The racism of the Brexit campaign set the scene for the murder of Jo Cox. Her brutal killing is continuous with Breivik’s Utoya massacre. Then as now the peddlers of hate, from the those who ‘bravely’ spoke of the failures of multiculturalism, to those inciting hooligans to taunt refugee children with their 1930s style cartoons are responsible.
Breivik, like Mair, was a creation of modern Europe’s refusal to admit that race is integral to its formation, not an aberration, not a pathology. It is the logical outcome of the sustained refusal to accept the fact that Europe was not, is not and will not be a white continent but that its power structures have to change in recognition, which means engaging deeply with the legacies of race, ceding white power, and dismantling Eurocentrism.
It is on this battleground that Jo Cox died.