shows that in Britain, it was between the world wars that anti-imperial insurgency in the colonized world combined with widespread dissidence in the metropolis to challenge the foundations of the racialized empire. However, it was only in the 1960s and 1970s, as Black people in the United States and elsewhere began to organize, that opposition to racial discrimination became genuinely widespread and increasingly mainstream among large sections of white society too (Virdee 2014: 123–44). The late emergence of a general term to describe racial hostility should be understood in this context.

Changing ideas of race and racism

In the last half-century this critical idea of racism has increasingly informed policy and analysis, including work across academia, and has been linked to both the formal and substantial delegitimization of racist ideas and practices. In this process, the social and intellectual climates around the ideas of “race” and “racism” have repeatedly changed. Originally, racism was widely assumed to concern the “colour question” and to be based on the idea of “racial groups” which were biologically determined. In the middle of the twentieth century, biological race was still widely accepted as real, but its stereotypical features such as skull shape and skin colour were discredited as markers of significant differences between human beings. Indeed, even earlier in the century, the sociologist Max Weber (1964: 138) had dismissed the idea that “common social relationships” were connected to “a common biological inheritance”. Early recognition of racism therefore centred on the idea that discriminating along the lines of biological race was irrational, and UNESCO (1968: 365) defined the phenomenon as “antisocial beliefs and acts which are justified by the fallacy that discriminatory intergroup relations are justified on biological grounds”. Yet race had often been conceived of in more than biological terms. In the nineteenth-century English-speaking world, Duncan Bell (2020: 28) argues, it “was typically configured as a biocultural assemblage, a hybrid compound of ‘cultural’ and ‘biological’ claims” (emphasis in original). Whiteness fixed the outer boundary of the race, but it was through culture that it was positively defined: “The racial identity of Anglo-America was most commonly described as ‘Anglo-Saxon’. The term was usually employed to designate a human collectivity defined by a vague admixture of mythology, historical experience, shared values, institutions, language, religious commitment, and cultural symbolism, all circumscribed (but not fully specified) by whiteness.” Race was “an insidious feature” of the Western political imaginary, so that “identifying the precise meanings of the term during the Victorian and Edwardian years is a thankless task. Racial thinking formed a shape-shifting amalgam of theories, vocabularies, practices, assumptions, and desires, and it both interdicted with and competed with other ways of conceptualizing human groups, most notably civilization and nationality” (Bell 2020: 26). Until the late twentieth century the dominant US racial group continued to be widely described as “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants”, a term which has only faded from use as Catholic groups such as the Irish and Italians were accepted into a broader category of “white”. Even after this, people of Latin American descent, “Hispanics”, continued to be distinguished from them, and distinctions of Black and white remained fundamental because of how histories of slavery and racial oppression had informed the deepest hostility rather than the visibility of skin colour.

If race has remained a powerful definer of discrimination, by the end of the twentieth century biological “race” had long lost even any residual credibility as as an objective category, but it was still cultivated by right-wing ideologues (Saini 2019). As Stuart Hall (1997: 6) put it, “all attempts to ground this concept scientifically, to locate differences between the races, on what one might call scientific, biological, or genetic grounds, have been largely shown to be untenable”. Yet new ways of fixing the concept continued to be sought, which Hall (1997: 7) saw as attempts to replace biology by culture: “We must therefore, it is said, substitute a socio-historical or cultural definition of race, for the biological one.” This meant that “the biological, physiological, or genetic definition, having been shown out the front door, tends to sidle around the veranda and climb back in through the window”. Against attempts to fix race either biologically or culturally, Hall insisted that it was “a floating signifier” or “a discursive category”, “more like a language, than it is like the way in which we are biologically constituted … The meaning of a signifier can never be finally or trans-historically fixed” (Hall 1997: 8). Since race was not an objective category, “racism” increasingly became the key concept, describing discriminatory beliefs, cultural orientations and political values, together with the sets of practices and institutions which instantiated them in society. The hollowing out of the idea of race gradually transformed the understanding of racism, diminishing and even eliminating a necessary role for the “biological fallacy”. Working in the same period, Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis (1983: 67) suggested that while racist discourse indicated an essential biological determination of cultural difference, its referent might be any group that had been “socially” constructed as having a different “origin”, whether cultural, biological or historical. The focus of racism could be “Jewish”, “Black”, “foreign”, “migrant”, “minority”; any group that was located in ethnic terms could be subject to racism as a form of exclusion. Since that time, racism has been increasingly used as a general term for hostility on the grounds of group identity, whether or not biological determination is posited. However, as Alana Lentin contends, race as a project or a system of rule and legitimation nevertheless has widespread bodily effects: “Race is not biology … but it may become biology” (Lentin 2020: 110, summarizing Clarence Gravlee).

In a common contemporary understanding, therefore, anti-Muslim sentiment is as much an instance of racism as hostility to people of colour, as well as another way of reproducing the latter. There has also been a growing recognition of how fundamentally racism is connected with class and exploitation. While still directed mainly at people of colour, it particularly affects poorer and lower-status groups. This also means that some people who are “white” in terms of skin colour may experience a xenophobia which is, to all intents and purposes, a form of racism. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Ambalavaner Sivanandan (2001) argued that there was a new “xenoracism”,

not just directed at those with darker skins, from the former colonial territories, but at the newer categories of the displaced, the dispossessed and the uprooted, who are beating at western Europe’s doors, the Europe that helped to displace them in the first place. It is a racism, that is, that cannot be colour-coded, directed as it is at poor whites as well, and is therefore passed off as xenophobia, a “natural” fear of strangers. But in the way it denigrates and reifies people before segregating and/or expelling them, it is a xenophobia that bears all the marks of the old racism. It is racism in substance, but “xeno” in form. It is a racism that is meted out to impoverished strangers even if they are white.

However, what this understanding refers to was not really new. Robbie Shilliam (2018: 19–32) demonstrates how, in the early nineteenth century, even the English “undeserving poor” were racialized by analogy with slaves, while Satnam Virdee (2014: 12–17) shows how Irish Catholics were the main “racialized outsiders” in Britain later in the century, followed by Jews at the beginning of the twentieth. The way that “race” was linked to national culture in ideas like “the Anglo-Saxon race” already implied a hierarchy among white people as well as between white and Black people. However light their skins might be, during the racial century Jewish people were rarely seen as fully white; Nazism, which many see as the archetypal racist ideology, developed a comprehensive racial hierarchy in which not only Jews and Black people but also Slavs were slated for extreme violence because they were regarded as racially inferior to “Aryans”. While each type of racism has specific roots and consequences, they overlap in contemporary societies; as Glynis Cousins and Robert Fine (2012: 166) put it, “prejudice and persecution in relation to Muslims, Jews and Black people are connected phenomena in the formation of European modernity”. Racist ideologies and practices combine different types of hostility in varying, selective ways, and these combinations may cause contradictions. For example, Gilroy (2004: 110) suggests that “white” migrant minorities may simultaneously be subject to new forms of racialization themselves and try to “seek salvation by trying to embrace and inflate the ebbing privileges of whiteness”. In the context of these intellectual developments, it is hardly a novel move to understand the hostilities towards eastern Europeans and Muslims – which we shall see played a central part in Brexit – as distinctive forms of racism, even if from a narrow “colour” standpoint Europeans could be seen as white and Muslims as belonging to a religious rather than a racial category.

Summarizing these changes in thinking, the fundamental problem with some older ideas of racism is that they make specific (biological, colour) grounds of irrational and harmful discrimination the definer, when it is the irrationality and harm of discriminating which is the problem. Certainly, all forms of racism have the capacity to make “race” real, so that Lentin (2020) is right to argue that “race still matters”, the specific ways in which people are targeted always have serious consequences (as the slogan “Black Lives Matter” suggests), and in modern global society the history of racism both begins with and returns to the oppression of Black people by those who regard themselves as white. However, the core of racism is not discrimination because of colour, religion, nationality or ethnicity; rather it is the very principle of discrimination on the grounds of people’s supposed membership of a group or category which the perpetrators treat as inferior to their own. This is usually thought of as being directed against particular groups, but “xenophobia”, that is, hostility to “foreigners” or non-members of the perpetrators’ own group, is also an important type. Gavan Titley (2020: 45) argues that the “shifting set of racializing practices cannot be adequately understood if analysis has to be accommodated in a ‘definition of racism’”. He is correct that narrow and rigid definitions are extensively deployed in denial, as I discuss below, but like any concept, the idea is capable of being defined, in a way which enables us to capture variation and change, if expressed at an adequate level of generality. It is therefore proposed here that racism can be defined, narrowly, as ideas and practices which entail hostility to people on the grounds of their otherness, and more expansively in terms of the patterning or structuring of such ideas and practices as they are developed and embedded in social life, together with the cultural and ideological panoplies which sustain the ideas of racial difference which underlie hostility.

Changing modalities, discourse and intentionality

Just as there are many different types of othering, there are many ways in which hostility may be manifested, and these have been changing. Racism is often associated with hatred, which implies a direct relationship between agent and target, but not all hostility is obviously “hateful” in this sense. It’s also sometimes assumed that racism is necessarily overt; this idea is particularly developed by those who promote hostility, who often deny being involved in “overt racism”. However, hostility or enmity may be covert, indirect, latent or concealed, as well as overt, direct, manifest or proclaimed. The less obvious forms of racism have always been important, even in societies openly organized on principles of racial dominance. As racism has been delegitimized over the last century, its most potent forms have often been those which are less obvious or openly designed. Sociologists and anthropologists still examine open forms of what Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton (1967: 4), writing in 1967, called “individual racism”, in which individuals directly express hostility to those from different backgrounds, and what Philomena Essed (1991: 11–53) later named “everyday” or “micro” as opposed to “macro” racism. These two concepts overlap, but they are not the same: for example, individual abuse and violence around the time of the 2016 referendum was not “everyday”, because it was stimulated by a high-profile political event. Everyday racism refers to individual hostility which occurs regularly in routine social interaction, such as the hostility experienced by Muslims and eastern Europeans in the UK over the previous decade.

However, alongside individual and everyday racism, studies have increasingly emphasized types which are typically indirect or implicit, even occurring through mechanisms which are formally regulated by norms against discrimination. Carmichael and Hamilton (1967: 4) coined the term “institutional racism” for hostility which was “less overt, more subtle, and less identifiable in terms of specific individuals” committing acts. This type, they argued, “originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation” than overt racism. A classic example was identified by the official Macpherson report into how London’s Metropolitan Police dealt with the killing of Stephen Lawrence. The inquiry defined institutional racism as the “collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour that amount to discrimination through prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people” (Home Office 1999). Many see such failures, however, as representing more than the ways in which organizational cultures permit bigoted individuals to practice violence or produce negative outcomes for minority groups. Police racism can also be seen as part of larger patterns, both of “state” racism (Goldberg 2002) and more broadly of what has been variously termed “societal”, “structural” or “systemic” racism. From this perspective, racism is built into the ways in which global and national social systems operate in their deep structures, and how many forms of power, entrenched in institutions, practices and ideas, combine to reproduce patterns of discrimination against specific groups. Economic and social inequalities, deeply rooted in long historical processes, work against minorities, while cultures of hostility persist in organizations and everyday social milieux. As Stephen Ashe’s (2021) survey shows, structural racism continues to be reproduced despite laws, norms, policies and institutions designed to prevent racial discrimination. Shilliam (2018: 119) argues that when discrimination in systematic forms (informal as well as formal) is outlawed, it continues in “individualized and fractured” forms.

Alongside these transformations in the practices and effects of racism and how they are understood, there have been significant changes in the discourse around it. As biological racism was recognized as “irrational” and “overt” discrimination became illegitimate, new discursive moves implied that we already lived in “post-racial” societies in which racial inequalities no longer needed special attention but could be addressed merely by treating everyone equally. This led, as writers like Reni Eddo-Lodge (2017) and Meghan Burke (2019) argue, to “colour-blind” racism, which by treating minorities as though they were already equal allowed structural discrimination against them to continue. A typical idea of this kind is that “All Lives Matter”, which claims to equalize all groups’ experiences but actually diminishes the significance of continuing discrimination and violence against Black people. In that context, all lives are not equal; indeed, as Priyamvada Gopal puts it, “White lives don’t matter. As white lives”, because white people are not oppressed as Black people are (Guéron-Gabrielle 2020).

What is going on in such ideological ploys, Lentin (2016: 35) proposes, is that “the understanding of what racism is becomes narrower”, so that “proper” racism is “often thought of in the past tense” and even “frozen” in those “examples from the past about whose horror there is universal consensus”, such as the Nazi genocide. Yet while the idea is solidified in this way, racism actually becomes “more and more motile”, allowing “discrimination and abuse to continue polyvalently under the guise of purportedly post-racial arguments about cultural incompatibility, secularism versus religion, or sovereignty and security”. Official rejections of frozen racism allow motile racism to continue, and we are left with “an inability to see, let alone understand, what fuels racism’s apparently continual drive”. Racism also appears to become debatable, “not because the racisms of the past are called into question, but precisely because by fixing ‘real’ racism solely in historical events, the continuities between racisms past and present are made undecidable” (emphasis in original). As Titley (2020: 61) argues, “postracial denial says you can talk about racism as much as you like, as long as it does not exceed the terms of a definition that we control”. It can even be seen, Sara Ahmed (2010) points out, as wilful to name racism, “as if the talk about divisions is what is divisive”. Increasingly, the gambit of the right is “to empty the idea of racism of any political purchase, to ensure that it is always subsumed to the meta-debate, primed as the trigger of patterned controversies where the ‘accusation’ becomes as controversial as the substantive issue” (Titley 2020: 61).

The systemic approach leads Titley to critique “dehistoricized understandings of racism” which “have made it possible to extract racism from political economy and social structures, locating it principally in the realm of ideas”, where it is “expressed through intentional speech acts and actions” (Titley 2020: 18, 40). He is right that racism is neither a purely ideological form nor wholly a matter of intentional acts, that these ideas are frequently used – together with a “frozen” historical approach – to limit racism to acts marked by overtly hostile intentions and that we need to examine the “shifting set of racializing practices”, recognizing that race “is a technique of power … always in formation” (Titley 2020: 44–5). However, the fact that racism is not by definition ideological or intentional does not mean that ideology or intentions are unimportant to it; indeed, we must also beware of frozen concepts of ideology and intention. Ideas which imply or protect racism ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Conceptualizing racism and political racism
• 2. Political racism and immigration
• 3. The Europhobic movement and its ideology
• 4. Racism in the referendum
• 5. Embedded racism in the Brexit conflict
• 6. Johnson’s victory and the nationalist Tory regime
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index