Racism - why is it still here?
Thirty years ago, many of us were convinced it’d be gone by now. We assumed it would just vanish, just like using tracing paper for toilet roll stopped being a thing. It was, after all, dumb. Nothing but an archaic irrationality. And for the Nineties, perhaps even after, things did seem to be going that way.
If we thought at all of how this was happening, we’d do what people normally do - run to the interpretation that put us in the best light. Our parent’s generation had been so much more racist than us. So surely we were just smarter and nicer. The ‘good people’ gene had concentrated in one generation. So we developed such tropes as your racist uncle discovering Facebook.
As ever, it was nothing to do with anything like that and was actually something material. My parents generation lived in white neighbourhoods, from where they went to work in white offices. They’d have at most service encounters with people from other races. But for us, life slowly changed. For us black and Asian people were not strangely other beings, they were workmates and neighbours. When our experience of them was so different, why would our response to them stay the same?
And while we might find it less flattering, this is actually better. Our response to racism didn’t really come from self-image (“I’m too nice for that”) but something more innate. Our parents’ response to protests such as this would have been “see how they’re stirring up trouble again after we’ve permitted them to live here”. Ours isn’t “time to state the sort of person I am”. Ours is “Black lives matter? Well, duh.”
Better. But not enough…
Think of the that first day at the new job where you shook hands with your new black co-worker. We thought this was all happening because of us, because we were such progressive, forward-thinking, inclusive folks. While they thought they were there because of them. And they were right.
What seemed to us to be a natural part of evolution, like the giraffe gradually getting a long neck, didn’t seem that way from the other side. It had come about by struggle. Sometimes this was co-ordinated, collective acts, challenging and overcoming the ‘whites only’ basis of workplaces and occupations. At other times it was more individualised, having to mount hurdles which to you and me had been open doors.
Which isn’t to say black people are always going to get everything right, or even all think the same in the first place. (I cringe now at all those punk lyrics which once seemed so right-on; “black man’s got his problems and his ways to deal with it”. Phew, that’s a relief!) It’s to say different material conditions will normally lead to different understandings.
It was hard for them to forget something which was hard for us to learn. Racism isn’t banished by spouting feelgood slogans, diversity training or asinine songs. Racism is political. So anti-racism has to be political too.
Even today, I don’t think many understand what institutional racism is. If something like the police force is racist (which it obviously is), the assumption is that the institution contains a threshold amount of racists. It’s like the only argument there can be is about “bad apples,” and how many bad apples there are. One side says it’s so few there’s no real need to worry. The other is concerned it might even be a whole branch or something.
But institutional racism means that the institution is racist, and the private thoughts and intentions of those who make it up are an irrelevance to that. This is why sop tactics such as better training or more black recruitment never go anywhere, because they’re failing to appreciate what the problem really is. And just think about it. How many times have you heard that stuff proposed? Ever heard of a time when it was working?
(And this is why the media fixation on accounting racist statues is so misplaced. The presumption is again about bad apples, outing the bad apples of the past. Yet Colonial Britain didn’t just throw up the odd racist, it was racist. And this is obvious. How could it have not been racist and done what it did?)
To ask why racism is still here, to ask why it’s getting worse, you have to ask what it is for.
The rest of the Western world has tended to see American exceptionalism the other way up to its official spokespeople. Things there were exceptionally bad. How come they didn’t have a proper health service or a social safety net? We could afford it, and they were a richer country. How come their society was so racist, particularly when they were an immigrant nation that styled itself as the land of opportunity? And how come its policing was so blatantly oppressive? Those three perplexing things, put them together and they make perfect sense.
Racism isn’t a twat in a pub trying to tell you a stupid joke, however annoying that twats is. Racism is a mechanism employed by the haves to divide the have nots. And the greater the divide between the have and have nots, the more the have nots need dividing between themselves. Donald Trump tweets his racist tweets so he can carry on sitting on his gold toilet.
Many of the civil rights campaigners later turned into poster boys for corporate anti-racism, such as Martin Luther King, said this time and again. Its not the part yuppies use for motivational quotes beneath their e-mail signatures, but they said it often enough.
And as Britain became more neoliberal, became more and more like America, policing had to become more oppressive and racism had to be stoked up. Complain of the swingeing austerity cuts and they’d counter with the mantra about money “leaving the country” for foreign aid. Foreign aid is a fixed amount of GDP, which had neither gone up nor down. It had nothing to do with why your local library or day centre was closing. It was there as a fall guy. Bad stuff? Blame it on the foreigners.
But then came the twist.
In 1979 Thatcher made some barely coded remarks about indigenous Englanders being “swamped by an alien culture”. This worked, many tempted to the far right flocked back to her and she won her first election. And so her successors imagined they could pull that trick forevermore, that their hand was on the spigot that allowed them to pour out just enough race hate for them to channel and control. Instead they’ve unleashed a tiger.
Since then the forces against us aren’t divided so much as riven, between those who think it’s gone so out of control it’s time to shoot the tiger, and those who still think they can ride it. In both Britain and America, the governing party was taken over by its extremist wing.
And then came the flip.
Black Lives Matter protests had their impetus in grassroots black anger. They sprang up too quickly, too far and wide for any central committee to be behind them. Rather than the clone armies of the Trot sects, signs were all hand-made. When John Boyega spoke to the crowd, star of one of the top-grossing films of modern times, he didn’t even have a rudimentary platform to stand on. And they saw racism the way those who suffer racism will. The idea that this was a political protest was baked in from the start.
But from there the attendees quickly diversified. In America, veteran Civil Rights leaders have expressed surprise how wide-ranging they are. And when you hear a Black Lives Matter protest in Inverness got called off for fear of too high numbers, something’s going on. White folks are, to be clear, joining the protests because they’re anti-racist. But not just because of that. It’s become a lightning rod for a general storm. People have realised, on some level, that if we let them divide us by race we’ll be letting them divide us. Racism, the hornet’s nest stirred up to keep us apart, is the very thing now bringing us together.
What happens next is less clear. But it’s likely to vary between there and here. In America the first and over-riding response was a display of naked force. But responding to anti-racism and policebrutality protests with racism and police brutality didn’t prove smart. Tear gas, truncheons and rubber bullets dispersed crowds in the immediate sense, but stiffened resolve.
Here the Met unsurprisingly responded with aggressive policing, kettling protesters and demanding names and addresses from people. But that’s more exception than rule. In Bristol they stood by as that slaver statue went for a swim, confident they could make some arrests later at a more convenient time for them.
Overall the plan has been to try and corral everyone back into the official, ’common sense’ version of anti-racism. Emphasise the wrongness of events in America to de-emphasise the links to what happens here. Use the old inadequate definition of racism as mere personal prejudice. Insist people go down “proper channels” if they don’t like stop-and-search or statues to slavers, full in the knowledge those channels exist to get us lost in them, not give us what we want. Make a few platitudinous public statements, take a knee for the press and anyone not satisfied with that is clearly outing themselves as a trouble maker.
In America, given that response, the campaign quickly moved on to calls to dissolve, defund or in other ways corral the cops. If they can’t be reformed they need to be removed, if they can’t be removed at least reduced. Here it’s been common to lump the cops in with other ‘services’, as we opposed austerity cuts. (Which some of us warned against at the time!) Are we going to start chanting “defund the police” when so many were calling for more funding just last week?
So will this stealthier approach work for them? Let’s hope not, but it might well do. Permitting protests is just as much a tactic as assaulting them, perhaps a more effective one because it looks less like a tactic. Worryingly, things already seem to be slipping into a well-meaning but vaguely generalised debate over which old ‘Fawlty Towers’ episodes to show, as if racism is just some unfortunate hangover from the past.
Soft power can be smarter, because it doesn’t look like power at all.
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