More than a week has now passed since areas of London, beginning with Tottenham, erupted in rioting and looting spreading to Birmingham and Manchester. Not much else is being discussed in the UK these days be it in the mainstream or through social media and the blogosphere. There hasn’t been much to add to the excellent analyses by Richard Seymour who has been providing us with daily takes on the riots from various perspectives. I am not the only one to have commented about the racial dynamics the riots are creating; Merlin Emanuel asks some crucial questions:

We the black community are not your enemies or the root of the problem. Those of you to the far right, I understand many of your concerns, but please put aside your legitimate reasons for anger and consider this:

Do blacks own poppy field and gun factories? Is it us that take your jobs, raise your taxes and leave you to struggle while the rich and powerful live in luxury?

Is it blacks that neglect your elderly or feed your children poisonous ideals and values?

Is it black people who outsource your jobs to foreign territories and then open up our borders to immigrants who will compromise your right to earn a decent living by working for peanuts?

Gary Younge, incisive as always, pointed to the seemingly incomprehensible anger felt by young blacks at a system they cannot penetrate, but reminded us that the roots of the riots run deeper than race alone. And indeed they do, but despite this the riots, in the way they are being intercepted and interpreted in the dominant discourse, are being made about race. Saying this leads to instant scepticism. In a discussion on Twitter, the novelist Linda Grant claimed that the riots could not be said to be racial because of the multicultural nature of the rioters. Indeed, the young people involved came from all ethnic backgrounds. The fact that the match struck in Tottenham was a reaction to the failure of the police to give adequate answers about the nature of the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan was, as Gary Younge pointed out, largely forgotten by the time the riots had spread to Hackney. These were not echoes of Brixton or Toxteth 1981.

Nevertheless, the push to racialize the events was there from the moment they erupted. On the BBC News at Ten O’Clock last week, the anchor claimed the riots were mainly gang related and that it was a result of wars between different ‘endz’, which she earnestly explained were ‘gangs’ (most people know that ‘endz’ in fact refers to neighbourhoods or postcodes). From then, we heard David Cameron pledge to crack down on gangs; everywhere you turn it’s gang culture what dunnit. While many have been at pains to place Cambridge historian David Starkey’s embarrassing remarks (above) on BBC Newsnight as beyond the pale, his claim that ‘the whites have become black. A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion and black and white boys and girls operate in this language together’ were made in the context of the constant name-checking of ‘gang culture’.

The interview conducted by the BBC with veteran black writer and activist, Darcus Howe, which went viral on youtube, was not only about bringing the riots themselves back to race, but also saw journalist Fiona Armstrong displaying the worst kind of patronising, colonialist mentality in her rude questioning of Darcus Howe – a grandfather as he reminded her – whom she accused of rioting and dismissed as making unsubstantiated assumptions about the police killing of Mark Duggan. The fact that the BBC apologised for the interview does not excuse the fact that the line of questioning pursued by Armstrong was considered admissible within the context of what is largely seen as rioting by an out-of-control ‘underclass’ which if not all black, is seen as infused with the decadence of a ‘black culture’ synonymous with violence and irresponsibility.

The constant reference to a feckless underclass, lacking in morals and in need of discipline and punishment is anything but new and is discursively as racialized as the direct references to ‘black culture’. The European working classes, as Etienne Balibar among others has pointed out, were conceived of as a race apart in the heyday of the Golden Age of race of the late 19th and early 20th century. The eugenics movement was in large part aimed at keeping under control a feeble-minded underclass which if allowed to breed unchecked would infuse ‘the race’ with a weak strain which would lead to its ultimate demise in the ‘race war’. The interrelation of something being facilely named ‘black culture’ with the equally easy appeal of ‘underclass’ as totem reveals the extent to which poor whites are still thought of in racial terms by the British elite. The rampant use of animalistic language – ‘feral rats’ – demonstrates the ease with which the rioters and looters are portrayed as pests feeding on ‘our’ society, a society many see them as external to, or wish to banish.

Tragically, the deaths of Birmingham brothers Shazad Ali and Abdul Musavir and Haroon Jahan, mowed down during their effort to protect their neighbourhood from looters, is evidence of how the riots are also about the creation of interracial divisions. The English Defence League‘s capitalization on the riots and their claim to be protecting the streets were soon exposed as an excuse to foment further violence. In response to all this, the liberal establishment’s appeal to ‘local black leaders’ further reveals the attempts to racialize the riots. Where are the ‘local white leaders’? There is no such thing because clearly white people do not require local leaders because they are not out of control or in need of being reined in. White  leaders do not need to be named because they are of course the leaders, the government of the country. And as overwhelmingly white leaders they represent middle class white people like themselves outraged at and fearful of the ‘animal-like’ masses.

Which brings us to the question of where all this is going. Black people in the UK are no strangers to the heavy hand of the state. Stop and search, suspicion, harassment, brutality and death in custody or at the hands of trigger-happy ‘officers  of the law’ are nothing new. Impoverished whites don’t fare much better. What is changing, added to years of rolled back civil liberties in the wake of 9/11, is the acceptance that fascist approaches are a necessary evil to control a population seen through the lens of neoliberalism as utterly unable to keep itself in check. Already the rioters are being rounded up and sentenced to jail for the most minor of offences. Water canons and rubber bullets are being prescribed. Black-outs on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have been suggested as ways of cracking down on communication between would-be rioters. The backdrop to this is the attack by Cameron on human rights which he has claimed have ‘been interpreted in a way that has undermined morality’. While the critique of human rights is well-founded, Cameron’s attack is all too clear within the racialized context of the post-riots Britain. Human rights for Cameron and his supporters means being too soft on those too different from ‘us’ – the holders of the nation’s morality – to enjoy our tolerance any longer.

Cameron’s pouncing on the opportunity to go towards undoing human rights legislation, something which has been on his agenda since coming to office, is apiece with a belief held by many throughout Europe that hegemonic western liberals have for too long been soft on racial/cultural others who, in turn, have taken advantage of this ‘generosity’. The result is either Muslim fundamentalism or the criminal immorality of cultures (races) destined to destroy us from the inside. The only answer, from this perspective, is to get tougher. The irony of curbing human rights while constantly preaching the moral high ground in the face of Middle Eastern repression or Muslim illiberalism is utterly lost on a ruling class so seeped in the belief of its  own supremacy that it feels justified to act with impunity against a population with which it has lost any shred of connection.

The desperation with which many liberals are attempting to make the post-riots story non-racial is testament to the success of postracialism in making us believe that ‘real’ racism is a thing of the past. Hence, for many David Starkey’s outbursts on Newsnight were utterly beyond the pale. However, beyond the fact that Starkey was merely giving voice to the beliefs of many of those who think that water cannons and rubber bullets are necessary, the racial reading of the riots has little to do with overt racism of this nature. Starkey and his ilk are far from extinct. The real racial subtext is less overt and thus more pernicious. It is about the externalisation of those seen as responsible for the riots, their portrayal as bestial and thus as expendable, extinguishable – necessarily and justifiably so. This has always been the aim of racism: a logic for legitimising the discipline, control and even ultimately the murder of those made utterly other.

Universalist antiracist rhetoric

I have a new article our in Feminist Legal Studies, part of a Special Issue on ‘Queer Liabilities of Critique’ edited by Stacy Douglas, Suhraiya Jivraj and Sarah Lamble. You can read my article, ‘What Happens to Antiracism when we are Post-Race?’ on Scribd. Comments welcome as usual.

The Special Issue on ‘Queer Liabilities of Critique’ responds to the recent controversy surrounding Raw Nerve Books and its public apology to prominent gay rights activist Peter Tatchell for content published in the edited collection Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality (2008).  The book contained an article critical of Tatchell’s gay rights activism in Britain (‘Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the “War on Terror”‘ by Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem). Both the article and book, which received wide acclaim from scholars and activists alike, offer important analyses of the ways in which discourses of queerness and raciality have been silenced, displaced and marginalised within more dominant LGBT and human rights politics. Following threats of legal action by Tatchell, the book was listed by Raw Nerve as out of print, despite being slated for reprint after a sold out first run. As a result, the authors and editors of the book have been effectively subject to the very form of silencing that they critique.

The Special Issue considers the broader implications of this and similar events for academic and activist critique. Questioning the terms in which these situations are framed and debated, the contributors examine not only the processes through which such silencing occurs, but also the specific power relations that make some people more or less vulnerable to the consequences or ‘liabilities’ of critique.

Gavan Titley and I have published an article on The Guardian’s Comment is Free today stating why we think that the political mainstream is far more involved than we would like to think in the development of Anders Behring Breivik’s idea on multiculturalism and immigration.

Despite the fact that Anders Behring Breivik was not permitted to publicly justify his actions in public on Monday, a scrambling defence of his repertoire of prejudice is already in full swing. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bruce Bawer, who is quoted by Breivik in his manifesto 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, emphasises his repeated warnings that a rightwing extremist may use violence to address “legitimate concerns about genuine problems”. Bawer blames mainstream politics for failing to address the corrosion of Europe by Islamicisation and multiculturalism, meanwhile The Jerusalem Post cautions that “Oslo’s devastating tragedy should not be allowed to be manipulated by those who would cover up the abject failure of multiculturalism”.

Racism is often justified as an aberrant reaction to understandable provocation; the focus on “multiculturalism” in the aftermath of the Oslo tragedy draws attention to contemporary racism’s most elastic alibi. The “failure of multiculturalism” is an article of faith in European politics and, like all acts of faith, it depends on the acceptance of an underlying mystery. Despite the denunciations of this “failed experiment”, there has never been a time in Europe where multiculturalism was the dominant ideology. As Ralph Grillo has argued, state practices, in the few countries that have adopted them, are characterised by a “weak” patchwork of policy initiatives and aspirational rhetoric. Yet critics have consistently assumed the damaging existence of a coherent “strong” form, which is always “unbridled”.

Multiculturalism has historically been accompanied by accusations of “reverse racism” and “unfairness to whites”. Since 9/11, politicians and commentators have held it responsible for an extraordinary range of social and political problems. The overwhelming power attributed to this semi-fictional project, and the fact that it is often critcised in countries with small immigrant populations, with no real history of multiculturalism in practice, should give pause for thought.

It is widely recognised that racism underwent a change in the post-war period, shifting from being an ideology of racial hierarchy to one of “natural” cultural incompatability. The so-called “new racism” of far-right parties during the 1980s and 1990s ingested the language and logic of multiculturalism, and portrayed ordinary – white – people as victims of an elite imposition, hypocritically denied their “right to culture”. These ideas are pressed into service in the emerging defence of Breivik’s political despair. In extreme versions, multiculturalism is regarded as self-hatred, in more nuanced attacks as a laudable experiment that foundered on the rocks of their difference and “our” naive generosity. Both versions portray “multiculturalists” and “immigrants” as an internal threat to a given national culture, and an otherwise pristine state of social cohesion.

The vision of multiculturalism as a conspiratorial alliance between varieties of leftists and “Islamists” is a staple of the Islamophobic blogosphere. In his analysis of Breivik’s document, Doug Sanders points to the influence of “Eurabian” writers such as Bawer, Mark Steyn, Melanie Phillips and Robert Spencer in agitating for a millenarian vision of a civilisation under attack. This début-de-siècle genre mirrors the fin-de-siècle European obsession with decadence and moral decay, the difference being that it is now Muslims, rather than Jews, that threaten to devour their tolerant hosts.

What makes the narrative of multicultural failure toxic, however, is its mainstream acceptability. There is no cordon sanitaire between the out-and-out Islamophobes and the political mainstream, and the past decade has proved that the traffic of ideas goes both ways. The myth of excessive generosity allows for tighter migration regimes, compulsory integration projects and neo-nationalist politics to be presented as nothing more than rehabilitation.

Recent recitations of the comforting narrative by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, garnered significant publicity. More attention needs to be paid to the mainstream racism it has given legitimacy to elsewhere in Europe. The former Dutch immigration minister Rita Verdonk proposed a system of “integration badges” for immigrants. The former Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen declared a “battle of culture” against multiculturalism and Islam, and his culture minister, Brian Mikkelsen, explicitly targeted a “medieval Muslim culture” in Denmark. Päivi Räsänen, the new Finnish interior minister, proposed prioritising Christian refugees in the interests of cohesion and to “prevent discrimination”. While these examples are drawn from contexts now associated with far-right electoral successes, they illustrate how the alibi of an “utterly failed” multiculturalism has provided political capital to centrists and liberals for quite some time.

The political class should reflect before responding to the tragedy in Norway, particularly when “austerity” politics may make the scapegoating of immigrant-descended and Muslim groups worse. No easy connections can be made between the recorded thoughts of a killer and the complex circulation of political ideas. However, writers who have consistently warned of the need to defend an ailing civilisation have questions to answer when a massacre is explicitly justified in their terms. And mainstream politicians, content to lazily peddle an exaggerated story of multicultural excess and Muslim difference are not exempt from this criticism.