The latest article, by Gavan Titley and myself, part of the Guardian’s series on Racism in a Digital Age which includes articles by Gary Younge and Mehdi Hasan. Not long after he was Photoshopped picking crops in a field by Paolo Ciani, a councillor for the rightwing Italian Future and…
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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:
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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.
Comments closedThis has been a week rich in racist pickings, if ever there was one that was not. First we had IMF chief, French Socialist Dominique Strauss Kahn’s arrest for allegedly raping a Guinean hotel worker in his $3,000 a night hotel room in New York. DSK’s (as the French media affectionately call him) history as a sexual predator and the collusion in covering this up by the left-wing media in France has been documented by the Les mots sont importants collective. Comments closed
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.
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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’.
Comments closedNick 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).
Comments closedProponents 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,…
Comments closed“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:…
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