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.

As the unfolding DSK saga had barely begun, another racist hit the headlines in the form of the bizarre Lars Von Trier who during a Cannes Press Conference, proclaimed to understand Hitler and to sympathise with him to some extent, despite his upbringing as the son of adoptive Jewish parents (gee, thanks, Lars!). Drug-fuelled as it may have been, his rant was revealing at one particular juncture, when he said “I’m not against Jews… Well, Israel is a pain in the ass but…” In other words, Von Trier tried to right his antisemitism by dressing it up as anti-Zionism. This is as bad as the Zionists who accuse anyone who opposes them of antisemitism. It is reverse antisemitism, justified by anti-Zionism. And it’s not OK.

The London School of Economics has seen it fit to invite Thilo Sarrazin to a debate tomorrow as part of this year’s ‘German Symposium’. Sarrazin recently made waves with his book, ‘Deutschland schafft sich ab’ (‘Germany does away with itself’), a rant on how Germany is being ruined by immigrants. he has also said that all ‘Jews share a certain gene’. Sarrazin certainly strengthened German Chancellor Angela Merkel in her remarks in October that attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany had ‘utterly failed. Merkel’s anti-multiculturalist stance, although hardly new, gave renewed succour to David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, both of whom have joined her in speaking out about the dangers of multiculturalism as they see it in recent days.

German academics and students in the UK have written an open letter in protest against Sarrazin’s invitation to an event under the banner of ‘free speech’. The ‘freedom’ to peddle racism is not free: it runs a high cost for those on the receiving end. Please join us in protesting this by signing the petition and/or joining the Facebook group.

Read on for the open letter sent to the LSE by Germans in the UK.

INTEGRATION INSTEAD OF A CLASH OF CULTURES!

AN OPEN LETTER REGARDING THE “LSE GERMAN SYMPOSIUM 2011 – INTEGRATION DEBATE”

We are irritated by the invitation extended to Mr. Thilo Sarrazin and Mr. Henryk M. Broder to sit on the panel of the opening event of this year’s “German Symposium” at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) on 14 February 2011, which is entitled ‘Integration Debate: Europe’s Future – “Decline of the West”?’. Both authors have severely harmed the debate and by this poisoned the social peace in Germany. The panel’s title draws on slogans alluding to an alleged clash of cultures, while the invitation of a representative of the Muslim community in Germany falsely directs the discussion’s attention to a religious minority.

The public statements made by Mr. Sarrazin and Mr. Broder distort causalities and disregard central causes of this challenge affecting all of society. Regarding these challenges, research on migration and integration has repeatedly identified socio-economic factors as their prime causes. However, Mr. Sarrazin and Mr. Broder argue that there exists a pathological unwillingness among minorities in Germany (in particular Muslims) to integrate into society, claiming that religious and cultural background account for this alleged lack. Mr. Sarrazin goes as far as to ‘link genetics and culture’ (Frank Schirrmacher, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 29 August 2010).

Addressing the challenges facing our immigrant society requires a future-oriented debate, which offers solutions to pressing concerns. Such a debate must be conducted rationally and make use of the findings of scientific research. Across Germany, a variety of programmes is being successfully implemented on the political level. These address in particular the equality of access to education and the labour market, and thereby aim to foster an understanding which mandates that efforts be taken collectively. On the other hand, the defeatist and culturalist argumentation found in publications in Germany such as Mr. Sarrazin’s Germany Does Away With Itself (2010) and Mr. Broder’s Hurray, We Capitulate! (2006) leads to division rather than understanding, while equally lacking any serious suggestion aimed at overcoming societal problems. The stigmatization of certain social groups by Mr. Sarrazin threatens social harmony and social cohesion; the secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany characterized public statements made by Mr. Sarrazin as ‘racist’ and aiming for ‘lowest instincts’ (Stephan J. Kramer, Der Tagesspiegel 13 October 2009). Both, Mr. Sarrazin and Mr. Broder, warn of an allegedly looming Islamization of Europe and thereby join a group of Islamophobic publicists and politicians across the continent.

Naturally, every debate must be conducted critically and aim to include all constructive views which seek a resolution of the matter at hand. It is equally obvious that human dignity is to be respected at all times. In light of his empirically falsified and provocative statements and publications, which in parts incite racial hatred, Mr. Sarrazin in particular has disqualified himself for such a rational, constructive debate. Mr. Broder, as can be deduced from his public statements and writings, is equally disinterested in holding a beneficial debate.

As German students and academics living in the UK, we are vehemently opposed that the integration debate, which will open this year’s “LSE German Week”, draws on these provocateurs – the programme initially listed them as ‘iconic public figures’ – instead of on acknowledged experts.

The LSE is rightly considered to be among the world’s leading social science universities, which prides itself with its open-mindedness and its international student body. Therefore, the university’s German Society should aim to represent a modern, progressive and open-minded Germany, which is fit to face the challenges of the 21st century. We therefore criticize that the polemical, socially divisive and non-scientific theses of Mr. Sarrazin and Mr. Broder are given a prominent platform on an overall inadequately staffed panel.

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’.

There is little point in repeating the many excellent critiques collected so far in this dossier. Instead, our starting point is to take seriously this fairly insipid essay as a certain kind of media event. In other words, why, given the limited, frayed and disjointed set of policies that might be gathered messily under the label ‘multiculturalism’, launch a full–frontal attack that would have been exaggerated a decade ago? Why, after a decade in which multiculturalism has been loudly denounced as a bad thing by a rota of New Labour Ministers, media commentators and mandarins from liberal-left to right, pretend that there is a pressing taboo to be broken in a new political era?

Multiculturalism, as almost everybody recognizes, is a slippery, fluid term, retaining a fairly useful if limited descriptive sense in postcolonial, migration societies, but also skittering off to index normative debates, real and imagined policies, mainstream political rhetorics, consumerist desires, and resistant political appropriations. But it is also, in western Europe more generally, something of a ‘zombie category’, in two senses. The first, as intended by Ulrich Beck, is that of a social category or idea that is ‘dead but still alive’. The second is more ritualistic, as it is also an idea that can be revived and made to walk amongst and haunt the living. Over the last decade, in countries where limited multicultural provisions have been done away with, and even in countries where nothing called ‘multiculturalism’ can be discerned, multiculturalism has functioned as a ritual object. Its slipperiness allows it to become the space in which debates on race, immigration, citizenship, belonging and legitimacy are conducted. Frequently understood as an experiment, or era, or project, or unitary ‘philosophy’, it is ritually revived merely in order to be publicly disavowed. We tried our best, they asked for this, it didn’t work, and now we need to get back to a state of integration, of common values, of shared culture.

If we maintain this broader focus for the time being, it is clear that the zombie of multiculturalism is central to the justification of assimilative integrationism and neo-nationalist politics in contemporary Europe. Blamed for everything from ‘parallel societies’ to gendered horror to the incubation of terrorism, the litany of multicultural failure allows for disturbing political developments to be presented as nothing more than rehabilitative action. The most obvious recent example of this is Angela Merkel’s declaration in October that ‘multiculturalism has ‘failed, failed utterly in Germany’. Under pressure from the right of the CDU as it sought to siphon off populist fairy dust from Thilo Sarrazin, Merkel’s appeal to the undead was particularly cheeky. It is not just the indecent haste with which she moved on from celebrating the youthful multiculturalism of Germany’s football team, but also the fact that it is only a decade since Germany reformed its exclusionary nationality laws. An aspirational rhetoric of multikulti has long done battle with concerted attempts to define a Leitkultur and to specify – both from conservative and liberal positions – deutsche Werteordnung for all the dis-integrated ‘migrants’ to sign up to. But pointing out the obvious empirical lack of a multiculturalism that failed is to miss how it functions euphemistically. As per the convention, complex social problems and political-economic disjunctures can be blamed on ‘migrants’, and the solution, handily enough in a neoliberal era, located in an increased individual responsibility to become compatible. The range of processes of social dissolution and varieties of anomie that multiculturalism is still held responsible for is scarcely credible. However, as Sneja Gunew put it astutely, ‘multiculturalism has been developed as a concept by nations and other aspirants to geopolitical cohesiveness who are trying to represent themselves as transcendentally homogenous in spite of their heterogeneity’ (2004: 16). As, for a variety of reasons to do with migration and neoliberal globalization, a sense of transcendental homogeneity gets harder to represent, rejecting rather than embracing ‘multiculturalism’ becomes central to renewed attempts at transcendence.

When surface is depth

While this sense of homogeneity does not easily apply to the UK, several observations translate from this wider context to a discussion of Mirza’s essay. The first is that most media frenzy debates on multiculturalism are assembled from fragments of what Nasar Meer, in his response, termed the ‘ascendence of MII knowledge’ – generalised, anecodotal ideas that suit the blog, tweet, political soundbite and short commentary form. Most recently, Steve Vertovec and Suzanne Wessendorf have examined this as the transnational circulation of multicultural ‘crisis idioms’ that constructs multiculturalism as a single doctrine that has fostered separateness, stifled debate, refused common values and denied problems, while facilitating reprehensible cultural practices and providing a fecund habitat for terrorists (Vertovec and Wessendorf 2009: 13-19). Thus what commentators here have noted as the passé, dated and unsubstantiated character of Mirza’s essay is actually the horizon of its existence. The assembly of clichés, the cyclical claim to be breaking taboos and the subsequent feeling of déjà vu is the point of the exercise.

Secondly, this rolling rejection of multiculturalism is not a rejection of ‘labelling’ or culturalism, but rather a reworking of it. In Merkel’s case, it is bound up in the complex articulation of ‘Germanness’ in a field of intensive conflict over this process. In Mirza’s case, not only does she proceed on the assumption that people in the UK actually live their lives in concert with the managerial categories of multiculturalism, she neglects some interesting instances of how multiculturalist thinking has been central to the backlash against multiculturalism. All commentators here agree with her that labelling people according to ethnicity is reductive. Yet why does the essay not deal with the most obvious recent examples of this reductiveness? The horrible irony of the governmental rejection of multiculturalism that took a particular form post-Cantle Report is that it produced the pernicious labels of ‘The Muslim community’ and ‘The White Working Class’. Multiculturalism, apparently, emboldened the former and neglected the latter, but in rejecting it New Labour simultaneously tightened the parallelism it was so anxious to tackle while ethnicising and patronising the post-industrial population it had presumed it no longer needed electorally. None of this recent politics filters its way into the essay, instead it is populated by brittle stereotypes bridling that nobody gets their jokes and ‘innocent remarks’.

Political correctness gone mad, again

For all the entreaties to dispense with political correctness that occur in this genre of argument, it needs to be remembered that attacking multiculturalism is itself a form of political correctness, a way of talking about race, and saying coded things about minorities in a ‘post-racial’ era. So when Mirza concludes with an injunction to ‘speak openly about these issues’ we should recognise openness also as a form of code. Of course, we could choose to take these recycled arguments at face value, reading her as actually wringing her hands about the sorry state of Britain’s approach to tackling racism, an approach which, as she rightly points out, may in some ways have contributed to the entrenchment of racism rather than to its alleviation. We could choose to puzzle over her confusion of anti-racism with the politics of multiculturalism and diversity and the facile interchangeability of the terms ‘racism’ and ‘prejudice’, or ‘race’ and ‘diversity’. White liberals may nod solemnly when she invokes ethnic labeling to point out that none of the authors ‘is white and therefore cannot be easily dismissed as ignorant, naïve, or unwittingly prejudiced.’ However to do so would be to ignore how these arguments play a central role in the rewriting of the agenda around race and racism which is at least as old as the antiracist movement itself. Where there are attempts to tackle racism there are those willing to claim either that there is no problem, or that the problem is not what it is claimed to be – that it isn’t because ‘I is black’.

The argument that institutional intervention into the alleviation of racism through, for example, equalities legislation, the sanctioning of institutional racism or the implementation of diversity initiatives is counterproductive is clearly not novel. It is counterproductive, the argument goes, both because it sees racism everywhere – an extension of the ‘political correctness gone mad’ argument – and because it is patronising to black people and ethnic minorities who do not need a ‘leg up’ to get ahead. Once again this is a form of discursive transposition, this time of a position popularised in the United States by public figures of colour such as African American Republican Ward Connerly, founder of the American Civil Rights Institute, set up to militate against affirmative action, or The End of Racism author, Dinesh D’Souza whose latest offering, The Roots of Obama’s Rage has had Glenn Beck gushing ‘yes, thank you, yes, somebody really gets it, and has a better handle on it than I think anybody else out there.’ The British context is of course radically different to the US-American one, and the sub-debate in these contributions on the problems of conceptual transposition is an important one. However it is crucial to ask who benefits from depicting racism as a thing of the past, institutional racism as largely fictitious and the redressing of Eurocentric bias as irrelevant and patronising.

Is it those who actually face racism, who Mirza recognises still exist? Or is it those commentators, including public figures of Black and Ethnic Minority backgrounds, who ‘courageously’ go out on a limb to object to the antiracist ‘status quo’, aware that occupying this putatively contrarian position pays significant dividends in a political climate in which the racialized’s demands for justice and equality are treated as spurious precisely because the notion that racism is a thing of the past has become the orthodoxy? In fact, the current framing of the ‘race problem’ as a crisis of ‘too much diversity’ – as Prospect’s editor David Goodhart put it in 2004 – is underpinned by the yarn that Britain is straitjacketed by an antiracist morality that not only damages ‘race relations’ but gives succour to the far right. In other words, those who face racism are not only being held responsible for, as Mirza puts it, creating ‘a climate of suspicion and anxiety’, but also for ensuring that the BNP has ‘gained support because of’ multicultural policies. Other contributions have noted the unsubstantiated nature of that argument, and the assumption that racism will be rationally dispelled by policy change. What is also important is the way in which Mirza insists, like all the other recent high profile opponents of multiculturalism, on fully conflating multiculturalism with antiracism.

In so doing, they conflate the struggle of the racialized against the systemic injustices of the state with an institutionalized, managerial, ‘multicultural’ response, ostensibly to racism. This response has always failed to deal with the legacies of race-thinking, as they supplant it with essentialist explanations of minorities as either culturally weak or excessively cultural. Secondly, they concur with the orthodoxy that views multiculturalism as a minority demand for recognition, obscuring the less convenient truth that treating the racialized as culturally distinct and communally divided has weakened and depoliticised the antiracist movement since the 1980s. The ‘official antiracism’ that Mirza identifies as requiring radical criticism is not even antiracist in name since the dissolution of the Commission for Racial Equality. It has been supplanted by a diversity agenda that conforms with the ‘Bennettonization’ of the fight for greater equality. We agree with Mirza’s implicit questioning of a ‘diversity industry’ and of New Labour’s themed multiculturalism as part of the Britain TM moment. However Sara Ahmed has previously nailed the strange assumption that the presence of mediated, cost-free multicultural aspirations is some kind of true reflection of lived realities, particularly when it leads to the argument ‘how can you say you experience racism when we are committed to diversity?’ Continuing to refer to largely ineffectual measures such as diversity training as ‘antiracist’ plays into the hands of a postracial agenda not only by assuming that racism has largely been overcome. It also implicitly contends that it is the racialized that are responsible for any bad feeling against them that may persist, and that residual ‘prejudice’ proves that racism is an individual rather than a societal problem.

Given this latest rehearsal of familiar themes, it is the responsibility of those of us who remain committed to overturning racism to ask who is served when racism is denied. It is not the exploited migrant workers or the asylum seekers living off vouchers, it is not the children detained for months on end in detention centres such as Yarl’s Wood, it is not the wife of Jimmy Mubenga who died aboard BA flight 77 while being forcibly deported to Angola on October 15, it is not Hicham Yezza, jailed on unfounded terrorist charges and it is not the third generation black and Asian Britons who continue to face ‘heavy handed’ policing, deaths in custody and incarceration at a rate that far exceeds their numbers among the population. As long as there are stories such as these and the countless others that remain unheard and untold, the arguments that editorially frame a publication such as Rethinking Race are corrosive precisely because of their banality.

Alana Lentin (Sussex University) and Gavan Titley (National University of Ireland, Maynooth) are the authors of ‘The Crises of Multiculturalism? Racism in a Neoliberal Era’ forthcoming from Zed Books in 2011.

Nick Griffin was right about one thing: Churchill would have felt at home in the BNP.

The appearance of Nick Griffin, leader of the British Nartional Party, on BBC Question Time on October 22, 2009 has led to massive debate across the UK. Those in favour of freedom of speech advocated for Griffin to be allowed on the programme in the interests of exposing him. Those opposing said that there should be no platform for fascists and that Griffin and the BNP would only benefit from the publicity, no matter what was actually debated. I agree with the latter position and have always done so. Rare words of sense were written by Gary Younge in the Guardian reminding us that the other panelists, in particular Jack Straw, as the representative of New Labour is as guilty (if not more so) of encouraging racism in Britain as Griffin, especially considering Straw’s incendiary 2007 remarks on the niqab and the direct link between this and rising Islamophobia.

The panelists on Question Time were literally falling over themselves to show themselves to be tolerant and non-racist in the face of Griffin’s blatant racism. However, the mechanisms they chose to do this by resorted to the tried and tested recourse to patriotism (critiqued by Paul Gilroy in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack with regards the Anti-Nazi Leagues in 1987).Griffin was asked to comment on his statement that “If Churchill were alive today, his own place would be in the British National Party.” This led to outrage expressed by the other panelists who accused the BNP of hijacking Churchill as its own. But the uncomfortable truth is that Griffin is right: if Churchill were alive he would share the beliefs of the BNP because he did so in his day. It is a delusion to think that Britain fought the Second World War because it oposed racism. Churchill, in particular, was a eugenicist, having drafted the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913, the only law on eugenics to be passed through the British parliament (albeit never out into effect).

Griffin said on Question Time that “Churchill in his younger days was extremely critical of fundamentalist Islam.” Whereas it may not have been called that in Churchill’s day, according to winstonchurchill.org:

Churchill’s view was reinforced by his experiences as a young British officer serving, and fighting, in Arab and Muslim lands, and in South Africa. Like most of his contemporaries, family and friends, he regarded races as different, racial characteristics as signs of the maturity of a society, and racial purity as endangered not only by other races but by mental weaknesses within a race. As a young politician in Britain entering Parliament in 1901, Churchill saw what were then known as the “feeble-minded” and the “insane” as a threat to the prosperity, vigour and virility of British society.

“The improvement of the British breed is my aim in life,” Winston Churchill wrote to his cousin Ivor Guest on 19 January 1899, shortly after his twenty-fifth birthday. A fuller account of his abhorrent beliefs can be read here.

Suffice is to conclude that a reversion to British patriotism and dubious figures such as Churchill as a means of tackling the abhorrence of the far-right has and will never be sufficient. Having been said, it is hardly surprising that this – along with blatant anti-immigration one-upmanship – was the only tactic employed by the Griffin pathetic QT co-panelists (with the exception of the only non-politican, Bonnie Greer).

Proponents of the notion that European populations are falling in to decline because of the increased birth rate among the ‘wrong type’ of people are gaining influence. There is a close link to be observed between these types of arguments and those of populist writers such as Christopher Caldwell who, in Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, links culturalist arguments about the danger posed by Islam to Europe to demographic ideas, seemingly inspired by Gobineau, about the ‘bastardization’ of the European race. More on my approach to the return of biological racism can be found in Chapter 4 of Racism.

“Lentin’s book is not only an accessible survey of scholarly writing on the nature of racism but is also a powerful intervention in its own right.”

Arun Kundnani of the Institute of Race Relations, and author of the excellent The End of Tolerance, has written a thoughtful review of Racism: A Beginner’s Guide here.