Welcome to the latest edition. Apologies for the 24hr delay. Substack were doing some form of check up.
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How Anti-Racism can be Racist.
Racism, we all know, is a slippery topic. No one admits to it. However it is not just the low-level gruff assertion ‘I am not a racist’ that convinces interrogators that the defendant is indeed being wilfully blind, but also that people who think deeply about the topic – who’ve read Robin d’Angelo’s ‘White fragility’ – can also be holding ideas that create misunderstandings about how ‘race’ operates, and therefore consolidate rather than ease racial disadvantage.
So here are four ways in which anti-racists can be racist.
1. Not recognising pre-migration history.
There are two false ideas that combine to create mis-readings of the state of multi-ethic Britain: a) that immigrants to this country arrive as tabula rasa – blank slates with no pre-existing features that would make them distinct from the generality of the British population; b) that therefore all ethnic groups are, or at least ought to be, virtually identical and interchangeable.
The result is that any disparities in terms of minority ethnic groups being disadvantaged is seen as de facto the result of racism in the system. Curiously the obverse, that in some areas such as Cabinet membership or professional football, where some minorities perform well above the national average does not seem to register.
All this reflects a racist assumption that the cultures and backgrounds from which minority communities have migrated has no significance or value. But very clearly how ethnic groups perform in this country maps closely the nature of the original immigrant cohort. Groups that arrived in the fifties and sixties, very often from poor rural communities, to plug the gaps in the unskilled, low-paid end of the British labour market – notably from Jamaica, Mirpur in Pakistan and Sylhet in Bangladesh – continue to be amongst the most disadvantaged in Britain today. Conversely, groups that came for reasons of business or study, or especially who were forced into exile because of their very success in the countries they came from (notably East African Asians, and to some degree Sri Lankan Tamils) have tended to thrive also in this country. This is not to say we should be negligent or unconcerned about improving the conditions or opportunities of struggling minorities; it is to say that we need greater realism about the causes of disparity.
For example, the autobiographical recollections of Ram Gidoomal in ‘Sari ‘n’ Chips’ (1993) depicts the common riches-to-rags-to riches experience of many South Asians who had to flee East Africa in the early 1970s. Gidoomal also illustrates the deep-seated continuity of cultural traits: “Most of my business knowledge has not been acquired formally; it was something I picked up from my father at the dinner table. I watched him, heard him and took in the business skills he demonstrated” (p 108). Other backgrounds, including my own, don’t easily develop that sort of capacity. Joseph Henrich’s ‘The Weirdest People in the World’ confirms the resilience of cultural patterns in persisting on beyond the migration process. In a section on ‘The Children of Immigrants’ (pp 243-244), using his benchmark characteristics of strongly based kinship societies (namely ‘more conformist-obedient, less individualistic-independent, and less inclined to trust or expect fair treatment from strangers’), Henrich reports the evidence of a cross-European survey that for the children of immigrants who grew up in Europe the continuities ‘remain strong even after we statistically accounted for differences in income, education, religious denomination, religiosity, and even people’s personal experience of discrimination’.
Such differences play out in a variety of ways that often go unnoticed. Whilst Indian diasporas have become involved in local politics, providing high profile leaders in the USA and especially Britain, diasporic Chinese communities have always had a low political profile, focussing especially on business. Expectations that ethnic groups should produce fairly identical profiles across a whole range of activities simply fail to account for deep-seated, continuing behavioral differences.
Consequently, highlighting disparities of outcome may present itself as an anti-racist claim for social justice; in reality it may well be a rather arrogant, indeed racist, discounting of the continuities of people’s inherited culture and ways of being.
2. Not recognising diversity within ethnic groups.
No English person would ever dream of seeing their fellow English as one undifferentiated, homogenous whole. We are instinctively aware of a wide range of variable factors, most notably social class, but also age, region, education, religion, or gender that affect how we understand each other. Yet so often with people from ethnic minorities we abandon common sense and see only their ethnicity as being significant. Even worse, we homogenise all the variant ethnicities in our society under the shapeless category of ‘BAME’, or the even uglier UKME/GMH.
This failure to give respect to individuals in all their wide-ranging diversity leads on to two serious failures of judgement. Firstly, it leads to shallow and careless choices along the lines that ‘we must appoint a BAME/UKME.GMH/person of colour’ to this post, in order to advertise our inclusivity, with too little attention to their suitability. Early on in our multi-ethnic society, as writers such as Faroukh Dhondy have acknowledged, middle-class member of ethnic minorities realised white establishment innocence meant that doors were open for them into ‘representative’ appointments where ethnicity was key, as long as the applicant could disguise the privileged background that differentiated them from most people of their ethnicity.
More broadly, the black economist and sociologist Thomas Sowell how policies for ethnic quotas have not benefitted the entire ethnic group but rather the better educated minority within that cohort (‘Preferential Policies: An International Perspective’ 1990). No one would dream that as a middle-class Londoner I would fit well as vicar on a very largely white housing estate on the edge of Newcastle simply because I was white. Yet white establishments consistently make those sorts of mistakes. The losers are the bulk of working class minority ethnic people who remain under-represented.
The second failure is to not recognise diversity of opinion within ethnic groups. Long experience in multi-ethnic communities has given me memories of the repeated appearance of a succession of ‘black spokespeople’ who burst on the scene, have their short spell of glory, and then disappear, whilst the situation continues unchanged. Again, there has never been a ‘white spokesperson’ (not even Nigel Farage): why are we naïve enough to anoint ‘black spokespeople’?
The tendency to believe there is only one black/minority ethnic voice that is ‘authentic’ and to which white people should only pay attention to is particularly misleading in the recent period when race has been receiving so much attention. It has come to the fore in the recent controversy over the Government’s Sewell Report, where following its immediate rubbishing by the Runnymede Trust there was a rush by liberal white opinion to damn it without close attention to its contents. The imbalance is possibly furthered by how information coming from the United States is simplified, so that it is the progressive voices – at a popular level of Black Lives Matter, at an academic level writers such as Ibram X Kendy or Cornel West – that are heard, with black conservatives such as Glenn Lowrie or Thomas Sowell largely neglected.
Conservatism amongst ethnic minorities is too easily discounted, and often dismissed as ‘false consciousness’, as the docile reception of the values of white authority. For example, after the shock of Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016 false consciousness was essentially the reason given by Chimsmanda Ngozi Adichie, a writer from an elite Nigerian background, for black and Latino people voting for Trump. (Even more were to do so in 2020). She gave no thought to considering that these voters had independent good reason to vote Trump from within their own terms: ethical commitment to a Supreme Court opposed to abortion, or small businessmen and shop-owners attracted by promises of decreased regulation.
Popularly, dismissive phrases such as ‘coconut’ or ‘banana’ (black or yellow on the outside, white on the inside) too easily reflect a limiting assumption that there is such a thing as authentic blackness/yellowness, thereby inhibiting the free and unbounded self-expression of people from ethnic minorities. To assume that minority ethnic people are not able to authentically have the same range of outlook and opinion available to them as white people is racism.
3. Undermining black agency.
‘Soft racism’ is the racism that unconsciously limits the level of expectation that we have of minority ethnic, especially black people, and so devalues their agency. In situations where minority ethnic people are not thriving it fails to consider alternatives which go against prevailing progressive opinion. Education is perhaps the primary but not the only focus, but it is part of a matrix where we need to consider how far approaches which are workable for wealthy and educated (and therefore very largely) white people are disastrous when imposed on very different contexts.
Thus, if a successful, professional woman age 37 decides she would like to be a mother, but without the irritating, permanent entanglement of having the father around, then single motherhood can work. She can afford the highest quality childcare. She may well have childless friends or relatives only too happy to share some of the responsibility. For an 18 year old on the sixth floor of a tower block the result of single motherhood can too often be misery. Collecting her child from nursery at the end of a demanding working day, her leisure is largely taken up with caring for a small child without easy access to outside space. She may have a network of friends who are similarly situated, but there will still be little release from the relentless pressure. Society is casual about the vicious cycle created.
Likewise for a young man in a highly paid, demanding job the use of drugs at the weekend may well provide a welcome rhythm and release from weekday intensity. For a young man who is unemployed and with little to offer on the job market, the same dugs become the controlling and dominating factor of his life. Society is casual about the vicious cycle created
So too with education. In homes where parents have the residual energy to impose clear boundaries, where attention is given to informal learning and children are developing a sense of potential, then a school regime that is not too intense allows the children to learn. In backgrounds where boundaries have been uncertain or unpredictable but authority at times fierce, children can struggle to make progress if school life lacks clear boundaries, sanctions and expectations. Consequently the low levels of basic literacy and numeracy that is still too common in schools has been countered, effectively, by schools which deliberately set higher standards behaviour and expectations of achievement. It is no accident that such schools, with the Michaela Academy in Wembley as the most marked, are seeing substantial numbers of children achieving strong academic success. But overall we too readily accept black under-performance, and too slow to develop higher expectations.
To fail to scrutinise national policies or acceptable behavioural patterns which have the effect of reducing black agency or progress is racist
4. Wanting to be Virtuous.
In ‘The Status Game’ Will Self writes of three ways in which people can seek to gain good social standing – by physical dominance, success or virtue. Physical dominance is increasingly ruled out in most (though not all) areas of our society, success is by its very nature restricted and rationed, which leaves virtue (or virtue seeking) as a major route to giving a good account of ourselves. Further, our growing emphasis on the importance of identity and therefore the rise of aggrieved or mis-treated, identity groups provides rich opportunities for people to up their virtue scores, notably by supporting the causes of women, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, the disabled, the poor and so on – very often with little awareness that the injustices experienced have very different causes. (The category confusion in the too common and too easy conflation of gender and race issues in particular needs further serious consideration; and underlies a sloppy understanding of ‘inclusion’).
The outcome is to set up an opposition to between ‘full slate’ progressives, feeling bound to take up the cause of all identity groups, and conservatives suspicious of all such ‘minority’ groups (though women are 50%+ of the population). The outcome we now refer to as ‘culture wars’. The danger of such across-the-board polarisation is that each case ceases to be judged on its merits, but simply seen as one particular front in a war where quarter is not to be given at any place in the battle.
There is a particular danger here for Christians to be too eager to place themselves on what is seen as the side of the angels, when that is a possibility that only angels have. For human beings the lines are drawn much more messily; again the current women vs trans debate indicates that full-on virtue seekers simply can not at some point avoid being on a side that some see as un-virtuous. If we are rightly conscious of being Christ’s ambassadors and, in Paul’s words to Titus, are ‘eager to do what is good’ (2:12), then we can short-circuit and too easily take what is seen to be the virtuous side. Particularly when it is the case that Christians have neglected an important ethical issue, as is certainly the case with ‘race’, then there is a risk of trying to compensate by quickly taking up what seems to be a strongly moral position. If that is mixed in with an equally strong sense of white guilt, then that may have an extra appeal to Christians who rightly recognise the positive role of guilt, but may nonetheless be embracing it too readily.
Whilst the record of white guilt, including the church’s record, is undeniable, feeling virtuously guilty may not necessarily lead the best assessment of what is right and just at the present time. As mentioned above, there is no unanimity about how the present situation concerning race in Britain, or the USA, is to be depicted and assessed. The fact that the strongly critical radical or progressive voice levels the more guilty verdict on white people is of itself no indication as to whether or not it is the most perceptive.
As my support for the Sewell Report over against Runnymede criticisms indicates, I believe the more ‘conservative’ voice describes the situation better, and therefore offers more constructive ways ahead. If our common concern is rightly for racial justice, and especially for the well-being of the poorest and least powerful, then there needs to be thoughtful consideration of how that is best served. Several black conservatives in the USA would argue that policies intended to increase black well-being have had negative consequences, particularly in weakening family cohesion and paternal responsibility. That argument needs at least serious consideration before we jump to moral conclusions. Giving the wrong answers for what seem the right reasons brings harm not blessing to people.
It is racist to support policies which make us feel virtuous or guilty but in reality do not work for the good of the minority ethnic poor.
None of the above is to suggest that we should overlook the straightforward racism that limits minority ethnic progress in the workplace, or the long term damage of casual racism. But it is to warn that the glib acceptance of anti-racist assumptions can at times lead to results which damage ethnic minorities, especially the poor.
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Video of the Week
How to be an Antiracist - Ibram X Kendi - The Aspen Institute.
Kendi is probably the most high-profile and influential progressive black academic. This video gives you a good opportunity to consider his views (or his book of the same name).