The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain - Softcover

Kundnani, Arun

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745326455 ISBN 13: 9780745326450

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2007

Synopsis

'Before you can solve a problem you have to understand it. Arun Kundnani not only understands the roots and ramifications of contemporary racism but explains it clearly, linking the local, the global, the political and the cultural. An incisive book at a decisive moment.' Gary Younge 'An illuminating analysis of the historic development of British racism, and how this has evolved into the current debates about the demonisation of immigrants, asylum-seekers, Muslims, the war on terror, segration, assimilation, multi-culturalism and Britishness.' Herman Ouseley, former Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality 'Kundnani expertly dismantles the racism informing much of current political discourse. This is an important contribution to the struggle against racism.' Councillor Salma Yaqoob, Vice-Chair of Respect 'Kundnani guides us through the history and origins of the nebulous forms of today's "new" racism, placing economic and political exploitation back at the heart of the issue. An invaluable book for confusing times.' John Pandit, member of Asian Dub Foundation 'Cutting through the media-hyped public hysteria on issues around multiculturalism Kundnani has produced a highly accessible and valuable historical analysis of racism shaping contemporary policy-making.' Ruhul Tarafder, 1990 Trust Is Britain becoming a more racist society? Arun Kundnani looks behind the media hysteria to show how multicultural Britain is under attack by government policies and vitriolic press campaigns that play upon fear and encourage racism. Exacerbated by the attacks of 9/11 and 7/7, Kundnani argues that a new form of racism is emerging that is based on a systematic failure to understand the causes of forced migration, global terrorism and social segregation. The result is a climate of hatred, especially against Muslims and asylum seekers, and the erosion of the human rights of those whose cultures and values are perceived a

About this title

About the Author

Arun Kundnani is an Adjunct Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and teaches terrorism studies at John Jay College. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Leiden University, Netherlands, an Open Society Fellow, and the Editor of the journal Race and Class. He is the author of The End of Tolerance (Pluto, 2007) and The Muslims Are Coming! (Verso, 2014).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The End of Tolerance

Racism in 21st-Century Britain

By Arun Kundnani

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2007 Arun Kundnani
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-2645-0

Contents

Acknowledgements, vi, 
Foreword by A. Sivanandan, vii, 
Introduction, 1, 
1 Echoes of Empire, 10, 
2 From Dependency to Displacement, 26, 
3 Seeds of Segregation, 40, 
4 We Are Here Because You Are There, 55, 
5 Asylum and the Welfare State, 72, 
6 The Dialectics of Terror, 90, 
7 The Halabja Generation, 106, 
8 Integrationism: The Politics of Anti-Muslim Racism, 121, 
9 Migration and the Market-state, 141, 
10 Here to Stay, 153, 
11 The New Leviathan, 165, 
12 Community: Theirs and Ours, 180, 
Notes to the Text, 189, 
Index, 215, 

CHAPTER 1

Echoes of Empire

One thousandwogs [equals] fifty frogs [equals] one Briton. One European is worth twenty-eight Chinese, or perhaps 2 Welsh miners worth one thousand Pakistanis. – BBC journalists' formula for the newsworthiness of disasters, early 1970s1

Racism is conventionally thought of as a matter of individual prejudices and the ways that these are expressed in word and deed. On this view, racism describes any kind of hostility or offensiveness on the basis of race, culture, nationality, religion or other kinds of belonging. It is closely related to parochialism or xenophobia and is often seen as a part of human nature or national culture, perhaps the regrettable but necessary correlate of patriotism. It is also this view of racism that focuses attention on the need for cultural sensitivity and awareness, the need for everyone to be equipped with a working knowledge of other cultures and sufficient respect to avoid causing offence. This is not necessarily a false account of racism but it obscures a larger truth. For racism is also about society as a whole and the relations between different societies, their structures and their processes and the power relationships they embody – the ways in which some groups of people profit from the systematic exclusion and subordination of other groups, which, in turn, result in some groups living lives that are harder, shorter and less free. This alternative, structural view of racism is important because it directs us to racist laws, conventions, practices, institutions and ways of thinking, not just individual acts and attitudes. It is a view of racism that also calls our attention to the machinery of states in sustaining racist practices. Crucially, it puts racism into history, asking us to consider how particular forms of racism come to exist and who profits from them. It also sets the experiences of different groups of victims of racism against the common social structures that have excluded them and asks how those structures have interacted with other forms of oppression, such as those of class or gender. In taking racism to be an aspect of society as a whole, it moves beyond questions of whether one region or class of society is more or less racist than another. Finally, it abandons attempts to account for different racisms in terms of different 'national characters' and instead explains the shifting character of racism in different contexts in terms of the political struggle against racism, its progress or lack thereof. It is only the structural view that can fully explain the changing nature of racism in Britain and guide the fight for racial justice.

The modern idea of racial identity appears to have its origins among the Portuguese of the sixteenth century, who sought to legitimise their early development of the Atlantic slave trade and the plantation economies of the 'New World'. By the end of the seventeenth century, England had surpassed the Portuguese in the supply of slaves, primarily to the Caribbean. The more that slave-traders and sugar-planters faced criticism and rebellion, the more they turned to the idea of Africans as a subhuman category of being in order to provide quasi-intellectual cover for the violent transportation of slaves from Africa to the Americas. It was the need to insulate the lucrative slave trade from moral condemnation that prompted the first attempts to create a systematic ideology of racism and solidified the fateful association of African features with inferiority. The raw material for this systematisation was a prior legacy of unorganised racial beliefs, superstitions and fears directed at Africans, such as the association of blackness with monsters and the devil and the idea of Africans as closer to the animal world. Before the intervention of the slave trade ideologists, the perception of Africans had been less rigidly defined. To Elizabethans, it was not the African as such but the 'Blackamoor', with connotations of an Islamic threat, that conjured racial fears. Although Islam was a multiracial civilisation, it was reduced in the European mind to the 'Moors' and associated with Africans. In the suspicion of the 'moor', race and religion were intertwined in a way that would recur in later centuries. The Islamic world of the 'East' was demonised as a monstrous realm, needing to be captured by Christendom and transformed according to a God-given mandate. Not for the last time, the East was allotted a role within a Western drama not of its own choosing.

AN 'IMPERIAL RACE'

England's eighteenth-century domination of the slave trade carried with it the beginnings of the mass diffusion of the modern concept of racism. The racism produced by the Caribbean sugar plantations was recycled to legitimise the expansion of British colonialism in India at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Racist ideology became central to the growing tentacles of British capitalism and its imperial project. It was over the hundred-year period of high imperialism from the mid-nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth that racism was popularised to the British public and a racial view of the world came to be widely adopted. As the historian Marika Sherwood has written:

from the mid-nineteenth century ... the building of an empire and the containment of labour troubles at home ... required the institutionalising of an earlier myth of the superior Englishman, now with a civilising mission. It required also the derogation of everyone else to an immutable racial hierarchy whose bottom rung was occupied by Africans.

Thus 'a new national ideology of beneficent imperialism' was propagated by an army of

writers, philosophers, economists, scientists and politicians, the churches and their missionaries, empire societies, children's and women's organisations ... the purveyors of popular culture, including magazines and the formal education system.

At first, this was an entirely middle-class ideology in which 'lower classes' were also conceived in terms of race: the working classes were imagined as 'literally racially distinct from the middle and upper classes'; the Irish, too, were interpreted as literally 'dark'. Notions of the 'racial health' of populations became a mounting obsession and gave racism a pseudo-scientific veneer, in which physical differences were taken to be signs of differing aptitudes for civilisation. The influential nineteenth-century anthropologist John Beddoes compiled an index of 'nigresence', cataloguing the inhabitants of the British Isles by their racial features. His conclusion was that 'nigresence' was increasing in the lower classes owing to the presence of Irish immigrants, whom he described as 'Africanoid'.

But from the late nineteenth century, racial categories were brought 'into ever closer proximity to working-class lives'. The drawing of the working class into a new national ideology proved necessary to mobilise Britain as 'an imperial race' and the sentiment of white superiority that was previously centred on the elite became available to the masses. Empire dictated a shift away from concentrating on the differences between racial/class subgroups of the population of Britain. Instead, Britannia was construed as racially homogeneous and rigidly distinct from its colonial subject 'races' and alien immigrants. Humanity was imagined as a hierarchy, with the 'lesser breeds' as 'backward', child-like, incapable of self-rule or historical progress and as therefore requiring colonial tutelage – the 'white man's burden' of empire-building. One consequence of this was that, by the 1900s, the socialist-inspired class consciousness of earlier decades had given way to demands for social reform that were increasingly linked with the national interest in imperialism. An expanding empire abroad was posed as the necessary economic base for the avoidance of class conflict at home, and the guarantor of 'the working man's prosperity'. In the famous words of Cecil Rhodes, speaking in 1895 after witnessing an angry meeting of the East End unemployed, in order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines.

In this spirit, reforms to education and health policy, which anticipated the creation of the welfare state, were pitched by groups such as the Fabian Society in terms of the need to breed 'an imperial race', fit and able enough to take its place in the forward march of empire. Sidney Webb, writing in 1907, worried that England was threatened by 'race deterioration, if not race suicide'. Since the 'least patriotic' 25 per cent of the citizens were producing 50 per cent of the next generation, there was a threat of 'this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews'. The government, argued Webb, must intervene in 'the production of healthy, moral and intelligent citizens'. This was a period when Darwin's theory of evolution had been taken up by the 'science' of eugenics, which had been founded by Sir Francis Galton in the mid-nineteenth century. Eugenicists held the view that the 'lesser breeds' were destined for extinction in the name of natural progress. It was necessary, therefore, for the 'civilised races' to isolate themselves from these subhumans, and it was permissible for societies equipped with this 'science' to assist the natural process of their 'inevitable' extinction. Thus the wiping out of entire populations was made intellectually respectable.

In these ways, the empire came to provide the British public with a grand lens through which to view events in Africa and Asia. But, it was a lens that blocked out the actual experiences of the people living under British rule, thus enabling the demonisation of those same people when they settled in Britain – in ways that parallel today's hostility to migrants fleeing the upheaval unleashed by global capitalism. Take, for example, the Chinese, who began to settle in the UK towards the end of the nineteenth century. They were depicted as a sinister threat to British civilisation with their secret societies and loose morals. These prejudices took on a harder edge after the end of the First World War, when newspapers began a campaign of scapegoating against the Chinese of London and Liverpool, portraying their communities as hotbeds of opium addiction where white women were regularly seduced and corrupted. A whole industry of films and novels portrayed the sexual and narcotic dangers of the 'yellow peril'. The government responded to these fears with the introduction of the Alien Restriction (Amendment) Act 1919, which extended into peacetime the emergency wartime powers to prevent immigration to Britain, and the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920, which prompted a campaign of police raids on Chinese areas. What was systematically ignored was the actual history of opium smuggling, a history that heavily implicated Britain's own exploitation of China. That history began in the early nineteenth century, when Britain depended on imports of porcelain, silk and tea from a Chinese economy that was, in many ways, more advanced than, and did not require exports from, Britain's. British capitalists thus faced the problem of a long-standing trade deficit with China that they were desperate to overcome. A solution was found in growing large quantities of opium in colonised Bengal and then exporting these to China, in spite of the official Chinese state ban on the drug. The result was spiralling levels of addiction in China, as the largest drug-smuggling operation in world history led to Britain's acquiring the huge trading surpluses that were necessary to underpin the rise of the City of London as the centre of the world economy. When the Chinese authorities attempted to stop the trade, the British state sent in gunboats to defend its tax revenue, beginning the first 'Opium War' of 1839. Ironically, the unfavourable terms of trade thereafter imposed on China by British guns led to economic hardship in China, resulting in the beginnings of emigration and the emergence in Britain of Chinese communities. By this time, though, the stigma of opium abuse had attached itself to the supposedly degenerate Chinese character, rather than to British colonial practice. With such twists and turns does empire discharge its 'white man's burden'.

Thousands of episodes such as this left deep marks on the texture of English/British culture, producing a selective collective memory, a repertoire of mutually supporting racisms – based on culture, religion, fantasy, science or history – built up over time, to be drawn on and mobilised in different situations. It was not that racism constituted the essential foundation of Englishness; that was no more true than the claim that liberty, equality and fairness were the underlying forces of national history. But a recurring feature of that history was the way in which racism was given new life and old ideas were transformed, in step with changing circumstances. Thus, in the nineteenth century, as the British Empire faced the challenge of an Islamic-oriented resistance to colonialism in India and Africa, the idea of a specifically Muslim fanaticism was at hand to 'explain' these disturbances. Though mobilised as part of a Victorian imperial project, the concept of Islamic fanaticism had medieval roots and would continue to have force in the twenty-first century. While some periods favoured the revival of old forms of racism, at other times racisms were discredited and defeated. In the second half of the twentieth century, scientific racism underwent this fate to a large degree.

Yet the end of the British Empire in the second half of the twentieth century did not bring the end of racism. Rather it offered the pretext for its transformation. Like a ship rebuilding itself at sea, racism could survive the damage inflicted on its structures at various historical moments, even exploiting such moments of crisis as opportunities for renovation. Such processes are usually ignored in conventional accounts, which prefer to ascribe racial ideas only a superficial role in British history. But race is a socially constructed concept that is both wider in its range and more profoundly rooted in the history of the nation than is commonly supposed. Moreover, the restriction of the concept of racism to 'colour' difference has concealed the full range of ways in which racism has operated in Britain, including against Jews, Gypsies and the Irish. The standard view, in which Victorian imperialism introduced colour-based racism to British society while the end of empire left behind a residue of racial attitudes that have been progressively eradicated, is mistaken. The history of racism began earlier and, as we shall see, the end of the British Empire provided the conditions for a reincarnation of racism, as it was reborn in the form of a white cultural nationalism. Those who had been made into colonial subjects as Britain expanded its imperial rule over multiple 'races' were now to be excluded from the white nationality that Britain sought in a context of contracting sovereignty.

NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY

It was in the name of national sovereignty that anti-colonialists had fought the British Empire. If there was one idea that defined the new world that was to be built on the ruins of the Second World War, it was the idea of national sovereignty. The war itself had been started, ostensibly, to defend the sovereignty of Poland from Nazi invasion. At the end of the war, the world was imagined as divided up into sovereign nation-states. 'Sovereignty' referred to the right of each of these states to manage its own 'internal' affairs as it saw fit. No other state had the right to intervene in sovereign territory. That most of the world remained in the grip of European colonialism was regarded as a temporary phenomenon, which would disappear as soon as the nations of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean were 'mature' enough to take over the management of their own affairs. It was this framework of national sovereignty that was seen as the best way of ensuring peace and progress. Nations were to choose their own ideological path, either through elections, revolution or uprising. But ideology would not be forced on a nation through outside military intervention. To prevent that from happening, the United Nations would establish a system of 'collective security' in which the aggression of any nation would be rebuffed by the 'international community'. Of course, these principles were constantly violated in the following decades, and the formal equality of nations posited by the United Nations was contradicted by the vast differences in military and economic power (hence decision-making at the UN was split between the General Assembly where all were equal but powerless and the select Security Council where real power resided). But the fact that the principles of universal sovereignty were the standards by which states were judged remained important. The Cold War game was defined by the rules of national sovereignty – even when these rules were broken. The US war in Korea, for example, could only be justified on the grounds that it was to free the Koreans from foreign intervention. It was not justified, as it would be today in a different era, by the notion that the North Korean government was a 'rogue state'.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0745326455
• ISBN 13: 9780745326450
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232