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Archive for the ‘Post-race’ Category

Stolen from the brilliant Steve Bell

So David Cameron has been given Marine Le Pen’s blessing. As the new head of the racist French party, the Front national, she says,

It is exactly this type of statement that has barred us from public life [in France] for 30 years… I sense an evolution at European level, even in classic governments. I can only congratulate him.

Marine Le Pen is right to point out that what used to be beyond the pale, is now acceptable speech. White Europeans everywhere are now ‘daring’ to say what they always thought about black people, migrants, and Muslims having been given the go ahead by their politicians. As Seumas Milne points out in the The Guardian, Cameron’s anti-Muslim racism is nothing new: “much of the ground for Cameron’s neocon turn was laid by Tony Blair and New Labour – and politicians such as Phil Woolas, who unsuccessfully tried to play the Islamophobic card to save his skin.” Read the rest of this entry »

We need ‘a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism.’

David Cameron has announced that the ‘doctrine of state multiculturalism’ has encouraged different cultures to live separate lives. He went on to say that, while we are quick to condemn white racism (really?), we are ‘too cautious’ when someone who isn’t white holds ‘equally objectionable views’. Read the rest of this entry »

Excerpt published on the Muslim Council of Britain site

Ours is a righteous cause,” says Stephen Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) of the English Defence League, “Alright, OK,” replies Jeremy Paxman, anchor of BBC2′s flagship news programme Newsnight, “A lot of people are worried, I believe you.

The decision to invite the EDL to appear on Newsnight on February ahead of the its march on Luton planned for February 5, touted as the “the biggest demonstration in its 18-month history” according to The Guardian, was ill-informed. Those interested in engaging in the ‘no platform’ debate may do so. However, what was more striking about the Newsnight appearance was Paxman’s ultimate inability to counter the incendiary, anti-Muslim statements tripping off Lennon’s tongue. Inability or unwillingness? Read the rest of this entry »

The Privilege Denying Dude

This piece, co-written with Gavan Titley, was published on the Muslim Council of Britain’s website in response to Prospect Magazine’s ‘Rethinking Race’ feature, edited by Munira Mirza.

As reluctant connoisseurs of multicultural clichés, we were somewhat disappointed that Munira Mirza’s essay forgot to report how Birmingham City Council killed Christmas and replaced it with Winterval. As several contributors have noted, her largely anecdotal essay presents a set of arguments that could have been assembled anytime over the last twenty years. Furthermore, it remains mired in the either/or logics it sets out to critique; displays no sense of the motility and changing nature of racisms; depends on the active forgetting of how ‘cultural racism’ has shifted in the ‘war on terror’ era to coded discourses of values, compatibility and loyalty; and refuses to engage with how, as Soumaya Ghannoushi (2006) argued, the perennial trope of the ‘multiculturalism problem’ has become a euphemism for ‘the Muslim problem’. As Gargi Bhattacharyya noted, the article is not really about multiculturalism, but proposes a familiar attack ‘on the claim that racism exists and shapes social outcomes’. Read the rest of this entry »

Naomi Klein has written a damning account of Obama’s complicity in killing off the movement for reparations for slavery. By announcing that the US would not be represented at the UN’s anti-racism conference, ‘Durban II’, ostensibly because it is anti-Israel, he has effectively declared to black people that he will not stand up for them.

As Klein notes in conclusion, the right in the US has already decided that Obama is a ‘reverse racist’ that wants to use public finance to redirect funds directly to minorities and away from whites. Nothing could be further from the truth, but,

No matter how race-neutral Obama tries to be, his actions will be viewed by a large part of the country through the lens of its racial obsessions. So, since even his most modest, Band-Aid measures are going to be greeted as if he is waging a full-on race war, Obama has little to lose by using this brief political window actually to heal a few of the country’s racial wounds.

Read the whole article here

An interesting aid for teaching the problems of racelesness, post-racialism and colour-blindness to students. I will be using this in my first lecture for undergraduates who will doubtless be asking whether racism isn’t a thing of the past with the election of Obama. Although this is clearly a bigger issue in the US, the Obama election has had an enormous effect on the consideration of racism in the West more generally. Although we obviously cannout simply adapt US realities to different national contexts, the issue of post-race is as alive and well in Europe as it is in North America, the difference is only that it is not discussed in those terms because race in the post-war era was not considered central to what it means to be European.

Sometimes it’s funny how you come across something that tallies completely with what you are thinking/writing at the moment. This video speak to the paper I am writing now on ‘Post-race, post-politics: the paradoxical rise of culture after multiculturalism’. Excerpts to come and comments welcome on the writing in progress. For now. enjoy the video… More at http://twitter.com/jsmooth995