At this point those who use the terms ‘racially tinged’ or ‘racially charged’ to describe white supremacy should be prepared to explain why they chose to employ those terms instead of ‘racist’/‘racism.’ If the answer is their own discomfort, they’re protecting the wrong people.
Tweet by US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 12 January 2019 (Rojas Weiss 2019)
In late 2018, the euphemization of racism went viral. It seemed that suddenly Internet users were waking up to the ridiculous contortions that the media were getting into to avoid describing a person or a situation as racist. In the US, against the backdrop of increasingly brazen support for white supremacism, facilitated though not instigated by the Trump presidency, activists and writers were pointing out the media’s discomfort with naming racism. In one striking example, a single Washington Post article spoke of ‘racial insults’, ‘racial undercurrents’, ‘racial animosity’, ‘racial fringes’, ‘racial attacks’, ‘racial connotations’, and ‘racial fears’ to describe the so-called ‘stoking [of] racial animosity’ by Republicans (Glickman 2018). In January 2019, new US Congress member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez addressed the issue head-on, challenging the media for their failure to name Iowa representative Steve King’s open support for white supremacist positions and white nationalist organizations as racist (Zatat 2019). Journalist Yashar Ali reported that NBC News had sent guidance to its journalists ‘that they shouldn’t refer to Steve King’s comments as racist. Instead they said reporters should say, “what many are calling racist,” or something like that.’1
On the other side of the globe, that January, like every January since 1788, was a traumatic month for Aboriginal people in Australia. It is not that the month brings more structural injustice than any other in a country where Aboriginal life expectancy is ten years lower than the average (AIHW n.d.) and where every child in juvenile detention in the Northern Territory is Aboriginal (Allam 2018). It is that the opportunity to debate the legitimacy of celebrating the nation on the day of colonial invasion rubs salt into these still-open wounds. In January alone, five Aboriginal girls under fifteen took their own lives (Fryer 2019a). This did not deter the repetition of well-worn racist tropes by morning-show host Kerri-Anne Kennerley, who questioned whether any of those marching in Invasion Day protests had ‘been out to the outback where children, babies, five-year-olds are being raped, their mothers are being raped, their sisters are being raped’ (Dodson 2019).
Kennerley claimed offence after her remarks were called racist by fellow panellist Yumi Stynes. Aboriginal writers, commentators, activists, and social media users spent the last days of a January already infused with deep exhaustion responding to the inevitable outpouring of racist denial that followed the incident. Fiona Nicoll’s observation that ‘the very idea of suggesting that someone might be racist has been elevated into a crime to rival (if not displace) racism itself’ was echoed in these responses (Nicoll 2004). For Aboriginal leader Shannan Dodson, Kennerly’s behaviour was a ‘common example of how deeply offended people become when they are called out for racist behaviour, which is touted as much more offensive than actually being racist’ (Dodson 2019). Indeed, the Australian Communications and Media Authority was to take Kennerley’s side in the dispute, finding that her remarks did not breach its code and thus had not provoked ‘intense dislike, serious contempt or severe ridicule against a person or group of people because of age, colour, gender, national or ethnic origin, disability, race, religion or sexual preference’ (Kelly 2019).
Racism is denied and offence is taken because naming racism is heard as an outrageous accusation (Ahmed 2016). No one is a racist. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva tells it in his classic text Racism without Racists, all whites but the members of white supremacist organizations mobilize ‘sincere fictions’ to claim they are not racist (Bonilla-Silva 2018: 1). Beyond the ‘colourblind America’ of Bonilla-Silva’s description, there are no racists either. From this perspective, Australian senator and former major-general Jim Molan is not a racist, despite the fact that in 2018 he shared fake Islamophobic videos put out by the far-right Britain First party on Facebook. Molan was one of the architects of Australia’s punitive asylum seeker policy ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’, which since 2013 has required any asylum seeker who attempts to arrive to Australia by boat to be detained on one of two Pacific islands, Manus in Papua New Guinea and Nauru in Micronesia. He has also been accused of war crimes for his role as commander of US coalition forces in Iraq (Wareham 2018). Addressing the accusations that his Islamophobic statements on social media were racist, Molan said, ‘I’ve put my life on the line for Islamic countries … for people to say this is racist I find deeply offensive.’ He claimed to have ‘no regrets’ for posting the Britain First videos (Lowrey 2018). In fact, Britain First itself denied its own racism, claiming on its website that ‘the word “racism” was invented by a communist mass murderer, Leon Trotsky, to silence European opposition to “multi-culturalism”, so we do not recognise the validity of this made-up word’ (Gander 2015).
In his second line of defence, Molan argued, ‘Anyone who thinks I am anti-Islamic or racist is stark raving mad – I am not either.’ So, neither Australia’s actions in the Iraq War nor its offshore asylum detention policy may be included in the definition of racism acceptable to him. Islamophobia, in particular, despite being a major driver of the War on Terror, is ‘not racism’ in Molan’s view. Supporting him, the then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said that Molan did not have ‘a racist bone in his body’ and that calling him a racist was ‘disgusting’ and ‘deplorable’ because ‘he defended Australians’ values in the battle against Islamist terrorism in the Middle East’ (Gartrell 2018). The ‘no racist bone’ cliché was also the defence used by Donald Trump after he accused six Congress members, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar, all of whom are women of colour, of being ‘savages’. ‘Those Tweets were NOT Racist. I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!’ he tweeted (Bruney 2019).2
Beyond the role played by denial in such incidents lies racism’s debatability, the ‘incessant, recursive attention as to what counts as racism and who gets to define it’ (Titley 2019: 8). The presentation of racism as debatable is heightened within a media landscape ‘characterized by increased communicative participation through connective media, where “more talk” is a socially valorized and economically prioritized pursuit’ (2019: 4). As soon as racism is mentioned, an ‘invitation to refute its relevance’ is proffered (2019: 2). Gavan Titley’s discussion of how social media exchanges are typified by what Sanjay Sharma calls a ‘racialized info-overload’ illuminates the difficulty of enhancing racial literacy in public discourse (Sharma 2013). Examples from contemporary media abound, from the question posed by television documentaries with titles such as Is Australia Racist? (SBS 2016) to social media explorations of the true intent of Irish actor Liam Neeson’s admittance that he once wanted to find any Black man to kill in revenge for the rape of a friend (Michallon 2019). Was race really at play?
The responses to Neeson shed light on how the ‘not racism’ I propose characterizes how we speak about racism today goes beyond denial and pseudo-humanistic declarations of colourblindness. ‘Not racism’ entails the constant redefinition of racism to suit white agendas, and goes to the heart of the question of who gets to define what racism is. We are long past the days of postracialism theorized by Bonilla-Silva and others. Today, defining racism has become a site of political struggle. Neeson’s story is but one example, but, for Gary Younge, it had a sharpening effect:
The next time someone asks me why I have a chip on my shoulder, I need no longer brush the question away with disdain. I can say, with all sincerity: ‘Because there may well be an Oscar-nominated actor out there who wants to kill me, so I have to be alert at all times.’ (Younge 2019)
The fact that Neeson asked his friend the colour of her attacker’s skin can only be understood against the ‘centuries-old role that black male sexuality plays in the justification of racism in general and lynching in particular’ (Younge 2019). In contrast, others applauded Neeson for divulging a forty-year old story that he could easily have kept hidden as an uncomfortable but useful exercise, eliding the fact that his publicists considered that a fantasy about murdering a Black man was an acceptable narrative to draw on to promote the revenge film in which he stars, Cold Pursuit. One African-American conservative columnist, for example, felt Neeson uttered ‘uncomfortable truths about himself and his own prejudice’ as opposed to what she calls the ‘extremely unhelpful … PC script’ of white guilt (K. Davis 2019). The dominant view expressed in the dismissal of Younge’s fears as unhelpful political correctness is that leaping to accusations of racism is needlessly denunciatory. However, this is only possible if racism is treated as just another opinion among a ‘diversity of viewpoints’, which avoids the uncomfortable truth that Neeson had unconsciously or otherwise absorbed the history of white supremacism and thus ‘calculated that he would be able to kill and, by deploying the legal cover of self-defence, get away with it’ (Olusoga 2019).
The adjudication of whether a statement, an action, or a process is racist in our mediated public culture eschews engagement with what race does as a discursive and performative regime in these scenarios. The discussion of whether someone like Neeson is racist happens in unconscious comparison to hegemonic accounts of what racism is and what ‘a racist’ looks like. Neeson’s admission is itself proffered as proof of his non-racism: ‘I’m not racist,’ he told Good Morning America. ‘I’m a fairly intelligent guy and that’s why it kind of shocked me when I came back to earth’ (Pulver 2019). The quest for personification on both sides of the argument – those for whom Neeson has offered us a teachable moment about the universality of revenge, and those for whom he epitomizes the racism lurking behind urbane civility – bypasses a more nuanced analysis of the landscape in which these events play out. In this terrain, the question of who can control the definition of racism has grown in importance almost as a function of the lack of control that many racialized people have over the determination of their life course.
This chapter argues that the dominant conception of racism relies on a Eurocentric formulation that is unable to fully encapsulate the effects of racial rule and the logic it bequeathed on social structures and consequent individual lived experience. Racism, as I shall show, was first coined to describe a problem internal to Europe: rising antisemitism in the context of twentieth-century European fascism. At its origins, the term ‘racism’ did not apply to the colonial domination that existed in parallel with these intra-European political developments. And in some cases, as we shall see, a commitment to fighting racism in Europe comfortably coexisted with the belief in the racial inferiority of colonized peoples. I do not wish to discount the fact that, since first entering the lexicon in the late nineteenth century, racism has been explained and theorized in many useful ways. However, what I suggest in this chapter is that we need to interrogate its origins in order to understand what it is possible to do with the dominant explanation of racism: that it is a moral wrong based on bad science. This perspective yields a thin understanding of racism as aberrant behaviour, measurable and punishable in individuals, a view which, in turn, lends itself to becoming something that can be expressed by anyone regardless of how they are racialized.
The question of who can control the definition of racism has grown in importance almost as a function of the lack of control that many racialized people have over the determination of their life course.
Consequently, the boundaries around what can be defined as racist extend ever outwards, especially at times of perceived crisis around racially indexed topics such as migration, crime, and terrorism (D. A. Davis 2007). This can be seen in the acceptance of terms such as ‘anti-white’ or ‘reverse’ racism, and this has serious institutional and political implications. In one case, during a discussion on a popular French TV chat show in 2007, Houria Bouteldja, the spokesperson for the decolonial antiracist group the Mouvement des indigènes de la République, insisted on the need to educate the white French population about the history of racism and colonialism. She used the term ‘souschien’, an ironic neologism that makes reference to the category ‘Français de souche’ (‘of French stock’), first employed by Front national leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1979 and later taken up by French demographers to refer to ‘indigenous’ (white) French people, thus distinguishing from the Black and Arab population. The contrarian philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, who, as we shall see in Chapter 4, is a notorious figure in French discussions of race, chose to add a hyphen to render the word as ‘sous-chien’, or ‘sub-dog’ (mongrel), and accused Bouteldja of anti-French or anti-white racism (Confiant 2008). Finkelkraut’s provocative re-punctuation provided an example for those, among them the French republican magazine Marianne, keen to demonstrate how France’s postcolonial citizens had been allowed too much leeway. The then French Interior Minister, Brice Hortefeux, who knew well ‘that Houria Bouteldja was being ironic’, was one of the first to take up Finkelkraut’s call to arms. ‘He declared that foreigners whom France “welcomes, hosts and feeds do not have the right to insult French people”’, thus effectively denying French citizens of immigrant origin the right ‘to bandy words about or make puns like any other French person’ (Confiant 2008). As a direct consequence of these events, in May 2010 and again in October 2011, Bouteldja was summoned before the courts on charges of anti-French racism, the result of a case prepared against her by the Alliance générale contre le racism et pour le respect de l’identité française et chrétienne (AGRIF).3 That the AGRIF emerged from agents of the fascist Vichy regime and the murderous OAS in Algeria, and had strong contemporary links to the Front national, illustrates the centrality of ‘anti-white racism’ to a right–left consensus premised on the threat posed by a rising movement of autonomous antiracist intellectuals.
In another context, the October 2019 British Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report into racism in higher education included the category ‘white British’ in its survey, finding that 9% of white English students and staff experience what they called ‘racial harassment’. The inclusion went against advice from academics and Black student union representatives that it was not appropriate. An EHRC representative problematically associated a ‘small number of examples of anti-English sentiment at Scottish and Welsh universities’ with ‘offensive comments about Gypsy and Irish Traveller students and examples of anti-Semitic slurs’, despite the fact that these groups occupy distinctly different racialized positions to white English people (Batty 2019).
When looked at in the context of ‘not racism’, what these examples show is that racism is both universalized and particularized from a structurally white perspective. On the one hand, groups who have traditionally been the objects of racial subjugation and violence are set up as today’s ‘real racists’, while, on the other hand, when it comes to the adjudication of white racism, great care must be taken before ‘jumping to conclusions’. A white understanding of white racism as excessive, aberrant, and attitudinal is useful to elites in the current political moment. The definition of ‘true’ racism must, it is proposed, be protected, gently wrapped in the tissue paper of ‘legitimate knowledge’. This makes it near impossible to look beyond the statement ‘I’m not a racist’, and ask why this declaration stands in for an adequate discussion of race as a technology of power, reducing it instead to the narcissism of the question ‘Are they, are we, am I racist?’
‘Not racism’ is a quest to control the definition of racism that enacts a discursive racist violence (A. Lentin 2018). I began tracking the narrative following the June 2017 attack on the Finsbury Park Mosque in London by Darren Osborne, who drove his van into a crowd, killing one Mosque-goer, Makram Ali, and injuring ten others. Osborne was described by his family as troubled but ‘not racist’. Osborne’s actions, it was claimed, were not motivated by hate. He was a ‘lone wolf’ who was ‘complex’, according to the Telegraph newspaper’s report, despite shouting ‘I’m going to kill all Muslims – I did my bit’ after the attack (Ward et al. 2017). After this, I started to notice an almost daily repetition of ‘not racism’ declarations. ‘Not racism’ is packaged in a variety of ways. However, two elements always accompany the presentation of an individual or a situation as ‘not racist’. First, racism is characterized as an excessive ascription. Second, alternative definitions of racism that diverge radically from what most people on the receiving end of racism understand it to be are offered in its place. The (re)definition of racism as universal, ahistorical, and a question of individual morality, rather than being structurally engendered, is the linchpin on which ‘not racism’ hangs.
I trace ‘not racism’ back to the emergence of racism as a concept, and to what we understand race to be. We have paid insufficient attention both to the conceptual development of racism and to its relationship with race, which, as I have been arguing, is a complex assemblage that is intrinsically unstable, polyvalent, and mobile (Stoler 2002: 373). If we wish to understand the longer-term intellectual context out of which the apparent contemporary primacy of ‘not racism’ arises, we need to look harder at the development over time of the terms we use, including those of us who consider ourselves antiracists. What Barnor Hesse has called the ‘undecidability of racism’, and the fact that there are competing – dominant and subordinate – understandings of what racism is, which also hang on different definitions of race, can obscure our clarity of vision (Hesse 2004). This problem does not only affect public debate, but is internal to race scholarship (Stoler 2002). However, this is not just a matter of intellectual disagreement; it is intrinsic to the unfolding of race itself, not predominantly as an ideology, but rather as a ‘political technological … organization’ (Hesse 2004). In other words, what we think racism to be is shaped by and in turn impacts on what we think race is. Whether we consider race to be descriptive of something, most commonly the idea of a hierarchical taxonomy of biological population groups, or rather of a set of processes that serve to order, manage, sediment, sift, correct, and discipline, empowering some while causing others to buckle under that power, is central to how we conceive of and tackle racism.
‘Not racism’, then, goes beyond denial, both systemic and of the personal kind that accompanies ‘white fragility’ (DiAngelo 2018). Rather, what is generally thought of as ‘real racism’ is frozen in past examples that float free from the wider context within which they can be fully understood. The Nazi Holocaust, most prominently, is encapsulated by the genocide of the Jews of Europe while being severed not only from the adjacent Roma genocide but also from the racial-colonial practices which both prepared the ground for these atrocities and continued uninterrupted before, during, and after they ended (Césaire 2000 [1955]; Langbehn and Salama 2011). This paradoxically allows for racism to be (re)defined because the most commonly used examples of it – the Holocaust, Apartheid, and Jim Crow segregation (Hesse 2011) – are explained not as extreme yet consistent manifestations of racial rule, but as the expression of misguided, and even pathological, beliefs which, like these events, are also presented as being ‘of the past’. Because racism is viewed as being fixed securely in history, the expression of less enlightened knowledges, any lingering racist beliefs are seen as the preserve of less progressive people. We hear this mindset in the oft-repeated liberal claims that white people are less racist than in the past, a measure gauging what people are willing to say about their beliefs rather than the extent to which race continues to structure sociality.
Racism is generally construed both as uniquely historically specific and as detachable from history, or, as I have described it elsewhere, as both frozen and motile (A. Lentin 2016). It is ‘reassigned to the past through a temporal logic of white dislocation’ (Yancy 2008: 236), and relocated amidst ‘ungrateful’ former colonial subjects, the descendants of enslaved people, and the still colonized Indigenous peoples of the settler states. As we have seen, this relocated racism is often named ‘reverse’ or ‘anti-white’ racism. It is part of the story I want to tell, but it is not the whole story. For even when racism is admitted to persist within white society, expressed by individuals or by institutions, there is a reticence to name it because of the dominance of the idea that ‘real racism’ is either over or extremely marginal. For many, the pastness of racism begins with the declaration of a postracial era following the election of Barack Obama to the US Presidency. However, the root of the problem is buried much deeper, arguably with the invention of racism itself.
To show how this is the case, I first analyse the birth of racism as a concept in Europe. I consider the role played by academics in sidelining structural accounts of race as it operated in colonial contexts and how it continues to pertain in the contemporary study of migration, for example. Racism is consistently presented as aberrant and pathological, rather than a reality of what Stuart Hall called ‘societies structured in dominance’ (S. Hall 1980). In the context of Brexit and the Trump election, anti-immigrant racism has been successfully framed as ‘racial self-interest’ and placed on a par with the mobilization by ethnic minority groups in self-defence. Political scientist Eric Kaufmann’s proposition that the defence of white Christian identities is merely an innocuous form of identity politics provides intellectual legitimation for the discursively violent white redefinition of racism as ‘not racism’ (Kaufmann 2017, 2018a).
‘Debatability’ and ‘not racism’ can be seen as structured into prevailing understandings of what racism is. On the surface, this is due to the predominance of distancing and deflection as characteristic responses to accusations of racism, as demonstrated by the Kennerley and Neeson cases, and by the euphemization of racism. But these tendencies did not emerge spontaneously. Rather they can be found in the conceptualization of racism itself, which, from its inception in the late nineteenth century to its more widespread adoption in response to the growth of European fascism in the 1930s, was not attentive to the contexts of racial rule that produced racist sentiment. The failure of racial literacy is in the detachment of the structural from the attitudinal. This failure is not just one reproduced by a racially illiterate and structurally white media but is also undergirded in scholarship which contributes to the uncertainty that surrounds the question of what racism is. As we shall see, this reaches a pinnacle with the attention given to the proposal that what Eric Kaufmann calls ‘racial self-interest’ is ‘not racism’ (Kaufmann 2017). The widespread acceptance of this argument can be witnessed in the constant justifications of anti-migrant policies and public sentiment by way of the purportedly ‘legitimate concerns’ of white populations, or even white terrorists.
Whether race precedes racism or vice versa is a question at the heart of race scholarship. However, it is less common to ask whether racism as a concept may have its own limitations. Are dominant conceptions of racism enablers of the deliberations over what racism is or is not? The predominance of frozen accounts of racism hinge on a narrow interpretation of race as confined to nineteenth-century expressions of eugenicist racial science which led by the mid-twentieth century to their full expression in the Nazi genocide. Such a view neglects the longer durée of racial rule as ‘colonially constituted’, and its reliance on more than a biological account to theorize human difference (Hall 2017; Hesse 2016). The aim of determining the boundaries of humanity as a tool of colonial domination which necessitated the assertion of European Christian supremacy over internally and externally colonized populations was articulated well before the invention of new biological epistemologies during race’s ‘golden age’ from the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, cultural and religious incompatibility – the predominant discourse framing opposition to migration as ‘not racist’ today – was integral to racial thinking from the outset. As Ann Stoler discusses, one of the main ways in which racism was expressed in colonial Indonesia was with regard to the cultural competencies that were displayed or not displayed by so-called ‘natives’. Could ‘natives’ ‘feel at home’ in a European setting? (‘To feel at home’, she says, ‘was a term used in the legal record.’) Various means were put in place by Dutch colonial administrators to judge whether an individual ‘native’ could be said to be ‘feeling at home’. More than any biological difference, the judgement of an inability to ‘feel at home’ was used as a means to set apart and discriminate against colonized subjects (Stoler and Lambert 2014).
To be sure, it is important to draw out the violence of racism, which is core to how Black and other racialized people understand and experience it and oppose it to an account of race which equates it with a naturalized form of identity. P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon Woods argue, for example, that the widely influential racial formation theory conceives of race both negatively, in terms of racism, and positively, in terms of racial identity (Saucier and Woods 2016; see also Omi and Winant 2013). It posits that groups were organized racially before being subjugated on the basis of race, thus minimizing the antiblack violence that they see as having brought race into being. Questions which have justly become important to the discussion of whether race preceded racism or vice versa, such as whether antiblackness is at the core of racism or whether, in contrast, it has antecedents in intra-European antisemitism or Islamophobia, have, however, mainly elided the fact that none of these questions were of concern to early adopters of the term ‘racism’. To what extent, then, does racism as it was first conceived adequately encapsulate what we are speaking about when we stress race as a form of rule which, far more than a prejudicial attitude and not exclusively a murderous ideology, underpinned colonial governance, underscoring the relationship between Europe and the rest of the globe, defining the modern era, and giving rise to persistent questions about what constitutes humanity?
Europeans who first deployed the term ‘racism’ in the late nineteenth century were untroubled by either antiblackness or the colonial constitution of race. Some among them were racists. Such was the case of nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial anthropology. Carole Reynaud-Paligot follows the trajectory of racial anthropology from the mid-1800s, from the general abandonment of anthropometry, through the excitement about new ideas of serology, and later to genetics (Reynaud-Paligot 2009). By the end of the nineteenth century, anthropology’s efforts to establish standardized anthropometric classifications of racial differences were thwarted by newer research, such as that of Franz Boas, which used cranial measurements to show, contra the dominant thinking, that there was no way of delimiting racial groups, and that human mixing made it impossible to classify humans in the same way that zoologists grouped animal species (Boas 2015 [1911]). This did not deter anthropologists such as Paul Rivet or Raoul Anthony, who continued to see the value of the research and did not renounce either the conceptual utility of race or the effort to classify people.
The 1930s ‘obliged anthropologists to descend from their ivory tower’ (Reynaud-Paligot 2009: 30). By this time, the grand majority of anthropologists had concluded that, owing to intra-European migration, there was no way of distinguishing European races – Germans or Nordics from Slavs or Latins – and that there was no equivalence between race and nation, thus opposing racial scientists like Arthur de Gobineau and Georges Vacher de Lapouge who had cemented them together. French physical anthropologists almost unanimously denounced rising antisemitism in 1930s Europe. The French anatomist and anthropologist Paul Broca contended early on that there was no such thing as a Jewish race. Nevertheless, despite general agreement that there was ‘equality among the white races’ and that antisemitism was ‘barbarous’, the same could not be said for ‘the question of equality among the races of colour’ (Reynaud-Paligot 2009: 34). The focus between the two wars thus shifted to the colonial arena, which became a ‘privileged terrain of anthropological observation’ (2009: 15). Racial anthropology based on studies conducted on colonized peoples had a prominent place at the 1931 colonial exhibition in Paris and interest in it was ‘largely shared by the colonial powers’ (2009: 17).
This was the backdrop for the evolution of the concept of racism among French anthropologists. A case in point was Jacques Millot, who taught ‘physiology of human races’ at the University of Paris until the 1950s. Millot was an ‘antiracist’ activist and a member of the journal Races et Racisme, which was outspoken about the rise of Nazism (Reynaud-Paligot 2009: 39. He believed that racism was a discriminatory German ideology separate from the practice of race science (Hund 2018). Consistent with this was his belief, apparently gleaned from cranial research on African-Americans, that Black people’s brains had 20% the capacity of those of whites.
A consensus on intra-European racial equality and an objection to racist discrimination in Europe thus coexisted with the practice of colonial racial anthropology and racial science by the same scholars. This apparent paradox is at the root of two competing ways of narrating racism. The first, subordinate narrative uses a ‘black analytics’ to interrogate the ‘colonial-racial characterizations of the West’ (Hesse 2014: 143). The second narrative is analytically white and predominates in the US sociology of race relations and the western social sciences in general. It largely sees racism as an aberration, as antithetical rather than co-constitutive of liberalism, democracy, and the European nation-state (Lowe 2015).
[The] narration of racism is white analytically where it forecloses historical and contemporary commentary on the colonial-racial order of the West in analyses of modern social formations like capitalism, militarism, liberalism, democracy, nationalism, individualism and whiteness. … [S]ociology’s narration of racism is Black analytically where it interrogates these sociological foreclosures of colonial-racial characterizations of the West and analyses the routine conflation of its modern social formations with the normativity of white domination and non-white subordination. (Hesse 2014: 143)
The original European interpretation of racism saw it as an intra-European problem born of the false distinction made by the Germans between different groups of white Europeans (including European Jews). Those who challenged this racism, including the aforementioned anthropologists, were able to do so while tacitly condoning, or at least failing to mention, the persistence of racial-colonial domination. For Barnor Hesse, this creates both a conceptual and a constitutive ‘double bind’ at the heart of racism (Hesse 2004). The very racism that sidelined Black (and other racialized) thought from the academy (Morris 2017) means that we are left with a partial, white understanding of racism which presents a very different account of race, failing to think about it as ‘an inherited western modern-colonial practice of violence, assemblage, superordination, exploitation and segregation’ (Hesse 2016: viii).
Despite the earlier practice of racial science by opponents of fascism and antisemitism such as Millot, following the Holocaust and the revelation of Nazi eugenicism, racial science became exclusively equated with Nazism. This yielded a blueprint wherein ‘real’ racism is not only extremist or exceptional, but also tacitly concerned with Europe’s reckoning with itself. Unsurprisingly, this has impacted particularly on western European societies in which the Holocaust was enacted and with which many among its populations were complicit. Coming to terms with being the perpetrators of antisemitic genocide has, however, gone hand-in-hand with a denial of the coterminousness of the Holocaust and colonial rule and a temporal division of the European history of racism into pre- and post-Holocaust eras. After the end of the Holocaust, racism became comparable, debatable, and ultimately assessable as racism or ‘not racism’. This coexisted with a strong rejection of the language of race which overlapped with the challenge to racism, as mentioned in the Introduction. Antiracialism – the objection to the use of the word ‘race’ – creates a taboo around race which, while in many cases is derived from a real worry that speaking about race has an unavoidable naturalizing effect, nevertheless detracts from a critique of the coexistence of official ‘non-racism’ and coloniality (Kerner 2007).
‘Frozen’ associations made between racism and the Holocaust lead to the active rejection of race as a technology of power for making sense of this. For example, contrasting British and German attitudes to the political mobilization of minority groups, Ruud Koopmans and Paul Statham remark that ‘for obvious historical reasons related to the race politics of the Nazi period, race has never gained currency in postwar German political discourse’ (Koopmans and Statham 1999: 677). The editors of a volume comparing immigration in New York and Amsterdam demonstrate a failure to see race as anything but a descriptor of phenotype, and therefore, in their view, irrelevant in societies which are less comfortable with using the language of race. They claim that ‘in contemporary New York, “race” is basically a color word’, while ‘in Amsterdam, Islam (and cultural values and practices associated with it), not color-coded race, is the “bright boundary” and basis for exclusion of many immigrants and their children’ (Foner et al. 2014: 137). By equating race only with skin colour, its role as a sociopolitical assemblage of power underpinning European domination both preceding and exceeding the period of Nazi rule is underplayed. Not only does this negate the significance of antiblackness in the Netherlands, and Europe more broadly, but it also sweeps the legacy of intra-European racial rule under the rug, burying it alive (Goldberg 2009).
Beyond academia, in France particularly, conflict over the use of the term ‘race’ has become a considerable political fault line. As signalled by the Marianne headline cited in the Introduction, decolonial and political antiracists are denounced as racist for referring to race. In a November 2018 open letter signed by eighty French academics in Le Point magazine, decolonial scholars are condemned for an ‘intellectual terrorism’ that recalls Stalinism’s attack on enlightened European thinkers (Le Point 2018). The letter was replicated in Quillette magazine (Quillette 2019). The author of one French book on the ‘left and race’ claims that using a ‘racialist vocabulary’ and distinguishing between ‘white’, ‘Black’, and ‘Muslim’ stands in opposition to the ‘humanist and universalist ideas at the heart of the leftist struggle for the defence of human rights’ (Boucher 2018). In this reading, racialized minorities reproduce racism when they support the right of Muslims to publicly practise their religion by veiling, for example, because opposition to racism should be inseparable from ‘anticlericalism’. An antiracism seen as promoting the ‘memories and traditions of subaltern groups’ rather than advocating for ‘all proletarians and “wretched of the earth”’ is a dangerous US implantation (Boucher 2018).
The taboo of race relies on a singular and teleological view of race which sees it as always inevitably ending up in the attempted extermination of the Jews of Europe. This was undeniably of prime significance to the history of racism, and it is concerning that it is being forgotten and downplayed in many quarters. A 2019 study, for example, found that ‘more than half of Austrians surveyed didn’t know six million Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust’ (Miller 2019). However, a sole focus on the racism of the Holocaust, especially one that fails to connect those events to other operations of racial rule, some of which directly impinged upon it, such as the German concentration camps in Namibia, ignores the persistence of racial rule after 1945 in colonial contexts and in the racial logics of contemporary incarceration and policing, borders and migration, social welfare, education, housing, and so on. A Eurocentric conception of racism advanced by a structurally white academy is unable to fully encapsulate colonially constituted racial domination, leaving us with a situation where, despite the competing existence of a ‘black analytics’, racism remains ‘more objected to than understood’ (Hesse 2014: 141).
The universalization of the Holocaust as the paradigm of racism posed a problem for other victims who mobilized the term to make sense of and draw attention to their own oppression. Rather than encouraging analogy and subsequent solidarity, as I further argue in Chapter 4, there has been a tendency towards comparison based on a sliding scale of racisms. As Alexander Weheliye remarks, comparison ‘feeds into a discourse of putative scarcity in which already subjugated groups compete for limited resources leading to a strengthening of the very mechanisms that deem certain groups more disposable than others. In the resulting oppression Olympics, white supremacy takes home all the medals in every competition’ (Weheliye 2014: 14). While certain analogies could be drawn with the treatment of the Jews – ‘exclusion, discrimination, ghettoization, exterminations’ – others could not, especially if they ‘appeared inassimilable or incomprehensible and threatening to the privileging of the paradigmatic experience’ (Hesse 2004: 14).
After the Holocaust, nonetheless, African-Americans attempted to repurpose the Eurocentric concept of racism to draw attention to the degradation of Black lives in America well after the end of slavery. The ‘We Charge Genocide’ petition was an attempt to force white opinion to face the convergences of the Jewish and the US Black experiences, rather than insisting on the uniqueness of the Nazi ‘moment’ (Hesse 2011). Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power introduced the concept of institutional racism as a form of internal colonialism (Carmichael and Hamilton 1969). However, both the foundational Eurocentrism of the racism concept and the continued dominance of a ‘white analytics’ pose a problem for the political mobilization of the term ‘racism’. Polemically, Hesse suggests that neither the idea of internal colonialism nor that of institutional racism ever ‘seriously challenged the post-World War II Eurocentric concept of racism’ (Hesse 2011: 171).
In scholarship, the effacing of colonially constituted racial rule was replicated in the development of race relations as a field of study in US sociology from the 1930s on. This, inter alia, shaped how racism was understood mainly by white sociologists in the UK until the ‘Empire struck back’ with the explosion onto the scene in the 1980s of Black and colonial migrant scholars such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Hazel Carby (CCCS 2014 [1982]). US sociology focused attention away from colonialism by theorizing ‘race relations’ as a matter internal to the United States, and mainly focused on Black–white interactions and inequalities post-slavery. In fact, during what Zine Magubane calls the ‘long era of global Jim Crow (1865–1965)’, so-called ‘race relations’ were intimately connected to colonial projects (Magubane 2016). For example, the Chicago School sociologist Robert Park and the ‘career man in Negro life’ Thomas Jesse Jones (Woodson 1950: 107) were central to the attempt ‘to articulate the “new South” and the “global South” as co-joined and coterminous political and economic projects’ (Magubane 2016: 378). As cotton-picking in the Southern US ended after 1930, they were involved in the Togo–Tuskegee programme, in which African-Americans were trained by the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, to bring cotton-picking to West Africa in the aim of globalizing an industry built on slave labour (Zimmerman 2005).
The involvement of sociology in this colonial project illuminates the problem of compartmentalizing and euphemizing race as the study of ‘race relations’. According to Magubane, race relations scholarship authorized ‘a comparative sociology premised on the idea that societies are distinct, nationally bounded entities wherein social change is generated by endogenous mechanisms’ (Magubane 2016: 378). It created a separation between racism – a contemporary problem internal to the US in this instance – and colonialism – which was seen as firmly in the past. Further, in both the US in general and US sociology in particular, an image of the country as anti-colonialist prevails. So residual racism may indeed be a relic of slavery, for example, but slavery in itself is not seen as a form of internal colonialism, not to mention the ongoing colonization of First Nations people and land. If this connection were laid bare, the US would be seen not as separate from, but as integral to the global racial-colonial project, thus clarifying the significance of transatlantic slavery for the development of modern capitalism and western enrichment (Williams and Brogan 1964).
The comparativism that drives race relations research also frames a migration studies agenda that is often hostile to using race conceptually to understand both why people migrate and the impact of racism on their lives post-migration. Many in the migration studies community, especially in Europe, tend to reject race-critical assessments of the drivers of immigration and the carceral nature of migration control. As a field, there is a tendency for migration studies to see the issue of migration as ‘postracial’, often cloistering it in economistic frameworks or relating it to liberal paradigms of human rights. In fact, as the militarized policing of borders and the subsequent transformation of the Mediterranean into a watery graveyard attests, race and colonially inflected environmental disaster and their by-products, war and starvation, have never been more central to migration and refugee movement (Erel et al. 2016). The elision of race as fundamental to understanding past and present migration policies has serious political consequences given the proximity of migration scholars to policy-making via the high-stakes funding awarded to research in the field as well as the proliferation of migration studies centres and consortia that work to support national and supranational migration regimes (Erel et al. 2016; Grosfoguel et al. 2006; A. Lentin 2014b).
Mainstream migration studies scholars often prefer to measure racism by comparing the experiences of direct discrimination by migrants and people of colour across individual societies. For example, Adrian Favell considers that imposing a race lens on either intra-European East–West migration or Latino immigration to the US is counter-productive. For him, ‘post-colonial theories of race, ethnicity and multiculturalism that clutter the shelves of bookstores and the pages of syllabi in the Anglo-American-dominated field of “ethnic and racial studies” are also ineffective and largely irrelevant in relation to these new movements in Europe’ (Favell 2008: 706). However, as David Goldberg has suggested, similarly to Magubane, relational and interactive approaches to race and racism make better sense of how ‘ideas and practices emanating from elsewhere are made local’, because what appears ‘homegrown’ does not develop in isolation from the ways in which the ideas and practices of race and racism have developed in other locations (Goldberg 2015: 254). In particular, a comparative approach has tended to place historically racist states, such as South Africa and Nazi Germany, alongside each other. However, they should be more correctly seen as each having relationally influenced the other. Ignoring this and taking a comparative approach leads to the erroneous suggestion that states can be looked at in isolation as though ideas of race do not circulate globally. That they do is as true today as it was in the past, as attested to by the interminable debates about the hijab and the burqa that began with the French ban in 2004 and contaminated all western societies (A. Lentin and Titley 2011). It also implies that there are ideal-typical examples of racist states that can be compared to each other, thus excluding the much further reach of race beyond these ‘frozen’ prototypes and minimizing cases that are not considered as ‘extreme’ as the ‘limited number of different models for state-based racisms’ (Goldberg 2015: 252). In contrast, we can look at racisms as historically specific while still maintaining ‘a focus on the (transnational) relationality of racisms across contexts’ (Titley 2019: xi).
‘Not racism’, as we are beginning to see, builds on the Eurocentric definition of racism, its severing from a basis in colonial rule, and a strongly antiracialist drive based on the taboo of race, which replaces antiracist commitment (Goldberg 2009). It is mobilized most successfully in discussions of migration, where academics and policy-makers present immigration control as a sensible approach that has nothing to do with racism. Barack Obama, in an address to a gathering of ‘young leaders’ in Berlin in April 2019, proposed that ‘we can’t label everyone who is disturbed by migration as racist’ (Da Silva 2019). Once immigration ceased to be of material necessity to European societies rebuilding after the destruction caused by the Second World War, migration controls became more a matter of culture than of economics, both of which were presented as racially neutral. In Australia, after the end of the ‘White Australia Policy’ in the early 1970s, albeit often exploitative labour migration could continue apace while family reunification and asylum were progressively hindered and criminalized. From the late 1970s on, after the ending of family reunification and the imposition of other restrictions on the movement of former colonial subjects to Europe, the ‘real racism’ of old was construed as an outdated, irrational attitude and cleansed from what became the dominant perspective on questions of migration, national identity, and citizenship. It became ‘not racism’ but ‘commonsense’ (Bhattacharyya 2020). Today, motivated by a confected fear of dwindling white population numbers, much effort is made to assert that being anxious about the effects of migration on ‘national culture’ is ‘not racist’. In reality, Gargi Bhattacharyya reminds us, ‘controlling and shaping population movement is among the most consistently racialized practices of most contemporary states’ (Bhattacharyya 2018: 129). It maps onto the longstanding racialized obsession with another aspect of population control – fecundity – and the attendant white fear that ‘like weeds, these people can reproduce in the most inhospitable of circumstances’ (Bhattacharyya 2018: 39).
‘Not racism’ also hangs on the idea that to foreground race is unscholarly. This is given weight in public discussions where currency is made by a disproportionately publicized group of academics who argue that to name racism is denunciatory rather than empirical. Most prominent among these is the aforementioned political scientist Eric Kaufmann, who asserts that white people’s expression of anxiety in the face of migration may be ‘racial self-interest’ but it is ‘not racism’.4 He bases his theory on the myth of a hegemonic ‘left-moralist’ agenda which wrongly portrays the commonsense of the ‘ethnic majority’ as racist (Kaufmann 2018a). Antiracists are caricaturized as an anti-free speech ‘mob’, while his own analysis, grounded in attitudinal surveys and social psychological theorizations, is presented as sober and detached. A large part of the success of ‘not racism’ is its proponents’ ability to portray themselves as the defenders of Enlightenment rationality and free inquiry against an authoritarian antiracist hegemony that finds academic legitimacy in what they propose is the unscientific domain of critical race theory. While Kaufmann and his associates, such as the theorist of national populism Matthew Goodwin, pin their colours to the mast by defending discredited racial science contrarian Noah Carl, the questioning of the legitimacy of critical race scholarship is also a mainstay of less contentious areas of academia (Kaufmann 2019). As we have seen, migration studies scholar Adrian Favell rejects critical race theory as an imprecise mode of analysis and lauds research that moves beyond what he calls ‘purely denunciatory work on the negative consequences of immigration (such as studies of racism)’ (Favell 2003: 20). How does the idea that racism is used too imprecisely move out of academia to inform and shape public discussions, and what is the role of the media-friendly academic in whitewashing ‘not racism’?
If critical race studies emphasize the structural, ‘not racism’ is a sentiment dressed up as serious science, recalling once again Flavia Dzodan’s reflection on the political salience of ‘gut feeling’ (Dzodan 2017). Eric Kaufmann’s 2017 study of Leave and Remain voters in the UK Brexit referendum and Trump and Clinton voters in the US 2016 presidential elections was presented in a report by the UK think-tank Policy Exchange entitled ‘Racial Self-Interest is Not Racism’, and later in a full-length, much-publicized and -reviewed book, Whiteshift (Kaufmann 2017, 2018a). Kaufmann proposes that white Christian ‘ethnotraditonalism’ is one among an array of available identifications, and that seeking to defend it against non-European immigrants is mere racial self-interest and ‘not racism’. Kaufmann cites the longtime opponent of what he sees as the UK’s overly open attitude to migration and multiculturalism, writer and quangoist David Goodhart, who claims that racism ‘has been subject to mission creep’. Goodhart proposes that applying the label of racism to concerns about immigration leads to ‘those in public debate [being unable to] draw a distinction between group partiality and a racism based on the fear, hatred or disparagement of outgroups’ (Kaufmann 2017: 2).5 ‘Racial self-interest’ cannot be equated with ‘real’ racism. ‘The challenge here’, Goodhart proposes, ‘is to distinguish between white racism and white identity politics. The latter may be clannish and insular, but it is not the same as irrational hatred, fear or contempt for another group – the normal definition of racism’ (Goodhart 2017b). This view is one logical outcome of the dominant idea that racism is an aberrant attitude.
The idea of a ‘normal definition’ of racism performs the separation between rationality and irrationality and is itself central to a racial epistemology. In fact, it is untrue to say that racism is always irrational on either logical or moral grounds. To determine the morality of racism, ‘we cannot, on pain of circularity, simply claim its immorality a priori and infer its irrationality from this’ (Goldberg 1990: 337). In fact, it is easier to find historical examples of people enacting racism ‘rationally’ given the benefits that racial discrimination has had, and continues to have, for the racially dominant, both personally and in terms of whole societies. Slavery is the prime example of this (Harris 1993). We only need to consider that former slave owners were paid compensation for the loss of ‘their slaves’ after the official abolition of slavery to see how this is the case. As research by the historian Catherine Hall has shown, many among Britain’s elites continue to benefit financially from this compensation, including former Prime Minister David Cameron (C. Hall 2013).
Goodhart, Kaufmann, and other proponents of ‘not racism’ bracket the workings of racial capitalism off from their identification of ‘the normal definition of racism’, which is confined to the irrational attitudes of outlier groups. Such a view is derived from a social psychological approach to racism which dominates the field, particularly in the US, conflicting with the view Kaufmann presents of critical race studies as hegemonic. The failure to ground social psychological research in a critical history of racial formation leads to ‘racial self-interest’ being theorized as a question of ‘in-group favoritism and out-group animosity’, as the author of another book on ‘White Identity Politics’ puts it (Illing 2019; see also Jardina 2019). Structural accounts are disregarded in favour of individual ones, with Kaufmann even going so far as to argue that the now banned policy of ‘red-lining’ in US real estate, which effectively led to the segregation of urban neigbourhoods on Black–white lines, was not about racism but about ‘individual choices about where to live’ (Chotiner 2019). Kaufmann’s resistance to accounts of racism as structural rather than purely attitudinal relies on an unempirical assertion of racism as a question of diverse ‘psychological profiles’. Some people, he suggests, are suited to ‘cosmopolitanism’ and others to ‘ethnotraditional nationalism’. He argues that ‘imposing either on the entire population is a recipe for discontent because value orientations stem from heredity and early life experiences’ (Kaufmann 2018a: 12). However, because he denies the validity of structural accounts of race, Kaufmann is unable to explain the origins of these beliefs. His may be an extreme example of the separation between structure and the individual, but it is one that is generated by the dominant notion that race equates to identity and racism to attitude. Even when structural, or in this case institutional, racism was recognized by the Macpherson inquiry into the London Metropolitan police’s mishandling of the investigation into the 1993 murder of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence, it was recognized ‘in such a way that racism is not seen as an ongoing series of actions that shape institutions’ (Ahmed 2004, emphasis in original).
Kaufmann’s reliance on attitude surveys to assess racism, which is narrowly defined as irrational, exclusionary, and hierarchical, allows him to separate between racist and non-racist sentiments in order to build what he suggests is a more complex picture of the nuances of ‘racial self-interest’. His universalist interpretation of racism severs it from what Miri Song calls its ‘historical basis, severity and power’ (Song 2014: 125; see also Saucier and Woods 2016). This psychologizing of race, re-expressed as inherent tribalism, has a particular lineage, one that in Britain at least originates with the anti-immigrant 1960s British politician Enoch Powell, to whom Kaufmann’s associate David Goodhart has been compared (Shilliam 2018b). Kaufmann sees Powell’s views as encapsulating both racism and ‘racial self-interest’. His preference for excluding migrants over assimilating them may have made Powell racist. However, Kaufmann believes this should be separated from the ‘genuine majority grievances buried in [Powell’s] message’. According to Kaufmann, Powell was merely noting the rapidly changing nature of many of Britain’s neighbourhoods and raising the valid point ‘that the cultural impact of immigration is perceived as negative by most whites in reception areas’ (Kaufmann 2018a: 319). Recall that this is what has been said much more recently of the perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre, Brenton Tarrant. So, in Kaufmann’s view, racism can only be at work if it involves what the philosopher of race Jorge Garcia calls ‘moral viciousness’ (Garcia 1999). But it is ‘not racism’, he told New Yorker columnist Isaac Chotiner, if ‘this idea of slowing down a rate of ethno-cultural change is … motivated by attachment to one’s own’ (Chotiner 2019).
The neighbourhoods Powell and Kaufmann were concerned about are the kinds described by British sociologist and anti-austerity campaigner Lisa Mckenzie. Mckenzie has written that ‘white working-class women’ living on housing estates already facing harsh austerity policies feared greater hardship as a result of asylum seekers being housed there (Mckenzie 2015). The vote to leave the European Union was not an expression of white working-class racism but one of ‘precarity and fear’ (Mckenzie 2016). However, as the demographers Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson reveal in their detailed analysis of the Brexit referendum results, the outcome could not be put down to the, albeit dominant, idea that ‘the more deprived an area was, the more likely its residents were to vote Leave’ (Dorling and Tomlinson 2019: 37). Furthermore, the fewer immigrants who lived in a given area, the more likely residents were to vote for Brexit, thus opposing the idea that the referendum was the result of interethnic tensions and downward pressure on scarce resources. The only determining factor swaying the vote was ‘the personalities of those who led the campaigns’ (2019: 26) and their success in fomenting fear of immigrants. The figurehead of the pro-Leave campaign, Nigel Farage, used a real photograph of migrants entering Slovenia to claim that EU membership is leading Britain to ‘breaking point’. He thus pinned the blame for societal misery on migrants – and not even migrants actually entering Britain – rather than years of domestic austerity measures that have left poorer people from all ethnicities worse off. As many have pointed out, the manipulation of anti-immigration sentiment, openly aired across the media as a topic of legitimate debate, was a major catalyst for Brexit.
Kaufmann agrees that opposition to immigration gave birth to Brexit but posits that the only viable response is to assuage what he sees as legitimate fears by setting immigration levels ‘that respect the cultural comfort zone of the median voter’, also arguing in favour of Trump’s Southern border wall (Chotiner 2019). Nadine El-Enany made the point early on that ‘the racist discourse that has defined the Brexit campaign must be understood in the context of Britain’s imperial legacy [and is] symptomatic of a Britain struggling to conceive of its place in the world post-Empire’ (El-Enany 2016). This attention to the cultural meaning of loss of empire is utterly dismissed by Kaufmann when he reduces racism to a question of personal attitudes of warmth or hostility towards immigrants, measurable with online questionnaires. The detachment of racism from the racial regimes that continually play the bass notes under these debates is evident when Kaufmann wins points for asking ‘inconvenient questions’ that people who ‘denounce everyone as racist’ are said to dare not ask. Kaufmann contends that ‘ethnotraditional nationalists’ have a right to a secure white Christian tradition alongside those whom he calls ‘vibrant minorities’ and against those who refuse to assimilate into his vision of an elastic whiteness (Kaufmann 2018a: 28). He presents assimilation into whiteness as a question of individual choice. He completely ignores the extensive literature examining the circumstances in which once negatively racialized groups, such as the Jews or the Irish, ‘became white’ in US society, where they were positively counterposed to Black and Indigenous peoples (Brodkin 1999; Ignatiev 2015). By ignoring this history, which also has variants in other western countries, including the UK, Kaufmann is able to provide an intellectual justification for the increasingly widespread idea that beleaguered white people, reconstituted as coherent communities, have as much of a right as other ‘identity-based’ groups to protect their interests.
Kaufmann’s context is Brexit and Trump’s anti-migrant wall-building project. However, the detachment of what are commonly called ‘open and honest debates’ about immigration from racism, for which ‘merely concerned citizens’ are seen as wrongfully blamed, has been a feature of anti-immigrationism dating back to the ‘gold rush’-era construction of the Asian ‘yellow peril’ in the US. A more recent example is the 2005 British Conservative Party’s publicity campaign, which asked, ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ under a pseudo-handwritten, lower-case: ‘it’s not racist to impose limits on immigration’. As Ben Pitcher correctly notes, the present-continuous ‘thinking’ is used knowingly in the place of the alternative ‘believing’ (Pitcher 2006). The billboard could not then be said to be an expression of a core party value. Rather, the message is that the party is in tune with the thoughts of the ordinary voter, who is a good person despite having doubts about the benefits of immigration. Over ten years later, the terms of ‘not racism’ have become more strident. While then there was a subtle granting of permission to be ‘thinking’ that the wish for more immigration controls was not racist, now there is open assertion that this is indeed so. Immigration has been successfully presented as ‘not racism’, and imposing restrictions on, indefinitely incarcerating, and deporting those who are labelled ‘illegal’ is just commonsense. Being anxious about immigration does not equate to being motivated by racism. Rather, the ‘racial self-interest’ of white identity politics is as rational as that of any other ethnic group. Given the centrality of white anxiety about immigration, not only to migration policy-making, but also to the manifestos of murderous white supremacists from Utøya to Christchurch, the blitheness with which the putative ‘not racism’ of anti-immigration is asserted is of concern.
Whiteness in ‘white identity politics’ is dislocated from its origins in the securing of racial supremacism over colonized and indigenized populations, obscuring the structures in which white people inherit the racially derived benefits denied to those racialized as non-white in Euro-American societies fuelled by the wealth of colonialism and slavery (Roediger 2019a). It negates the fact that whiteness was given meaning within racial regimes based on the theft of native lands and the enslavement of Black people. Whiteness itself is property, as noted in Chapter 1. It has intrinsic value as a quality that only white people can possess (Harris 1993; Moreton-Robinson 2015). The benefits that accrue as a result of being white come to be expected by white people, so that any threat to their status or their reputation is perceived as illegitimate, particularly when it comes from the racially subjugated. While Harris’s theorization of whiteness specifies the US context of Indigenous dispossession and African enslavement, the globalization of white supremacy across the settler colonies, through the imbrication of Europeanness in whiteness, and as reproduced in contemporary migration regimes, makes this a useful framework beyond the US. It explains the claim that those who espouse a white national ‘ethnotraditional’ identity feel justifiably anxious about sharing finite resources with both new and older migrants who are, to use C.L.R James’s formulation, in but not of the nation. Whiteness cannot be detached from its primary role of setting the boundaries of racial distinction and therefore it cannot be made to appear as just another among an array of ethno-cultures.
Whiteness cannot be detached from its primary role of setting the boundaries of racial distinction and made to appear as just another among an array of ethno-cultures.
To identify whiteness is to name racialized power. However, white people often hear this as a naming of themselves as individuals, rather than as beneficiaries of a system that they could contribute to dismantling for the benefit of everyone. That is why it is so common for white people to dislike being called white. Calling someone white is heard as akin to calling someone racist. To make this association is to be ‘anti-white’. And this ‘new racism’ is seen as dominant in a world where anxieties about white demographics reign. Demonstrating the extent to which there is discomfort about naming whiteness, in April 2019, the British Channel 4 newscaster Jon Snow was investigated by the UK’s communications regulator Ofcom for saying of a Brexit rally that he had ‘never seen so many white people in one place’ (BBC News 2019). The regulator received 2,644 complaints about his remark, which led to an official apology from Channel 4. These fears about the ‘last days of a white world’ grow with the increasing acceptability of the idea of ‘white genocide’ beyond the fringes of the extreme right wing from where they originate (Richmond and Charnley 2017).
The recalibration of white as one among a series of ethnic identities and ‘anti-white racism’ as a consequent possibility has antecedents in what Martin Barker called the ‘new racism’ in his book of the same name (Barker 1982). We can draw a line from Barker’s discussion of the adoption of the pseudoscientific ideas of ethology and sociobiology in the late 1970s by the anti-immigration British Conservative Party of Margaret Thatcher to the idea that what Kaufmann today calls ‘racial self-interest’ is not only rational but also natural. Migrants to Britain were deemed incompatible with what Kaufmann openly calls white Christian culture because its ‘bioculturalist’ view of the world synthesized ‘nature and culture, biology and history’ (Gilroy 2001: 33). Migrants, in this vision, have been uprooted from their purportedly organic homelands and replanted in an inhospitable and alien climate. To repatriate them not only benefits white people motivated by ‘racial self-interest’ but migrants themselves also. This version of events is core to the ‘great replacement’ theory cited by the Christchurch terrorist. In Kaufmann’s narration of legitimate white anxiety, biology plays a lesser role than psychology. Assimilation into what is portrayed as a superior white culture, whose ability to shift and accommodate difference is portrayed as its strength over others, takes the place of repatriation. But both the ‘new racism’ and Kaufmann’s ‘whiteshift’ theory treat racism similarly.
Tapping out a constant rhythm above these narratives of ‘not racism’ is the implantation of Islamophobia into mainstream political culture. The widespread acceptability that, because ‘Islam is not a race’, it is ‘not racist’ to question Islam and fear Muslims is crucial for understanding the widespread acceptability of figures such as Kaufmann, Goodhart, and Goodwin, whose study of national populism also couches it in terms of ‘not racism’ (Goodwin 2018). The mantra ‘Islam is not a race’ permits Islamophobia to flourish under the guise of concern for women and gay rights, and for a secularism rebranded as radical opposition to Islam and Muslims. The mushrooming of anti-Muslim racism under the guise of anticlericalism is a linchpin of the ‘new atheism’ movement. It is not immaterial that one of its central protagonists is Richard Dawkins, whose 1976 book The Selfish Gene was key to the theorization of sociobiology, an accelarated Social Darwinism of the post-war migration era which underpinned the ‘new racism’ and greatly influenced the political outlook of then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Dawkins 2016 [1976]). Kaufmann and Dawkins find a common home at Quillette, which Dawkins described as a ‘superb online magazine [that] stands up for the oppressed minority who value clarity, logic and objective truth’.6 It is more accurately a voicebox for white identity politics and racial pseudoscience wrapped in the fiction of ‘viewpoint diversity’.
In the next chapter, I argue that ‘not making it about race’ is an impetus on the left as much as on the right of politics. An underlying core belief unites those on both sides: that race is made to matter too much.