An article featured in the Observer of 16th April 2023 by the writer Tomiwa Osolade titled “Racism in Britain is not as a Black and White Issue. It is More Complicated than that” in which he highlighted a report on ethnic inequality in Britain which has found that Irish, Jewish, and Roma & Traveller people are amongst the most abused ethnic groups.
In response to the article veteran Labour MP and life long black antiracist campaigner Diane Abbott wrote to the Observer on 23rd April. She dismissed the hostile experiences faced by Jewish, Irish and Traveller people as mere “prejudice” as opposed to the racism faced by black people[1] Since in her account, no one from these groups had to sit at the back of the racially segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 where Rosa Parks had refused to sit, they could not claim to have been victims of racism (the not quite unspoken reason being of “white” skin pigmentation.)
To add insult to injury in the eyes of her detractors, Diane Abbott stated that the prejudice that Jews, travelling people and Irish now suffer was little more than that directed at people with ginger hair. This letter drew a storm of protest from Jewish groups especially and led to her suspension from the Parliamentary Labour Party. It has also generated considerable. discussion on how to reframe racism and the struggle against it.
Much of this comment and analysis has focused on the apparent cul-de-sacs that identity politics and critical race theory with its ideological “white privilege” immutability. In the first of two articles dealing with the issues raised by Ms Abbot’s letter, I wish to flesh out in these debates the historical construction of race as a social category and the problematisation of critical race theory.
Before engaging with the substantive issues around this topic, a few words about Diane Abbott’s personal story are in order. First elected to the House of Commons in 1987 as a pioneering Black MP (one of four Black and Asian MPs) she has a formidable reputation, preceding and post ceding her election, as a trail blazing antiracist campaigner and spokesperson. She has suffered more racist abuse (of particularly revolting kinds) and death threats, online and offline than any other MP. As a political ally (and former lover) of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and prominent member of the Socialist Campaign Group of left wing (many would say “hard left”) Labour MPs, she has been an outlier for much of her political career serving as a Public Health Minister in the last Labour Government under Gordon Brown and was elevated to Shadow Home Secretary under Corbyn’s leadership. Her strident advocacy of many left wing causes and media profile has attracted much criticism of the purely political kind. She also suffers from Type II diabetes which has arguably affected her judgement and cognition, most notoriously in a “car-crash” interview with Nick Ferrari on London Broadcasting Channel during the 2017 General Election campaign when she was unable to elaborate on her proposal to recruit 10,000 police officers should she had become Home Secretary.
But to return to her “prejudice v racism” letter, it has to be said that she has form when it comes to making, at the least, clumsy statements on race relations. In 1996, Ms Abbott wrote a column for the Hackney Gazette objecting to the recruitment of Finnish nurses to work in a local hospital. Her arguments for employing local people rather than those from abroad rested on the question of whether “Finnish girls, who may never have met a Black person before, let alone touched one, are best suited to nurse in multicultural Hackney.” She expressed her surprise that “blonde, blue-eyed girls from Finland” had been chosen rather than Caribbean nurses “who know the language and understand British culture and institutions” In the ensuing controversy, she was supported by fellow 1987 BAME entrant to Parliament Tottenham MP Bernie Grant who dismissively asserted that Scandinavians “don’t know black people – they probably don’t know how to take their temperature.”[2]
In the years that have passed since Diane Abbott penned that article and particularly since Brexit and the growing saliency and divisiveness of immigration as a political issue; it is hard not to spot the Faragian style xenophobia coated by antiracism in it. Here is a loudly professed antiracist making the argument that immigrants are un-British; that they do not understand British culture and institutions. The blue-eyed Finnish nurse of 1996 occupied the same position then in Diane Abbott’s conception of Britain as the “values” of those crossing the English channel in small boats deemed to be detrimental to “British values” and “cultural cohesion” are in that of the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, as he defends the Illegal Migration Bill put forward by his boss, Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, who puts a Trumpian stamp on that claim by asserting that they are given to “heightened levels of criminality” including “drug dealing, exploitation, prostitution”.[3]
Were Diane Abbott to revisit that article would she, as a trenchant critic of the anti-migrant tenor of many Brexiteer arguments, perhaps not recognise the uncomfortable resemblance of the latter to what she said in the former. As an offspring of the Windrush generation, she would surely have been aware of the hostility of many to being treated by Black and Asian medics. She must have heard of the notorious prohibition by many housing landlords in the 1960s: “No Blacks. No Irish. No Dogs.” Whither the difference between racism and prejudice?
The Fracturing of Antiracist Solidarity
Since the early 1980s, antiracist struggles have been transformed from the positive, universalist perspective of unity in common struggle which recognised that different groups such as Afro-Caribbeans, Jews and Irish had different experiences of racism and which was embedded in broader social justice and working class betterment movements to the dissipation of such solidarity into the silos of differing groups who through the dynamics of identitarianism[4] have been sucked into the negativity of zero-sum conflict of communal or tribal interests between one another.
Where once anti-racists saw their mission as combating racism, many now see it as confronting the dominance of “whiteness” which is seen as indistinguishable from racism. This preoccupation with whiteness lies in a sense of pessimism about overcoming racism – a pessimism which is articulated most by the celebrated contemporary African American essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates who in his book Between the World and Me writes mournfully that “The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment.”[5] This ‘eternal present’ vision of “whiteness”, “white power structures” or “white privilege is an outcome of the disintegration of radical struggles and the weakening of labour movements through the globalised hegemony of neo-liberalism which has also generated for racists and nationalists fears for the erasure of “whiteness” and the undoing of “western civilisation” concepts as interchangeable for them as it is for anti-racist pessimists.
To understand the current impasse in antiracist discourse and practice, it is necessary to engage with and question critical race theory and how it reifies identity politics. It is then necessary to deconstruct “whiteness” through revisiting how race and racism has been constructed throughout the history of the Western World by spurious science and philosophy. It is through the process of “othering” and/or in group/out-group formation that racism really develops as opposed to the formulation of essentialist concepts such as “whiteness.”
Critical Race Theory
Critical Race Theory (CRT) theorises and seeks to examine society and culture as they relate to categorisations of race, law, and power. CRT is loosely bound together by two common themes. Firstly, CRT proposes that white supremacy and racial power are maintained over time and that the law especially many be a major agent in this process. Secondly, CRT work has investigated the possibility of transforming the relationship between law and racial power. CRT is a product of postmodern philosophy, it derives from critical theory, a social philosophy that argues that social problems are influenced by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors.[6] In other words, CRT places much more emphasis on structural and institutional racism than on individualised and inter-personal forms of racism.
CRT began as a theoretical movement within American law schools in the mid- to late 1980s as a reworking of critical legal studies on race issues. Within the US legal world, CRT has stoked controversy since the 1980s on such issues as: its deviation from the idea of colour blindness; promotion of the use of narrative in legal studies; advocacy of “legal instrumentalism” as opposed to ideal-driven uses of the law; analysis of the US Constitution and existing law as constructed to and perpetuating racial power and encouragement of legal scholars to be partial on the side of promoting racial equality.[7]
Among the major themes in CRT work generally as identified by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic are the following:
🔴Critique of liberalism: CRT scholars advocate a race-conscious approach to transformation rejecting liberal embrace of affirmative action, colour blindness, role modelling or the merit principle.
Storytelling or the use of narrative to disseminate and explore experiences of racial persecution.
Revisionist interpretations of American civil rights law and progress. For example, CRT founders like Derrick Bell argued that civil rights advances for African Americans coincided with the interests of white elitists and Mary L. Dudziak asserted that US civil rights legislation was enacted to gain support for the USA from third world countries in the Cold War with the USSR.
🔴Intersectional theory. How the combination or intersection or race with class, sex, class, national origin plays out in various settings.
🔴White privilege: belief in the plethora of social advantages, benefits and courtesies that accrue from membership of the dominant white race. Examples may include not being followed round in stores as a potential thief by staff or not being avoided in the street at night. To which could be added the question “Where are you really from?”
🔴Microaggression: Belief that small acts or racism, whether consciously or unconsciously perpetrated, and which derive from prejudiced cultural heritage have the power to mar the daily experiences of oppressed individuals. Examples can include that question, unfavourable remarks about Afro hairstyles and the derogatory reference “You lot.”
🔴Structural determinism: exploration of how particular modes of thought or widely shared cultural practice are determinants of significant social outcomes, usually occurring without conscious knowledge. CRT theorists therefore posit that the prevailing system cannot redress certain kinds of wrongs.[8]
There are various sub-groupings within CRT which relate to intersectionality such as Critical Race Feminism (CRF), Hebrew Crit (HebCrit), Latino critical race studies, Asian American critical race studies (AsianCrit), South Asian American critical race studies (DesiCrit) and American Indian critical race studies (TribalCrit). CRT methodology and analytical framework have also been applied to the study of white immigrant groups.
For CRT believers, having white skin pigmentation is reified in property. Whiteness as property means in this account that whiteness is the ultimate property that whites alone can possess. The property functions of whiteness – i.e., rights to disposition; rights to use and enjoyment, reputation, and status property; and the absolute right to exclude – make the American dream more likely and achievable for whites as citizens.[9]
CRT: Defenders and Detractors in this Culture War Front
Since around 2010, CRT has moved from academia into mainstream cultural discourse. It has been popularised in the US by the ideas of Ibrahim X Kendi in How to be an AntiRacist (2019) and Robin DiAngelo in White Fragility (2018) and in the UK by Reni Eddo-Lodge in Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (2018).
The work of Kendi presents us with two interrelated dichotomies. Firstly, one can only be racist or antiracist. Secondly, one can either support the existence of disparities between races as right and natural or one can attribute them to racist power structures and policies in society and oppose them. He asserts that the” claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism … the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it – and then dismantle it.”[10]
Robin DiAngelo’s approach to racism is thoroughly postmodern. She believes that white people in the USA and much of Europe including the UK are unavoidably racist because of the ways in which they have been socialised in white supremacist countries. In White Fragility she describes whiteness as a “constellation of processes and practices” consisting of “basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all, but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people.” For Di Angelo, “whiteness” is a system that whites perpetuate with everything they do. Her central tenet of anti-racism is not ‘Did racism occur?’ but ‘How did racism manifest itself in that situation.’[11]
For Reni Eddo-Lodge ‘for so long the bar of racism has been set by the easily condemnable activity of white extremists and white nationalists.’ [12] Her refusal to talk about race to white people is not directed at all white people, ‘just the vast majority who refuse to accept the legitimacy of structural racism and its symptoms’ For ‘at best, white people have been taught not to mention that people of colour are “different” in case it offends us. They truly believe that the experiences of their life as a result of their skin colour can and should be universal.’[13]
CRT has attracted the ire of right-wing culture warriors on both side of the Atlantic especially in the wave of Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests that exploded across both after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. In the televised debates with Joe Biden prior to the Presidential Election of that year, Donald Trump claimed that critical theory is racist and teaches people that America is a horrible place. In a Presidential memo issued earlier that year which stated:
[A]ll agencies are directed to begin to identity all contracts or other agency spending relating to any training on “critical race theory”, “white privilege..” and that “employees across the Executive Branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that “virtually all White people contribute to racism”. The memo described CRT as “propaganda” five times, “divisive” five times, “unAmerican” twice and “anti-American” once. CRT is declared to be “contrary to all we stand for as Americans.”[14]
Defenders of CRT or, more accurately, the moral panic around it, claim that Republicans use it as a catch-all for any discussions of America’s past or present that have the potential to render their base uncomfortable.[15]
Throughout 2020-21, laws claiming to ban CRT from public school curriculums were passed in Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas and were advanced in Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, and West Virginia. Although palpably unconstitutional, these bills indicate an ominous desire on the American right to revoke speech protections and crush academic freedom,[16] line with the visibly growing authoritarian sentiment in populist, pseudo-democracies like Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Poland, and the Philippines. The wording of bans on the prohibition of “concepts” that “public schools shall not promote” such as “the belief that the United States is a meritocracy is an inherently racist or sexist belief” are so wide as to veto great terrains of discursive space.
In the UK, the moral panic about CRT was imported from the US of Donald Trump via right-wing commentators in the Spectator and Daily Telegraph. Despite scant evidence that CRT and associated concepts were and are widespread in British school curricula, it suddenly became a leitmotif for the government of the then Prime Minister Boris Johnston in the summer of 2020 with BLM protests over the George Floyd murder, the personal experiences by young black people of racism and the visible monuments to Britain’s imperial and slave trading past such as the Colston statue in Bristol. At the end of a six-hour debate in the House of Commons to mark Black History Month, the then equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, came down “unequivocally against” the CRT concept. She warned “We do not want to see teachers teaching their pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt.” She solemnly declared that “Any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.”[17]
The previous month, the Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden, warned museums of possible loss of public funding if they took down statues as a result of pressure from campaigners. The Department of Education informed schools in England that they were not to use materials produced by anti-capitalist groups or teach “victim narratives that are harmful to British society.” In his speech to the Conservative Party conference in October 2020, Boris Johnson accused Labour of being on the side of those who “want to pull statues down, to rewrite the history of our country … to make it look more politically correct.” [18]
Thus the controversy around CRT is less perhaps around its academic and discursive content and more as a symbol of the war against “woke”; a rallying cry against a liberal elite whose values are allegedly being foisted upon an unwilling population and who had prior to the December 2019 General Election has supposedly tried to thwart the will of the people as expressed in the Brexit referendum of June 2016 by frustrating the EU withdrawal process in Parliament and campaigning for a second referendum.
But to discuss CRT and its utility in relation to antiracism and wider anti-discrimination discourse and practice, it is necessary to examine and interrogate how race has been conceptualised and systemically formulated throughout history. This will be the subject of Part II of this series.
[1] Kenan Malik “Abbott’s letter shows how antiracism has been reduced to decrying ‘white privilege’ The Observer 30th April 2023.
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Kenan Malik “Beneath the skin of our submission with whiteness lie deeper fears about our place in the world” The Observer 7th August 2022.
[6] Wikipedia
[7] Ibid
[8] Wikipedia: Delgado, Richard and Stefancic, Jean (2012) Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. Critical America (2nd Edition) New York University Press pp.27-29
They also list:
🔴 Empathetic fallacy: The belief that one can change a narrative by offering an alternative in the hope of the listener’s empathy swiftly and reliably taking order. This hope is false, on their account, because since most people are not exposed to many people different from themselves and will therefore mostly seek out information about their own culture and group.
🔴 Essentialism: The reduction of the experience of a category (gender or race) to the experience of one sub-group (White women or African Americans).
🔴 Non-white cultural nationalism and separatism (including Black nationalism a la Louis Farrakhan’ s Nation of Islam): The exploration of more radical ideas that argue for separation and reparations as a form of foreign aid.
[9] Harris, Cheryl I. (June 1993). “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review. 106 (8): 1707-1791; Ladson-Billings, Gloria (January 1998). “Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? “. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. 11 (1): 7-24 From Wikipedia
[10] Helen Pluckstone (Ist October 2020) Is Critical Theory Racist? The Conversation
[11] Ibid
[12] Eddo-Lodge, Reni (2018) Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. P.66 London: Bloomsbury
[13] Ibid, p.ix
[14] Pluckrose, p.1
[15] Moira Donegan “What the Moral Panic about ‘Critical Race Theory’ is about” Guardian 17th June 2021
[16] Ibid
[17] Daniel Trilling. “Why is the UK Government Suddenly Targeting ‘Critical Race Theory’ Guardian 23rd October 2020
[18] Ibid
[9] Harris, Cheryl I. (June 1993). “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review. 106 (8): 1707-1791; Ladson-Billings, Gloria (January 1998). “Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? “. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. 11 (1): 7-24 From Wikipedia
[10] Helen Pluckstone (Ist October 2020) Is Critical Theory Racist? The Conversation
[11] Ibid
[12] Eddo-Lodge, Reni (2018) Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. P.66 London: Bloomsbury
[13] Ibid, p.ix
[14] Pluckrose, p.1
[15] Moira Donegan “What the Moral Panic about ‘Critical Race Theory’ is about” Guardian 17th June 2021
[16] Ibid
[17] Daniel Trilling. “Why is the UK Government Suddenly Targeting ‘Critical Race Theory’ Guardian 23rd October 2020
[18] Ibid
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
Barry,
ReplyDeletegood to see this piece going up. We had discussed it a few years ago. Maybe Kenan Malik's new tome inspired you?
A few discussion points:
- Considering Diane Abbott's letter to the Guardian was apparently a third and final draft, I think it can be concluded that she would still hold the same views she expressed in 1996. Remember, the period when she emerged as a Labour member was the period whenever the left began to move away from an egalitarian worldview to one of identity politics, funded (ironically) by the Thatcher government.
- CRT has also attracted plenty of left-wing criticism as well and for good reason as it’s an inversion of left-wing politics. Its divisive worldview encourages people to think of themselves as perpetual victims, even if the person comes from a background of wealth and privilege. And, as Jewish people have been finding out, they don't count in the intersectional hierarchy. Here, left wing anti-racism meets rabid right-wing racism: both view Jews as a substrata of society with money and prime jobs. But while the left wish to redistribute the wealth, the right want to exterminate them.
- ‘Why I’m No Longer…’ is the book that imported these American centric ideas to the UK. I read it at the same time as Douglas Murray’s ‘The Strange Death of Europe’. I couldn’t finish either of them as the tone was either shrill and hectoring or, in Murray’s case, smug and racist.
- In the UK, from what I can tell, CRT is broadly used to describe teachings around colonialism and slavery. Important subjects to discuss, but there is a fear among some that it is fostering division among kids as it tells them that Britain is irredeemably racist and that they are victims. If the subject is poorly taught, then I can believe kids will get that message. A good teacher, I hope, would encourage a broader view.
It most certainly did, Christopher. Thanks for the useful commentary.
DeleteBarry, if CRT can survive the probing that any idea must be open to then it will have a stronger claim to do what it says on the tin. It is not that woke ideas are necessarily wrong. What is often wrong is the intolerance of their holders to a different idea. Woke is a serious threat to ideational pluralism. As such it will draw to itself those whose egos simply cannot stand being disagreed with and whose first resort is to name call and smear.
ReplyDeleteAgreed, Anthony and Christopher.I have just read Tomiwa Owolade "This is not. America. Why Black Lives in Britain". Excellent critique of, among other things, the American centric nature of CRT which is hardly applicable in other African origin discursive formations.
ReplyDeleteCTR heads and the Diane Abbot's of this rock we live on need to understand that we are on this rock for ...three score and ten and some people have a better sun tan others....and when all is done and dusted we all eat, sleep and shit in the same positions ( tells me not only are we all the same but there is more to unite us than divide us)....
ReplyDeleteAs for me...as man once said..."Well some might call me a goodtime fella, I ain't black and I ain't yella, Just a white boy lookin' for a place to do my thing".....
Barry,
ReplyDeleteSeems fearless Jess is being called a bully and a racistand she isn't a fan of Ike Turners music...
Mean while in France the police are still as racist today as the were when I penned my first TPQ piece ****. ...I mentioned about what I seen on the streets of the leafy suburbs in 2005 . I also wrote about how in 1961 were beaten, rounded up en masse and murdered by French police officers who had been assured they would be protected from prosecution.
****Barry read the article, my style of writing hasn't changed. The music i listen to hasn't changed. How I look at life hasn't changed and neither has my view on politics....
Jess never mentioned race and it's rich for Headmistress to play the race card as she recently attended the Nuremberg Rally or the culture war hate fest that was the National Conservative rally and has never promoted antiracist teaching
ReplyDeleteAnd in case you didn't know Ike Turner was a monstrous wife beater and Jess is Shadow Safeguarding Minister. Hope she sues the backside of Headmistress and Keir tells her to go take a running jump.
ReplyDeleteBarry,
ReplyDeleteAnd in case you didn't know Ike Turner was a monstrous wife beater and Jess is Shadow Safeguarding Minister
Tell the world something new Sherlock. Now Katharine Birbalsingh who has never attended anything closely resembling a Nuremburg rally tweeted a picture of Tina Turner and in the background there was Ike and Fearless being the plank she is tweeted "hold the line!", adding: "Stay with me! Domestic abuse is never ok and we will defeat those who prop up the status quo…"
So the question that has to be asked is.....Fearless is chilling at home enjoying a beer, toking on a number listening to a classic radio station and 'River Deep Mountain High' or 'Proud Mary' by Ike & Tina is played....Do you think Fearless presses mute, phones the radio and gives them the Alf Garnett about Ike or she taps her feet and sings-a-long?
You like to talk about liberal democracies and how much you like the EU. Whats your thoughts about the UN asking Napoleon "Whats the deal with your police force.......Frankie called them out in 2014 on TPQ about what he seen first hand in 2005 when he was living in the leafy suburbs...." And Macron gives the UN the same response as Israel give the UN....( mind you own business<-----also the title of a classic Hank Williams song)
I condemn the behaviour of police forces in France towards the young people of the banlieue just as I do the institutional racism of many police forces in the US and the Mets in London.
ReplyDelete