Race Identity and Belonging

CONTENTS
Introduction: Race and Racialisation in Neo-liberal Times George Shire Rethinking Segregation Bilkis Malek Mans The Talk on Road: A Dialogue with Young Black People on their Experiences of Gun Crime Ejos Ubiribo Melancholia or Conviviality: The Politics of Belonging in Britain Paul Gilroy Last Orders for the English Aborigine Patrick Wright Fear of Difference/ Fear of Sameness: the Road to Conviviality Roshi Naidoo A Defence of Multiculturalism Tariq Modood Identity for Identitys Sake is a Bit Dodgy Zygmunt Bauman Racism, Cosmopolitanism and Contemporary Politics of Belonging Nira Yuval-Davis My Jihad: A Personal Reflection Amir Saeed Institutions and Racism: Equality in the Workplace Farhad Dalal Notes on Contributors
7 19
31
48 60
72 82 92
101 114 123 141
Introduction
Race and racialisation in neo-liberal times
George Shire
The essays in this book all have a history. They are pieces of work triggered off by different events, issues and concerns, with different things to say about the moment we are now in. I would argue that that moment is characterised by the insistence, by Britain and the United States in particular, on a variant of neoliberalism in which the idea of equality has disappeared from the lexicon; and it is also characterised by the way in which the salient of race or racialisation marks the discussion in particular ways. Racism is not what it used to be, and ideas of race, and racisms and anti-racisms, are in constant motion. Some of these essays help us to see how these ideas have functioned in the moment of neoliberalism, both internationally and locally. They point to the need for critical readings of our time; and they contribute to a greater understanding of the ways in which the white axis of power operates. They address some of the ways it transforms and reforms social relations through racial categories and consciousness, by calling attention to the particularities of racialisations as they mutate and take on new ground. Race today is inflected in substantively different ways from what was going on fifteen or twenty years ago, and the hierarchy of race is delivered in different forms. This is true at the national and local level as well as globally. Within a neoliberal framework people are seen as individualised, atomised, disconnected. Thus, for example, the meaning that equality had in social democratic left discourse has been replaced by the notion of inclusion and exclusion, and it is framed as a question about individuals. Liberal individualism provides the underpinning for a legalistic understanding of racism, as a transgression of rights to which a person is entitled. However this juridical approach is unable

Race, identity and belonging
to transcend its own complicity in the production and reproduction of racism. Racism is seen as individual pathology rather than as something that is socially produced or can be socially addressed. The equality discourse we had in the 1970s (which of course had its own problems) no longer exists. Whiteness circulates as an axis of power and identity around the world: there are specific local and national arenas in which racial power is formed, but there is also a racialised power across the global alliances that are currently emerging. Some of these essays speak to the interconnected nature of those systems and that power. Its not just a question of dealing with local English or British racisms. One wants to think about them in relation to the international.
Postcoloniality and living with difference I tend to think about these issues in a global as well as local context. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is to say a bit about my own formation and biography. I spent my childhood in a country which no longer exists - the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. This was a very particular formation; it was a racial dictatorship of settlers, established by the British government in 1953.1 There was growing hostility to apartheid in South Africa at that time, but there was little realisation in the British labour movement that policies with an exactly similar tendency were being pursued in these territories, which were the direct responsibility of the British electorate, disguised under the title of the Central African Federation. y grandfather worked as a cargo carrier for white missionaries and settlers in the system of forced labour known as chibaro in the early 1920s. This was still frontier country in those days, and the settlers forced people to work without pay to build their houses, roads and railways. My grandfather was from a generation that had been engaged in traditional subsistence farming. His parents had been killed in the first war of liberation in 1896. The settlers not only drove them off their land but confiscated their herd of cattle. My father worked as a garden boy, attended evening classes set up by Sir Garfield Todd and became a local school teacher. He would later emigrate to Britain in the early
1. The Federation, set up as a federated realm of the crown, consisted of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Nyasaland (now Malawi).
Introduction
1960s, but he first saw and smelled modernity as a garden boy and a cleaner, reading magazines and missionary catalogues left lying around by his employers. When he landed on a boat at Southampton from Cape Town he could not understand why everybody kept on calling him that coloured from Southern Rhodesia. Within this racial dictatorship, the choices that I could make - or that my family could make for me - were determined by the practical every day business of getting by - for example by issues such as whether or not I would be available to look after the cattle, and the amount of time left in between those key functions of the organisation of the family to go to school. The only schools that I could go to were the schools that were provided by missionaries. To get into these schools you had to have a baptismal certificate - not a birth certificate - the first regulative document I ever had was the baptismal certificate. And you learned to dance to the tune, to know the bible - otherwise you wouldnt get into school. It wasnt a place to say that you didnt believe in Jesus Christ, because if you said that you didnt go to school. As well as a colonially adapted form of the English school curriculum, we had to follow a compulsory course in how to become a garden boy, a chef, and a good servant - the vocational route for Africans. Learning about African music, paintings and drawings was considered heathen and forbidden. So there were these local ways in which my life was regulated by the everyday. Of course there were things going on at the macro level - the land being taken away, access being denied to productive parts of the country and the city - but there were also these regulative systems in place in the minute day-to-day aspects of our lives, whether it was making a choice about going down one street rather than another, or living in one part of the country or another. olonisation works in and through its regulative stance, on the ground, in peoples daily lives. And it is also there in the literatures that are made available, the images that are circulating. The photography, the films, the sounds, and the narratives in my Victorian schoolbooks, all had a regulative function. This is the world in which I came into being. Growing up in such a place left me with only one choice - to get out and start the process of decolonising my mind through an involvement in the war of liberation and discovering the pleasures of educating myself. Although my experience is particular, similar coercive and regulative processes provided the context for people growing up across the colonial and neo-colonial world. For us it is not a simple question of learning to live with difference. Living with difference is one thing, but the
project of decolonisation is another. Some people misunderstand living with difference to mean that you can simply give up yesterday and just start happily living together. There is a vogue for living with difference that operates at that level - just moving on. I want pluralism in a much more real sense. Before I can even choose whether I like Bourdieu or not, I am still dealing with something that came to me early on in life. So I want to lock living with difference and postcolonialism together. They have to enter into conversation with one another. It was only after I arrived in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s, drifting from one sort of colonial subjectivity to another, that I discovered that I was incomplete and that I was irreversibly contaminated by this place. I had to find a way to live with this place. That has been my understanding of what is meant by the struggle to live with difference. hen you frame multiculturalism and the question of living with difference in an international context, it becomes a question about sanitation, health, education - things that are part of peoples daily lives. And if you place the idea of nation into the heart of all that, different issues come to mind. I am interested in thinking about the cosmopolitan from the perspective of the global south. And this is the point at which questions of distribution enter the debate, and the need for new kinds of state.
Black and white bodies Something that has disturbed me particularly in the current clash of civilisations wars is the persistence of racial terror, and the continuing confluence, though expressed in changing inflections, between the whiteness of power and neoliberalism. One sees the questions of postcoloniality returning though in a different way. In the age of the post, those older questions from colonial times reconstitute themselves in the present. Some of the gestures and remarks in the work in this collection enable us to think about those two questions - how to live with difference, and the question of postcoloniality (though, as we shall see later, these questions are not the same as each other). One thing we can see on the international scene is the return of the dark body. One can see a direct line from the lynchings of black men in the American South to Abu Ghraib. In the circulation of the images from Abu Ghraib you can see that preoccupation with the dark body - abused, sexualised, degraded. And
10
Introduction
it can be seen in the escalation of racist attacks against Muslims, the nightly television depictions of civil war in Iraq, the riots and civil disorders in France as alienated African and Arab youth make visible their anger, and the many bodies of dead black young men found on the beaches of Sicily, young people who have died trying to cross the Mediterranean in search of a better life. The images of abuse violently focus attention on what is perhaps the biggest question for the twenty-first century - facing up to the difficulty of living with difference and the poverty crippling the majority peoples of the world. The vocabulary of racialisation is a mobile resource - its effectiveness can extend beyond the pigment of the body in question. If you look at recent discussions about immigration, for example, although the bodies under discussion are not black, the underpinning of that discussion, the alien wedge notion, is still there - the notion of being invaded by hordes of people coming over here to rip us off and swamp us. One of the older ways of putting the alien wedge notion into play was to go for skin colour - it was a way of holding that image together. This has not completely disappeared. In the images that people think with, the past returns quietly, but without necessarily being pitched in exactly the same way. In the post the skin colour question has shifted. Something else sometimes comes to occupy that space. It doesnt work in exactly the same way, but you can see the thread. Its echo is still registered. The Kosovans or the Albanians or Moroccans or Muslims have come to occupy the same terrain that some of us used to occupy in an earlier period. Thus there has been a return to a kind of Powellism in the British social cultural and political landscape, but with a twist. he notion of intersectionality is useful here. It helps us to think about the commonalities and differences between various socially constructed categories of people, and allows analysis of the ways in which categories of difference intersect in social practices, institutions and cultural discourses. Old notions work with new circumstances to give them particular kinds of meaning. Some of the essays in this collection give insights into the different ways through which race and racialisation is increasingly returning to the agenda, and becoming normative in the description of what is going on in the political scene in Britain. The question of skin colour is an interesting one. The constant fascination with the figure of Princess Diana is a case in point. In the media commentary on
11
Tony Blairs resignation as prime minister in May 2007, there was constant reference back to his Diana as peoples princess speech. How does sense get made of this, and how does it relate to his presentation, in his farewell speech, of Britain as a great country - something that he knows we all feel, deep down inside?2 ianas allure has to do with a particular figuring of whiteness, which is very different, for example, from the way Sarah Ferguson - the redhead - was represented and read. The circulation and representation of that body - with its whiteness, paleness, beauty, femininity, purity - is completely distinct from, say, images of post-soviet Eastern European whiteness. There is a yearning for particular white bodies in the visual, the scopic; it somehow makes connections to all those older countries. And it goes beyond questions of Englishness: Englishness functions here as a kind of supra-language. Theres a twinning of Englishness and whiteness - and whiteness in particular forms of representation - which is about more than skin colour. And the post-soviet world is outside that bodyscape. This new inflection has allowed old forms of whiteness to continue to haunt us. It allows us to not recognise Polish bodies - or Irish bodies - as white bodies. They are outside, they can be seen as a kind of white trash. Thinking about whiteness as a category of this kind helps us to understand some of the racialisation processes that take place in our perceptions of the post-soviet world. It enables us to see how migrants from Eastern Europe, by the time they reach Sangatte, are already black. What is it that works people into these kinds of narrative? There is something about white bodies, and the yearning for them, that is connected to the axis of power. This is much more than a question of discrimination. Liberalism is technically anti-discriminatory, but it is plugged into the whiteness of the privilege of power. Whiteness - particular forms of whiteness - can be seen as a signal of proximity to power. More than two and a half millennia of the domination of the world by Europeans (and latterly the United States) could hardly fail to produce racism. And it is important to understand the crucial role of whiteness in that domination: it goes some way to explain the alliances that are produced around
2. The British are special. The world knows it. In our innermost thoughts we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth, Tony Blair, Sedgefield, 10 May 2007. 12
Introduction
Iraq, for example. Its power is institutionalised, and racism is institutionalised, on the global stage. The unipolar world, dominated by todays heirs to the succession - Europe and the United States - continues to circulate and bring together particular configurations of identity and power, and to produce racism. Part of the process of understanding this is to identify the different ways in which it works locally and in different geographies. The look of the skin, as a cultural construct, continues to have purchase as a code that allows people to keep their privilege. Some people can buy into this and some cant. For example, in South Africa people can be anti-apartheid and yet at the same time continue to enjoy the benefits of their whiteness. Making whiteness visible as part of the axis of power helps us to understand how this continued enjoyment of the benefits of whiteness is made possible. Whiteness historically embodies, and continues to confer, entitlement. Thus someone like George Bush, in spite of his many personal idiosyncrasies, doesnt arrive in power as a result of struggle. Hes secure. His identity is not an issue; its not in crisis. In his person different forms of power are embodied and articulated. ooking at the connections between whiteness and the contemporary unipolar world makes us see that coming to terms with living with difference cannot be separated from the way the post-colonial economy is organised. Issues of difference are connected to issues of distribution. Socialism therefore has to rework itself so that learning to live with difference is as important within it as its distributive instincts. One of the only ways to do that is to constitute oneself as an incomplete subject. To constitute our selves in that way would bring us closer to a community of love, in which we would stay the course of the conversation without guarantees, drawing on resources of hope to enable us to imagine differently. In other words, the issue of living with difference cannot be separated from the issue of socialism. There is a question there about learning, which is also a question about politics.
Decontextualising power Another issue from the past that has come back to haunt us in new ways is the recent panic about young black men and crime. One way of looking at this is from the perspective of the impact of US influence on global youth culture. A group of young black people with few
13
options become conscripted into the idea that that these particular forms of youth culture are the only way there is to be. They are seduced by ideas about glamour, toughness, and status. At another level, we have seen New Labour, and Tony Blair in particular, talking about street crime as if it is directly produced by certain kinds of black culture and black families. Blair took the question of race as both subject and object. Race is mobilised as an explanation for what has happened, but it is black people as individuals who have to find the solutions. There is no sense of the complexities or histories within which peoples lives are constructed. The invisibility of the whiteness of power prevents people from noticing the way it operates. Its as if it doesnt exist, doesnt take place. It is possible to understand what is staging these events, but people dont look in the right places for explanations. What made me feel particularly disturbed about Tony Blairs lurch into frankness in April 2007, when he argued that violent street crime came out of a specific aspect of black culture, was that the young people in question were being completely decontextualised. This is connected to the ideas I referred to earlier about inclusion and exclusion: the unspoken assumption is that the individual is responsible for what has happened, and for the solution. People are seen as outside sociality, outside history, at the very moment in which their culture is mobilised as an explanation for their actions. This is not to deny that people are actors in their own histories - of course they are - but this does not mean that the circumstances in which they find themselves are primarily their own responsibility. he cultural formations through which these dramas are enacted are also something that goes largely unnoticed. It is not acknowledged that the situatedness of the young men has been informed by the global USbased youth culture that opens up the way they live their lives. When a young person goes out of their house, they walk in a particular way, they hang out in a particular way, and they generate certain soundscapes. The identities they occupy, their becoming, has been informed by particular cultures. And the people who respond to them are also part of that global circuit of youth culture. They already have an associative link with it. We read these young people through the same global youth culture that has produced them, through the paradigms that we internalise; it is through particular representations of US global youth culture that we understand them and become fearful of them. The observer and
14
Introduction
the observed are inside the same loop. I am arguing that the cultural sphere - the culture of neoliberalism - plays a key role in processes of racialisation. Here race is mobilised as a paradigm through which peoples fears are lived. The way that we think about race is articulated in many different conversations. The way it comes into play in the debates about young black men and crime is no longer coded in the same way as it was in the 1970s and 1980s (though of course aspects of it remain depressingly the same).
The multicultural question The New Labour response to the multiculturalism question is also connected to the question of living with difference. The importance here is to try to see what it is you need to do to nest this question within the slightly different one of how we can feel comfortable with how we have got to here - which is not at all the same thing as talking abut chapattis and rice and peas. The way we think about multiculturalism largely depends on which theme has triggered its invocation. The question of who you are, or were, or could be, always comes up at the moment at which people are in doubt of themselves, about something. And sometimes those fears are seen through the multicultural question. Its not so much that people have a sense that they would rather live in a monoculture. Its more a question of feeling insecure in their sense of being. And many of the forms of identifying themselves as British that people once had have been shaken up by a number of other histories. That means that theres a kind of longing for something that can put them back together again. They dont want to think of themselves as being in a site of danger. So when we are thinking about how to find ways of living together, the multicultural question is a very interesting route into that. One of the things these essays do is try to map how the multicultural question has been ravelling and unravelling. They are not trying to stitch up one form or another of multiculturalism, and they are not for or against it - which is not something that I would see as very useful. Multiculturalism is not a condition that you can prescribe for people. Its not an injection - take a dose of multiculturalism on Monday and you will be fine on Tuesday. What is going on is the return of culture as part and parcel of the way in which we think ourselves today. And the problem with New Labour is that it has moved away from the question of how to
15
enable us to be comfortable with what we have become. Instead it is still trying to lock itself into the past that it thinks - I dont think it knows - is the way to be. Sometimes it will go back to the second world war, sometimes its the world cup, and sometimes its that noxious acclaim of British values, as if nobody else had them. This question of the description of the self is something that is at issue in a number of these essays. longside what could be seen as an inability to think in new ways about how we can live together in difference, there is of course a section within the British establishment that is not interested in thinking about these questions: they dont feel the need to think about ways of negotiating difference. This has a lot to do with the cultural production of ignorance, and the relation of ignorance to power. The complex history and experience of migrants and settlers in the United Kingdom is still frequently represented in pathological terms. Dominant discourses in the social sciences are entirely comfortable with reproducing a number of pathological assumptions about the way black culture and social life are constructed. In relation to multiculturalism, and to other areas of discussion about race, this has a been a big problem. In addition, those in power frequently have an instrumental approach to knowledge, searching for a confirmation of what they already know. Someone has a bright idea over breakfast, papers get circulated, things emerge from the mouths of Trevor Phillips or John Reid, and something then has to be done. People also have an investment in that cultural production of ignorance because it is easier not to think. Thinking things through is labour. Not thinking is less trouble. The neoliberal world is a dangerous place, but disrupting it requires energy. Sometimes the impetus to think differently comes from disruptive events. Twenty-five years ago there were riots in Britain. Those disorders opened the doors of the academy and other public institutions for people like me professionally. Without those disorders I most certainly would not have got a job in the academy. And in some ways that started some of us thinking about these questions, to begin the difficult work of understanding some of these processes. Im not saying we need another riot, but it was that transruptive that created the space in which it became possible to think differently. The absence of obvious resources for the disruption of the current settlement is what makes it sometimes difficult to see how we could map a different political trajectory - one that is radical, liberatory and agonistic.
16
Introduction
We need the ability to simultaneously comprehend the project of postcoloniality - the longer project - and the theory of difference. And the importance of these essays is that they are part of a body of work that has a continuing critical engagement with the politics of difference and postcoloniality as the issue of our time in the twenty-first century.
Conviviality and difference The question of multiculture plays itself out in different ways in different places, and for different groups within each place. For example, mega cities like London are sometimes celebrated for their conviviality, the ways in which people there are comfortable with difference. But they are both comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time. They are not always comfortable for certain forms of identities and identifications. Take the example of a superpredator in the City, spending 10,000 on cocaine, and compare that to someone who is busted for having grass or crack in Brixton (though Im not arguing here for affirmative action for drugs). People are not treated in the same ways. Somehow we have to attend to those distinctions, and, for example, to the ways that those communities are policed differently. We have to return to the question of difference in order to think about the aspects of peoples lives where difference is masked, or where certain kinds of identity are privileged. onviviality occupies a different narrative space from multiculturalism: it carries a vision of the future lived in the present. It is about living together in real time. It offers an alternative to what New Labour presents as the two possible trajectories for immigrants - that they must either learn English in six months, appreciate daffodils and integrate; or else they will stay separate, blow us all up and go back to where they came from. Imagining this different way of postcolonial living is something that was attempted by the GLC in the last days of its life. It is there in the photographs, in the images on the billboards across the city. But it is constituted from multiple references, each jostling to find a way to live in a particular place, in a particular time. This kind of conviviality is not the same as, though it is to do with, living with difference. What tends to arise from within a neoliberal framework is a hierarchy of differences - people are seeking to reorder a hierarchy which is already there. So though on the one hand you could say that one of the gains of the last ten years is that people have become more comfortable with some aspects of living with
17
difference - that there have been convivial moments - on the other you can see that there has been no real challenge to hierarchies of difference - so that living with difference in that sense hasnt really made any difference at all. The notion of conviviality is a pointer towards the idea that there are other forms of sociality, in which people can get by, in ways that are not always antagonistic towards one another. It is useful to know that, and just because something exists within a particular context doesnt mean that it doesnt produce its own forms of pleasure. But if you want the convivial to be connected to a left discourse you have to articulate it to something else, something that challenges hierarchy, that makes a radical break from the ways in which specific local and national histories are formed and racial power is forged. For conviviality to mean something, it has to be based on an interest in others that is combined with respect for those others. Its not just a question of William Hague going to the Carnival for the day - that is a convivial moment, but it is not disruptive of hierarchies of power. We need to develop the capacity for deeper forms of relationships, which are transformative and can be maintained over time. t could be that changes of this kind might come about through a transruptive moment emerging from the global south. But the dominant powers are likely to see this as no more than a temporary glitch. They would remain firm in the notion that it is the North that produces the universal. I want to think about how one could create that transruption within the North, so that it would literally give up on the idea that it is the place from where the universal emerges and is thought. What would it be like to decolonise the North from within? One way this might occur is through learning lessons from the South, learning to listen. So I come back to this question about teaching and learning, which is a form of politics by other means.
18
Rethinking segregation
Bilkis Malek
Bilkis Malek argues that incoherent ideas about the causes of segregation, including those of people who repudiate multiculturalism, risk returning us to the days of a British monoculturalism.
Concerns about ethnic segregation have taken centre stage in domestic analyses of the implications for multicultural Britain of the events of 9/11 and 7/7. Yet, almost half a decade into the war on terror, we appear to be no closer to defining a cultural and political vision of Britain in which Muslims, alongside their fellow British citizens, can feel they belong and have a valuable contribution to make.1 I want to suggest that this ongoing state of affairs revolves around a reductive understanding of segregation, which is based on incoherent ideas about the value of multiculturalism, and an inability to imagine the shared responsibility on both Muslims and non-Muslims for overcoming the realities of ethnic segregation. In this article I argue for the need for a more nuanced position on the meaning of multiculturalism; an articulation of what it is about the majority of Muslims that makes them ordinary; an openness to what Muslims have to offer to national debate; and an exploration of ways to build on the broad coalition of support united behind the anti-war alliance.
1. Although Muslims are distinguished by their religious affiliation to Islam, negotiations of Muslim identities, on both an individual and group level, are intertwined with experiences of nationality, cultural origins, language and other markers of ethnicity. In Britain understanding of Muslims as ethnic, as opposed to religious, groups is entangled still further with the conflation of Muslim and Asian cultures in dominant discourses, but also in current references to notions of ethnic segregation when debating the alienation of Muslim youth. 19
Death or resurrection of multiculturalism? During the 1970s and 1980s multiculturalism was criticised by the political right as an initiative promoted by loony left councils, doomed to failure because it supported the expression of cultural differences at the expense of a unifying and harmonious national culture. But since the onset of suicide attacks by Muslim individuals on the West, it has been the centre-left that has increasingly voiced disillusionment with multiculturalism as a policy for promoting better understanding and relations across ethnic groups. The declaration by Trevor Phillips in 2004 of the end of multiculturalism encapsulated a frequently expressed centre-left view that multiculturalism has led to fragmentation rather than integration. In some cases, such as the new assimilationism being developed in the pages of the respectable left journal Prospect, the arguments being put forward have a resonance - in terms of their exclusive notions of national identity - with views held by members of the BNP .2 There have been some two decades worth of critiques and re-thinking of multiculturalism, and this may warrant some disillusionment with its potential for success, but the fact of the matter is multiculturalism as a coherent government policy has never existed in Britain. Inconsistencies in its meaning and practical application were being identified long before the new millennium invocation of the clash of civilisations between Islam and the West.3 s Bhikhu Parekh has pointed out, a society like Britain clearly is multicultural, in that it is composed of different cultural communities. But it may remain monoculturalist if its political ethos is based on assimilating minority cultures into the mainstream. British politics has been divided on this point: liberals have tended to perceive minority cultures as integral to defining national identity, while conservatives tend towards the view that traditional, or majority, culture should enjoy a privileged status.4 In the post 9/11 era politicians and analysts from across the political divide have contributed to a kind of common sense rejection of multiculturalism, believing that it is cultural differences as opposed to commonalities that have been nurtured by policies of multiculturalism. This conclusion is not wholly at
2. Ali Rattansi, Whos British? Prospect and the New Assimilationism, in Cohesion, Community and Citizenship, Runnymede Trust 2002. 3. See for example, MacDonald et al, Murder in the Playground, Longsight Press 1989. 4. B. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, MacMillan Press 2000, p6. 20
odds with critical commentators of multiculturalism. However, the latter would argue that such a situation has arisen out of an understanding of ethnic group cultures as homogenous wholes. For more effective multicultural policies it is necessary to respond to ethnic identification as fluid and influenced by a plurality of experiences and sources of identity. n the current rush to develop new policies to overcome the latest perceived threat to a cohesive British society - the segregation of ethnic communities - it might, at the very least, be useful to engage with some of the ongoing critical debates about multiculturalism. This is particularly so as the governments current approach is profoundly shaped by precisely the same understanding of ethnic group cultures as distinct entities that was associated with earlier, reductive, notions of multiculturalism. Such thinking is precisely what makes it a struggle for the prime minister to be able to distinguish ordinary Muslims from Islamic terrorists. In the initial days following the 7 July bombings the prime minister was keen to establish a shoulder to shoulder image with Muslim leaders and Muslim communities united in a common struggle against the terrorists. But since then politicians from across the political divide have not been as careful, or able, to maintain a distinction between ordinary law-abiding Muslims and terrorists acting in the name of Islam. Muslims as a whole group have been challenged - to critically examine the values and activities within their own communities, to question their political affiliations, to shape up their mosques, and to ensure that their communities are neither a safe haven nor a recruiting ground for terrorists. In July 2006, a few days before the first anniversary of the London bombings, Tony Blair impressed still further the responsibility on ordinary Muslims for defeating Islamic terrorism. Before a House of Commons liaison committee, the prime minister asserted that Islamic terrorism had to be defeated in its entirety - in its extreme interpretation of Islam and its completely false grievances against the West. He added that government alone could not defeat Islamic terrorism: it was necessary to mobilise the wider Muslim community to defeat the ideology and grievances of Muslim extremists. The prime minister went on to challenge Muslim leaders who, he believed, were only partially disputing the position of extremists, in that, although they opposed the use of violence, they gave the impression that they sympathised with the grievances of the terrorists.
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This insistence on containing both the problem and solution within the Muslim community carries firm undertones of you are either with us or you are with them. It allows only a very narrowly defined and unrealistically burdensome space for the involvement of Muslims in Britains democratic process for dealing with the war on terror - one within which even Downing Streets hand-picked Muslim taskforce has found it impossible to operate.5 The series of new initiatives announced by the government once more places the responsibility for integration on Islam and Muslims. One such initiative was the Islam Expo - a four-day event that took place in June 2006 at Alexandra Palace - inviting the public to explore the history and culture of Islam. There is also the Islamic Roadshow of moderate Muslim scholars which travels to different parts of the country to promote a modern and non-violent interpretation of Islam. I have no doubt that there will be some benefit arising from these initiatives: as with the saris, samosas and steel-band brand of multiculturalism, the current crop of initiatives may eventually help the British to shed their fear of the hijab, beard or mosque. But the principle weakness of reductive multiculturalism - that of containing ethnic groups as segregated cultural entities - continues to be evident in these projects. he present moment may be marked by calls for the end of multiculturalism, but government policy itself remains underpinned by weak, and ineffectual, versions of multiculturalism. Long-standing commentators do not call for an abandonment of multiculturalism; they propose instead that it can help to improve and enhance race and ethnic relations through more complex contextualisation of peoples lived realities attuned to the shifting contours of black and white cultural and political identities.6
5. The Muslim Taskforce was set up after the suicide attacks on 7 July to tackle the spread of Islamic extremism. Members (who include peers, MPs, businessmen, imams and community leaders) have expressed their disappointment that many of their recommendations and concerns, including that British foreign policy is a central factor in the radicalisation of Muslims, have been ignored by the government. Following the failure of the British government to call for an immediate ceasefire in the recent military campaign by Israel in Lebanon, many members of the Muslim taskforce, including Labour MPs Sadique Khan and Shahid Malik, signed an open letter to Tony Blair impressing that government policy was placing civilians in the UK and abroad at increased risk. 6. Ali Rattansi, Racism, Culture and Education, in Race, Culture and Difference, James Donald and Ali Rattansi (eds), Sage 1992, p41. 22
Current realities of segregation In 2006 we are two, almost three, generations into Britains post-war race relations narrative. Earlier government policies on race relations, such as assimilation and integration, were underpinned by the view that successive generations would play their part in eroding the traditional and pre-modern practices of their immigrant elders, and adopt a superior British way of life. Yet it is precisely the generations born in Britain that are now the focus for national anxiety about the consequences of ongoing dynamics of ethnic segregation. Even before 9/11 there was some government momentum behind addressing the issue of segregated communities, in response to the series of public disturbances involving mainly Asian and white youth in the north of England in the summer of 2001. David Blunkett, who was Home Secretary at the time, seized the moment to re-invigorate policies based on assimilation. Armed with findings from a series of official reports into these Northern riots, and fuelled by the fallout from 9/11, Blunkett drew on longstanding Asian stereotypes to focus public attention on to Asian, and more specifically Muslim, communities as the main cause of the problems. The official rhetoric proposed that not speaking English at home, strong kinship ties, long holidays in Pakistan/Bangladesh, and marrying partners from the same country of origin, were maintaining ethnic segregation. he idea that Muslims, and other migrant communities in Britain, have failed to integrate because of a lack of openness to other cultures and perspectives is simply not viable. Indeed some sections of migrant communities are now out-performing the indigenous population in education and employment, and many are well integrated into the fabric of British society. But regardless of their success in education, employment and involvement in civic and wider community structures, Muslims feel the brunt of being cast as the enemy within. Their segregation is one of disconnection from the nations cultural and political imagination. The common sense view about Asian communities not having integrated into British society dominated explanations and perceptions of the four homegrown terrorists responsible for the suicide bombings in London in 2005. However, the information that has emerged since, including the two official government reports published this year, has undermined these common sense
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perceptions.7 The four perpetrators themselves were by no means a homogeneous group; for example one of them (Jermaine Lindsay) was a convert to Islam. More significantly, all four - as indeed was the case with many of the Asian youth involved in the northern riots - were found to be well integrated into British society. The overall picture emerging is that the perpetrators came from respected affluent families not bound to strict religious codes. The two that were married had chosen their own partners, who were both British, and for their respective ages they had all achieved relative educational success. Mohammad Siddique Khan and Shazad Tanweer, deemed to be the main organisers of the attacks, were also known for their participation in wider community activities - Khan was a popular teaching assistant at a local primary school and Tanweer a member of his local cricket team.8 If segregation was indeed behind the radicalisation of these four individuals, then their personal histories demand that we re-think our understanding of its dynamics. he recent biography of freed Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg provides fresh insight into the experiences of segregation amongst seemingly well integrated Muslim individuals.9 Beggs childhood was by all accounts one of which Blunkett et al would be proud. Born in Birmingham, of Indian/Pakistani Muslim parentage, Begg went to a local Jewish primary school because of its reputation for educational success. He recalls wearing the Star of David on his school blazer with pride and enjoying learning Jewish history. He learnt about Indian history alongside English literature and history from his father, and his teenage years were formatively shaped by his involvement in a local gang the Lynx, which included fights with other gangs, often white racists, as well as dance parties, popular music, etc - many of the normal associations of British teenage life. Throughout his childhood Begg had minimal contact with organised religion
7. Report into the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005, www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ publications/reports/intelligence/isc_7july_report.pdf; Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7th July 2005, www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/7-july-report. pdf?view=Binary. 8. The emerging personal profiles of the 23 British Muslim citizens arrested in August 2006 on suspicion of planning multiple terrorist attacks on transatlantic flights appear to be very similar to the perpetrators of 7/7. 9. Moazzam Begg was never tried for supporting or playing a role in Islamic terrorism, for which he was detained in US custody for three years. See his Enemy Combatant, Free Press 2006. 24
or institutions such as the mosque. His sympathies for the plight of Muslims abroad did not arise from attending mosque or listening to radical preaching, but from watching media coverage of military conflict in the Middle East, Bosnia and Afghanistan. He recounts how it was as he became more aware of the historical inconsistencies of Western interventions abroad (such as arming Saddam Hussein and the Taliban when it suited their interests) that he felt he was being asked to choose between his conscience and his country: his conscience won every time. There are aspects of Beggs upbringing that are by no means typical of his generation of British Muslims. But it is precisely Beggs openness to these common sense markers of integration that invites alternative conceptions of the dynamics of segregation. In the end his integration did not prevent the splitting of conscience and country which arose from the impact of British policies on Muslims abroad. This highlights the global dimension of British Muslim contestations of government policies. And this global dimension is much more complex than is usually credited in popular debates, which often assume that Muslims in Britain are automatically going to sympathise with Muslims abroad. What we often forget is that many Muslims opposing the war on terror also oppose the Wests support for non-democratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia. ritish Muslims, like other migrant communities, have maintained and developed global family and community networks, which have been further strengthened by access to global and new media networks that provide alternative sources of news information. They are far more attuned than many non-migrants to the demands of global citizenship, and in a position to assess domestic policy not just in terms of its impact at home but how it impacts on ordinary people abroad. (Doreen Massey also poses this global question for a domestic politics in her analysis of the politics of place for London and the need to globalise in some way the local claims to multiculturalism.10) What Muslims are demanding is not that the West or Britain does not intervene in foreign matters, but that its interventions are consistent with its much-touted principles of justice and democracy. In this context, integration into British society can be quite fundamental to feeling at odds with being British in a global context. We should not perhaps be so surprised that the domestic terror
10. See London Inside-Out, Soundings 32. 25
threat comes not from the unintegrated, but from those settled and familiar with the official values of being British.
Ordinary sensibilities of Muslims Another dynamic of segregation that can be gleaned from the unfolding experiences of second and third generation Muslims is that their lifestyles and cultural outlooks, increasingly negotiated through the foregrounding of Islam, fall outside of the official national outlook. Segregation here arises from living in a multicultural society which remains doggedly mono-cultural in its outlook. Here too it is worth quoting Begg for a deeper insight. During one of many interrogations whilst in US custody an FBI agent asks Begg, if he wasnt part of the Taliban or alQaeda why did he leave the UK for Afghanistan of all places? Begg replied:
I was born and brought up in England - but I never saw myself as English. And neither do the English. I know English history, English language, and English literature better than a lot of English people. But Im not white and Im not Christian. And my ancestry is from another world. Dont misunderstand me. Britain has the best multicultural society in Europe, but still in most parts of the country I feel out of place. Id like to go to an English country village, with my dark skin, my beard, and my wife in her hijab and not be stared at or singled out. In fact Id like to do that in the areas that neighbour the one where I live. Id like people to see we generally want the same things in life, that they should not feel threatened by me. I want the English to like me, because they are accepting - not just to tolerate me, if Im trying to assimilate. I dont know how much of this you understand as an American, but in many ways you are more acceptable to British society than I ever could be. After all, youre white, and I take it Christian (Enemy Combatant, p 213).
Ever since 9/11 the official political line has been to emphasise the need to differentiate ordinary Muslims from terrorists acting in the name of Islam. Yet, as Beggs experience suggests, as a nation Britain has lacked the inclination to even begin to understand what it is about Muslim lifestyles that is ordinary or worth defending. The situation goes much deeper than simply overcoming long-standing fears
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of the hijab or beard in the English village. It is about being able to conceive assertive Muslim identities as a specific negotiation of the opportunities and tensions peculiar to the present moment. When Begg says we essentially want the same things he means exactly that, and his beard or his wifes hijab in quintessentially English settings should not be regarded as evidence in contradiction of that. What the Muslim hijab and beard do signify is that in multicultural Britain we may have different cultural resources at our disposal for negotiating the opportunities and tensions of the moment. ne consequence of the successive neo-liberal projects of the Thatcher, Major and Blair administrations has been the onset of a social recession: the creation of a materialistic consumer-orientated society has been to the detriment of personal relations and social well-being. One response to this by sections of Britains migrant populations has been to re-appropriate established community networks as a valuable cultural resource to offset some of the consequences of this social recession. In this respect, for many second and third generation Muslims the turn to religion has little to do with sympathising with Islamic fundamentalism, and everything to do with negotiating an alternative lifestyle to that driven by modern capitalism, the growth of consumerism and the accumulation of material wealth. This is not an uncritical embracement of religion, and can frequently involve contestations of the established cultural structures and meanings of Islam - including heated debates and arguments with family and fellow Muslims. You only have to glance at some of the column inches filled by young Muslims in the flourishing Muslim media to appreciate that their renegotiations of faith and community are closely intertwined with negotiating living in a neo-liberal consumer society. Begg puts it straightforwardly: there must be more to life than routine existence. There has been a failure of political imagination from within the left, in not recognising the recourse to this cultural resource as an alternative and valid response to neo-liberalism. The cultural dynamics and trends within migrant communities neither form nor inform the national outlook. And this is another sense in which ordinary Muslim lives and ideas are excluded from the nations idea of itself. For sure, there is wide recognition that migrant communities are characterised by distinct cultural formations, experiences and practices. Yet there is no attempt to understand the cultural resources of migrant communities beyond their in/compatibility with official discourses of the nation. We do not imagine how
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migrant identities might actually contribute something valuable for overcoming the difficulties of the present. This, I believe, is the foremost challenge for addressing the realities of segregation experienced by Muslims in Britain. It reflects the more complex questions of culture posed by critical multiculturalism, of understanding the shifting contours of cultural and political identities. Rather than seeking to explain one cultural formation or another, we need to open spaces where different cultural formations are both contested and valued for the way in which they have responded to the cultural and political direction being defined by the government. We can begin to identify some of the more specific challenges for opening up such spaces by reflecting on both the optimism and frustrations of the anti-war alliance.
Strengthening anti-war alliances beyond the war The many disparate groups that have united behind the anti-war movement provide glimpses of the possibilities and challenges for building stronger interethnic alliances that could give hope to more peaceful relations across national and cultural borders. There is in the wider public responses to the events of 9/11 and the war on terror the possibility of the beginning of a blurring - perhaps only temporarily - of the earlier lines of segregation between British Muslims and their indigenous counterparts. A fundamental reason behind this is that there have been many individual and group actions that have enabled Muslims to feel that their pain and suffering is no longer confined within their ethnic group. Examples of such acts have included the resignation speech of the late Robin Cook and the unprecedented demonstration in London opposing the invasion of Iraq involving an estimated 2 million people. f the broad coalition of support united behind the anti-war alliance can be translated into real political alliances, it could provide the most progressive basis for long-term international peace. But here is where the optimism perhaps begins and ends. This is because the kind of inter-ethnic sensitivity that is a feature of the anti-war alliance does not go beyond the injustices of military invasion in the Middle East. It does not confront the underlying dynamics of ethnic segregation discussed earlier. This was aptly demonstrated in the actions of British Bangladeshi Muslims who marched alongside the millions protesting against the invasion of Iraq holding No War placards with Socialist Workers
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Party slogans torn off, in order to distance themselves from the atheist leanings of the SWP . In particular there needs to more acknowledgement of the role of religion in the public sphere, both within the anti-war movement and more widely. Of course the public sphere must guard against ideas of a religious state, and no religion should be allowed to dictate state policies. But this is not the same thing as enabling religious groups to have a voice within democratic processes. My own sense is that bringing religion into the political sphere, putting it under the same scrutiny as any other ideology or doctrine that shapes peoples lifestyles, will improve the ability to monitor and challenge ongoing forms of oppression that get passed off as religious beliefs. nother critical challenge thrown up by the war on terror - and one that has more widespread implications for ethnic segregation - is the need for a much deeper acknowledgment and recognition of the pervasiveness of a culture of thinking in the West that is inconsistent with the values of justice and protecting the innocent. There are many instances from the war on terror that expose the Wests mission to spread democracy as questionable in its respect for innocent lives and the desire for justice. They include such instances as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the David Kelly affair, and the death of Jean Charles de Menezes. Each of these events has been explained away by officials as the actions of a few bad individuals, an anomaly, or unfortunate circumstances. Collectively, I believe they reveal something more rooted about Western attitudes towards the other which is historically linked to its sense of cultural superiority. It is captured in Beggs experience with US soldiers, many of whom he felt found the war at odds with their own faith/beliefs, only able to carry out their duties by seeing the detainees as subhuman. Whilst in detention at Bagram, a born-again Southern Baptist explained to Begg, I convince myself each day that you guys are all sub-human, agents of the Devil so that I can do my job. Otherwise Id have to treat you like humans, and we dont do this to people where I come from (Enemy Combatant, p165). Those opposing the war on terror in the West have been consistently critical of its many illegal, undemocratic and inhumane outcomes, but so far they have failed to take collective ownership for the mindsets behind those failures. In the end, the leaders and administrations that gave us the war on terror must be seen as a product of the West. And there needs to be a collective taking of
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responsibility for the cultures and systems that produce the thinking and actions of these respective individuals, the offices they hold and the institutions they represent - just as Muslims are being challenged to take wider critical ownership for defeating Islamic extremism. he international crisis around the war on terror has thrown up deep questions of identity and democracy, for Muslims and non-Muslims, the West and non-West. Yet the weight of emphasis has continually been on the need for one side to change - Muslims and non-Western nations. This reflects the segregated world that we live in. To overcome it we need to move beyond exposing the lies and deceit of Blair, Bush and co. We need to start with a renewed understanding of the dynamics of ethnic segregation, which continue to characterise our increasingly multicultural worlds.
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Mans the talk on road

A dialogue with young black people on their experiences of gun crime
Ejos Ubiribo
Ejos Ubiribo looks at the issues behind gun crime.
Before my own brothers murder in 2002 I was already very concerned about the slaughter of black British men at the hands of their own brothers. At any given opportunity I would raise these concerns, which more often than not would be on the phone in conversation with two of my girlfriends (the only two that kindly endured my marathon diatribes). In trying to make sense of the madness which for me was the near weekly accounts of the murder of black young males, I became conscious of the deep rooted apathy about this in both the black community and wider society. Black men killing black men did not matter. Feeling powerless I resigned myself to just talking about it. However, it is something that is extremely difficult to ignore when the accounts are of people you know. My first experience of gun crime was in 1998 watching a news report of a young man gunned down in Willesden, north west London. Although barely catching the victims surname, there was something familiar about it. Less than an hour later I learned that it was Rudy King, the cousin of a friend. Then in July 1999, my friends boyfriend, Dean Roberts, was shot dead in Harlesden, again in north west London, three weeks before the birth of their son. In the following few years I came to know (both directly and indirectly) many young black males involved in shootings. But it was the beginning of 2002 that would change my life forever.
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At a New Years Eve party in Hackney, I, among other partygoers, witnessed the murder of two men. A single shot was fired. The bullet went through one man, ricocheted against the wall and entered the head of a second man. The following day I found out that the second man was my friends brother. For months after I was disturbed by the death of these young men. What had started off as isolated incidents in the commonly recognised black areas, such as Brixton and Hackney, fast became a daily occurrence of random shootings. I became insanely frightened for my brothers. In July that year my fears were realised, with the murder of my eighteen year old brother. Gun crime had now become my own reality. I joined the chorus of lament for the deaths of sons, brothers, fathers and lovers. But I also wanted to understand what was happening and why. Commentary in the media has tended to be sensational scare mongering; often with barely concealed racial overtones. What sympathetic coverage there has been - a few TV documentaries and broadsheet features - has failed to develop an analysis which puts the phenomenon of young black men killing other young black men into a wider political and economic context. he accelerating occurrences of gun crime in Lambeth, Brent and Hackney have resulted in a slew of community, police and government partnership programmes. However, because there is no centralised system that can measure or assess their performance, it is difficult to discern their true impact. The young people I spoke with did not cite any of the plethora of antigun crime initiatives as a factor in diverting them from crime. In fact, their overwhelming belief was that gun crime was inevitable. While I do not wish to discount the significant and necessary work of anti-gun crime programmes, the question of their effectiveness needs to be addressed - and I hope that it will be in the forthcoming Metropolitan Police Authoritys Gun Crime Scrutiny Review. Having said that, it has been a significant development that the establishment has recognised that the social and economic condition of inner city children in general, and black children in particular, is a major factor leading them to engage in crime. It has led to proactive work aiming to redress the social and economic imbalance through education, training and employment. These are areas which have previously failed disaffected black people. However, in my own personal experience, disaffection does not apply to all black people from impoverished backgrounds. Many young black people have transcended social and economic deprivation and there is much to be learned from how they have achieved this.
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For example, what can we learn from black girls positive attitude towards education (although not necessarily toward school)? want to make a start on developing an understanding of gun crime by first giving a voice to those at the centre of the problem - black young men and women - and seeing what they might be able to tell us. All the extracts which follow are taken from discussions with people from the south London borough of Lambeth, which is one of the Metropolitan Polices Operation Trident hotspots, I ask Robert who is sixteen what it was like growing up in Brixton.
Robert Hard. Say were going out, we cant go nowhere without police following behind us or just stopping us on the road. Ejos From what age did you start experiencing that? Robert Nine, ten. The way I used to go on on road was not like a bad boy, but we were young, so we just carried on how kids would act. But theyd just think theyre bad boys, theyve probably got drugs or guns on them. So theyd just pull us over and stop us. Shareen and Nadia, both young women, aged 18 and 14, describe a gun culture they perceive as widespread. Shareen and Nadia You know, gun crime has risen to the point where everybody on the street these days have a gun. Boys as young as 12 are carrying guns. Thats what people do. Ejos We say it so naturally but thats not what everybody does. Who are we talking about? Shareen and Nadia Friends, family, people we know. Either theyve got a gun, they know someone thats got a gun or theyre involved in a gun crime. Ejos Is it just for protection or is it for stripes? Shareen Yeah it is for protection, but its also for, yeah Im a bad boy I carry a gun.
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Ejos Black men, or men in general involved in street culture, feel that they have to take on that Im not afraid of anyone persona. Shareen Otherwise you get taken for a boy - and when I say taken for a boy, people take the piss if you dont react the way they want you to react. They will take you for a boy, thats how they see it. Nadia If you aint got money youre a prick. Shareen Then you cant get a girl, because you cant buy her things, and you cant purchase things to make you look good, to even get a girl. Kane was convicted and imprisoned for a firearm offence. He illuminates the complexities that black males face in our society. Kane I tell you what, money goes to your head, and with a gun on top of that you start getting that extra power. Money, power, respect. You can gain respect from people if youve got money. Im not saying every mans got to be that way. That doesnt make you a man. But the man I want to be, thats what it is. Kane echoes the sentiments of all the young people I spoke with. For them money is the only tangible marker of success, and as disenfranchised black people, particularly black men, they can rarely access this through legitimate work. They seek other alternatives, mainly through hustling. Kane I grew up on an estate and the role models are the people that are doing well for themselves, because everyones living in, you could say, poverty. So, you look to whos ever looking good, whos ever making life looking interesting. When you get to the stage where the usual stuff boys do is getting boring now, you either want girls or money, or both. I was more like I was going to get money. I saw the older guys and they were doing their thing. And thats who are your role models when youre on an estate. Ejos Would you say you were poor?
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Kane I wouldnt say I was, but what I say to my mum when she says she tried the best for us is, at the end of the day we live in an estate and youve got to face that everyday, so youve got to be a certain way to survive. So if you did so well for us why we still living here? If my dad was a successful person I wouldnt be living on an estate, would I? Wed be living in a nice house, going to a private school and all that stuff. But obviously that didnt happen. So to me hes not the best role model, because he hasnt got what I consider to be the qualities of life. Ejos What are the qualities of life? Kane When I see people that have had a good education, and the way they look at life and the things they get up to, it looks a lot - I dont know - easier for them. Their parents are always willing to help them out, through Uni and stuff. We didnt have all that stuff so well always look for an alternative. Ejos Whats the alternative? Kane I suppose you want the fast money now. You dont want to go the long way. I think it is much more of a struggle for someone who hasnt got a rich father to go through Uni. And when youre going back and forth to Uni every day, you come home and see this guy down the road who seems to have everything that you want and youre trying to strive for. It depends what you want. Im talking more material things, but then I suppose Im more materialistic because Ive seen what material things can do.
Respect and conflict The culture of respect plays an important part in escalating conflict between young men. To try and make sense of it I am speaking with James who is 16, and Trevor who is an older man and his mentor. James was born in Jamaica and came to England in his early teens. He offers a unique transcultural perspective of gun culture from his first-hand experience of gun crime, which begins in his early years in Jamaica and continues when he migrates to England. Our conversation takes place in Trevors car as we drive across South London.
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Ejos How much did your gun cost you to get? James My dad gave it to me. Ejos So you were how old? James About 12. Ejos Have you ever shot after anybody? James Yeah. Ejos Have you been shot? James Yeah Ive been grazed. Ejos Id be shook if I thought somebody was trying to kill me. James I never cared whether I died or not. Ejos Why is that? James That was just my mentality then! Ejos You didnt value your life? James Nope. Ejos Did you enjoy your life? James Yeah. Ejos So the thought of you being taken away from that life didnt really matter? James I never had that thought.
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Ejos Were you in a crew? How many of you were there? James 30. I built the crew. Ejos So did that make you the top boy? James Nah, it never made me the top boy, I was just like anyone else. Ejos What did you do? James Everything like bad boys, like rude kids do, like going out beating people up, shooting after people, running up on people, all of that. Just for fun - nothing better to do. Ejos Was there money involved? James At first when we started it was just for fun, until some of us realised what we could get out of doing it, so we just started doing it on the regs, on the regular. Ejos Is it from street robberies to jacking people? James Street robberies, big robberies like running up on shotters [drug dealers, usually class A drugs] and stuff like that. Ejos So, running up on shotters your age? James Nah, shotters all ages. Big man like, big guys in the business. I ran up on man and take his ting - theyre boys. Ejos For me, if youre gonna run up on certain man theyre looking to dead you. There are just certain man you cant - I dont know, you tell me. James You can run up on anyone, you just have to know what youre doing. Ejos Did it ever get to a point where people suspected you?
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James Yeah, thats why we had to shoot after people. We had to stand our ground because they suspected it was us, because it was only us that had the crew, so they figured it out. Ejos You make it sound quite organised. Its the same kind of thinking you apply to setting up your own business - getting the staff together, having your daily objectives. Did you plan it? James Yeah we did. Ejos What would you do with the money? James Buy whatever I wanted, buy trainers, buy clothes. Id squander my money. Ejos What made you change? James I was getting older, and the more older the more dangerous, the more things that would happen, so I just left it, cut that game. While were talking a group of young boys in school uniform are fighting on road corner. They capture our attention. Trevor Theyre playing about. Ejos No theyre not! Theyre battering the shit out of him. Is that how boys play about? James Theyre play fighting. Trevor Theyre not doing nothing but play fighting. Ejos Ok, but that kind of play gets serious. Trevor I know that. I dont play with friends like that, me na ramp wid people at
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all. Exactly it just get serious and people think they know your strength because maybe theyve handled you a little way. Before you know it they wanna try and bully you now, because they think theyre stronger than you. So I dont play none of that. But theyre youngsters, so they have to live and learn. Ejos I was going to ask you what your relationship is like with the men in your family? James My relationship with my whole family is cool. Ejos How does your mum feel about your lifestyle? James Obviously she dont like it. No mum would like that. She can probably see some of the places its coming from. She keeps asking me why do I do it. I cant tell her why I do it. I used to do it for the fun of it, just for the excitement - and for the reputation, obviously, because you get a reputation from doing it. I had my reputation before I started doing it because the way my mentality was - I dont care, I could die any day, so not anyone could say anything to me and I would just flip. But now I look at it differently. Thats how I got stabbed in my face twice in two months. Ejos What was that over? James One was over a girl, a next one was over my brethren popping a chain - just a madness. Ejos When you say its over a girl I just find that interesting, because theres no men fighting over me - not that I would want them to. So I just want to know whats going on? James His girl must have slept over at my house and my girl found out, and told her brethren. Her brethren text her and told her that was a violation, because her brethren thought I slept with her. The youths brethren saw the text in my girls phone, went back to his brethren and told him I fucked his girl. He came on the hype.
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Ejos What are you going to do? James What am I going to do to him? Trevor He aint doing nothing. James I aint doing nothing man. Ejos So where has that change in mentality come from? I can imagine that five years ago you would have wanted to kill him straight? James I wouldve dead him. Once he had shank [stabbed] me, I wouldnt have dead him, my boys would have done it. But I told them to allow it, because when he did it people had straps [guns] on them, and they were like here, here, do that, and I was we just had a little madness. I never knew he shank me because it was a bang. I never knew he shank me till after. One day I caught him and I was gonna burst him, but, true say, it was in Brixton and I left it. Ejos Why, is Brixton hot? James Yeah, Brixtons hot, theres cameras in Brixton. There was too much people there. I just left him. He called me and said, Why are we beefing? Ejos I think ultimately hes shooked, because hes phoned you and apologised. So in essence, if its a winning, dont you think youve won? James Yeah basically. Ejos So why the need to scuff? James He bust my lip! No one can bust my lip, thats my face. With someone else it wouldve been a minor, but thats my face. Ejos From what I hear, you saying you come from a family thats got a rep. When you were growing up did you feel that pressure?
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James Nah, I never felt that pressure because I never needed to. Once they knew my family background it was like, nah Im not touching that kid! Ejos So is it like you said, you just wanted to do it? James I just wanted to do it. Ejos Its about power. You didnt use that word, but Ive come to that understanding from reading theorists and the ideas of people. Often with men in general, and black men in particular because of the way society is structured, from when youre young youre socialised to believe that its natural for boys to fight. We accept thats how boys are raised. Trevor Dont cry, be hard. Youre always telling your boy child, Dont cry, be hard! You arm the young boys with the skills for them to survive within the society. Ive got a son, Ive got a daughter, and its the same thing, they dont grow the same. My son gets armoured with the skills, so a lot of the things that my daughter might brush off my son cant brush off, get used to, because its a hard world. So, yeah, from a young age boys are given, this - not violence tendency, but theyre given this hard exterior. Society demands it. Ejos Well I understand that from my brothers experiences. With my older brother, he built a reputation on the streets, so by the time he first went inside his reputation was solid in West [West London], and I later learned that he was known in other areas as a kind of street legend. When he went inside my four remaining brothers were 14, 15 and two of them 13. My parents took the two older ones to Nigeria because they saw what was coming, leaving the two 13 year olds behind because they thought they were still young. But as one of them was coming up he felt the pressure and he went about establishing his own rep. The reason why we started this conversation was because of power. Within this society black men dont have that real power that they seek. Most men are socialised to seek power, in the belief that power validates their manhood. Its how much money you have, if you can provide for your family. James It depends the power that you want. You can have power of running
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the streets, you can have power of running your family, you can have power of running the whole world. Ejos Ultimately, the power Im speaking about is to be able to provide for yourself and provide for your family. James Thats what makes you man, when you can provide for your family. Trevor A man is a man who can defend what is his, which includes his family and anything that belongs to him. I tell you, that is what the youth really want. When you hear them talking about power - maybe he cant explain himself properly or maybe he aint breaking it down - but Ive seen with young people especially, what means the most to them is that power, not self respect but people respecting them. So thats the most powerful thing to a young person. A lot of them dont make a dime. Money! They dont ever make money. Money! What do they know about money? They make chump change. To them, as far as theyre concerned, if someones stepping to them and invading their space and disrespecting them, theyre willing to kill over that. They dont kill over their family, a lot of them dont care about their family, because if they did they wouldnt put their mum through a lot, and their brothers and sisters in harms reach - because a lot of the time, when theyre in beef its their brothers and sisters who get it. So to me they are totally misguided in their principles, or what they say is important to them, and thats a fact! Ejos James whats your response to that? Trevor Its a macho thing. James Thats the mentality of everyone. Once they know youve got a gun they wont want to step to you. Once youve got a gun and anyone steps to you, youre gonna use it. Thats the advantage youve got. Trevor Thats the disadvantage to it! James Its a disadvantage as well.
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Trevor That every time you have an argument youre gonna use it. Ejos James believes its an advantage because it affords him power. Trevor sees it as a disadvantage because he knows that ultimately youre gonna end up dead or in prison. Trevor Definitely. Ive been there, done it. Everything James is going done, Ive done it a million times over. Im 38. Ive spent seven and a half years of my life in prison. There aint no crime I havent committed or been involved in. Ive lived in Brixton all my life, so what these young people go through, for me, unless theres an ulterior motive thats productive - were talking about making money and investing it into a legitimate business and getting yourself out of the game - as far as Im concerned, theyve lost the plot totally. Young people nowadays, you heard James say it as well, he squandered money. Ejos James youre very articulate, I have to say that, but I dont expect any less anyway. Once I was speaking with my brother and he was trying to school me on cultural books. I was like, Listen mate Ive read those books. But I was surprised because he was reading books that I was reading at university. He was reading them because he was interested in them - so Im not surprised. I say this all the time, the same drive that you lot apply on road is the same drive that you must and can apply to do something positive. James Thats why Ive cut my road life earlier than some people have. The earlier you cut your road life the better it is, you have more opportunity. For some people theres an end. For some theres not. Some people do it because they have to do it, some people do it for the reputation and just for the fun of doing it. Youve got some people, when they fire guns, the way they love firing guns, theyll keep on firing it and firing it, and theyll either end up dead, in prison, or theyll kill bare [lots of] people. I always say this to people. Its not about what you do and what comes straight after, its the consequences you pay after what youve done that hurts most. Because if youve killed someone, youve got to live with your conscience for the rest of your life - that, rah, Ive taken that persons life and any day someone can know that its you, and someone else just run up on you and take yours. Then wheres that gonna leave your family? Even though you done
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already mash up one family, your familys gonna get mashed up. You could have your own kids and that, their Dad get killed, and if your kids are big theyre going to want to retaliate. Everyone makes their choices, everyones got a choice in life. If you want to follow the road life, you can follow the road life. If you want to go straight, you can go straight. Ive seen it. Theres nough of my brethrens dem that I wish Id followed when I was younger. But I cant turn back the hands of time. So all I have to do now is try to change from now for the future, because I cant change the past. What I did Ive done. I cant go back and say Im going to give back that person all the money that he gave to me, because I dont know how much money he gave to me, thats how mad it is. I have been through so much things and seen so much things, Ive seen nough people get killed, Ive seen people getting killed and shitting themselves as theyre dying. Ive seen all that. Ive been in shoot outs with man. Its what the consequences are, because if someone was to shoot me and my people know who it is, I know that persons gonna die if they catch him. But the way how my life is, there is so much enemies that Ive got, if someone was to kill me no one would know who it is, but yet still someone else would die for it - even if its not them, someone will die. Ejos If you were to die would you want your people to retaliate? James I cant really say because I dont really know my view on that right about now. Obviously Im not matured enough like you lot are, but from my point of view, yeah, I would want someone to die back for it. But maybe if I was a bit older and understanding life a bit more, probably no I wouldnt. Id have the same views as you. But because of how young I am, obviously my views going to be different from yours. Ejos Where do you see yourself in five years? James In five years I want to be playing football, thats what I want to be doing, but I cant definitely say that I will be playing football. Obviously my dream is to play for Manchester United. I want to but Im not going to say I will make it, because the way how life is, it might not turn out the way I want to. Were back in Jamess neighbourhood and, as Trevor is about to drop James off, there
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are a group of young men standing on the corner of the road. James informs us that he is in conflict with them, so Trevor continues driving. James immediately becomes defensive, assuming a hyper-masculine posturing. Trevor Do you want to be dropped somewhere else? Im not dropping you here. James Why not? Theyve seen me!
Conclusion In 2005 gun crime rose by more than 50 per cent despite huge efforts by Trident and the black community to combat it. And as it has risen so has the number of black males imprisoned for these offences. There is now an alarming number of young black men facing life imprisonment. I am not suggesting that these men should not be made accountable for their crimes. But the judicial system pathologises black males, and rarely ever gives serious consideration to the impact of their social and material condition. There is a fundamental need for long-term solutions that will alleviate the social and economic conditions that lie at the root of gun crime. In the meantime the most effective kinds of intervention are those in which the lived experience of the young men is understood and embraced. Black men, particularly those from the streets, and who most likely have a criminal experience, are pivotal in influencing the hard-to-reach young people. Both James and Robert cite Trevor as a major influence in diverting them away from crime. But alongside economic change and community intervention, we need to challenge patriarchal ideas of masculinity. All the young men concurred that men are socialised to accept violence as a norm. Kane explains: In our culture we seem to accept violence as a way of disputing things, to argue things out. Explaining why he carried a gun, he says:
Im not the instigator. Ive got no reason for that, Im a business man, it dont make no sense. But youve got to try and protect the investment. If someones trying to do you something, youve got to be able to defend yourself, and theres no point putting out fists these days, because thats not gonna get you nowhere.
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And with the gun comes power:

But one thing is, when you start, it brings a sense of power, and when the power comes you feel the man. No one can fuck with you, you feel invincible.
Kane realised that street crime only gave him false power, limited to the streets. But instead of adopting a more consciously critical position, he now seeks affirmation of his manhood through material wealth. He is playing the capitalist game, pursuing the same power that the white middle class have. In his attempts to counter the stereotypes of black male identity he has ended up adopting an ideal of success not very different from the Thatcherite individualism of the 1980s. Men who, refusing to be victims of a hierarchical political economy, have sought alternative means of economic production to provide for themselves and their families, have done so at the price of losing their souls, and their lives. Kane expresses the pain and crisis that black males face in their struggle to be self-determining: Ejos Were you not afraid when the gun was being pointed at you? Kane No, I werent afraid of none of that, truthfully. Ejos How does it happen - you just dont think about it? Kane You know what it goes back to I never really felt love, in a sense of - I dont know, how can I explain it - inside, deep down, nothing really bothered me. I cant really explain it. Its just a feeling within I feel, when you hold it deep inside, it just makes you want to give out pain. You dont really care about other people because you might be going through things yourself that are making you feel pain, and you feel no-one cares about you. When youve got that sort of anger inside you, it will make you easily not care about others. Ejos Do you think you had a lack of respect for life? Kane Definitely - if you have all that anger inside, you act on instinct rather than think things through.
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If we are to alleviate gun crime, we must do the brave and radical work of interrogating patriarchal masculinity and a culture of domination - as well as advocating new avenues for self-actualisation that foster the emotional well being of disaffected black people. Just as many women have found agency in the therapeutic discourse of dialogue, so can men. In loving memory of Junior
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Melancholia or conviviality
The politics of belonging in Britain
Paul Gilroy
Paul Gilroy reflects on the current fascination with heritage and identity - and its connections to postcolonial anxiety.1
Few words have been more abused and damaged recently than that fateful pair, heritage and identity. We have to begin by unpacking those key terms and exploring some of their tacit connections to larger cultural and political maps of our divided nation. These paired concepts refer us initially to the founding, historic, tension between country and city. But it would be too simple to say that heritage gets associated with the past and with rural life, while identity belongs emphatically to the present and to Britains urban environments. Furthermore, the national topography becomes more complex when we appreciate that the Irish, Scots and Welsh do not appear to be lacking in either of these two precious attributes: it is the English who are widely regarded as deficient in these areas. We can begin by directing our thoughts towards the difficult issue of where that sense of lack - we can call it a heritage and identity deficit - originates. In thinking about the recent history of England, talk about heritage
1. This article is based on a talk originally given at a heritage and identity conference at the British Museum in July 2004 (see also Patrick Wrights piece in this book). 48
and identity manifests a larger problem, the boundaries of which they help to mark out. Indeed the sheer frequency with which heritage and identity have been cropping up can now be read as a sign that all is not well within Britains political culture. We must remember that Identity is also the name of the British National Partys official monthly magazine. Its title encapsulates their harsh cure for the countrys ills. ith these problems in mind, I would like to suggest that the currency of heritage and identity must be made to reveal the deeper layers of feeling for which it supplies a polite vehicle. I associate the power of these concepts with the widespread desire to elevate Englishness into an ethnicity, and the impulse to recast Britishness so that it acquires an almost racial resonance. At root, these impulses are hostile responses to the supposedly disruptive presence of cultural diversity. I would like to suggest that they have been associated with the rise of a disabling anxiety about how to locate the evasive cultural basis of Britains ebbing social cohesion. For focusing so much attention on heritage and identity reminds us of another loss: the departure of a public culture in which, for good or ill, matters of belonging and inclusion could be taken for granted, because everybody more or less knew who they were and where they fitted in to the big hierarchy of the fractious national family.
The question of national identity The pathological desire to become absolutely certain as to who we are is the first substantive problem we must address. A second difficulty resides in the characteristic employment of culture-talk as a means to fix and retain that impossibly-complete national self-understanding. Culture can never, for me, be frozen in the way that this anxious pursuit of identity demands. To seek to fix culture is a problem because if we arrest its unruly motion we ossify it. Culture then becomes a dead specimen behind glass, to be contemplated rather than engaged. Todays great concern about the cultural content of our national identity, which heritage and identity help to solve, is not a general feature of human psychology. It is an unwelcome product of particular historical circumstances, which we should be able to recognise as belonging to the countrys post-colonial phase. What is fast becoming the common-sense explanation of Britains recent cultural woes suggests that this tell-tale anxiety over national identity (and the
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desperate pursuit of a certainty which can banish it) must be understood as the consequence of excessive and unwelcome immigration. Unlike more recent incomers, the no-longer-wanted commonwealth immigrants of the 1950s were regarded as settler-citizens. But they were exactly like contemporary asylum-seekers and refugees in that they were seen as being foisted onto an unsuspecting local population by callous politicians remote from the urgent tempo of ordinary urban life. The disruptive and unwelcome presence of all Britains aliens was therefore the result of an illegitimate demand. The white working class had not only been required to bear the brunt of assimilating these incomers into the British way of life; they were also expected to protect that ideal community against the intrusion of what Enoch Powell liked to call the alien wedge. This kind of argument has been recycled so often that it should be very familiar. It was a favourite of Powell and of Margaret Thatcher. Lately, however, it has become the slyly articulated viewpoint of Messrs Blunkett, Mandelson and Blair, who covet the populist magic it could once accomplish. Luckily, a more thoughtful approach to the issues of heritage and identity can help to repudiate it. et me put this another way. I think Britain has outgrown the 1960s model that linked assimilation and immigration. Two generations later, I prefer to see the anxieties which fuel the contemporary concern with heritage and identity as having their source not in anxieties about immigration as such, but in the effects of de-industrialisation and de-colonisation, in increased inequality and insecurity, in privatisation, and in the regressive modernisation that was begun under the Conservatives and has been enthusiastically continued by New Labour. These forces have shaped the turmoil into which immigrants, aliens and more recently asylum-seekers and refugees have been thrown, forces for which they have been made responsible - though the large social and economic changes involved were clearly not of their making.
Post-colonial melancholia As Stuart Hall argued thirty years ago, successive waves of incomers have been caught up in the countrys continuing quarrels with itself. The loss of the Empire, and the disappearance of the greatness that went along with it, had obvious political and economic consequences. We are far less alert to the resulting cultural and psychological dynamics. In the very moment that colonial settler
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citizens arrived as a replacement population prepared to take on the dirty and dangerous tasks that the locals no longer wanted to do, Britain found itself unable to mourn and work through its loss of empire. The country also found it hard to adjust to the presence of semi-strangers who, disarmingly, knew British culture intimately as a result of their colonial education. Rather than face up to the reduced geo-political stature embodied in that half-alien presence, Britain developed a melancholic attachment to its melancholias vanished pre-eminence. The colonial settlers guilt, self-loathing and their demanding descendants supplied and depression are an uncomfortable reminder of the history of increased by knowing the empire, which still returns spectrally in and then by denying complex forms that haunt the present and what the empire remain as painful and guilt-inducing as they involved are fascinating. This arrangement is what I call post-colonial or post-imperial melancholia. It is not the older, simpler melancholy transmitted in Britains folk traditions, nor even its middle-class counterpart, first announced by an apprehensive Mathew Arnold standing down at Dover beach, listening to the articulate sound of the shifting shingle and watching the lights twinkle from the French coast. Post-imperial melancholia is a neurotic and even a pathological development. It blocks the vitality of the culture, diverting it into the pleasures of morbid militaria and other dead ends for which heritage and identity supply the watchwords. It becomes impossible to get away from the painful and exhilarating memories of empire, and to move beyond the disabling sense that the nation can only enjoy restorative solidarity and healing community when it is at war. his dangerous situation has been compounded by melancholias recent cultural consequences. They have looped back into national consciousness, feeding and extending the basic pathology. The novelist Tony Parsons speaks for and to his generation by arguing that, in order to be the right sort of man, one must first have fought in a war. This linkage helps to explain the countrys apparently endless fascination with the second world war. That conflict is imagined obsessively because it seems to have been the last time in which, with characteristic pluck and ingenuity, true brits faced an enemy that was simply and uncomplicatedly evil. This, after all, is why David Brent and Gareth Keenan still want to watch The Dambusters on DVD. Many of the Spitfire
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pilots in the sky were Polish, but down in those famous, culture-conserving air-raid shelters, tea was being ritually brewed to restore national spirit and to revitalise a sense of homogenous community - across class divisions. That elixir was nourishing while it lasted. Once it ran out, togetherness and mutuality were replaced by chronic, nagging pain - something that helps to explain why so many British people identify with the twinges felt by poor, wounded Harry Potter. After the war, Commonwealth immigrants accomplished what the Nazis had never been able to do. They wrecked an unsuspecting England from within. Traditional white working-class distaste for the aliens was always mingled with the economic fears of those who had to compete in the same labour market, but it was amplified by another, deeper discomfort that arose from discovering what the brutal administration of the British empire had actually involved. As the mechanisms of belated reparation and litigation start to move, we are able to discover the shameful things done in the name of crown and country. However, people persist in denying that those crimes could have anything to do with the bitter dynamics of the postcolonial present. The wars and other low intensity conflicts in Kenya, Cyprus, Korea, Aden, Malaya, Ireland and many, many other locations, have slipped out of official national memory, but they remain somehow pending and unresolved in the perennial fantasy of conflict with Germany, which seems to have grown in potency by being closed off to living memory. elancholias guilt, self-loathing and depression are all increased first by knowing and then by denying what the empire involved. They are intensified by having to face the extent of national hatred and contempt for immigrants. The populist power of xenophobia and racism augments this complex formation, which leaps into life periodically to defend the place of Empires memory - in the nomenclature of the honours system, or in bullying would-be citizens about their unsteady command of syntax and punctuation. Those depressive and depressing symptoms are interspersed by periods of manic elation - usually related to spectator sports. A shocking convulsion of shame and concern attended the saga of official incompetence and indifference staged around the murder of Stephen Lawrence. That event marked the latest episode in the emergence of the countrys racial conscience - yet there had been many racist attacks before and many since Sir Stephen Macphersons lucid report went on to the same shelf on which Lord Scarmans slim volume had been deposited some years earlier. Thus genuine
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upset at inadequate judicial responses to the crime was complemented by a bizarre pattern of pretended incomprehension about its character and causes. Britain goes to great lengths to try and avoid accepting that racism could have been a specific factor both in the original killing and in the laws subsequent inadequacies. This too involves matters of heritage and identity, which get compromised and undermined by the failures of the judicial system. It is also important to see the recent popularity of revisionist histories of the empire in the context of national melancholia. These approaches to the glories of the past have become attractive and inspiring in a geo-political situation where the revival of empire has been explicitly demanded by influential voices. Widelyread historical works, most notably by Niall Ferguson, Linda Colley and Saul David, do more than just airbrush and nuance the rationally applied barbarity of Britains colonial past. Their implicit purpose is more sinister and more profound. They seize command of the role of victim that has become such a prestigious item in the moral economy of multi-cultural Britain. These authors would have us accept that the British are the primary victims of their own colonial history. That kind of position supplies a useful pre-condition for the revival of empire abroad and the rebirth of a homogenous, imperial spirit at home.
The clash of civilisations If that was not bad enough, promising discussions of the countrys multi-cultural character have been thwarted by the dissemination of civilisationist commonsense. Terror and racial conflict are now explained away as local manifestations of a global clash of cultures. This diagnosis has been projected ever more widely and authoritatively since the New York towers fell. Of course, a similar hardline culturalism can be traced back to Powells speeches, but it was given a fresh twist in British discussion on the electoral successes of Pim Fortyn, Jorg Haider, Jean-Marie LePen, the BNP and UKIP . Spun into valuable populist currency by the New Labour leadership, a timely blend of Powellism and bastardised Samuel Huntington served to increase the clamour for more difficult citizenship tests, and turned attention towards a cavalcade of terror mosques, veiled women and maimed imams. The post-industrial riots up north, where dwelling and labour markets carry the imprint of informal segregation, were loudly interpreted as race riots, meaning that they were supposed to convey something of the inner truth of
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the unbridgeable ethnic and religious differences that were fracturing the British polity. It bears repetition that the intensity of all these conversations has grown in direct proportion to the collapse of certainty as to what the core content of British culture should now be. Was it dumbed down or sexed up? Was it Endemol or Murdoch? Mike Skinner or Paul Dacre? Naomi Campbell or Alistair Campbell? he widely current civilisationist assertions about assimilation, culture and belonging were initially filtered through discussions criticising mistaken multi-culturalism in no-longer-homogenous Scandinavia, and incorrigible political correctness in the USA. Considerable space was devoted to these topics in the august pages of the respected journal Prospect. These themes were then taken over into the liberal mainstream by being re-printed in The Guardian. Prospects editors appear to have decided to occupy this controversial ground as a way of establishing a reputation for rigor, seriousness and taboobusting relevance. Their treatment of the hot topic of race, diversity and national identity was dominated by the political problems supposedly introduced by unassimilable mass immigration, by intrusive refugees and, most importantly, by a conflict rooted in the stubborn adherence of settler-descendants to their original cultures, religions and other ethnic habits. Wherever they have found themselves, the perverse attachment of those second and third generation immigrants to the dangerous legacies bequeathed by their colonial foreparents has been deemed inappropriate to their happy new circumstances. For these commentators on the problems that multi-culture poses for joined-up government, increased diversity made solidarity impossible. The obvious alternative proposition, that not diversity but racism and systematic marginalisation were responsible for Britains political divisions, was never entertained. Too many analysts preferred to make ready-mix pseudo-politics out of reified ethnic culture, and to indulge their defensive desire for the kind of compensation that can only be conferred by brittle arrested identity and immobile frozen culture. Prospect has spearheaded the adaptation and updating of well-worn themes drawn from the Powell lexicon. Immigration is always an invasion, and the inevitably following race war is a culturally-based conflict born from a fundamental, pre-political incompatibility. The only vague novelty here lay in the folding of these ancient motifs into a nominally left discourse.
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A team of fearless grandees, heavy hitters like David Goodhart, John Lloyd, Bob Rowthorn and Michael Ignatieff, were lined up to vent their spleen against the special privileges that would accrue to immigrants if the misguided cues from Macphersons report were wrongly applied; to lament a lack of attention to the plight of poor whites; and to expand the definition of an immigrant hyperbolically so that it could gobble up three or even four generations of culturally lost-souls adrift between being the aliens they ought to be and the Britons they were unlikely ever to become. The resulting torrent of lamentation was spiced up by another factor that it is easy to miss. The joined-up obligation to be tough on the misdeeds of immigrants meant that these commentators felt their own liberalism was being painfully taken away from them by their noble commitment to make sense of the countrys intractable problems. Their loud howls of resentment at this additional loss compounded both the characteristic melancholia and the embarrassing antipathy towards blacks, Muslims, illegals and asylum-seekers. Once again, none of them could imagine that Britains post-colonial settlers and the various sanctuary and hospitality-seeking peoples who have succeeded them had been caught up in economic, cultural and historical problems that were not of their making. Nobody could accept that it was the misfortune of these immigrants to try and settle or seek hospitality amidst de-industrialisation, the destruction of the welfare state, privatisation, marketisation and immiseration. trangers and aliens have been made exclusively responsible for the fact that their marginal lives have come to symbolise national decline and loss - when of course they are in no way the cause of the quarrels with which their presence has been associated. Melancholia means that it is easier to go along with the script that makes Britains perennial organic crisis primarily intelligible as a matter of race and nation, heritage and identity. Many of the continuing responses to Bhiku Parekhs report into Multi-Ethnic Britain reveal the same dismal pattern. Melancholias signature combination of manic elation and misery, self-loathing and ambivalence, is evident there too. Where this pathology has taken hold, hostility to the proposition that racist violence and institutional indifference are normal, recurrent features of British social and political life is regularly intermingled with absolute surprise at the nastiness of racism and the extent of the anger and resentment that it can cause. Hostility towards asylum-seekers and refugees cannot be concealed; but, once again, the idea that it has anything to do with noxious, violent racism or neo-
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fascist ultra-nationalism remains a shocking revelation and induces yet more guilt. Confusion and disorientation arise from a situation whereby melancholic and xenophobic Britain can quietly concede that it doesnt much like aliens, blacks, foreigners, Muslims and other interlopers and wants to get rid of them, but then becomes uncomfortable when it learns things about itself it doesnt like as it gives vent to these feelings of hostility. nne Wintertons recent joke about the death of the Chinese cocklepickers in Morecambe Bay, and the subsequent horrified reaction against it, are a typical example of this cycle of hatred, outrage and guilt. Thinking about those watery deaths is shocking and instructive. The bodies on the beach do more than teach us things we cannot bear to learn about the state of our de-regulated labour market. Washed up by the tide, the vulnerable, lessthan-human bodies of those would-be immigrants represent the discomforting ambiguities of the British empires painful and shameful but nonetheless exhilarating history. In this precarious national state, individual and group identifications converge not on the body of the sovereign or some other iconic national object-Britannia - whether recast in the guise of gym-trim Diana or the equally-immortal Queen Mum, David Beckhams various haircuts, or even the beaming, sweaty figure of Prime Minister Blair himself - but in opposition to the intrusive presence of the incoming strangers. Trapped inside the local logic of race, nation and ethnic absolutism, their menacing, unwanted bodies refer resentful consciousness to the unacknowledged pain of empires loss and the unsettling shame of its bloody management. Powells alien wedge entered here because Britain was once out there, being great in the world it dominated. That basic fact of global history is undeniable. And yet, grudging recognition of it now provides a stimulus for additional forms of hostility. They are triggered by the realisation that, even if todays unwanted settlers are not actually post-colonials, they can still carry with them all the ambivalence of the vanished empire. Even if they are white, they can be held hostage by the idea that they too are immigrants; even they can project dangerous discomfort into the unhappy consciousness of their fearful and anxious hosts and neighbours. Indeed, the incomers may be unwanted and feared precisely because they are the unwitting stimulus for the pain produced by memories of that vanished imperial and colonial past.
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John Lloyds blustery concern for the plight of Britains poor whites was also important because it showed how readily the melancholic pattern dovetails with recent US exports. As far as race is concerned, the US is the only future that the brit punditocracy can imagine for our country. Huntington, whose latest work sees the flood of immigrants from Latin America as the single most immediate and serious challenge to Americas traditional identity, had some years ago articulated for Americans the scary linkage between immigration and multiculturalism. And this linkage has now moved to the centre of reflection on the government of multi-culture. More than a decade ago, in language that was deeply marked by anxieties over racial degeneration - recast in cultural terms that were no less absolute than their biological antecedents - Huntingtons Clash of Civilizations linked urgent geo-political problems to the ghastly prospect of growing cultural diversity:
Multiculturalism at home threatens the United States and the West; universalism abroad threatens the West and the world. Both deny the uniqueness of western culture. The global monoculturalists want to make the world like America. The domestic multi-culturalists want to make America like the world. A multi-cultural America is impossible because a non-Western America is not American. A multicultural world is unavoidable because global empire is impossible.
Huntingtons elision of the US and The West is significant but - for the English reader anyway - it is also misleading.
Britains convivial heritage Our heritage and identity should be telling us that the United States is not the inevitable destination of our distinctive history of racial politics. There are many ways in which our countrys long experience of convivial post-colonial interaction and civic life has, largely undetected by our governments, provided resources for a vibrant multi-culture that we do not always value, use wisely or celebrate as we should. Please note that I say multi-culture rather than multiculturalism, for in Britain at least there is no such ideology. The desire to forge it died long ago in the ashes of the ILEA and GLC, which had been trying to challenge and re-work the outmoded discourse of assimilation that had been left untouched
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since Roy Jenkins, Roy Hattersley and company set it aside in the 1960s. The countrys convivial culture sprouted spontaneously and unappreciated from the detritus of their failed social experiment. In acknowledging the political and cultural force of conviviality I am not saying that racism has been dealt with. It is still at work, souring things, distorting economic relations and debasing British public life. However, we must also face up to the fact that racism is no longer what it was in the rivers of blood days - when Powells bleak prophecy of racial war was confirmed a few weeks later by the murder of Martin Luther King Jnr. Todays political geography and the cultural climate around race are rather different. Thus, for example, years of tokenism have sometimes had significant effects. Sport, pop, advertising and the House of Lords are all superficially integrated. n particular, reality TV has unwittingly done a great deal to situate racial difference among other contending varieties of diversity. Racial and ethnic differences get rendered unremarkable. Instead of adding to the premium of race, we learn that in consumer culture the things which really divide us are much more profound: taste, life-style, leisure preferences, cleaning, gardening and child care. By making racial differences ordinary and banal, even boring, Britains emergent conviviality has promoted everyday virtues that enrich our cities, drive our cultural industries and enhance our struggling democracy so that it cannot operate in colour-coded forms. Conviviality takes hold when exposure to otherness involves more than jeopardy. It inspires us to applaud settler and other immigrant demands for a more mature polity that, even if it is not entirely free of racism, might be equipped to deal with racial hierarchies as a matter of politics without lapsing into unproductive guilt and narcissistic anguish. That shift could benefit all of us. From a far healthier position, we might even be able to identify the results of ordinary multi-cultures demands for recognition in various areas of policy: health, education and criminal justice, as well as the arts and cultural planning. Couldnt a confrontation with racism make all those institutions work better - that is, more democratically and inclusively - across the board? Once sufficient political will exists, that supposedly unbridgeable gulf between civilisations can be easily spanned. This came over very strongly in the tales that the homecoming British detainees told of their Caribbean detention by the US government at Guantanamo Bay. Their being fed with burgers from the Bases
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branch of McDonalds, rather than the culturally appropriate meals which are a much-vaunted part of the Camps humanitarian regime, was a hint at what can be achieved. Even more telling was the revelation that, in articulating their strongest desires for freedom and relief from the Camp regime, they say that what they really craved was a packet of Highland Shortbread biscuits! Jamal al-Harith, born 37 years ago in Manchester as Ronald Fiddler to a family with Jamaican origins, was held in the Guantanamo Camps for two years before being released and sent back in March 2004. He recounted his post-colonial life story in the Daily Mirror and on Manchesters local radio, and offered a welcome rebuke to all the mechanistic and over-simple conceptions of cultural difference that are currently in circulation. His critique lost nothing by being left largely implicit. In between a shocking account of the stupidity, horror and hopelessness of his long ordeal, he explained how much that famous shortbread had mattered: We were all obsessed with Scottish Highland Shortbread. We wanted some so much. And here - in the message of that traditional hunger, lodged in those battered and humiliated British bodies - the problem of assimilation specified in the 1960s should be laid to rest forever.
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Last orders for the English Aborigine

Patrick Wright
What are the secrets of secret England?
Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget. For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet. G.K. Chesterton, 1907
While driving near Halstead in north Essex last year, I came across a road sign announcing that I was about to enter New England and should therefore reduce my speed. I did as instructed, eager to get the measure of this optimistically named place. Ornamented with dragons and satellite dishes, the first building I passed was a combined restaurant and ballroom named Taste of China. Opposite was a road haulage firm called Westrope, which, at one corner of its sprawling site, had managed to mutate into a clapboard junk shop overflowing with concrete garden statues - a collection that moved effortlessly from robust classical Goddesses to wrinkled gnomes and Old Mother Hubbards shoe. I noticed a few houses, an unseasonably closed roadside restaurant named Pippins, and also a thriving new garden centre: the kind of place where even tightly-buttoned English folk reveal themselves to be at ease with the most flagrant products of cross-breeding. But that was about it. I had passed through New England before I was really aware of having reached it. Later, I looked for the place on a map but could find no trace at all. I searched on the internet but, even when I added encouraging words such as Essex, I couldnt get closer than the east coast
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of the USA. Despite the temporary yellow signs indicating that one of John Prescotts new housing developments was being built in the neighbourhood, Britains New England is apparently still too small to register. The old version, meanwhile, continues to lurk all around us. he lines from G.K. Chestertons poem The Secret People quoted at the beginning of this essay also feature at the head of a chapter entitled The English Enigma in Tom Nairns book, The Break Up of Britain.1 Writing in the 1970s, Nairn used the passage to introduce his argument that a loosening of the British state would only be possible if accompanied by some restoration of the English political identity. Ireland, Wales and Scotland could, as Nairn said, be grasped as relatively ordinary examples of modern political nationality, but the English were too vague and mixed up to fit a nationalist stereotype. Diluted by the British Empire, they retained no national dress and possessed only what Nairn called a faltering and disconnected iconography (John Bull etc). There was, he said, no coherent, sufficiently democratic myth of Englishness. As a result, the English were left lurching about between worship for the semi-divine Constitution and the Mother of Parliaments and crude racism of the sort shown by the London dockers who marched in support of Enoch Powell in 1968. In terms of constitutional reform, things have been moved on significantly since Nairn wrote those words. We have a Scottish Parliament, a Welsh national assembly and, despite ongoing difficulties, a far less murderous situation in Northern Ireland. We have also seen new attempts to define the values around which a devolved and various Britain might cohere. In 2000 Bhiku Parekh and the members of his Commission were savaged - and not just by the tabloids - for advocating a rethinking of national identity in their report on The Future of MultiEthnic Britain. Bernard Crick fared much better when proposing the Home Offices more disciplinary new citizenship test for immigrants in 2003. Gordon Brown has also argued the need for a new sense of British identity, with an emphasis on the importance of being enterprising while still attending to the golden thread running through British history: not backwardlooking nostalgia, as he insisted last year, but a renewable tradition in which prominence is given to civic values and the sense of duty and fair play. That vision of a New Britain, in which economic prosperity is harmonised with social justice,
1. Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (first edition 1977), Verso 1981, pp291-305. 61
may indeed be something to work for. But the thought of a resurgent English nationalism does not inspire Mr Brown - nor any of his Cabinet colleagues - to comparable flights. It is surely not just because both Brown and Blair are Scottish that the English Question is met with palpable silence in government circles. Indeed, it provokes an embarrassment of the kind that, during Mr Blairs first government, made the rebranded politicians of New Labour highly reluctant to be photographed near old buildings. It is fine to emphasise the virtues of regionalism within Europe, but English nationalism is denied as an incorrigibly primitive beast, best kept carefully locked up in its cave. If there is good reason for this sense of caution, it may be connected to the continued circulation of Chestertons lines about the secret people of England, that never have spoken yet. In 1997, they were cited by Martin Bell as he opposed Neil Hamilton in the Tatton byelection. In June 1999, James Gray, the Scottish Tory MP for North Wiltshire, quoted them as he argued against the injustice of a post-devolutionary situation in which MPs for Scotland still retained power to make decisions over England. hestertons lines are also popular with the champions of the countryside. In February 2002 they were used by Iain Duncan Smith on behalf of farmers beset by Foot and Mouth. Favoured by fox-hunting militants, they also appear on the marching banners of the Countryside Alliance: brandished as the slogan of a rural population oppressed by urban majority values and a Labour government that has no respect for rural custom and practice. They are quoted by the Campaign for an English Parliament; and they feature in the rhetoric of the UK Independence Party - for whom the secret people are oppressed by the remote decisions of the European Community. If these lines from Chesterton remain one of the most persistently quoted expressions of English identity, this may be because their definition of Englishness differs from other well-known examples. Various figures, including Stanley Baldwin in the 1920s and George Orwell in 1940, have reached their definitions of the national identity by drawing up lists of characteristic qualities or traits. Chesterton had his preferences too, but the Englishness of his secret people is not just an inventory. It is, instead, a defensive stance adopted against the power of the state and the transformations that follow in the wake of a modernising history. As such, Chestertons version of Englishness has proved more easily adjustable to changing times than Orwells inventory of smoky
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towns, red pillar-boxes, autumnal mists and bicycling old maids (a collection of characteristic fragments that seemed threadbare and sadly exhausted when John Major tried to reorientate them towards middle England in the early 1990s). It has also shown greater application than the horse-drawn ploughs that Baldwin declared to be both primordial and timeless in a speech in 1924 - at the very moment when they were being replaced by tractors all over the country. Far more emphatically than Orwells or Baldwins. Chestertons Englishry finds its essence in that sense of being opposed to the prevailing trends of the present. Its a perspective that allows even the most well-placed man of the world to imagine himself a member of an endangered aboriginal minority: a freedom fighter striking out against alien values and the infernal works of a usurping state.
Drunk but free So what are the sources of this defensive and surprisingly persistent way of thinking about English identity? The Secret People was first published in 1907 in a magazine named The Neolith. Its secret Englishmen can be imagined as a group of Anglo-Saxon men seated in an unrenovated pub: slow but steadfast, unschooled but instinctively wise. These representatives of native common sense have sat there drinking their undoubtedly real ale while the centuries have unfolded outside and sometimes come crashing in through the door. They have seen the comings and goings of sundry invaders, and gained nothing through a long succession of rulers - from Norman barons to the triumphant puritans of the Civil War. Some may have put down their glasses and wandered off to fight with Nelson at Trafalgar (dying like lions to keep ourselves in chains). In general, however, these unreconstructed natives have not responded enthusiastically to those who have tried to rally them to the defence of their own interests: A few men talked of freedom, while England talked of ale. Or again: It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest / Gods scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best. Chesterton (who died in 1936) cannot have seen binge-drinking of the kind that nowadays tends to alarm even half-drunk observers of the English Saturday night. However, he did find a peculiarly philosophical way of coming down on the side of the alehouse. He treated beer as both the desire and customary right of the put-upon native Englishman. He developed this idea in his argument with the Fabian socialists who imagined building up a strong
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and expert state as an instrument of enlightened social reform. Working-class alcoholism was a matter of concern to the Fabians (as it was to many European socialist parties seeking a wider, and non-drunken, franchise at the opening of the twentieth century). Together with his long-standing friend Hilaire Belloc, who also praised the traditional pub as a fortress of virtue in a degenerating present in which nothing is capable of endurance,2 Chesterton argued strongly against these meddlesome Fabian reformers. Writing in The New Age in February 1908, he declared Drink and property have been swelled in our world into abominations The proposed abolition of personal property has its only practical parallel in teetotalism. So this curious Edwardian symbolism grew up, in which beer came to be associated with traditional English freedom, while the joyless and over-intellectual Fabian meddlers such as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw put themselves to bed with warm cocoa. hestertons idea of Englands secret people, far from being an outcrop of Tory thinking, originated as part of this argument within the frame of Edwardian socialism. Chesterton and Belloc came to be known as Distributists, arguing - against both monopoly capitalism and state socialism - that property and ownership of the means of production should be as widely spread as possible. Their vision was variously shaped by Catholicism, anarchism, Chartism and the decentralised tradition of guild socialism. Their beleaguered England was on the side of the people against Industrialism, monopoly capitalism and the rules and bureaucrats of what Belloc called the servile state. It also had a strongly anti-imperial tinge. Chesterton elaborated this aspect of his Englishness in an essay taking issue with Rudyard Kipling, and in particular with Kiplings epigram what can they know of England who only England know? It was, contended Chesterton, a far deeper and sharper question to ask what can they know of England who know only the world?3 He saw Kipling as an imperial cosmopolitan, whose devotion to England was the outcome not of love but of critical thought. This he valued far less than the real (by which he meant instinctive and unreflected) patriotism of the Irish or the Boers, whom Kipling had recently hounded down in South
2. Quoted from At the Sign of the Lion in Hilaire Belloc, The Hills and the Sea, Methuen 1912, pp251 & 252. 3. G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, John Lane 1905, pp46-53. 64
Africa. Kipling, he said, did not belong to England or, indeed to any place: and the proof of it is this, that he thinks of England as a place. The moment we are rooted in a place, the place vanishes. We live like a tree with the whole strength of the universe. For Chesterton, the large ideas prosper when it is not a question of thinking in continents, but of understanding a few two-legged men. Travel of the kind in which Kipling had indulged was a mere distraction, which shrank the world into a series of destinations:
The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men - diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern Britons. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men - hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky.
Or again, this time in opposition to the new mobility of motor-car civilisation: The man standing in his own kitchen-garden, with fairyland opening at the gate, is the man with large ideas. His mind creates distance; the motor-car stupidly destroys it. e may initially feel attracted to this attempt to dissociate England from the organisational efficiency of the imperial British state. Yet Chestertons remains a thoroughly defensive definition of Englishness - one that was formulated in bitter awareness that the world was actually charging headlong in the opposite direction. Its anti-imperialism was less a critical engagement with the British Empire than an inward-looking act of retreat and denial. Though presented as a cosmic locale, Chestertons England was from the start also a last ditch to be defended against all sorts of encroaching modern forces. Chesterton himself demonstrated this in 1914, when he published his comic novel The Flying Inn. This work shows beleaguered English virtues lined up against a host of parodied modern absurdities. It opens with Humphrey Pump, whose pub, the Old Ship, lies by an apple orchard in a little village named Pebbleswick. All would have remained well in this organic English nook, except that the British government, thanks to an over-intellectual cabinet minister
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named Lord Ivywood, has succumbed to alien influences. In what may have been intended as a comment on the cranky and disconnected faddishness of Fabian intellectuals, Ivywood has fallen under the spell of a zealous Islamic prophet, and imposed a ban on alcohol. The Old Ship may long have been a refuge for those who wished that, in Bellocs phrase, the fear of mutation should be set at rest (Hills and the Sea, p254). But it must close, so Dalroy and Pump uproot their pub sign, take a barrel of ale and a large cheese and set off around the country: coming out of hiding to erect their pub sign at a series of fugitive locations, and then melting away again as the authorities catch up. hile it contains the famous poem praising the rolling English road (made, as readers may recall, by the rolling English drunkard), The Flying Inn also imagines the nightmare that follows when the English oligarchy is run by an Englishman who hasnt got an English mind. That, of course, is Lord Ivywood, against whom Chesterton celebrates the unschooled publican Humphrey Pump as a kind of English aborigine who has learned by experience rather than through books. Common sense and an incorruptible kindliness lie at the root of Pumps Englishry. He also has an instinctive grasp of his native land, knowing the English boundaries almost by intuition. The deepest thoughts are all commonplaces, as Chesterton writes, once again lining up unreflected English instinct against the detached and artificial cleverness of the ruling elite: if they have to choose between a meadow and a motor, they forbid the meadow. Predictably enough, the governing classes also have a taste for the most pretentious of Modern Art. One scene is set in an exhibition of Post-Futurist Art at a fairly unmistakable Tate Gallery. Admirers expound on the virtues of the exhibited works, even though they cant tell a landscape from a portrait. The show is also approved by the Islamic prophet, who pronounces that there is no need for these Post-Futurist works to be proscribed as idols, since they cant really be called pictures at all. Too much encroachment The Flying Inn is still admired as a prescient comedy: an early assault on political correctness and the bureaucratic mentality of the centralised state. Chesterton was indeed insightful on some themes. His distrust of Fabianism and the scientifically organised state alerted him early to the dangers of eugenics. His mistrust of the Fabians was also vindicated in the 1930s, when many of these
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highly educated thinkers embraced Stalins Soviet Union as the progressive land where centralised state planning had really come into its own. Similarly, there was nothing fictitious about many of the industrial and urban degradations he and Belloc opposed. Yet the dangers of Chestertons way of thinking about England as an organic realm threatened by modern forces were also there from the start. In the poem, The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), the malevolent encroacher is presented as a weed creeping inward to obscure the ancient horse carved in the chalk of a Wessex hillside:
The turf crawled and the fungus crept, and the little sorrel, while all men slept, Unwrought the work of man.
Yet in The Secret People, the agent of destruction had already been given human form. Here are the nullifying bureaucrats of the modern state:
Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes.
The racial alien is also dragged in: the cringing Jew, accompanied as so often in anti-Semitic iconography, by his loyal sidekick the staggering lawyer. These lines, which are not excerpted in the dictionaries of quotations, indicate that qualities distinct from Humphrey Pumps incorruptible kindliness may be found at the heart of Chestertons England. Indeed, they suggest that it may be impossible to adopt the values of secret England without also signing up to a current of fear and loathing that brings a whole series of alien destroyers streaming by. This was certainly the case with the organic movement that set out to revive the (genuinely) depressed English countryside in the 1920s and 1930s. One of the organisations bent on reviving the English type at this time was a Chestertonian-sounding association named the English Array, which had cells or musters around the country. Its members were on the side of compost, brown bread, and the old village hierarchy. They disliked white bread, tinned and imported food (English food in English bodies as they advocated), and also the alien bamboo that was threatening to replace native hazel as a frame for English
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runner beans.4 Thanks to its far right ideologues, who included the notoriously anti-Semitic A.M. Ludovici, and also A.K. Chesterton (a fascist cousin of G.K. Chesterton), this eccentric defence of the English countryside was identified with an anti-Semitic assault on the financial system, and a tendency to view the urban population as gibbering, faithless, horribly over-fertile products of degenerate interbreeding. Having emerged with one foot in this camp, the Soil Association would later have to reorganise itself around the understanding that, while the organic idea may be benign when it comes to potatoes, carrots and apples, vile things start to happen when it is applied to human societies. espite Chestertons incipient anti-Semitism and his softness for fascism (admitted in the 1930s, when he opposed Stalinist Communism as the alternative), his lines about the people of England, that never have spoken yet found their most respectable application during the Second World War. And perhaps never more strongly than in the House of Commons debate on 2 September 1939, which challenged Neville Chamberlain, together with his policies of appeasing Hitler (who had just invaded Poland). When the leader of the Labour Party, Arthur Greenwood rose to speak, Leopold Amery shouted Speak for England, Arthur! from the Conservative benches. But the secret phobias would return with This England, an explicitly Chestertonian publication that would become one of Britains most widely circulated heritage magazines (for a further discussion see The Village that Died for England, pp41-3). Launched as a quarterly reflection on English Life in 1968, it advocated looking back with pride, and said of the contemporary world, it may be clever and modern and progressive. But its certainly not English. This may have seemed faintly amusing when applied to decimalisation, but by 1976 the targeted encroachment was different: the knowalls have opened the flood gates until our cities throb with trouble. England is our home. Heathrow is our front door. In 1992, the owner of This England, Roy Faiers, was involved in the successful campaign to defeat John Taylor, now Lord Taylor of Warwick, when he stood as black candidate for the safe Conservative seat of Cheltenham. The polarisations that are so characteristic of Chestertons vision of England continue to reverberate in other ways too. A considerable number of recent
4. For the English Array and other rural activists of this period, see my The Village that Died For England (revised edition) Faber 2003, pp180-240. 68
books about England have adopted an elegiac mode, even if their funereal lament for England and its representative forms is by no means always accompanied by accusations directed at an alien encroacher.5 An ostensibly comic strand of fiction persists as well. In 1995, Andrew Roberts published The Aachen Memorandum, a slight but highly symptomatic novel, in which an English Resistance Movement rises up against a German dominated European Superstate that bans Christmas Trees and Hollywood films, and elaborates interfering rules concerning the right, or otherwise, of native English women to shave their armpits. Pursuing the same theme of bunkered Englishness, Richard Littlejohn in 2001 came up with To Hell in a Handcart, a sniggering fulmination directed at predictable targets - from the political correctness of the state functionary to racism awareness training. This book serves quite adequately to bring us up to a present in which Chestertons poem The Secret People appears (this time complete with staggering lawyer and cringing Jew) as poem of the month on the British National Partys website. dont wish to overstate the connectedness of the examples I have cited, yet there is little doubt that, while Chestertons version of secret England dates from nearly a hundred years ago, it expresses a way of thinking about identity and change that remains active to this day. It is by no means a dominant outlook, yet its persistence in an age that is actually defined by global mobility, transnational identities, and a weakening of the nation-state, justifies the sense of caution that many feel about English nationalism. In polarising the past from the present, it produces a kippered England in which the very thought of difference or change is instantly identified with degeneration, corruption and death. Chesterton and Belloc may have associated their remaining England with Catholic values, but it has since become a Philistine England, in which native commonsense becomes indistinguishable from unspoken (but all the more effective) prejudice, and in which the elegiac spirit becomes militant and vicious. In too many versions it is a secret England not because its people are genuinely too oppressed to speak, but because they prefer to sit muttering over their beer: sharing unspeakable ideas that are neither remotely adequate to the
5. Recent examples of elegiac writing about England include: Peter Vansittart, In Memory of England (John Murray 1998); Roger Scruton, England: an Elegy (Chatto & Windus 2000); and Byron Rogers, The Last Englishman; the Life of J.L. Carr (Aurum Press 2003). 69
issues they pretend to address nor capable of commanding public debate. This way of thinking about England as a land of beleaguered residues does nothing to clarify the problems it addresses. Instead, it wraps them in a grossly simplified narrative of (old) authenticity and (new) corruption, and then sends its followers out in search for scapegoats. It justifies sceptics, such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, in shunning the idea of Englishness altogether, preferring to identify with a New Britain organised around a democratic conception of citizenship rather than a reactive fantasy of organic roots.6 It also lends urgency to the project of those who would reclaim English traditions (including the vin-da-loo Ingerland of the football terraces), and create an expanded New England in which, as Billy Bragg has suggested, the hyphenated phrase Anglo-Saxon would testify to the fact that the English have been mongrels since time immemorial.7 ertainly, we should reject the suggestion that English identity consists of a single closed lineage to be conserved against present challenges. We should avoid putting anyones static and disconnected idea of tradition where political interaction and civic vitality should be. We should also refuse the idea of the English as a secret people. Back in 1914, Chestertons roving commonsensical publican Humphrey Pump made do with a pub sign, a cheese and a barrel of beer. But, if last years Labour Party Conference is anything to go by, his instinctive, fox-hunting descendants prefer to dump dead animals in the streets of Brighton, and to snarl anti-Semitic insults at Gerald Kaufman (see Guardian 30.9.04). What, finally, are the implications of this outlook for those concerned with history and cultural heritage? This is surely a time for more rather than less historical awareness. Yet our sense of history should be informed by a critical perspective. It needs to be capable of understanding the otherness of the past and aware of the dangers of cleaving to imagined organic continuities. Far
6. See the exchange on this issue between Tom Nairn and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in Tom Nairn, Pariah; Misfortunes of the British Kingdom, London: Verso, 2002, pp163-70. 7. See the articles by Billy Bragg, John Williams, Pete Davies and others in Mark Perryman (ed.), The Ingerland Factor, Mainstream Publishing 1999. Billy Braggs treatment of the hyphen in Anglo-Saxon can be found on his CD English, Half English (2002). For an interesting account of six Anglo-British figures who have broken with thoroughbred fantasy, see Kevin Davey, English Imaginaries: Six Studies in Anglo-British Modernity, Lawrence & Wishart, 1999. 70
from being left to the British National Party or the monocultural elegists of This England, heritage should be embraced as a various theme: one that expands horizons rather than narrowing them, and also confirms (as many of our museums and galleries are already doing) that it is entirely possible to maintain a sense of cultural belonging in the twenty-first century without retreating into a dank tribal recess (Humphrey Pumps The Old Ship) and peering out aggressively at the increasing number of people who know that the future lies elsewhere. This essay is an extended version of a talk presented at the National Heritage Lotterys Conference, Who do we think we are; Heritage and Identity in the UK Today (held at the British Museum on 13 July 2004). In revising it, I have benefited from the discussions of that day, and also from comments made by Paul Gilroy (whose contribution at the conference also features in this book) and Melvyn Bragg.
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Fear of difference/ fear of sameness

The road to conviviality
Roshi Naidoo
Does recognising the other as the same as us threaten the fantasy of British uniqueness?
I recently came across an account of a meeting between Pablo Picasso and Aubrey Williams, the acclaimed abstract painter and key figure in the Caribbean Artists Movement.1 The two were introduced by Albert Camus, but the meeting was profoundly disappointing for Williams, as Picasso complimented him on his fine African head and suggested Williams should pose for him. This story illustrates two differing but related faces of racism. First, the fetishising of difference as exotic and the only marker of ones humanity, and second - as in Picassos inability to treat Williams as a fellow artist - the failure to see, for want of a better word, sameness. In cultural politics it is common to talk about the fear of difference as a crucial component of racism, but this inability to see sameness is not usually described as a fear. However, if we do think of it in this way it may help us to understand what is at stake for those who refuse to see beyond such markers of difference as race, sexuality, or disability. What power balances will be disturbed by accepting
1. See G. Jordan and C. Weedon, Cultural Politics - Class, Gender, Race and the Postmodern World, Blackwell 1995, p446. 72
both the differences and sameness of those around us? And if we understand this, can we see that people hold on to these fears for reasons other than naivety or ignorance? Perhaps there is something more threatening lurking here, which would explain this fear. his article considers the ways in which fear of sameness, as well as fear of difference, infuses race talk, and the implications this has for British national identity. It looks at how this is played out in various ways in public culture, in representation and in the workplace. But before we can tackle this we need to be clear about what we mean by sameness, to avoid it being interpreted as a liberal erasure of difference and a championing of the notion that we are all the same under the skin; such strategies have been used historically to privilege an ethnocentric conformity and to quash and control black political claims.
Sameness comes with a health warning Like many people who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, I was often assured by white school friends and neighbours that I was thought of as being just the same as them, that they didnt notice my blackness and that with them I could be assured that my colour didnt matter. This sort of claim to the acceptance of sameness was obviously problematic: it implied a deracinated view of others, a privileging of whiteness as the norm, and an unspoken dislike of those other foreigners who were patently not the same and whose differences did matter. Even as children we recognised that these sorts of remarks invited us to participate in a very limited idea of our sameness; we knew we were simultaneously like our white friends and like those troubling outsiders. The identity politics of the 1970s and 1980s took issue with this sense of sameness, stressing the power and pleasure of blackness and ones ethnic belonging, socially, culturally and especially politically. Through many of these analyses, being female, black, gay, etc, was recuperated as an important and privileged subject position which conveyed a unique critical vision on the world. Claims that individuals or institutions were race blind were treated with suspicion, and the politics of identity helped us to understand that being told you were the same was in effect being told you were like white people. Therefore the call for a recognition of sameness, and a stress upon global humanity and our interdependence, brings with it the weight of this history, and the worry that it may involve a loss of a specific black identity, which may
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in turn undermine the power to speak collectively. Those who have recognised that subjectivity cannot be essentialised, and community not homogenised, still feel uneasy when faced with any pleas to an underlying humanity which unites us despite our differences. Another problem with talking about sameness is that it can too easily be harnessed into calls for a normative, dominant Britishness of the prescriptive type implicated in citizenship testing, in the national curriculum, and in tabloid and more respectable views on why we need to exclude migrants and asylum seekers. This version of national belonging can cope with a limited celebration of visible ethnic differences, as long as they are subsumed under a more powerful, universal Britishness. Here you will often find the view that curry is our national dish, an observation usually used to secure a sense of new ease with difference within a largely unaffected national identity. It becomes a signifier of a nations capacity to be inclusive to its legitimate foreigners, but rarely invites us to reflect on our national myths and conceits.
Why fear? Why am I talking about the fear of sameness - surely this is just another aspect of our fear of difference? Isnt it just the inability to recognise the humanity of others, and to see that we are essentially similar, that underpins a fear of difference? Although this is true, understanding this as a fear allows us to see that there is much for some to be potentially fearful of - such as power shifts, changes in national identity, differing attitudes to migration, a radically different media universe and changes in how we understand the global poor. Whereas there is currently space to acknowledge difference in public culture without undermining the foundations of the state too much, facing the connections between us can potentially expose the deep social, political, cultural and psychological investments there are in how race and difference are currently understood. And possibly the most disruptive idea that lurks within this fear of sameness is that Englishness might not be all that special after all. Whereas fear of difference is associated with the right, liberals and those on the left define themselves partially through their comfort with difference, and against those who become anxious and fearful in its presence. To be comfortable with difference is often worn as a badge of honour; to shyly insert a reference to how conversant you are with an aspect of other cultures asserts one as
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cosmopolitan. I dont say this to be dismissive of it, and I dont think it always equates with an exoticisation of cultural difference. But while not to be fearful of difference is one thing - it can mean we are happy to live in multicultural cities or walk down Old Compton Street - can we also accommodate this and still retain a fear of sameness?
Fear of sameness in national heritage I recently worked on a cultural diversity project in the heritage sector in a home county. I declined the invitation to work with children of African descent, to talk about African animals at a local natural history museum, and also showed minimal enthusiasm for various multicultural festivals which were suggested. The parts of the project which recorded migration stories, particularly those of Travellers and Gypsies, were more interesting to me, but only, I said, if they were placed in a bigger context of the countys everyday history rather than treated as an exotic add-on to it. Addressing black and minority heritage in Britain, I said, should stop tinkering around the edges and think about the ways in which, for example, the histories of people of Caribbean, African and Asian descent are at the centre of the countys heritage, in the histories of its stately homes, the economies of its industries and in every aspect of its culture. made what I thought at the time was a wholly uncontentious claim, that Britain is made up of waves of migration and diaspora and that the legacies of colonialism, domestically and internationally, require closer scrutiny and representation in the heritage sector. However the implication that we are all, in some sense, migrants, and a mongrel nation (as Eddie Izzards migration history programme was titled) turned out to be a troubling idea. The objections which I met on many (though not all) sides were based on some complex issues which I found could best be theorised around this idea of a fear of sameness. The rewriting of general narratives of the nations heritage to locate us as always having been shaped by migration was seen as too diffuse and not as easy as putting on a multicultural event, which could illustrate ones commitment to diversity very clearly. How would people know that it was a diversity project and that the museum sector was now being more inclusive if this approach was taken? It became clear that there was a preference for projects where visible differences could be marked, such as brown faces on websites, different dress, and the evidence of being able to tick the ethnic boxes of audience figures. Without
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this how would we know we are comfortable with difference? To be critical of this would seem at first to contradict what I have said about the importance of a radical sameness which incorporates difference. Audience figures for museums and archives show that there is still an under-representation of certain groups and therefore it is only right that special attention is made to bring them in - there needs to be a specific appeal to difference. But we also have to ask whose interests it is in to mark certain differences, and how this works to secure a view of the state as ethnically neutral, magnanimously inclusive and therefore universal. I would be less cynical if this strategy went hand in hand with changing the narratives around the colonial objects in museums, thereby making a more profound commitment to ethnic minority audiences. Asserting sameness denies the state its role as a benign tolerator of new and baffling foreignness - instead it means accepting the fact of us all being caught up in the same historical and geographical momentum. ccepting this causes fissures in all sorts of national myths, particularly in the casting of the second world war as the golden moment of British national identity. When I read Paul Gilroys After Empire I thought immediately of a woman on the project I have been describing who seemed to occupy that place between melancholia for a past England and a pragmatic awareness of the need for a voice for a new multiculturalism.2 She talked of the first antiracist bus boycotts in England and of the need for more stories to be told in schools about migration to Britain; but this was coupled with an acute sense of loss for simpler times, which was acted out in her participation in second world war and medieval re-enactments. For people who understand British history on this binary of a white past/multicultural present, it is not difference in its present guise which poses a threat, but the fact that it was always so. In many parts of the local heritage sector the war is by far the most revisited of all historical moments, but sadly not with a view to challenging fascism and antiSemitism, or as a means of fostering sympathy for those currently dispossessed by war and conflict. Losing oneself in war reminiscences is figured in opposition to the modern and politically correct heritage of cultural diversity. It exists as something safe and knowable, as opposed to something which must reluctantly be embraced. There is space for some acceptance of difference and there is
2. Paul Gilroy, After Empire, Routledge 2004. 76
much talk of the contribution of military personnel of Caribbean, African and Asian descent in the war. But the notion of contribution keeps these figures at a distance rather than on the same plane as all those other heroic war figures. What if such soldiers and sailors didnt contribute to the war but won it? Does this interfere too much with our national myths? Race and heritage are concepts which rely heavily on each other to deliver meaning, but have to be kept separate so that the unpleasantness of race doesnt impinge on the purity of heritage, and especially on the sanctity of the war as a primary narrative of national greatness. Just as in the adverts currently marketing HP sauce as proper British (though to my knowledge tamarind doesnt grow in abundance in the UK), there is a fantasy of an all-white past of proper heritage which the mongrel nation narrative takes away from us. But to acknowledge our shared mongrel identity would make us think about colonialism, and how British culture was made all over the world. It would also mean recognising that it wasnt just this island of white Britons that held out against the Nazis, but also all the colonial forces. he mongrel nation narrative also causes ruptures in relation to asylum and migration, particularly in forcing us to acknowledge peoples full humanity. For example, even liberal responses to the plight of asylum seekers can often ignore their sameness and only make pleas for the acceptance of their differences. But what if those faceless asylum seekers who feature on the front of the Daily Express actually are complex people with the same rights, feelings and desires as us? The dehumanisation of them is so complete that even those whose backgrounds are recently migratory, and who thus could perhaps see similarities more clearly, can be just as vociferous in their dislike of these supposedly disruptive newcomers. A narrative of sameness is very unsettling. For example, what if those graduates working long hours in call centres in India actually have the same aspirations as graduates in Britain, and dont want to spend the rest of their lives in that situation? What if the worlds poor are also just like us? If we open up heritage to accepting this migration history, what does it mean in terms of how we should treat todays asylum seekers? All this means that noting and accommodating difference might not now be the most radical move. It might be that heritage narratives which embrace a radical sameness are more enlightening or challenging than those which only foreground difference. For example, the recent series of the BBC family history
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programme Who do you think you are? located a migrant background, not just for British Asian film director Gurinder Chadha, but also for comedian Julian Clary, and for a figure who is a particular representative of quintessential Britishness, Stephen Fry. To make that migrant connection is in fact a very important step in shifting our understanding of Britishness.
Fear of sameness in popular culture Like all those with an interest in the politics of representation, I watch television with a certain degree of anxiety and an annoying tendency to vocalise my interpretation of how race, gender, sexuality and other politics are being played out. This has been increasingly focused on whether or not black and ethnic minority characters are allowed to inhabit a space of radical sameness, i.e. one which does not skirt over their differences, yet makes those differences everyday, while also acknowledging their likeness to other characters. It may seem that in most forms of popular culture fear of sameness is not an issue, and one could point to the number of diverse names and faces on news, sport and popular drama. However, we still inhabit a media universe where a panel game of all white men is the norm, and one with all black women would be considered by most to be either a special interest programme or a freak show. n television comedy this fear of sameness manifests itself constantly. In a comedy landscape full of characters that we laugh at for being disablist, racist, homophobic and sexist, from David Brent to Alan Partridge to Larry David, we know that the presence of an other is there to ensure the joke is delivered and the main protagonists crassness made clear. Like the heritage sectors need for the ethnic other to announce its inclusiveness, comedies which critique prejudice, no matter how perceptively, rarely include main black characters beyond this function. It is well documented that alternative comedys commitment to refusing racism, sexism and homophobia as comedy staples did not really translate into the presence of substantially more diverse comedians (Lenny Henry ironically noted how nice it was to see so many of his black brothers and sisters at a recent British comedy awards show). We need to keep asking why this is so. Generally there is some awareness of racism in its guise as a fear of difference, but do people also understand it as a simultaneous fear of sameness? Sarita Malik, in her book on race and representation in British television, explores the
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ways in which we are offered characters, in soap operas for example, who either exhibit a colour blind sameness or are only marked by stereotypical difference.3 A constant refrain of television writers over the years has been that they do not know how to write for black characters. But as black actors themselves say, they are not asking people to write great black characters - just great characters that black actors are allowed to play. There is obviously a palpable fear of something going on here - the idea that one would have to write so particularly for a black character seems to suggest that they are baffled by the idea that such a person may have the same hang-ups and preoccupations as everyone else, as well as being baffled by how to deal with their differences. Every decade or so there is great media interest in a role where a black actor is cast as everyman, from Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field (1963), to Denzel Washington in Philadelphia (1993), to Will Smith in Independence Day (1996). But this would cease being news if there was sustained casting to this end. There are some exceptions to this is in television comedy, for example Victoria Woods dinnerladies. In this ensemble piece set in a workplace canteen, the presence of an Asian woman is banal and commonplace, though she is not deracinated. In a challenge to the positive/negative binary in the politics of representation (if we leave aside the figure of the young black man who fathers her baby), Anita is allowed to be as daft as the others and her difference and sameness are a constant focus of the comedy. In a discussion about faith Anita is asked who they worship in her family. She replies, Well we all really like Celine Dion. There is an episode of the sit-com Father Ted which nicely sums up this anxiety about how to address sameness and difference. The hapless priest, in an attempt to prove he is not a racist and make amends to the Irish Chinese community he has offended, holds a multicultural event. The slide show of racial stereotypes ends with a picture of people in China and Teds proclamation: The Chinese - a great bunch of lads. A fear of sameness also exhibits itself in the general lack of interest in how black people consume forms of dominant popular culture not deemed to be black. Cultural commentators are straitjacketed into having a view on particular things, and there is a general reluctance to accept that all those big
3. S. Malik, Representing black Britain: a history of black and Asian images on British television, Sage 2001. 79
cultural shifts and trends also impacted on black people, whether it is punk rock, Hollywood musicals or decade nostalgia. I am interested in those cultural texts, experiences and identities that are obscured by this refusal to accept that we too lived in Britain through all these things. For example, though much is written about hybridity and expressive cultures around forms such as hip-hop and bhangra, comparatively less has been written about the political expressive possibilities of black consumption of white culture. All this has much to tell us about the complexities of hybrid identities, belonging and national culture. By opening up these avenues and normalising them we can find out more about why it has been so hard for Britons of Asian, African and Caribbean descent to unproblematically belong to Britain. his is slowly changing. For example, visual artist Mayling To has explored British Chinese identity around Whams trip to China in the mid-1980s, illustrating how much these neglected areas can tell us about the nuances of identity formation and the politics of belonging. How can we theorise the split between private pleasure and public burdens of representation? What does all this tell us about the ethnicity of the state and its desire to present itself as neutral? How can the private complaints of black artists, academics, curators and others - who are always asked to reflect and comment on black culture, race and racism, but rarely on other things that have shaped them - be articulated in public without it being interpreted as a privileging of whiteness? What did it mean to be an Asian fan of the band the Smiths with their fetishising of provisional white Englishness? Is there a fear here that if we too have a view of British culture it dilutes the uniqueness of a white British identity and all the nostalgic preoccupations with spangles, chopper bikes and Watch with Mother?
Fear of sameness in the workplace I have often thought that the world of academia has many similarities with the world of comedy. Even in humanities departments, where an awareness of the histories of race and the overt and subtle hierarchies it produces are part of everyday life and work, this never quite translates to actually having more diverse staff. Like the comedians who cant move from critiquing racism to actually having all-round black performers in their sit-coms, departments whose bread and butter depends on identifying and rooting out discrimination rarely recruit in ways which reflect this intellectual commitment.
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In academia, as in many workplaces, this is not so much to do with a fear of difference. On the contrary, cultural difference is embraced and many black academics will tell you that they have had no shortage of offers to teach anything race-related, irrespective of whether or not it was a specialism. What is said, though, in many sectors including higher education, is that there is a reluctance to recognise expertise beyond race and value the same staff as all-rounders. Every now and then there is an exercise in self-flagellation about this state of affairs, but what is missing is any attendant questioning of why it persists. In whose image are staff being recruited and how is this informed by a culturally specific view of what constitutes a desirable CV? Interestingly, choosing the white candidate miraculously becomes a marker of an ease with difference and an absence of liberal guilt about black people. But it matters that the end outcome is the same as a discriminatory recruitment policy.
Conclusion In Gilroys descriptions of national melancholia punctuated by moments of manic celebration, he identifies many complex, hysterical reactions to being British. In thinking about our similarities to others we raise all sorts of worrying questions about our national worth. What if being British isnt that special after all? What if it is quite banal and we are just like other Europeans? What if we dont have an especially ironic sense of humour? What if we dont necessarily really need an English football coach for the national team as some commentators have recently suggested? Differences of ethnic others can be fitted into current definitions of what makes Britain special, especially in relation to our acclaimed tolerance; but taking us down the road of thinking about the ways in which we are all the same cannot help but cut through the arrogance, presumptions, distortions and half-truths upon which we build our national identity. The fear of difference is the fear that different people will dilute a stable British identity. However, recognising the other as the same as us disrupts that fantasy of wholeness in a much more profound way. The most threatening other is the one who passes unnoticed amongst us.
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A defence of multiculturalism
Tariq Modood
Tariq Modood argues that multiculturalism is not a politics of separatism; on the contrary, it is a politics of diversity and pluralism.
The New Labour government sought in its first term to emphasise the plural and dynamic character of British society by speaking of Cool Britannia, of rebranding Britain, of Britain as a young country (Tony Blair), a mongrel nation (Gordon Brown) and a chicken tikka masala eating nation (Robin Cook). There was a turning-point for the idea of multiculturalism in Britain in 2001, however, when in rapid succession over a few months David Blunkett became the Home Secretary, there were riots in some Northern cities and the attacks of 9/11 took place. These events, especially the riots and the global arrival of a certain kind of armed, messianic jihadism - which, some feel, too many Muslims in Britain (secretly) support - have led to not just to a governmental reversal, but to a new wave of criticism of multiculturalism from the centre-left, including from some of its erstwhile supporters. Of course, there have been left-wing critics of multiculturalism from the beginning, from way back in the 1970s when it was ridiculed as saris, somosas and steelbands by anti-racists, not to mention those who thought it was a distraction from class struggle or even a scam on the part of global capitalism. But I am talking about a new form of criticism, one which comes from the pluralistic centre-left. These are people who do not see everything in two-racial or two-class terms, and have in the past been sympathetic to the rainbow coalitional politics of identity, and the realignment and redefinition of progressive forces. Examples of savage attacks on multiculturalism from those who have long-standing anti-racist credentials
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include an article by Kenan Malik published by the Commission for Racial Equality, which argued that multiculturalism has helped to segregate communities far more effectively than racism (Connections, Winter 2001). The late Hugo Young, a leading Guardian columnist, went further and wrote that multiculturalism can now be seen as a useful bible for any Muslim who insists that his religio-cultural priorities, including the defence of jihad against America, override his civic duties of loyalty, tolerance, justice and respect for democracy (6.11.01). And Farrukh Dhondy, an Asian one-time Black Panther radical who pioneered multicultural broadcasting on British television, wrote of a multicultural fifth column which must be rooted out, arguing that state funding of multiculturalism should be redirected into a defence of the values of freedom and democracy (City Limits, 11:4). It is now a commonplace that the cultural separatism and self-imposed segregation of Muslim migrants is a challenge to Britishness today, and that a politically correct multiculturalism has fostered fragmentation rather than integration. This is the public view now of Trevor Phillips, Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, who has declared that multiculturalism was useful once but is now out-of-date, because it makes a fetish of difference instead of encouraging minorities to be truly British (see Times 3.4.04). In 2004 a swathe of civil society forums and institutions of the centre- or liberal-left held seminars or produced special publications with titles like Is Multiculturalism Dead?, Is Multiculturalism Over, Beyond Multiculturalism, etc (e.g., Prospect, The Observer, The Guardian, the CRE, openDemocracy, Channel 4, the British Council). would like to contribute to this debate by offering a brief restatement of multiculturalism, with the purpose of showing that it is not about separatism, fragmentation, anti-integration or anti-British nationality. I also argue that some key current trends and developments are broadly consistent with a moderate, pragmatic and, inevitably, uneven multiculturalism. In particular, the domestic political claims-making of many Muslim organisations should be seen as consistent with the array of broadly supported equality measures that have been developed in relation to non-religious groups. My purpose is to offer a defence of British multiculturalism. My first point is that counterpositions such as difference versus unity, or multiculturalism versus Britishness, are not in fact mutually exclusive choices. Leading political philosophers of multiculturalism - such as Bhikhu Parekh, Will Kymlicka, Charles Taylor or Iris Young - are not advocates of separatism. Thus, for
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example, the best recent public policy statement in Britain on multiculturalism, the Commission for Multiethnic Britain report The Future of Multiethnic Britain (Profile, 2000), is quite clear that there is no inevitable incompatibility with national identity. Equally, not all advocates of the politics of difference/diversity/ multiculture share the same general positions - and some are hostile to the term multiculturalism. What I am offering here is my personal understanding of political multiculturalism, though of course I am conscious that it is shared by and influenced by others. My understanding of political multiculturalism is that there are three key ideas at its centre: Equality, Multi and Integration. Each of these is explored further in the next sections of this article.
Equality: of dignity but also of respect Charles Taylor argues that when we talk about equality in the context of race and ethnicity, we are appealing to two different concepts - equal dignity, and equal respect. Equal dignity appeals to peoples humanity, or to some closed membership, such as citizenship. But it applies to all members in a relatively uniform way. A good example of this is Martin Luther King Jnrs civil rights movement. Black Americans wanted to make a claim upon the American dream; they wanted American citizenship on the terms that the constitution is theoretically supposed to guarantee to everybody. We appeal to this universalist idea in anti-discrimination work when we appeal to the principle that everybody should be treated the same. But Taylor (and other theorists in slightly differing ways) also posits the idea of equal respect, and it is this, I would argue, that is the key idea of multiculturalism or, as Taylor puts it, of the politics of recognition. s Iris Young has argued, any public space, policy or society is structured around certain kinds of understandings and practices, which prioritise some cultural values and behaviours over others. These are open to contestation, but usually in limited ways. The cultural structure of the public space and particular polity or society that we are members of will have developed historically, and will have come from a dominant group. And when subordinate groups claim equality within the society, they are claiming that they should not be marginal, subordinate or excluded; that they too - their values, norms, and voice - should be part of the structuring of the public space. Why, they
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ask, should we have our identities privatised, while the dominant group has its identity universalised in the public space? The argument becomes one about the public/private distinction, and the question of what is normal in that society - and why some groups are thought to be abnormal or different. o, for example, many gay people argue that they do not want simply to be tolerated by being told homosexuality is no longer illegal, and that acts between consenting adults done in private are fine. They want people to know that they are gay and to accept them as gay; and for public discussion about gayness to have the same place as discussions about heterosexuality. And when public policy is made - for instance on widows benefits or pensions - we should not assume an exclusively heterosexual model of society. This kind of argument for equal respect is central to multiculturalism. This approach has two major implications. Firstly, it takes the concept of equality beyond and into conflict with liberal citizenship, which is based on a public-private identity distinction. This distinction prohibits the recognition of particular group identities; it does not recognise that any groups of citizens are treated in a more or less privileged way, or are divided from each other. Secondly, this approach takes race, sex and sexuality beyond being merely ascriptive sources of identity, merely categories. Race is of interest to discourses of liberal citizenship only because they hold that no one can choose their race, and people should not be discriminated against on something over which they have no control. But if equality is about celebrating previously demeaned identities (e.g. taking pride in ones blackness rather than accepting it merely as a private matter), then what is being addressed is a chosen response to ones ascription. Exactly, the same applies to sex and sexuality. We may not choose our sex or sexual orientation but we choose how to politically live with it. Do we keep it private or do we make it the basis of a social movement and seek public resources and representation for it? Muslims, a religious group, are currently utilising this kind of argument, and making a claim that Muslim identity, just like other forms of identity, should not just be privatised or tolerated, but should be part of the public space. In their case, however, they come into conflict with an additional third dimension of liberal citizenship, that of secularism - the view that religion is a feature, perhaps uniquely, of private identity and not public identity. One response to this is to argue that woman, black and gay are ascribed, unchosen identities while being a Muslim is about chosen beliefs; and that
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Muslims therefore do not need the same level of legal protection as the other kinds of identities. But this is sociologically naive - and a political con. The position of Muslims in Britain today is similar to the other identities of difference. No one chooses whether or not to be born into a Muslim family. Similarly, no one chooses to be born into a society where to look like a Muslim or to be a Muslim creates suspicion, hostility, or failure to get the job you applied for. Having said this, the ways in which different Muslims respond to these circumstances will of course vary. Some will organise resistance, while others will try to stop looking like Muslims (the equivalent of passing for white); some will build an ideology out of their subordination, others will not. Some Muslims may define their Islam more in terms of piety than politics. ut whatever the different possible responses to being positioned as different may be, it remains the case that the argument for the reconstruction of public space and public norms is not an argument for separatism, but for exactly the opposite; it is an argument for the renegotiation of the terms of integration. It is a call for the dominant cultural values in a society to change so as to better represent all groups within the society. Equal respect, then, is an important part of the idea of equality. Commitment to it is what distinguishes multiculturalism from non-multiculturalism. It is the interpretation of equality as meaning that non-assimilation is ok; that minority identities ought to be included in the public sphere. One way to achieve this is to make some space for group recognition and autonomy in shared public institutions - not separatism but, for example, having a black section in the Labour Party, or women-only policy meetings in a trade union.
Multi: recognition of plurality The second key idea is that the context and character of racial equality is not a dualistic black/white but a multi. The groups for whom racial equality has to be won are multiple and have different identities, combining elements based on origins, colour, culture, ethnicity, religion and so on. Moreover, these groups have different socio-economic positions, (dis)advantages, trajectories in British society; it is not true that they are all worse off than white Britons. Indians and Chinese people, for example, are developing a more middle-class profile than whites. This complication of an ethnic stratification model has got to be part of what we are talking about when we talk about multiculturalism.
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The multi has to also apply to our analysis of racism: there is not a singular racism but multiple racisms. There are of course colour/phenotype racisms but there are also cultural racisms which build on political mobilisation colour a set of antagonistic or demeaning and participation, stereotypes based on alleged or real cultural especially protest and traits. The most important cultural racism contestation, have been today is anti-Muslim racism, sometimes called one of the principle Islamophobia. means of integration A multicultural approach, recognising the plurality of racisms and the distinctive needs and vulnerabilities of different groups, is therefore what is needed to tackle racial and religious discrimination.
Integration without assimilation The third key idea is integration. But integration here does not mean assimilation but something more pluralistic, a recognition that there are a variety of identities and positions. The kind of integration I am advocating would not try to deconstruct the identities that people say are important to them, or that they attach to certain kinds of communities or political projects. Nor is this kind of integration individualistic. It recognises that people have collective identities and not just individual identities, or identities based on citizenship. he traditional model of assimilation is one-way: here is a society, people come into it and they try to be like what already exists. The multiculturalist concept of integration is not one way but interactive. It is about fitting people together so that there is give and take, mutual change and the creation of something new. It also inevitably involves a redefinition of Britishness. An interactive idea of integration will clearly mean that we are always rethinking what it means to belong to this society, to be part of this country, to be British. Multicultural Britishness has to be an inclusive identity, not one that says to some people, well you are here but you are not British until you are sufficiently like us. These three ideas - equality, multi and integration - together make up a widely shared view of multiculturalism. And it is a view that gives no credence to the idea that multiculturalism is opposed to Britishness; on the contrary, the two things have to go together.
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For one cant just talk about difference. Difference has to be related to things we have in common. National identities - British identity or English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh identities - are important forms of commonality - though of course we need to define them in a reformed way, one that is not exclusive or racially biased. Furthermore, in my opinion nationality is actually an important container for multiculturalism (though no country can be merely inward looking). Nationality is a very important part of the integrative dynamic, and British society is in fact demonstrating this capacity for pluralistic integration. Obviously, nothing is ever perfect and finished at any one time; new challenges always arise, and when they do some political conflict is inevitable. There will always be conflict, and indeed it is through political debate and political contestation that integrative processes often work.
The development of multiculturalism in Britain Out of an immigration process consisting primarily of the importing of (temporary) labour for jobs in the British economy which white people did not wish to do, there have now emerged new communities capable of and perhaps wanting to maintain themselves as communities. New cultural practices, especially to do with the family and religion, have become a feature of the British landscape and continue to shape the personal lives and relationships of even British-born individuals. thnic identity - like gender and sexuality - has assumed a contemporary political importance, and for some migrants and their descendants it has become a primary focus of their politics. While ethnicity is disdained on much of the European mainland, and minorities are excluded and cowed, Britain (partly as a result of its complex imperial legacy) is marked by an ethnic assertiveness. Ethnic minority groups have contested the lack of respect they have experienced, and their lack of access to public space. Indeed, resistance to racism has come to be seen as an almost necessary path to citizenship and integration with dignity into British society. Some of these identities are sustained by communal practices - such as the high levels of endogamy amongst South Asians - but they are also sustained by socio-political conflict, which is especially evident at the moment in the case of Muslims. Hence there is very little erosion of group identification across the generations, though the kind of identity that is espoused may vary; colour has more salience
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for Caribbeans, religion for South Asians. These identities persist even when - as is in fact the case - participation in distinctive cultural practices is in decline. For example, compared to their elders, the young are less likely to speak to family members in a South Asian language, or to regularly attend a place of worship, or to have an arranged marriage. Yet they do not cease to identify with their ethnic or racial or religious group, though they may redefine what that group is (say, from Pakistani to Muslim). For identity has moved on from a time when it was largely unconscious and taken-for-granted because implicit in distinctive cultural practices; it is now more likely to be based on conscious and public projections, and the explicit creation and assertion of politicised ethnicities. Shaped through intellectual, cultural and political debates, such identities are fluid and susceptible to change with the political climate. However, to therefore think of them as weak is to overlook the pride with which they may be asserted, the intensity with which they may be debated and their capacity to generate community activism and political campaigns. uch minority identities do not necessarily compete with a sense of Britishness. The oppositional character of ethnic minority self-concepts has not been at the price of integration per se but - illustrating that integration can take different forms - it has been one of the means of integration. For political mobilisation and participation, especially protest and contestation, has been one of the principal means of integration in Britain. As activists, spokespersons and a plethora of community organisations come to interact with and modify existing institutions, there is a two-way process of mutual education and incorporation: public discourse and political arrangements are challenged, but then adjust to accommodate and integrate the challengers. One of the most profound developments has been that, increasingly, ethnicity or blackness is experienced less as an oppositional identity than as a way of being British, and something similar is probably happening to Muslim at the moment. The Caribbeans, who originally led the way with oppositional identities, are also ahead on the trend for hyphenated British identities. This is related to the high level of social mixing and success in popular culture that they have achieved. Yet so far all this has brought those of Caribbean descent few economic dividends. This suggests that an alternative strategy might be to delay assimilation till entry into a middle-class environment has been achieved
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- as British-born African-Asians and Indians, who are now displaying high rates of intermarriage, have done. Similarly, the refusal of Pakistanis to assimilate into local white working-class cultures has helped to sustain the formers hopes of social advancement, and has produced a cohort of higher education entrants on a scale that is the beyond the hopes that the government has for the white working classes. ight-wing commentators have often worried about the threat that nonwhite migrants and their descendants posed to Britishness. It is clear now that many in these ethnic minority groups think of Britain, appropriately reimagined and restructured, as a unifying identity. In fact it tends to be those groups that have a national-territorial base in the British Isles, and a historical grievance with the British state, who today most shrink from the label British. While Pakistanis in Bradford have been coming to an understanding of themselves as British, some Scots and Irish - both within and outside their territorial nations - are in denial about being British, and see one national identity as incompatible with another. A characteristic of British culture, despite its self-image of insularity, is the readiness to borrow and mix ideas and influences, as supremely exemplified in the English language. The British, especially the English, may be less open than other Europeans to their European neighbours, but they are also less hostile to multiculturalism and to inter-continental exchange. Hence today London is not simply an English or a British or even a European city, but a world city. Despite these integrative processes, there is evidence of continuing discrimination and institutional racism in most areas of British society. Sometimes reduction in one kind of racism is accompanied by an increase in another, or reduction of racism in one area of social life by an increase in another; for example groups that now have positive associations in accountancy may not in the entertainment industry and vice versa. There is accumulating evidence of differential prejudice and stereotypes, with anti-Muslim racism - often unable in practice to disentangle itself from anti-Asian racism - being on the increase, and the one most likely to be found amongst intellectuals. Religion, indeed, has come to have an importance not anticipated by sociologists, with their Anglo-American focus on colour. At a time when a third of Britons say they do not have a religion, nearly all South Asians say they have one, and an overwhelming majority say it is of personal importance to them. The
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presence of the new ethnic minorities is thus not simply changing the character of religion in Britain by diversifying it, but is giving it an importance which is out of step with native trends. Those who see the current Muslim assertiveness as an unwanted and illegitimate child of multiculturalism have only two choices if they wish to be consistent. They can repudiate the idea of equality as identity recognition and return to the 1960s liberal idea of equality as colour/sex/religion, etc, blindness. Or they can argue that equality as recognition does not apply to oppressed religious communities. To deny Muslims positive equality without one of these two arguments is to be open to the charge of double standards. This means that a programme of racial and multicultural equality is not possible today without a discussion of the merits and limits of secularism. Secularism can no longer be treated as off-limits. This is not a matter of being for or against secularism; what is needed is a careful, institutionby-institution analysis of how to draw the public-private boundary, and further the cause of multicultural equality and inclusivity. hat is important, then, is to recognise the existence in Britain of different kinds of multiculture; for example, a mixing and stylesetting hybridity, or an ethno-religious communitarian development. Minority groups have their own distinct character and so are likely to develop distinctive forms of integration. No one form of integration should be elevated to a paradigmatic status, either theoretically or in the area of policy. International terrorism and neo-conservatism are putting extra strains on democratic, negotiated integration, but pessimism about British societys capacity to produce pluralistic (rather than assimilative) integration is premature. Talk of giving up on multiculturalism is therefore unnecessary and may well alienate the communities that need to be brought into the mainstream. Indeed, those who indulge in such talk may simply be denying Muslim claims to equality.
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Identity for identitys sake is a bit dodgy

Zygmunt Bauman
Zygmunt Bauman argues that identity is rooted in human practice: its significance for each of us tends to be linked to the security of our position in the liquid-modern world.
In our business-like, matter-of-fact world - an instant-profit seeking, crisismanaging and damage-limiting world - anything which cannot prove its instrumental proficiency is a bit dodgy. This kind of utilitarianism is seen across the board in New Labour attitudes to culture, including their views on identity. But it should be borne in mind that this view is shared by many. Thus, for example, most academics would take the view that education is an end in itself, and scorned Charles Clarkes view that the main aim of schools and universities was to prepare people for the job market. However large numbers of students share Clarkes approach. Thus in looking at issues of culture and identity it is always important to bear in mind the position from which people speak: the practicalities of their lives will influence their attitudes. The perceptions of the teaching (knowledgeable) classes and the taught classes (intermittently called the people or the masses) frequently diverge. This is hardly surprising given the difference between the frames into which their respective lives are woven, and between the respective life-experiences on which
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Identity for identitys sake
they reflect (or not). Marx, a theory man, had plenty of occasion to complain about the incapacitating rift between theory and practice (whereas his selfappointed disciple Lenin, a man of practice, tended to censure the intelligentsia for their stultifying and shameful detachment from the masses). At all events, a further instance of this gap between theory and practice can certainly be seen in the gap between the discourse of identity and the realities for those involved in identity-recognition wars.
Hybridity and the global elite The knowledge classes, who happen also to form the articulated and self-reflexive core of the emerging global-extraterritorial elite, tend to wax lyrical about identity. Their members are busy composing, decomposing and recomposing their identities, and cannot but be pleasantly impressed by the facility and relatively low costs with which the job is being done daily. Writers on culture tend to call such activity hybridisation, and its practitioners cultural hybrids. Freed from their local ties, and travelling easily through the networks of cyber-connections, the knowledge classes wonder why others dont follow their example. But perhaps the circumstance that the others do not and cannot follow the example adds to the attractions of hybridity, and to the satisfactions and self-esteem of those who can and do practice it. stensibly, hybridisation is about mixing, but its latent and perhaps crucial function, and one that makes it such a praiseworthy and coveted mode of being-in-the-world, is separation. Hybridisation cuts off the hybrid product from each and all and any line of mono-zygotic parentage. None of the kinship lineages may claim exclusive ownership rights on the product, and no kinship group can exercise pernickety and noxious control over observance of standards. Hybridisation is a declaration of autonomy, nay independence, hopefully to be followed by sovereign practices. The fact that the others are left behind, stuck in their mono-zygotic genotypes, adds conviction to the declaration and helps to sustain its existence. The image of hybrid culture can be seen as an ideological gloss on achieved or claimed extraterritoriality. It refers, essentially, to the hard won freedom to trespass and freely exit, in a world criss-crossed by fences and sliced into territorially fixed sovereignties. Just like the extraterritorial networks it traverses, and the nowherevilles inhabited by the new global elite, hybrid culture seeks
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its identity in not belonging: in the freedom of defying and neglecting the borders that bind the movements and choices of lesser people - the locals. Cultural hybrids want to feel everywhere chez soi - in order to be vaccinated against the vicious bacteria of domesticity. he devotees of the orthodox meaning of identity would be baffled by this idea. A heterogeneous - and ephemeral, volatile, incoherent, eminently mutable - identity? People brought up on the modern classics of identity, such as Sartre or Ricoeur, would surely see that as a contradiction in terms. For Sartre, identity was a life-long project; for Ricoeur, it was a combination of lipseit that presumed coherence and consistency, and la mmet, that stood for continuity - two qualities which the hybrid identity idea emphatically rejects. But then, when the orthodox meaning of identity was cut according to the measure of the nation-state and nation-building, so too was the self-definition and social role of the knowledge classes - something that is but all but abandoned now. Hybridisation as the strategy of the heterogeneous (global) learned elite is a substitute for the ancient strategies of assimilation, adjusted to the changed circumstances of the liquid-modern, post-hierarchy era. It comes in a packagedeal with multiculturalism - the declaration of the contemporaneousness of cultures and the postulate of their equality; whereas the strategy of assimilation accompanied the vision of cultural evolution and a hierarchy of cultures. Liquidmodernity is liquid in as far as it is also post-hierarchical. The genuine or postulated superiority/inferiority orders, presumed once to have been structured in an unambiguous fashion by the unassailable logic of progress, are eroded and melted; and the new ones are too fluid and ephemeral to harden into a shape recognisable enough to be adopted as a safe reference frame for the composition of identity. As a result, identity has turned into a momentary outcome of mostly self-locating and self-ascribing efforts. It is left to the worry of individuals - an outcome that is acknowledged as temporary, and as being of an undefined, yet probably short, life expectancy. As Dany-Robert Dufour recently suggested, all our past grand references are still available for use, but none of them has enough authority to impose itself on reference-seekers.1 Confused and lost among many competitive claims
1. Dany-Robert Dufour, LArt de rduire les ttes: Sur la nouvelle servitude de lhomme libr lre du capitalisme total, Denol 2003, p69. 94
to authority, with no voice powerful or enduring enough to stand out from the cacophony and interpose a leading motif, residents of the liquid-modern world can not find, however earnestly they try, a credible collective enunciator (something that sustains for us what when left alone we cannot sustain; and secures for us, faced with chaos, a certain permanence - of origins, purpose and order(p44)). We have to settle instead for notoriously unreliable substitutes for such an enunciator - tempting offers instead of authority, notoriety instead of normative regulation. Ephemeral celebrities-for-the-day and equally volatile talks-of-the-day vanish from the limelight and headlines only moments after fast-moving searchlights and microphones have drawn them out of darkness and silence - such are the mobile signposts of a liquid-modern world. In this account, hybridisation can be seen as a movement aiming towards a perpetually unfixed, indeed unfixable, identity. At the unattainable, stubbornlyreceding, horizon of the process looms an identity defined solely by its distinction from all the rest: from each and any of the named, known and recognised, and for that reason apparently fixed, identities. On that rest, nevertheless, the identity of the hybridisers stays irredeemably dependent; it has no definite models of its own to follow and emulate. It is mainly a re-processing and re-cycling plant - it lives on credit and feeds on borrowed stuff. It can build/sustain its distinction solely through unceasing efforts to compensate for the limitations of one loan by bundling it up with more loans. The absence of pre-selected target can be compensated for only by an excess of cultural markers, and a steady effort to hedge all bets and keep all options open. he cultures that define the life-settings of the other people are characterised by those perched at the supra-cultural heights of hybridity as staunch, obstinate and unassailable realities, self-enclosed, binding and fixing totalities; thus hybrid culture is both programmatically and in practice extra-cultural. As if in open defiance of Pierre Bourdieus thesis that social distinction rests its claims to superiority on a strictness of cultural taste and choice, hybrid culture is manifestly omnivorous - noncommittal, un-choosy, unprejudiced, ready and eager to try everything on offer and to ingest and digest food from all cuisines. Exempted from the sovereignty of territorially circumscribed political units - just as the extraterritorial networks inhabited by the global elite are - hybrid culture seeks its identity in freedom from ascribed and inert
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identities, in a license to defy and neglect the kind of cultural markers, tags or stigmas that circumvent and limit the movements and choices of the place-bound rest: the locals.
Homo eligens: freedom, identity and consumption The new un-fixedness of the self tends to be referred to by those who practise and enjoy it by the name of freedom. One could argue, though, that having an unfixed and eminently until further notice identity is a state not of liberty but of an incessant and ultimately unwinnable war of liberation: a daily effort to get rid of and to forget. Identity has stopped being a cumbersome (because impossible to get rid of) yet comfortable (because impossible to be deprived of) legacy; it has ceased to be an act of once-and-for-all commitment to something presumed and hoped to last from here to eternity. It has become, instead, a perpetual task, for individuals orphaned of intractable legacies, and bereaved of reliable trust-havens. It has therefore become a forever inconclusive and infuriatingly ambivalent effort to wash our hands of past commitments, and to escape the threat of becoming entangled in any future commitment. The freedom of identity-seekers is akin to that of a bicycle rider; the penalty for stopping pedalling is a fall - one has to toil on to retain an upright posture. The necessity to keep toiling is unavoidable, since the alternative is too awesome to contemplate. Drifting from one episode to another, living through each successive episode oblivious to its consequences, guided more by an urge to efface past history than a desire to draw the map of the future, each actors identity is at each moment stuck in its present, which is now denied any significance as the futures foundation. Identity reaches for todays one-cannot-be-nor-be-seen-as-being-without things, while fully aware of their being the one-cannot-be-nor-be-seen-as-being-with of tomorrow. The past of identity is strewn with the rubbish tips where the daybefore-yesterday indispensables are daily dumped. The sole identity core that one can be sure of surviving and emerging unscathed from this continuous change is that of homo eligens - the man choosing (not the man who has chosen!); a permanently impermanent self, completely incomplete, definitely indefinite - and authentically inauthentic. Richard Sennett wrote of the liquid-modern business enterprise: Perfectly viable businesses are gutted and abandoned, capable employees are set adrift rather than rewarded, simply because the organisation must prove to the market that it
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is capable of change.2 Replace businesses with identities, capable employees with possessions and partners, and organisation with the self - and youll get a faithful description of the plight that defines homo eligens. Homo eligens and the commodity market coexist in perfect symbiosis: neither would live to see another day unless supported and nourished by the others company. The market would not survive if customers held on to things; for the sake of its survival it cannot stand a clients commitment or loyalty, or even a consistent trajectory that resists being distracted and avoids sideways sallies (apart, that is, from the commitment to shopping, and the trajectories that lead through the shopping malls). The market would suffer a mortal blow if conditions were secure, achievement and possessions safe, projects finite and completion of expeditions feasible. The art of marketing is focused on the prevention of options and desires being satisfied. Contrary to appearances and official declarations - and to the commonsense linked to both - the emphasis for the market is not so much on arousing new desires, but more on extinguishing old ones in order to clear the way for new shopping escapades. The ideal horizon of marketing is the irrelevance of desires to the prospective shoppers conduct. Desires, after all, need careful and often costly cultivation; and when fully developed they lose a large part of their initial flexibility. Momentary wishes and whims, on the other hand, can survive with little or no investment. enizens of the liquid-modern world need no further priming for their obsessive exploration of the shops than the hope of finding ready-made, consumer-friendly and publicly-legible identity badges. They wander through the shopping-mall winding passages, guided by a semi-conscious hope of finding an identity badge or token that will bring their selves up to date - and also by a semi-conscious apprehension that they might not notice the crucial point at which what were badges of pride become transformed into badges of shame. For their motivation never to dry up, it is enough for the shopping mall manager to follow the principle discovered by George Perec and suggested in his Life: the users manual: they simply have to see to it that the last bit on offer does not fit the rest of the identity jigsaw-puzzle, so that the assembly has to
2. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, W.W. Norton & Co 1998, p51. 97
be repeatedly started again from scratch. If identity jigsaw-puzzles are available solely in the commodity form, and cannot be found outside shopping malls, the future of the market is assured. Those among us who have been trained to enjoy mixing identity cocktails, and who are able to secure all the currently recommended (fashionable) ingredients, feel at home in a society of consumers. These people are, after all, the consumers who make this society. But this does not apply to the rest of we, the people - who have been cast aside by the re-structured company, which is now under new management and has a new name, we, the consumers. Barred access to the dainty, rare and costly extras needed to make the tasty cocktails currently en vogue, the rest (a very voluminous rest) have little choice but to swill their identity concoctions raw, coarse and straight as they come. It is pointless and cruel to reproach these others for ingesting drinks viewed by the fastidious cocktail-gourmets as inferior, crude and unrefined. For no one has offered them a choice. If, in spite of this, such people try to pursue their preferences, they will be rounded up and returned where they came from: to the fixed identity that is imposed upon them by others.
Freedom, security and identity To be sure, the idea of identity has always, whenever it has appeared, been torn by an inner contradiction: it suggests a kind of distinction which has tended to be smothered in the process of its assertion - and it points towards a sameness that can only be constructed through sharing differences. Identity becomes the subject of discussion precisely when either individuality or belonging is thrown into question. It can be brought into service in support of a bid for individual emancipation and for a bid for membership in a collectivity that overrides individual idiosyncrasy. The search for identity is always conducted under cross-fire, and proceeds under the pressure of mutually contravening forces. It navigates between the extremes of uncompromising individuality and total belonging; the first extreme is unattainable, while the second, like a black hole, sucks in, swallows and makes disappear anything which comes within its reach. Whenever chosen as the journeys destination, identity inevitably prompts movements in both directions. For this reason, identity is potentially dangerous to both individuality and collectivity, though both resort to it as a weapon of self-assertion. The road
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to identity is a battleground of interminable struggle, between the desire for freedom and the need for security. And for this reason identity wars are likely to remain inconclusive, and are in all probability unwinnable; and the cause of identity is likely to continue to be deployed as their instrument, though disguised as their objective. Freedom and security are both widely coveted, since each is indispensable for a dignified and happy life; and the pursuit of each converges on current identity discourse. The pursuit of these two values notoriously evades co-ordination, however, each tending to lead beyond the point at which the supply of the other is undermined. While no dignified or gratifying human life is conceivable without the admixture of both freedom and security, a fully satisfying balance between the two is seldom achieved: it is perhaps unachievable. A deficit of security leads to a worry about too much freedom, and to distressing uncertainty and agoraphobia; while a deficit of freedom can be experienced as a disabling security (often code-named by sufferers as dependence). hen security is missing, free agents are stripped of the confidence without which freedom can hardly be exercised. Without a second line of trenches, few people can muster enough courage to face the risks of an unknown and unsecured future; and without a safety net most people would refuse to dance on a tightrope. When freedom is missing, security feels like downright slavery or prison though if suffered for a long time, it may stifle the wish for freedom, as well as the capacity for practising it, so that unfreedom becomes the only possible liveable habitat. In Lion Feuchtwangers rendition of the adventures of Odysseus, the sailors who have been transformed into swine by Circe refuse to resume human shape when given the chance: comfortably worry-free, thanks to the meagre but regular and guaranteed supply of food, and the grubby and malodorous but rent-free pigsty shelter, they do not want to risk a more exciting but less secure alternative.3 Such reluctance to exchange a dull and oppressive routine for the risks of freedom is a common experience in the real world (most recently for the soldiers in the old Iraqi army, when they were summarily dismissed from their routine chores and their regular pay-checks). Any increase in freedom may be read/experienced as a decrease of security,
3. In Odysseus und die Schweine, oder das Unbehagen an der Kultur. 99
and vice versa. Both readings are justified - and which reading is chosen does not depend on the elegance of the arguments advanced in its support. The chances are, however, that support for change will be greater if any decision to bring about change is itself the result of an exercise in freedom. An expansion of prospects brought about by an increase of freedom is rarely seen as a fair deal if it results from a decision over which people have no control. Numerous research findings confirm this rule: people often resent changes in their life conditions, or in the rules of the life-game, not because of a dislike for the new realities emerging in their wake, but for the manner in which they were brought about - for having been introduced without people being involved in the choices made. Current identity discourse steers precariously between these contradictions, ambiguities and hidden traps. Virtually every proposition it begets is meat for some practitioners and poison for others; and it can turn from meat to poison and back depending on a fast and unpredictably shifting situation. roadly speaking, those hoping to obtain and retain security through exposing themselves to the risks and hazards of free choice tend to emphasise the value of underdetermined and under-defined, unfixed, incomplete, open-ended and above all easy to discard or revise identity. Those at the receiving end of identity wars, however, or smarting under the burden of coercive stereotyping, cut off from desirable choices and too much intimidated by their own insecurity to seriously contemplate a challenge to the game rules, tend to opt for identity as birthright, inalienable property and ineffaceable mark. The fact that such protagonists use the same verbal token to denote their sharply different cravings does not necessarily guarantee a meaningful dialogue. Though both sides speak of identity, they may well talk past each other - and they often do. Identity means a passport to adventure to one group, while the other thinks of it as a defence against adventurers. For one group identity is a surfing board, for the other a breakwater. In neither case is identity invoked for its own sake. But the reasons for its invocation differ sharply. And these reasons are rooted firmly in human practices - in what humans try to defend themselves against, and what they struggle to make their lot. And as long as peoples practices differ, the semantic load invested in questions of identity will also be different. Reality, as Karl Marx insisted, needs to be seen as human sensuous activity, practice - since social life is essentially practical.
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Racism, cosmopolitanism and contemporary politics of belonging

Nira Yuval-Davis
Nira Yuval-Davis looks at some of the problems of a cosmopolitan politics.
Cosmopolitanism is often constructed as the antithesis of racism, in that it eschews nationalism and/or any other particularistic identity and ideology. However, in my view the picture is considerably more complex than this, and my aim in this article is to explore some aspects of the relationship between cosmopolitanism and questions of belonging and exclusion. In particular, I will argue that a key problem of cosmopolitanism is that, like other universalist approaches, it can be careless about questions of difference and power and ends up operating (consciously or unconsciously) in a racialising and exclusionary top-down manner.
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Defining cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism is frequently seen as an alternative to any exclusionary politics of belonging. Ulrich Beck has even argued that that to belong or not to belong is the cosmopolitan question. However, this question - and much other writing on cosmopolitanism - implies that belonging is a choice that can always be made, and that one makes it solely for oneself. An alternative question to pose for cosmopolitans would be whether it is capable of including all others (not just selves) as having the choice of belonging. Moreover, a politics based around the idea of belonging as voluntary risks missing key aspects of the systems of social relations that sustain racism, which always involve boundaries that exclude and/or exploit the other. An approach, often from a position of privilege, which simply denies these boundaries or even just their legitimacy, is likely to overlook the processes within which racism and exclusion are able to flourish. osmopolitanism is by its nature a slippery concept, since it tends to reject fixed categories and notions. In the introduction to their book on cosmopolitanism, Sheldon Pollock and co argued that it: may be a project whose conceptual content and pragmatic character are not only as yet unspecified but also must always escape positive and definite specification, precisely because specifying cosmopolitanism positively and definitely is an uncosmopolitan thing to do.1 Notwithstanding this view, for the purposes of this article it is useful to characterise two broad trends within cosmopolitanism.2 One approach sees cosmopolitanism as a form of belonging which is detached and fluid, avoiding any fixed notions of boundaries. A representative of this approach is John Urrys cultural citizen (in Consuming Places, 1995) - one who operates on the surface, travels frequently and feels at home everywhere and nowhere. The other approach remains based on local attachments, but conceptualises the national as expanding into the international and the transnational. This is where discussions on global citizenship and human rights legislation belong, for example those promoted by David Held (in Democracy and the Global Order) and Mary Kaldor (in Global Civil Society: An answer to war).
1. See C.A. Breckenridge, S. Pollock, H.K. Bhabha & D. Chakrabarty (eds), Cosmopolitanism, Duke University Press 2002, p1. 2. Following Eleonore Kofman in Figures of the Cosmopolitan: privileged nationals and national outsiders, paper presented at the Cosmopolitanism and Europe conference, Royal Holloway, April 2004. 102
Whatever the nature of peoples conceptualisation of cosmopolitanism, it is important to remember that discussions on cosmopolitanism will always be closely related to specific cultural and philosophical traditions, and specific constructions of other forms of nationalisms and belonging. Thus the construction of cosmopolitanism in Germany, with its hegemonic history as ethno-nationalism, would be much more hostile to nationalism than, for example, American, or even British contructions, with their hegemonic histories of more civi-nationalisms.3 Cosmopolitan standpoints are also firmly situated in the social locations of the bearers of the cosmopolitan ideology and their intersected positions in terms of class, ethnicity, gender, etc. Zygmunt Bauman has argued that elites have always been more cosmopolitan than other strata of the population (see his essay in this volume); and Nina Werbner has argued that the forced hybridity and cosmopolitanism of migrant labourers in the West is vastly different from the celebrated nomadism and travelling cosmopolitanism of the professional and intellectual classes.4 Thus, cosmopolitanism is always situated, something that is sometimes unrecognised by its theorists. t may help to understand the connection between cosmopolitanism, racism and universalism if we look at some of the arguments within anti-racist politics. One fundamental division here can be seen in different visions of a non- or anti-racist society. The universalist vision argues that all people need to be treated the same, especially in the public sphere. For others, the key is a politics of recognition, claiming public acceptance of multiculturalism and affirmative action practices as a precondition for reaching a non-racialised society (see Tariq Modood in this volume). The universalists see public acceptance of forms of difference as a practice of racialisation and discrimination - a reification of boundaries. The pluralists accuse the universalists of recognising and legitimising only majoritarian discourse, which is usually western-centric, heterosexist and middle-class in nature; and of rendering invisible the standpoint and interest of excluded minorities. (This position has been argued not only by anti-racists but also by feminists and other identity social movements.)
3. This notion of situated cosmopolitanism is the focus of the PhD dissertation of my student, Ulrike Vieten, who is comparing German and British discourses on cosmopolitanism. 4. For example, in her 1999 article, Global pathways: working class cosmopolitans and the creation of transnational ethnic worlds, Social Anthropology, 7:17-35. 103
Before stating my position in relation to these difficult questions, I want to discuss three examples which might shed some light on them: the French legislation against wearing headscarves and other visible signifiers of religion in the public sphere; the contemporary plight of refugees in Europe and elsewhere; and - last but not least - the complex set of issues relating to human rights, and what has come to be called humanitarian militarism.
The headscarves affair The headscarves affair encapsulates some of the key issues involved in an apparently universalist and secularist approach to ethnicity. After several years of stormy public debates and the expulsion of several girls from French schools for wearing Muslim headscarves, on the grounds that they were breaking the requirement of school uniforms, France has recently passed specific legislation which demands the exclusion of any visible forms of religious attachment from French schools and other public institutions. This was done in the name of a neutral and universalist public sphere, and a strict separation between religion and the state. Although the law is couched in general terms, the main controversy has been about Muslims in general and Muslim girls in particular. Banning headscarves has been seen as part of the civilising mission of French republicanism - saving Muslim girls from the barbarian oppressive custom of wearing headscarves. In what has become a familiar pattern, symbolic fights about the character and boundaries of the nation have come to be embodied in the appearance of girls: womens dress (dare I say fashion?) is being invested in as a border battlefield.5 It is interesting to note at this point the effect of this law on Jewish boys, who are no longer allowed to wear kippas on their heads at state schools. In a recent interview, a French Rabbi pointed out that most religious Jewish boys in France attend Jewish religious schools these days, so that this law will not have a major effect on the Jewish community. In other words, the prohibition against the wearing of visible signifiers of religious attachment is not really valid in all parts of the public sphere. They are allowed - or actually required - to be worn in schools and other institutions which are under the control of religious community leaders. This means that, far from these poor Muslim girls being saved from the
5. For the detailed argument see my book Gender and Nation, Sage 1997. 104
clutches of the Mullahs, from now on, if they want to wear Muslim headgear in schools, they will have to attend schools over which these religious leaders have total control. Many contemporary Muslim girls want to wear headscarves not to signify their religious submission, but as a defiant signifier of minority identity, as part of an anti-racist mode. Such girls are likely to find their plight now made much more difficult, inasmuch as they are frequently involved in a dual fight against sexist community leaders as well as racist majoritarian society. Closing down majoritarian public spaces to this form of minority identity display has the effect of closing off yet another option for young Muslim women. Thus the French public sphere has not become more universalist as a result of this law; it has become more homogeneously western-centric. It is ensuring that it remains unpolluted by public signifiers of difference. Any form of cosmopolitanism that endorsed such a variant of universalism would thereby incorporate into itself a racialised and exclusionary discourse - in the name of supposed neutrality.
Refugees and other people on the move For writers such as Hannah Arendt, and more recently Giorgio Agamben, the refugee has come to symbolise the other, who is displaced, has no rights and whose life is in danger. The way refugees are treated is thus indicative of a systems approach to inclusivity and belonging. There are some who argue that cosmopolitanism, in the form of world government, offers answers to questions of international human rights and the protection of refugees and other displaced people. In this section I consider some aspects of this issue. Although the term refugees was first applied to those who escaped the French regime in the eighteenth century, it was not until the establishment of the League of Nations after the first world war that the first international organisation to deal with refugees was established (the Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees). After the second world war UNHCR (the United Nations High Commission on Refugees) was established and the UN Convention on Refugees was passed. Since the establishment of this machinery the business of refugees has grown enormously. The number of countries in which the UNHCR operates grew from 16 in 1962 to 123 in 1996. Furthermore there are many millions of internally displaced people in the world who are not classified as refugees (some estimates put the figure at 20-22 million); there is also an estimated worldwide total of 33
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million illegal immigrants. The UN Population Division reported in October 2002 that it estimated that in 2000 there were about 175 million people in total living in countries which were not their country of birth - double the amount in 1975 (and this estimate, of course, excludes illegal migrants). Alongside this large increase in the numbers of people in migration, there has been a radical change in attitudes and policies towards refugees and asylum seekers (the term asylum seeker applies to people who are not formally recognised as refugees, but who are currently actively seeking to be recognised as such by particular states). These changes have come about largely as a result of the end of the cold war and the growth of the securitisation agenda, especially after the events of 11 September the old postwar concept 2001 in the USA. In the new situation, of universal rights for the old postwar concept of universal rights refugees has vanished for refugees and other migrants has more ... rights tend to be or less vanished. In the newly globalised restricted to those who world, rights tend to be restricted to those have skills to offer who have skills to offer to countries of immigration. (This is in marked contrast to a western rhetoric of human rights that addresses itself to the nature of whole regimes, something I will look at in the next section.) The rest can be disregarded - they are seen as what Zygmunt Bauman has called surplus to requirements, as human waste.6 In a similar vein Giorgio Agamben has described refugees as living in a state of bare life.7 n a development from Hannah Arendts work, Agamben argues that in the nation-state system, the sacred and inalienable rights of man turn out to be called into question at the very point at which they are claimed by those who are no longer citizens of a state. Agambens reflections on modern bare life are of crucial importance; many - maybe even most - contemporary asylum seekers exist in a state that is usefully characterised in this way. However, my argument is that they are in this position not because they are refugees, but precisely because they are not legally recognised as refugees. The increasing numbers of those who remain as asylum seekers, rather than
6. See his essay in Mediactive: Asylum (issue 4 spring 2005), Who is seeking asylum, and from what?. 7. Giorgio Agamben, We Refugees, www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-we-refugees. html, p1. 106
actually attaining the status of refugees, show the gap between the legal framework and the reality of peoples lives. In the postwar era refugees that have been recognised as such have generally acquired some rights and protection in international law: although such law tends to be toothless in comparison with national state laws, it is complied with, at least formally, by all states. The problem is that, while ostensibly complying with the rights and regulations of international law concerning refugees, most states these days have created a situation in which it is more and more difficult - if not virtually impossible - to acquire that legal status. More and more people who some years ago would have been entitled to the rights and protection of the status of a refugee today have no legal means to obtain it, and are pushed into other, unprotected, forms of migration. It is really these people on the move (as the UN describes them) - unprotected and undocumented migrants, unable to attain the status of refugees, and constructed outside any national or international law - who exist in a state of bare life. Thus international law could in theory maintain the human rights of those who have lost their citizenship rights in their home country, but it fails to do so. t is also worthy of note that recently there have been many attempts to undermine the legal status and rights of refugees, even for the few who have managed to attain this position. For example, it has been argued that the status of refugee should no longer be a permanent status; it should be liable to be removed at any point at which it can be decided that the homeland has become safe. This would mean that, though they were not living in the conditions of bare life, such as are experienced by undocumented migrants, refugees would be compelled to live the life of the permanently insecure, unable to plan futures for themselves and their families. Thus the postwar international institutions have not provided the protection that they proclaimed in their first flush of youth. There are millions of people for whom global protective legislation does not guarantee non-exclusion; nor does it protect them from racialisation and persecution. This means that a cosmopolitan proposal for the construction of world government (such as put forward by David Held, for example) offers no real social and political alternative to racialised exploitation and exclusion at the global level. The evidence seems to indicate that international frameworks are only as strong as the ideological and material contexts within which they exist.
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Human rights and humanitarian militarism For many years, and particularly since the end of the cold war, support for human rights has been a rallying cry for people all over the world, not as citizens of specific states, but as part of the human race. As such, support for human rights on a global scale could be seen as cosmopolitan par excellence. Major steps for the human rights mobilisation have included the 1994 UN Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, and, more recently, the establishment of the International Criminal Court - something for which feminist and other human rights international activists have been fighting for a long time. However, there are a number of problems with the human rights agenda. Costas Douzinas, Head of the Human Rights Centre at Birkbeck College, London, argues that recent developments have actually seen the end of human rights, because they have become defined in over-legalistic terms, and have lost their utopian aspect. As such: while they remain an instrument of reform and, occasionally, a sophisticated tool for analysis they stop being the tribunal of history.8 Meanwhile, Michael Ignatieff, Head of the Centre for Human Rights at Harvard University, sees human rights as threatened for almost the opposite reasons. For him the proliferation of declarations and treaties is seen as dangerous not because human rights have been losing their utopian appeal, but because they have been losing their pragmatic appeal. Ignatieff warns against elevating the moral and metaphysical claims made on behalf of human rights.9 For him, human rights is a specific form of politics with a minimalist kernel, aimed at defending peoples rights to free agency, the ability to make decisions and to be protected from abuse and oppression. Thus the Ignatieff argument is based on a quite limited view of human rights, which exists within a specified legal framework, while Douzinas has an ethical and mobilising conception of justice. Ignatieffs conception of human rights is based on negative freedoms (to use Isaiah Berlins term); and this is too minimalist even for Amy Gutman, the Princeton professor who provided the introduction to Ignatieffs book. Thus she points out (p ix) that the right to subsistence is as necessary for human agency as a right against torture Starving people have no more agency than people
8. Costas Douzinas, The end of human rights, Hart 2000, p380. 9. Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, Princeton University Press 2001, p53. 108
subject to cruel and unusual punishment. This contrast between a negative (free from) and positive (free to) approach to human rights is one that is widely debated both within the networks of human rights activists, and between such activists and those who are critical of the concept of human rights. Such differences and difficulties are reflected within the UN institutions. While the original Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN in 1948 did indeed encompass civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, these spheres were separated out in subsequent covenants, under the influence of the cold war. Civil and political rights (largely negative, freedom from, rights) were given primacy in global human rights, while economic, social and cultural rights (positive, freedom to, rights) received much less attention. This emphasis was particularly strongly supported by the US. eedless to say, this does not mean that the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war has altered the approach of the US. In fact the selective and minimalist approach to human rights, and the notion that they encompass only civil and political rights, coincides precisely with the neo-liberal agenda, which has been strengthened by the collapse of alternative systems. Alongside this development, the other major controversial issue in international human rights related policies has been the assertion of the right - or even the duty - of the UN, or of some states, to intervene forcefully in the affairs of other states, those in which human rights violations have taken place. A major argument against such interventions is that the basis of international relations, as well as of the UN, has been constructed as inter-national, not trans-national; there is thus no space for intervening in what are considered to be the internal affairs of other states. Such interventions are likely to threaten the stability of international state order. On the other hand, one can argue that the impetus behind the establishment of the UN, and especially for the 1951 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was to provide an institutional framework capable of ensuring that the atrocities of the Nazi regime should never again be allowed to happen. The failure of the international community to intervene in Rwanda in time to prevent the major genocide there has been seen by many as something that must be avoided in future. And indeed one effect of the end of the cold war has been an increase in the ability of some states, or the UN, to make international military interventions, without thereby posing a
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major threat to international stability. In the post-cold-war era there has arisen a new phenomenon - humanitarian militarism; this describes an approach which advocates military intervention (thus far western-led) in specific states, on the grounds of massive abuses of human rights within such states, whether these result from the nature of the regime itself or from the militarised conflicts taking place within them. Such interventions - especially those sanctioned by the UN - have been seen by many as an inevitable step in an effort to transform the globe into a place where everyone can be protected through support of their human rights. There is a clear normative basis for this humanitarian militarism: not only that universal human rights have a higher normative value than state sovereignty, but also that there is a complementary need to fight against terrorism. Terrorism is seen as being promoted by rogue states, or as permitted by other failing states that are too weak to deal with terrorist groups operating within their territories; outside intervention is thus needed in such states in order to maintain local and global security. Although already hailed by the Reagan government as the core of its foreign policy, the fight against terrorism has become the inseparable twin of human rights abuses as a rhetorical device for the justification of international intervention, especially since the September 2001 events. ritics of this approach (such as David Chandler) argue that, although human rights discourse talks about human empowerment and recognition, in reality it offers less to people than was formerly provided by more positive forms of international aid. As the emphasis has shifted away from assistance in providing for peoples material wants, the withdrawal of such assistance has actually been used as a weapon in the battle against terrorism.10 Thus UN World Food Programme aid was withdrawn from Afghanistan after the September 2001 bombings in the United States; relief was suspended from Sierra Leone after the military coup; and in the aftermath of humanitarian interventions in Kosovo and Iraq people have had less access to food aid than before the interventions. In the case of Afghanistan, although some women in Kabul have been able to take off the chador (many prefer not to) and - more importantly - to go to school and work, in most of the rest of the country little if
10. David Chandler, From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention, Pluto Press 2002. 110
anything has changed in this respect; the main difference is that the gangs that control the growth of opium, which was banned under the Taliban, now have more power than ever. It is an open question as to whether or not such deployment of human rights discourse in fact serves to delegitimise the concept altogether.11 What is clear, however, is that, in spite of their foundational universalistic inclusive nature, human rights, like other cosmopolitan constructions, can be - and are being - used in a variety of racialised ways, as well as being used in struggles to resist them.
Concluding discussion Some critics have claimed that there is an inherent flaw in human rights discourse, in that it is unable to establish clear foundations for the substance and character of some of the new positive rights its proponents have proclaimed. The argument is that if the discourse of rights tries to embrace more than a neutral protection of means, and to include within its framework ethical and value-laden ends, or if it bases its claims on any external authority, this tends to undercut the universality and democratic content of rights (From Kosovo to Kabul, p119). Chandlers view is that arguments about the substance or content of human rights, or the means of implementing and guaranteeing them, cannot be resolved through democratically accountable mechanisms, because the very nature of such debate, in invoking the concept of rights, serves to repose political questions of power and distribution as moral absolutes, which then become subject to external or legal interpretation through international institutions or domestic and international courts. In other words, like Douzinas, Chandler links the end of human rights to the growing power of judicial authorities in this field. Unlike Douzinas, however, he sees this development as part of the growing hegemony of a normative discourse, rather than the end of it. He also differs from Ignatieff, however, in that he sees the spread of human rights politics as disabling rather than facilitating human agency. Crucially - and unlike much contemporary discourse - Chandler sees
11. For a development of this argument see Nira Yuval-Davis, Human rights, human security and contemporary gendered politics of belonging, in L. Basch, P . Clough & K. Timothy (eds.), Facing Global Capital, Finding Human Security: a Gendered Critique, Feminist Press, forthcoming. 111
popular grassroots democracy as the progressive alternative to topdown human rights discourse: it is more usual for rights-based approaches to see such grassroots democracy as an automatic expression of human rights. This is an important counter-argument. However, I cannot fully share Chandlers trust in the people. We all know that Hitler (and Bush - not that I equate the two) was supported by a majority of the electorate. And we all know that anti-asylumseeker and other racist agendas are driven everywhere by the view that they are good vote catchers; we also know that minority rights - including cultural rights - often need to be protected by top-down legislation, in order to counter racist practices in housing, work and other public arenas. So what is the solution to these dilemmas - if any - and how, if at all, does it relate to cosmopolitanism? n her article on cosmopolitanism in Soundings 24, Chantal Mouffe recommends a multipolar world order as the only answer to the tyranny of the contemporary unipolar world, which takes for granted western culture and norms as the highest form of achievement, and shows no sensitivity to different cultural traditions. She argues that, in order to create channels for the legitimate expression of dissent, we need to envisage a pluralistic world order, constructed around a certain number of great spaces and genuine cultural poles. Although I can see merits in Mouffes proposal, I can also see in it great problems. Her discourse in this article does not distinguish between social and spatial locations, or between cultural identities and political value systems. She therefore runs the risk that her proposed solution could be seen as reproducing the essentialised constructions of Huntingtons clash of civilizations thesis. She is right to argue that global politics cannot be assumed to be a politics of consensus, as most cosmopolitanism literature does, but her solution offers an insufficiently differentiated notion of a possible agonistic alternative. It is important that dissent within global politics is understood as a question of power. Any hope for emancipatory, inclusive and non-racist polities must be based on a politics of political alliances - rather than on cultural, religious, or racial allegiances. One solution to the problem posed by the limitations of emancipatory politics when expressed through the appeal to universal human values is offered by Dipesh Chakrabarty. He points out that the universal can only exist as a placeholder; its place is always ultimately usurped by a historical particular
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seeking to present itself as the universal.12 In this light, the aim of emancipatory and anti-racist politics could be to aspire to establish a universal which would be as inclusive as possible, at the same time knowing that this is a process and not a goal; perhaps it is in this sense that specifying cosmopolitanism positively and definitely is an uncosmopolitan thing to do. e cannot - and should not attempt to - construct a homogeneous, or even unified, political order. Rather, we should engage in a transversal dialogue (see Soundings 12, special issue on transversal politics, especially my definition there of what is transversal politics), bounded by common political values, informed by recognitions of our differential locations and identifications, and led by a global discourse in which translation, rather than a unitary language, is seen as the cosmopolitan tool.
This article is based on a lecture given to the anti-racist think-tank Agora in Stockholm, February 2005.
12. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capital, in Cosmopolitanism (for full reference see note 1). 113
My Jihad
A personal reflection
Amir Saeed
Amir Saeed describes the changing nature of his Islamic political identity.
I am a British citizen of Pakistani origin. If asked, I would describe myself as being Scottish-Pakistani. From a personal perspective I used to argue that I was part British, my argument being that I was literate in English, and had citizenship rights and responsibilities. In short, I had adapted to the ambiguous notion of British culture, to a degree at least. Religion was an element of my personal identity but not an essential part of my life. Unlike other Muslims, my faith was not of overwhelming importance. What was important was to have the right to practise (if I chose) my faith without fear, intimidation and ridicule. This willingness to put secular rights over religion mirrored my political maturity that was awakened in the 1980s. This was a time when, in Scotland at least, skin colour seemed more important than religion. In many respects my political identity was modelled around inclusive definitions of black. I understood the term black as meaning people of Third World origin who were victims of European imperialism, whether they were Latin American, African or Asian; to me they were part of the colonised globe and deserved my support. My citizenship responsibilities entitled me to be at least part British or Scottish. Indeed the notion of hybridity was my initial research area in academia. From national identity to sport to music, my research was initially focused on how minority groups adapted to, accepted, challenged and created cultures of both incorporation and resistance. But the events of 9/11 and the subsequent levels of hostility have made me question my own notion of hybridity. Increasingly
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I experience and see Muslims having to emphasise their Britishness. It seems they are given a stark choice: either be British or be Muslim. In short there is a demand that we assimilate, not just integrate. The events surrounding 9/11, and especially the War on Terrorism (TWAT as I like to call it!), have made me pay closer attention to my religious roots. My secular outlook, in recent months, has been replaced by a more religious and (I say so hesitantly) more Islamic perspective. Rather than seeing Islam just as a religion, my closer examination of the Koran showed me that it also offered a political ideology that could provide a framework for understanding contemporary capitalist society. For me capitalism, in simple terms, puts profit before people. Whilst mainstream popular culture and public opinion seem to decry the inhumane nature of Islam following 9/11, the following passage from the Koran seemed highly relevant: Whoever slays a soul it is as though he slew all mankind, and whoever keeps it alive it as though he kept alive all mankind (Al Quran 5:35). In Islam it is clear that life is to respected and the right to life is to be accorded to all beings. Unfortunately those who appear to be strongest critics of Islam seem to have the weakest knowledge of it. art of my academic research has involved talking to a large number of Muslims from various ethnic, gender and class backgrounds. Whilst it was apparent that my interviewees had somewhat different commitments to Islam, they all agreed that Islam had become the new enemy. During the early 1990s media representations of Islamic fundamentalism mainly focused on the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Some events, like The Satanic Verses and the first Gulf War, produced domestic anti-Muslim sentiment, but an onslaught on British Muslims or Western Muslims was not sustained. However the events of 9/11, the War Against Terrorism and the public attacks on asylum seekers have resurrected latent stereotypes. These have been accompanied by debates about the compatibility of Muslims living in the West. Are Muslims the enemy within? Are Muslims integrating enough? Is Islamic culture democratic? What role do women have in Islam? Suddenly Islam is under a hostile scrutiny, and any defence of it seems to be met by further accusations of Islamic militancy. It is against this background that I have to approach any further research I undertake in race and ethnic studies. Thus my work is clearly grounded in my Muslim identity - but I would argue that all research is grounded in personal identifications: it is just that some are more visible than others.
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National and international concern Recent polls suggest that immigration is now the third most important topic for British voters. Since 9/11 issues of race, religion and migration have become centre stage in society. The beginnings of a focus for hostility centring particularly on Islam were seen during the late 1980s and 1990s, when interest in the whole Muslim community in the UK increased significantly in the wake of the Rushdie affair and the 1991 Gulf War. Since then, new components have begun to appear in racist terminology, used to bait and ridicule Muslims. Old favourites such as Paki are accompanied by shouts of Taliban, Bin Laden and of course terrorists. This abuse is also directed at non-Muslims such as Sikhs, Hindus and Christian-Arabs. Anyone who looks like the other is fair game for such abuse, but its overt focus is on religion rather than race. he language of the media prompted the idea that British Muslims supported Bin Laden, Palestinian suicide bombers and Kashmiri separatists. This view was further fuelled by the disturbances in the North of England, which have been presented as a particular problem of the Muslim community rather than of the British-Asian community (or indeed the white British community) more generally. The far right saw a political opportunity to divide the British-Asian community by developing local election campaigns which attempted to fuse the War on Terror with immigration and Islam. In Blackburn, the British National Party suggested that the predominately Muslim area of the town was to have its own prominent symbol: a set of gates modelled on Saddam Husseins twin swords that heralded the entrances to Baghdad. The BNP had their first councillor elected in Blackburn in 2003. Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in particular have often been represented as separatist, insular and unwilling to integrate with wider society. Recent comments by a variety of mainstream politicians appear to substantiate these populist beliefs. David Blunkett and Peter Hain have both suggested that British-Muslims must make more of an effort to integrate into society. Blunkett has called for oaths of allegiance, not marrying spouses from the Indian subcontinent, and the introduction of English Language Tests. The stereotypical images of Asians used in support of such demands may have changed - in particular Asian passivity is being replaced by representations of a more militant aggressive religious identity - but the implication of a culture clash remains - and that British Muslims are at odds with mainstream secular society.
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A new racism? The far right, using Islamophobia as its main weapon, has now gained greater prominence all across Europe. Instead of robustly confronting this phenomenon, New Labour and European Social Democratic parties have pandered to the right to win votes. They have made little effort to counter the populist stereotype of Muslims as largely supporting terrorist tactics. Yet research in the area of national identity and ethnic minority communities totally contradicts the arguments of the right. For example, post 9/11 polls conducted by the British-Asian newspaper Eastern Eye (23.11.01) showed overwhelmingly that British-Muslims perceived themselves as loyal citizens - though they might oppose the US/UK bombing of Afghanistan. The right to disagree on this (or any other) question - a right which is one of the cornerstones of democracy - is often implicitly denied to British Muslims: one should consider whether white Britons who oppose government policy are routinely questioned about their loyalty. urthermore, the issue of asylum seekers has been conflated with the issue of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, thus further fuelling xenophobia and racism. This fear and hatred is often intensified by an argument that outgroups get more than they deserve, and more than native Britons. This veiled, populist, form of racism denounces government policies for improving the position of ethnic minorities - for example by quotas - as unfair, arguing that they give to ethnic minorities collective opportunities and rights that are denied to the white majority. This argument that Asians were being treated more favourably than whites was one presented by the fascists in the rise of the BNP in Burnley: they claimed that Asian areas of Burnley received extra funding compared to the white areas. This revived racism is not always covert: it frequently echoes discredited biological assumptions about race and the perceived superiority of the West. This link can be most clearly seen in the appropriation of Samuel Huntingtons Clash of Civilisations thesis.1 Huntington argues that that a new cold war is taking place, based not upon economics or politics but on culture: Islam, with its innate propensity to violence, poses a serious threat to Western civilisation. Huntingtons argument is based on an understanding that Islam - and Muslims
1. See Samuel P . Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon and Schuster, New York 1996. 117
- are inherently inferior. Whilst this argument is based on religion and culture, it resonates chillingly with the biological reasoning put forward in the nineteenth century to justify colonialism and imperial war. Furthermore, for Huntington Muslim migrants in the West pose a dangerous enemy within. Not only does the media perpetuate this image, but it also uses the issue of asylum to ideologically link the War on Terrorism with the issue of immigration. Throughout 2003 its onslaught on asylum seekers seemed to gain new momentum alongside the demonisation of indigenous Muslim communities. What is striking is how so many different historical manifestations of racism have been represented in the media war on asylum. Sometimes the emphasis is on the unfair burden on health, housing and education that asylum seekers would bring. Sometimes the argument is focused on a biological racism arguing that asylum seekers would bring in too many germs (see, for example, Madness of Blairs Imported Plagues, Mail on Sunday, 26.01.03). The terminologies associated with asylum seekers - bogus, floods, swamps - dehumanises this group and attempts to strip or dismantle any or all public sympathy for them. he medias war on asylum seekers and Western governments war on terrorism have become interwoven, and the panic induced by this lethal mixture has led to the serious erosion of human and civil rights. What is more discouraging is that both campaigns have enabled the far right to enter mainstream public conscience. Anti-immigrant parties appear to be gaining more political credibility across Europe. Encouraged by the assault on so called undesirables, the far right have managed to gain footholds in certain regions of Britain, and in towns like Oldham, Burnley and Bradford. The BNP currently has around 21 councillors elected across the country. Unsurprisingly, an increase in racial violence has accompanied the rise of popular support for these parties. Encouraged by this success, the BNP is attempting to build support in areas where there is little history of racial strife, or a negligible non-white ethnic minority presence.
Local concerns In the summer of 2002 Payman Bhamani, a young Iranian refugee, was stabbed to death in Hendon, Sunderland. Many believe the attack was racially motivated, and thus the tragedy brought Sunderlands record of race relations into the media spotlight - albeit briefly. Sunderland has recently seen a sharp increase in support
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for the BNP , and there is undoubtedly a connection between the economic and social make-of the area, its active far right presence and the increased incidences of racially motivated attacks and abuse. Despite certain economic successes in the area, Sunderland remains a relatively poor city and in certain respects its relative position has worsened. The Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) for 2000 indicates six wards among the most deprived 5 per cent of wards in England, and eleven within the most deprived 10 per cent. The decline of the shipbuilding and coal mining industries on Wearside, coupled with limited investment and the emigration of educated professionals, has led to increasing levels of long-term unemployment and poverty. The city has also suffered from a legacy of poor health. These are classic socio-economic conditions for fostering resentment toward outsiders who could potentially be seen to be benefiting from jobs, health and housing provisions at the expense of local people ccording to the 1991 census, the North East of England has an ethnic minority population of roughly 1.45 per cent, as compared with 5.5 per cent in Great Britain as a whole. Only 1.1 per cent of Sunderlands 294,000 strong population is ethnic minority. Official estimates from the Home Office put the number of refugees and asylum seekers currently living in Sunderland at around 1000. Yet despite these very small numbers, anger is growing amongst the population about the benefits allegedly received by asylum seekers. A Guardian report carrying interviews with local people provides an illustration of local white resentment:
The government should be looking after their own. I work in a bar where the BNP meet every Thursday, and what they are saying is right. Its about time somebody stood up for us. Get them out, she said, to nods from the other women around the pub table. They come in here - they are shoplifting, robbing people, stabbing people. Keep them out. Keep them out. Our government cant look after us. If the government looked after us there wouldnt be a problem. Weve lived here all our lives. We dont get free mobile phones. They get free air flights. Sunderland city council are flying them out from wherever they come from (www.guardian.co.uk/farright/story/).
The far right has capitalised on such sentiments, and fuelled the myth that Britain is a soft touch. For example, the Sunderland Patriot, a BNP-distributed local
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newspaper, described the favouritism directed towards the Muslim community by the local council. Evidence of this included the installation of CCTV cameras outside a mosque after worshippers had complained about racist abuse directed towards them. The BNP also argued that money spent on minority rights organisations was a waste of taxpayers money, and questioned whether these community groups were in the public interest. Though the proportion of non-white residents in Sunderland is small, the term asylum seeker is assumed to apply to anyone who looks different - i.e. not white. Recent research examining racism experienced by University of Sunderland students shows that even non-white students are abused with racial slurs based on asylum myths.2 For the vast majority of respondents in this study, racism and the issue of asylum had merged into a single issue. Out of the 33 interview respondents, all agreed that if they were not white they were regarded as an asylum seeker. Furthermore, this research showed that students were also subject to anti-Muslim comments even if they were not Muslims. In the local elections of 2003 the BNP won 13,500 votes in Sunderland - a city with fewer than 2000 non-white residents. Asylum and religious myths were clearly one of the main reasons for the BNP vote. The large number of BNP votes cast also supports the analysis of a CRE report (for details, see www.guardian. co.uk/farright/story) which argued that the most fertile wards for the BNP appear to be those with a very small number of minority residents, or all-white areas that have minorities close by. (There are a number of other factors associated with BNP support: their voters are often people who do not normally vote, many of them are young and most of them are male; they have also begun to attract some of the lower middle-class vote - Thatchers children who feel that their earlier support for Tony Blair was misplaced.)
My Jihad It would be naive to assume that the resurgence of anti-Muslim and antiimmigrant racism is a solely a consequence of the War on Terror. Not would it be accurate to characterise the War on Terrorism as simply an anti-Islamic crusade: in my view it is an attempt by proponents of free market capitalism
2. Amir Saeed, Northern Racism: A Pilot Study of Racism in Sunderland, Unpublished Paper Presentation 22.11.2003, Department of Criminology, University of Sunderland. 120
My Jihad
and the United States in particular to control resources in the whole of what it considers to be the less civilised parts of the world. The panic about East European immigrants, and US critiques of countries such Cuba and Venezuela, lend weight to the view that it is not only Muslims who are targeted by global neo-liberalism. However, as a result of the experience of being stigmatised by the media and popular culture as one of the enemy within, the last few years have seen a change in my social and political conscience. More and more I see myself as belonging to the ummah - the global Islamic community which supersedes nationality. There are two tiers to Muslim identity - one is related to faith and one related to country - but faith overrides any other component of identity. It appears that more and more British Muslims are now facing these challenging times by drawing strength from an Islamic faith-based identity which can provide solidarity with other Muslims, as well as an avenue of escape from being constantly identified in negative terms. This is a political process, and it implies a positive (re)conceptualisation of Islamic identity. Recent evidence in Britain suggests that British-Muslims, from a variety of different ethnic groups, are increasingly willing to assert an Islamic identity in the face of real and perceived prejudice. Indeed in some respects the concept of the ummah and the older conceptualisations of political Blackness draw upon similar feelings of exclusion and empowerment. his Islamic challenge to prejudice, and the struggle to assert an Islamic identity, has been popularised in the media as being intrinsically violent. The term Jihad is used to conjure up images of violent, irrational terrorism. However Jihad does not necessarily mean a call to arms and a prelude to bloodshed. A Jihad can be personal and may include debate, reasoning, marching and indeed voicing concern in a written format. My Jihad is a progressive Islam centred on the inclusion of all disparaged groups regardless of religion, ethnicity and even sexuality. At the genesis of Islam the main converts were slaves and women, the two most oppressed groups at the time. The fact that they saw something liberating and empowering within the Hadiths (sayings/teachings) of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) illustrates for me that Islam has a liberal and radical foundation inherent in its teaching. Unfortunately it is the fundamentalists interpretation of Islam that gets all the press: its conservative and exclusive interpretations are mirrored by an equally conservative media, which implies that cultural conflict is inevitable and natural.
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Hopefully this new Muslim ummah can (and indeed it has already done so) draw links with anti-war and anti-capitalist movements to challenge the barbaric nature of globalisation and the US-led War on Terrorism. Public opinion can be mobilised to challenge the dominating powers. Furthermore, this challenge can be led by Muslims. For example, the anti-war movement in Birmingham is directed with great energy by a young Muslim female. So whilst on the one hand we have the negativity and hostility of the mainstream press and body politic, an alternative voice can be found which builds on the principles of social justice and challenging oppression. Indeed Islamic scholars may argue that social justice and challenging oppression are the cornerstones of Islam:
What is wrong with you that you not fight in the cause of Allah and for those who are weak, ill treated and oppressed among men, women and children and whose cry is: Our Lord! Rescue us from this town whose people are oppressors and raise for us from You one who will protect us and raise for us from You one who will help. Al Quran 4: 74
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Institutions and racism

Equality in the workplace
Farhad Dalal
Farhad Dalal argues that ideas of racism and racial equality are embedded in processes of group formation and belonging. Understanding these processes may help us to make practices of racialisation more visible.
Individuals, groups and racial groups The word race is a commonplace. It is readily overheard in conversations at bus stops and dinner tables; it is cited frequently in newspaper columns as they describe the goings on in the world; politicians and activists continually draw on the idea of race; there are entire academic journals and departments dedicated to its study. And perhaps most importantly, the term is enshrined in British law through the Race Relations Act (1976) and its amendments. By virtue of the fact that the term race is granted legal status, we are all obliged to engage with it. If we do not, the law will reprimand and chastise us variously. Peculiarly, however, the groupings that race relations regulations require organisations to monitor are not racial categories but ethnic ones. Why is this and what is the difference between them? It is impossible to find definitions of race that are meaningfully distinguishable from those of ethnicity and culture. In their advice to the citizens of this country, the CRE rely on Suman Fernandos definitions of these terms: race - to do with
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visible physical appearance, said to be determined by genetic ancestry; culture - beliefs and behaviours shared by the group, said to be determined by education, upbringing and choice; and ethnicity - shared history, language, culture, a group identity defined from within, which is said to be determined by group identity, social pressure, and the need to belong. There are a great many problems with this way of dividing up the world. For example, the definitions overlap with each other (culture is made part of the definition of ethnicity); they are tautological (ethnicity is defined as a group identity the cause of which is group identity); although race is defined as having to do with physical differences, it is agreed by Fernando himself that there are no such things as races. Similar difficulties are to be found in all definitions that seek to differentiate this trinity. In fact, it is accepted generally within many discourses (for instance biology and sociology) that there are no such things as races per se. If one accepts this, as I do, then we are faced with a critical problem: if there are no such things as races, how can there be a thing called racism? Surely racism exists - but what does it consist of? he legislation tries to get around the problem by making a distinction between racism and discrimination (on the basis of a - false - dichotomy between thought and action), and then limiting itself to the latter. Racism is said to be the belief that some races are superior to others, whilst discrimination is to do with the activity of treating people less favourably on grounds of their colour, race, nationality or national or ethnic origin. Race Relations legislation allegedly limits itself to what people do, and does not address what they think. (In its literature the CRE appears to take race itself as a taken-for-granted category.) The House of Lords sought to clarify the definition of a racial group as that which has a long shared history and a cultural tradition of its own.1 These two factors are said to be essential to the demarcation of a racial group. Also relevant (but not necessary) requirements are having a common geographical origin, as well as a common language, literature and religion. But surely these latter are categories of culture as they are usually understood. And what of this idea of origin? In which epoch of the continuing nomadic history of the human species (which as far as we know walked out of Africa) are we going to draw a line, take a snapshot, and say that this is where people are originally from? Interestingly, the
1. In 1983: see www.cre.gov.uk/gdpract/ed_s_legal.html. 124
House of Lords make no mention of physical characteristics in their clarifications of race. So is a racial grouping the same as that of culture? In fact, when the activity of racial discrimination is defined, the physical characteristic of colour does feature. Discrimination is said to be racial if it takes place on the grounds of colour, nationality, race, ethnic or national origin. A history of the terms race, culture and ethnicity shows three things. First, a mish-mash of very different types of things are used to define them - nationality, geography, religion, language, behaviours, beliefs, some notion of where people are originally from, and colour. Second, whilst attempts to define the terms continually collapse into each other, the notion of colour (in particular those of black and white) has been used from the very beginning to name all three - we talk readily of white and black races, cultures and ethnic groups. Third, there is no agreement as to the number of races or cultures or ethnicities; they seem to spring up suddenly in contexts in which they were previously invisible. This invites a shift of focus from what these terms actually are to the functions they serve. I suggest that the terms are evoked at particular times and places in order to create distinctions, so as to be able to differentiate the haves from the must-not-haves; in brief, in order to create an us and a them. Thus what is critical is not racism, but racialisation, by which I mean the activity which consists of the evocation of the mythic idea of race as an explanatory or organising principle. Thus racism is not just a belief, it is first and foremost an activity. The question that should continually be asked is thus the reasons for any of these terms being used at a particular moment and in a particular time: who is seeking to make a differentiation and for what reason? he language used to describe Africans and other exotics (lascivious monstrous types, apelike, and so on) in the travel records of the early European adventurers is language we would clearly call racist in todays terms. Yet they did not make use of the term race in their descriptions. I think that this is because at that time the African was not yet human, and so was already Other. Over time, accumulating evidence forces one to admit Africans into the body of humanity, and this is the moment when the term race is required to keep them Other. It is now admitted that whilst they are human, they are of a different race. When the category of race started to crumble in the early twentieth century, then culture came to the fore. Now, it is said that while we might all be one race, they are of a different culture. As the idea of
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cultural difference becomes difficult to sustain in any meaningful way, there is a retreat to the idea of ethnicity - the internal sense of belonging to a group. The term ethnicity has more respectability, but its work is no different from that of race. The fact that race relations legislation requires one to monitor ethnic groups is testament to that fact. It is also the case that a semantic history of the terms black and white in the English language shows that the associations and meanings of the terms have not been there naturally from the beginning, but have we need a shift of developed and grown over the last five hundred focus from what these years or so into the signifiers of negativity and terms actually are to positivity that we come to take for granted today. the functions they In the English language the terms start off more serve or less neutrally. From the Middle Ages onwards, white comes progressively to be associated with goodness and positivity, and black with badness and negativity. (For example, blackness does not become associated with death until the fourteenth century.) Eventually (from the eighteenth century onwards), they come even to name things that can have no colour - the emotions - in order to signal where they are positioned on the scale of approval - for example black anger. I would argue that notions of black and white are critical to the project of racialising the world, and that they have been honed to work as signifiers of exclusion and inclusion. It is no coincidence that the Black was named as such by those that designated themselves as Whites. And it is no coincidence that the association and uses of the words mushroomed during the European Imperial adventures beginning in the seventeenth century. It is because race is an empty category that it has had to increasingly rely on an idea of colour to sustain differentiations. Thus the world is colour coded because it has been racialised. Another part of the argument is that, as each of us is born into, and goes through the psycho-social developmental processes in an already racialised and colour coded world, we inevitably imbibe the discourses with our mothers milk. So it is that our psyches too are inevitably racialised and colour coded, so much so that it becomes natural in day to day speech to reach for the word black when one wants to signal disapproval in some way. A trivial example: the fish caught illicitly and sold clandestinely during the fishing crisis of 1995 were spontaneously called black fish on the BBC news (BBC1, Nine Oclock News, 12.2.95).
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In sum, so-called racial identities are fictions manufactured by colonising processes. The fact that they come to be taken up as essentialist categories by those that the categories sought to marginalise speaks not to their reality, but to the power of ideology and discourses that we cannot help but imbibe through the psycho-social developmental processes we are bound to go through. But saying that races are fictions and reifications does not provide solutions to the problem of racism. The paradox is that something that has no material existence comes nonetheless to have a very powerful experiential and psychological existence, so much so that it has a critical role in the manufacture of individual identities. The fact that the world and the discourses have been racialised and colour coded means that we not only come to experience the world in racialised ways: we continually reproduce and reinforce the racialisations in our interactions with each other. espite the problems with the word ethnicity, it does capture something significant in its gesture towards the notion of belonging. Radical Group Analytic Theory (based on the work of the group analyst S.H. Foulkes and the sociologist Norbert Elias) would concur with the view that the need to belong is intrinsic and essential to the human condition. However, belonging is not a straightforward experience - it is a problematic. It is impossible to say just what is the essence of a particular us, say Britishness. When we look directly at the British us, we find not homogeneity but diversity - multiple groupings, overlapping and conflictual: vegetarians, landlords, Scots, accountants, miners, Christians, Muslims, fascists, liberals, and so on. And if one turns ones attention to each of these sub-groupings, they too disintegrate into further arrays of diversity. It is precisely because of the impossibility of finding and naming the essence of the us that one looks to the margins to the not-us, and uses colour to demarcate them. However, the idea of the not-us is beset by the same set of problems as the us, in that there is no unity to be found there either. Nevertheless, our minds somehow manage this feat of registering, in any particular moment, an experience of an us that is contrasted with a them: a difference not of degree, but of type. Here is the conundrum: I can always say that two things are the same by virtue of one attribute (say redness) and different by virtue of another (say age). Both are simultaneously true. So the question then becomes why in some circumstances do I find myself having an experience of similarity, and in other circumstances I find myself fixated by the differences.
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As the question is such an important one, let me ask it again in a slightly different form: out of the infinity of differences between any two people, why does one of these differences come to be more meaningful than the rest? The same can be, and needs to be, asked of similarities. To talk about belonging is to talk of a sense of an us. But the logic of belonging is paradoxical. For the notion of belonging to have any rational or emotional meaning and significance, two conditions of necessity must be fulfilled. First, in order to be able to belong to one place, it is necessary for there to be another place that one does not belong to. Second, there must be some who are decreed not to be part of the belonging group. If either of these conditions are not fulfilled, then the territory of belonging would become infinitely big and encompass everyone, and so become meaningless. This then is the hard truth about belonging - it is created by and through the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion to which the notion of power relations is critical.
The multiculturalist response Words are indeed very powerful things. They are so powerful that their mere use not only leads us to believe that the thing they refer to exists; it also leads us to act and behave in ways that take account of the things that are being alluded to. Thus the attempts to deal with racism that accept the idea of race are bound to create new difficulties and conundrums. One significant attempt is multiculturalism. The watchword of multiculturalism is equal but different. In this world view, because they do not understand each others belief systems, when people of different cultures, ethnicities or races, etc, encounter each other, they are inclined to misinterpret what they encounter; and this in turn arouses in them a mixture of anxiety and hostility. The solution proposed is a mixture of education and tolerance: education, in terms of learning about the Other culture and making it familiar; and tolerance, in terms of tolerating something that is causing one some kind of discomfort. This strategy, although completely sensible in one regard, avoids confronting the problematic of power and renders the world more benign than it actually is. One of the ways of testing the multiculturalist thesis is by asking the question, when is an encounter between two (or more) people thought to be not multicultural? Consider: the very notion of multicultural suggests the possibility of its normative inverse, something which one might call mono128
cultural. Similarly, the affiliated idea of a cross-cultural encounter implies the possibility of an encounter that remains within the tram lines of a monoculture. But, as I have been arguing, there can be no such thing as a monoculture. Cultures are structures that institutionalise power relationships. Whats more, the notion of a transcultural encounter is also problematic, as it invokes an idea of an encounter taking place in a region in some way beyond, outside, or prior to, culture itself. Let me put it this way: why do we tend to call the encounter between Mr Singh and Mr Smith multi or cross cultural, and not the encounter between Mr Smith and Mr Jones? here are two dangers here. One is culturalism, in which we become fixated by culture; the other is trying to do away with culture entirely, to end up in a culture-free space. These dangers are founded on, and alternate between, two kinds of errors. The first error is to take the division of humanity into cultures, races or ethnicities as unproblematic givens, so that the issue becomes one of how to negotiate these differences: culturalism is the tendency to get mesmerized by some of the divisions between human groupings found in the external social world. The alternative position, of a culture-free space, assumes that there can be a retreat into the internal world of individuals, and that human nature, our humanity, is something outside or prior to the social. My argument - in contrast to both these positions - is that these categories do not exist out there in nature: they are generated and sustained by the logic of power relations.
Institutional racism and the workplace For the purposes of this analysis, let us say that racism is a mechanism that works against the principle of equality. What I want to turn to now are the workings of racism in the workplace. The first thing to be said is that the workings of racism are usually invisible. In all countries, it so happens that certain groupings tend to do less well in the job market. It is not even clear that there is a problem here. Two or more people went for an interview and one of them got the job. In such circumstances, the conclusion one is often forced to draw is that the world as we find it (these people here better off, and those people there not so well off) is because some kinds of people are just better at some kinds of tasks. (In Finland for example, a country justly proud of its social conscience and democratic practices, about 55 per cent of graduates are women; and the majority of those getting
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higher grades are also women. Yet when it comes to managers in organisations at the highest levels, women make up just 6 per cent of them.) So something more must be going on in such situations, something that the principle of equal opportunities does not solve. When that something is clearly colour coded, it is called institutional racism (now renamed indirect racial discrimination in the legislation). must say that for a long time I struggled to really know quite what was being talked about when the term institutional racism was used. How can an institution do anything? Because ultimately an institution only consists of the individuals that belong to it. And I have created a further problem through the way I have been talking about racism. I have reified racism by saying things like the work of racism, and so made racism sound like it is a thing - a thing that does things to us. It then appears that racism itself is the problem. It is not. The problem is the way that human beings find themselves experiencing and treating other human beings.
How power is institutionalised I was recently helped to understand the term institutional racism through the story of a school teacher. The teacher really struggled to maintain discipline in his first year of teaching. One day early on in his second year he was excited to have found a solution for himself. At the very start of the new teaching year with a new class, he presented to the pupils a written set of rules of what was to be not allowed and also a graded set of punishments (detentions and so forth) to do with each infringement. Now when a student misbehaved, he said to them: I am obliged to punish you in this way for this misdemeanour because it says so in the rules. The teacher was very excited by the outcome. Wonderfully, the students did not complain but co-operated in the punishment process, because now, whatever was happening, it appeared that it was not the teacher doing it to them. The teacher was only following the same set of rules as the students. The rules had been institutionalised and all were subjugated by them. The world is not as simple as this classroom, and even the classroom is not as simple as I have portrayed it. However, the very simplicity of the story allows us to see some of the elements of institutionalisation that are normally invisible. Specifically, although on the one hand it is clear that it is the teacher who has actually created the rules, in day to day practice it
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appears that the teacher is powerless to do otherwise than he does; he is obliged to follow the rules like everyone else. The point is made clearer through another trivial experience. Recently, whilst walking along a road I saw a shortish policeman. It occurred to me that this was another example of the institutionalising mechanisms at work. In the past, when the rules said that the minimum height for policemen was to be six foot (or whatever it was) then this rule naturally excluded people from certain parts of the world from becoming policemen. There was no single person, no grand conspiracy, no statute in Home Office regulations saying that (say) Tamils should not be policemen - it is just an unfortunate outcome of a rule that all are subject to. Of course there are always rationales for the rules, rationales that seek to explain the necessity of the rule being the way it is. However, these rationales are not as rational as they might initially appear. In actual fact all rationales must always contain within them some element of rationalisation. ne can see clearly in the first story that the schoolteacher had the power to determine what the rules were. However, we can also see that in the practical situation in the classroom, that fact has become invisible to the school children. We can intuit that some years later the way in which these rules came into being will have been completely been forgotten. This would give us the impression of the rules having always been there - from the beginnings of time. This is the process of institutionalisation. Further, we can see that the process of institutionalisation obscures the workings of power, leaving us with the illusion that the situation we are faced with is natural, self-evident, and eternal. It then appears to us that policemen just are tall, and it does not even occur to us to question the hows, whys and wherefores of the situation. This description I have given of the processes of institutionalisation is exactly how ideology is usually described. As is well known, the function of ideology is to give particular historical and contingent arrangements of the world the impression of necessity and inevitability. As Roland Barthes put it, ideology transforms history into nature. Thus I would say that the processes of institutionalisation are identical to the workings of ideology, and indeed each is an aspect of the other. The thing about power is that the more one has, the more one is able to keep up the illusion of having clean hands, of being innocent if you will. For example, the structure of the military is such that the general - having
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ordered his troops into action - can sit having a quiet evening meal, whilst the dirty of work of killing is being done by others elsewhere. But even though the soldiers are doing the dirty work, the structure of the situation is such that even they need not feel any personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This is possible because a function of bureaucratic structures (and hierarchy in general) is to dissipate responsibilities so that it appears that no actual individuals are responsible for what is taking place. The general has the possibility of sleeping with an easy conscience because (a) he is not doing the actual dirty work, and (b) he has given this order in the service of something greater than him - his country, his people and so on - and so can actually feel virtuous and noble whilst other human beings are being slaughtered. Meanwhile the soldier has the possibility of easing his conscience by virtue of the fact that he is only following orders. He can think that as the intention and decision to propel him into action came from elsewhere, that is where ultimate responsibility must lie. There are two caveats I need to make, however. First, I would like to stress that these are possibilities not certainties; guilt and responsibility are never machined away in their entirety - many a soldier and even generals end up traumatised. The second caveat is to say that I am not arguing that one should do away with organisational hierarchies, structures and bureaucracies (which is an impossibility), nor that the primary purpose of these systems is to machine away responsibility (and therefore guilt). I am suggesting that there is something intrinsic to the nature of hierarchical structures that allows them to be used in this way. e can also get to see in this scenario how rationales are being mobilised to bolster activities. Like the schoolteacher, each can claim that they are only following the rules. It should be stressed, again, that on the whole these rules are experienced as naturally occurring injunctions - to love ones country, to defend ones way of life, and so on. The analogy of the army also helps us see why it is that the rawest and crudest instances of racism - that is, the most visible - are often seen in the most deprived areas. The captains of industry, or you and me sitting having a cappuccino in Covent Garden, are able, just like the generals, to make it appear that our hands are cleaner than they actually are. The analogy of the classroom, although useful, of course seriously misrepresents the ways in which such rules arise. In the classroom the teacher made a conscious
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decision to invent the rules in order to manipulate the students. In real life there is no such Machiavellian figure, or international conspiracy, planning how to benefit certain groupings and disenfranchise others. This is a problem which arises in evolutionary theory: how do we end up with things that look like intricate designs despite there being no designer? And the answer in this sociological and psychological arena is the same as in the biological one. These rules emerge and are thrown up by the processes of interaction which take place in the field of power relations. However it is that these rules come about, they inform the shapes and forms that institutions come to take. The result is that institutions, including the workplace, come to embody and represent these self-same rules. In sum, one of the functions of the structure of institutions is to bolster, conserve and perpetuate particular ideologies - and here is the twist: to do so without giving the appearance of doing so. n the descriptions I have given so far, I have made things appear more fixed and simple than they actually are. Let me correct that now. Institutions, like cultures, are not homogenous in the sense of sustaining a single ideology. In any one moment there are any number of ideologies, in all sorts of shapes and guises, contesting and struggling against each other. One rule might be - we must make money for our shareholders; another rule might be - we must look after our workers; another might be - we must concern ourselves with the environment, and so on. For ideology to function at its best, it must remain invisible; it must be as though it simply was not there. The reasons, the rationales, for acting in certain ways and not others, must be given a basis in something else, something rational. Although there is always something reasonable in the rational, its very reasonableness serves as a screen that hides the rationalisation. This invisibility is one reason why the issue of institutional racism is so intractable, and allows numerous commentators to say with equanimity and conviction that there is no such thing as institutional racism - and they say this despite the evidence supplied by an enormous number of reports by government and academic research bodies.
The invisibility of discrimination Since institutions (no less than individuals) emerge from and reside within psycho-social discourses, they will of necessity come to embody, reproduce and
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reinforce the prevailing ideologies and conventions that are found there. I take it as axiomatic that one of these conventions is the powerful linkage of blackness with badness, and goodness with whiteness. So all of us, all institutions, must embody and reproduce them in some way. I would like to stress the phrase in some way: this embodiment and reproduction is not the same everywhere and for all people. It is continually contested and modified. So I am not espousing a crude pessimistic determinism in which things are fixed forever. The point is that something exists in the British context (the theme of black and white) that necessitates contestation. Thus all institutions will come to have structures that somehow work in the direction of privileging its white constituents over its black ones. Thus there is much evidence that black members of an institution are found to do less well than the white members at a statistical level. But because the mechanisms of marginalisation are invisible, there exists the possibility of explaining away these facts in a variety of ways, and it is to these I will now turn. The denial of the existence of racism is integral to racism itself. It is part of what makes it work. If there is no problem in the first place, then nothing needs to be done. The understandings that are offered to explain why things are happening in the way that they are, are rationalisations masquerading as explanations, whose function it is to explain away the possibility of something untoward happening at an institutional level. he first kind of explanation is the idea that if the white members are doing better in the system, then it is because they are better. The rationale behind this explanation is that of meritocracy. And this must indeed be true on some occasions - at times a white colleague is more deserving of promotion than a black colleague. The key here is the phrase some occasions, because on other occasions this is not the case. But the way things work, the instances in which the assertion is true are used to make invisible the occasions on which it is not true. And the way in which this happens is as follows. It is the nature of statistical evidence that some of the data that constitute that evidence will directly contradict the statistical truth. For example, a statistical truth might be most of the apples in this basket are red. However, it is also true that some of the apples in this same basket are green. What takes place next is that these particular truths are used to deny the veracity of the statistical truth, which is like saying the fact that because some of the apples are
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green must mean that it is not true that most of the apples in the basket are red. For example, it is true that some black lawyers have reached the highest echelons of their profession and become Queens Council. This then is used to make the problem one of particular individuals. It is said if Winston and Satish are able to become QCs, then the fact that Harish, Meena and Sandra have not been able to must have to do with some difficulty in them. This then is one of the main strategies used to render institutional racism invisible. What is being said is that institutional racism does not exist, and that the problem as such is that of particular individuals. n some occasions, when it becomes blatantly clear that something racialised has indeed taken place, the individualising strategy is once again called upon to do its work. Now it is the bad apple theory, and it is used to say that it is this or that particular policeman, or social worker, or whoever, who is unfortunately racist. And if we cast out these individuals, things will be ok. The interplay between visibility and invisibility is a complex one. The question one always needs to attend to is when do people of colour become invisible and when visible? The following story draws out some of the intricacies. Recently I was invited to contribute to a training programme to do with leadership that was designed specifically for the so called ethnic minority members of a number of organisations. By now it is clear what is meant by ethnic minority - black people, the darkies. Anyway, I arrived at lunch time and there in the dining room of this conference centre were two groups having lunch - and it was very clear which was the group I was going to be engaging with. One table was entirely white, and the other primarily black. I was told by one of the organisers (both white) that those at the white table were here for stage two of the main training. It had been previously noticed by the organisers that participation by the ethnic minority members was almost non-existent in the main training. It had therefore been decided to run one specifically for the ethnic minorities, and so here they were, attending stage one of the same training. Now this seemed to me to be a good thing - they had noticed the problem and tried to do something about it. During the training session I described the powerful impact the dining room had on me when I first entered it, seeing that the people at one table were all black and the other almost all white. And I had wondered how it was that such
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a powerful division had come about in that way given that we were not living under a system of apartheid. Part of the answer was given then by one of the black members who said that on arriving on this course he was surprised to see a white colleague from his organisation in the other training. He was doubly surprised because he did not know (a) that the colleague, whom he thought he knew quite well, was on an ongoing training, and (b) he did not even know about the existence of that training. And then he was further surprised to discover two more white colleagues from his organisation also on that training. ow are we to understand what is going on? Clearly something very powerful had gone on in the organisation so that the lines of communication had circumnavigated this person, or gone through him as though he were not there. He was invisible to those who had disseminated information regarding the training. We may surmise that unconsciously - or perhaps consciously - the disseminators discounted him as a potential candidate for that training. We may surmise further that on his return, if he were to question how and why he was rendered invisible, it is very likely that it would be explained away as a one-off, that it was an oversight of some kind and that it was not done intentionally by anyone. And no doubt this rendition would at some level be true - no one individual intentionally excluded him. There must have been a chain of communication of A telling B about the training, who made a passing reference about it to C at the photocopy machine, and so on. And somehow, this chain never included the black person in question. It is really hard to comprehend how this can happen given that (a) there was no conspiracy, and (b) any one of the people who knew could have linked him into the information chain. This is exactly what makes the process of institutionalisation such a powerful and efficient mechanism in perpetuating ideologies, privileges and divisions. Its very silence and apparent non-existence is its strength. In my experience, what often happens next is that if the black person persists and does not buy into the one-off explanation, they are seen as difficult and as having a chip on their shoulder. When one does not feel heard, one either gives up, or is compelled to shout louder and louder, until ones voice gets shrill in its insistence, and gets to sound like whining. And that certainly does get heard, and is used to condemn the character of the complainer as weak in some way,
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which in turn distracts from the content of the actual complaint. Alternatively, the voice might become angry. Now the black person is experienced as threatening and disruptive. One of the defences put up by the institution (more precisely: people who constitute the institution) is one in which it is said that there is no basis in reality for the complaint; there is no conspiracy to keep black people down; the event that took place is a one-off and so meaningless. If this were true then the conclusion that one is then forced to draw is that the difficulties must lie within the black person. The protestor becomes perceived as the problem. In effect, what has taken place is that the black person has been diagnosed as being paranoid. The thing to note in these not improbable scenarios is the fact that what has become painfully visible is the black person as bad (angry), mad (paranoid) or weak (whining), and what remains invisible is that which has set off the whole situation in the first place. There is another lesson to be learnt from this scenario. The fact that a special training was offered to the ethnic minorities can be construed as positive discrimination. This special training is a compensation for a failure within the system. However, if this failure is kept invisible, then the only thing that is visible is apparently that they are getting special treatment! They are being favoured over us! We can see then that if the compensation is the only thing that is registered or noticed, it can set off feelings of resentment, jealousy and envy in the mainstream population. Reports in the mainstream media tend to pick up on and report exactly these sorts of favours, which in turn inflame the populist mind. his resentment in the mainstream gets further fuelled by a sense of being accused and blamed for being one of the better off - this is particularly galling when it seems that it is they that are the better off. To use a term like institutional racism is no help in a moment like this; it just further fuels the antipathies, and generates an impasse. What institutional racism? is the outraged cry. Just look at the special treatment they are getting - they are jumping housing queues and get all sorts of state benefits, whilst we have to wait for years. I will take up some additional reasons as to why it is so hard to see what is going on through another anecdote. An organisation convened a workshop to look at and think about the experiences of its black members in order to reflect on its possible unconscious processes. During this workshop one of the participants said: I am not responsible for what happened in earlier times and places. I did
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not colonise Africa and have nothing to do with slavery. I am an individual and I treat others as individuals - some people I like more and others less. I am just like everyone else. This is not an uncommon reaction from those in the mainstream; they feel unfairly criticised and accused of doing something, or feel unfairly blamed and made responsible for the sins of their fathers and their fathers. Now, I have a lot of sympathy for what this person is saying. And yet something more complicated must be going on. To understand what that might be we need to recall the fact that racialised discourses conceived the racialised us in two sorts of ways - vertically and horizontally. By vertically, I mean lineage - the so-called bloodline that is drawn from ones ancestors to the present day. This us stretches back in time, and indeed to the beginnings of time. And by horizontally, I mean typology. This us is an us because all those that belong are of the same type - Caucasian or Black or Mongoloid or whatever. In contrast to the first kind of us that lives in time, the second kind of us spreads across in space. These versions of us are not usually distinguished, and, depending on the rationalisation one wants to mobilise, one or other of these will be utilised. The participant in the workshop, in saying that, as an individual living in the year 2004, she really is not responsible for the historical processes of colonisation and slavery, is saying that she is not part of a lineage - us. Whilst there might be a bloodline between her and her ancestors, she is saying that she is not responsible for their crimes, and should not be held responsible for the actions that they took. Fair enough. owever, in the here-and-now she is in fact benefiting from privileges accorded to her as a white person by the processes that have become institutionalised. And this occurs without her having to do anything. In other words, whilst she is personally not responsible through lineage, she nonetheless benefits by virtue of typology. This occurs because the actions of the ancestors have prepared the world to be biased towards the whites. Thus, whilst this participants rejection of lineage is understandable and visible, she renders invisible the benefits she derives from typology. Her cry that she is an individual is an unconscious strategy to avoid acknowledging that she does in fact get benefits from the way that the system is structured. This helps her say, truthfully, But I havent done
H
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anything!. Maybe, but one is never just an individual. One cannot not belong to groups, and the relations between groupings are always power relations. In fact I have been arguing that groupings are generated by power relations. You can see what is happening here. The black is systematically marginalised by virtue of the grouping s/he is part of, whilst the denial of the significance of the groupings by the white person is a means of obscuring the workings of power. f there is anything at all to the idea of institutional racism, then we would have to admit that those at the centre, those that benefit from the processes of institutionalisation, must have a vested interest in not knowing about the conditions that put them there. This is because any change in the situation would necessarily entail a dilution of the privileges that they are currently accorded.
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Zygmunt Bauman is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, and the author of numerous books and essays on philosophy and modernity. Farhad Dalal is a member of the South Devon Psychotherapy and Counselling Service. He works as an organisational consultant, psychotherapist and group analyst. His publications include Taking the Group Seriously (Jessica Kingsley 1998) and Race, Colour and the Processes of Racialization: New Perspectives from Group Analysis, Psychoanalysis and Sociology (BrunnerRoutledge 2002). Paul Gilroy is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics. His most recent book is After Empire (Routledge 2004). Bilkis Malek works as a freelance consultant and researcher specialising in race and diversity. Tariq Modood is Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy and the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol, UK. His latest books are (co-ed) Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship: A European Approach (Routledge 2006), Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea (Polity 2007) and (co-ed) Secularism, Muslims and Multiculturalism (CUP 2007). Roshi Naidoo is a freelance researcher specialising in cultural politics for the heritage sector. She co-edited (with Jo Littler) The Politics of Heritage: the legacies of race, Routledge 2005. Amir Saeed is senior lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Sunderland. His research has been in racism, ethnicity and popular culture. Recent publications include book chapters on Islam and Hip Hop Music, Muhammad Ali and Islam and British Muslims post 9/11. George Shire is a senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London.
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Ejos Ubiribo is a freelance writer, cultural commentator and a member of Trident Independent Advisory Group (IAG), which provides Trident Operation Command Unit (OCU) with independent advice in tackling gun crime, interaction with and the policing of the black communities in London. She has contributed to many pro-active anti-gun crime initiatives engaging with at risk youth to divert them from criminality, and energetically works/lobbies for the empowerment of disaffected members of her community. Patrick Wrights books include The Village that Died for England, A Journey Through Ruins and On Living in an Old Country. He is a Professor at the Institute of Cultural Analysis, Nottingham Trent University. Nira Yuval-Davis is a Professor and Graduate Course Director in Gender, Sexualities and Ethnic Studies at the University of East London. Her publications include Gender and Nation (Sage 1997); Women, Citizenship and Difference (Zed 1999); and Warning Signs of Fundamentalisms (WLUML 2004). She is currently working a monograph on Securing Gendered Belonging/s: Human Security, Human Rights and Contemporary Politics of Belonging.
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Race Identity and Belonging

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Race Identity and Belonging

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CONTENTS

101 114 123 141

Race, identity and belonging

Race, identity and belonging

Race, identity and belonging

Race, identity and belonging

Race, identity and belonging

Race, identity and belonging

Race, identity and belonging

Race, identity and belonging

Race, identity and belonging

10. See London Inside-Out, Soundings 32. 25

Race, identity and belonging

Race, identity and belonging

Race, identity and belonging

Mans the talk on road

Race, identity and belonging

Mans the talk on road

Race, identity and belonging

Mans the talk on road

Race, identity and belonging

Mans the talk on road

Race, identity and belonging

Mans the talk on road

Race, identity and belonging

Mans the talk on road

Race, identity and belonging

Mans the talk on road

Race, identity and belonging

Mans the talk on road

Race, identity and belonging

And with the gun comes power:

Mans the talk on road

Race, identity and belonging

Race, identity and belonging

Race, identity and belonging

Race, identity and belonging

Race, identity and belonging

Last orders for the English Aborigine

Last orders for the English Aborigine

Race, identity and belonging

Last orders for the English Aborigine

Race, identity and belonging

Last orders for the English Aborigine

Race, identity and belonging

Last orders for the English Aborigine

Race, identity and belonging

Last orders for the English Aborigine

Race, identity and belonging

Last orders for the English Aborigine

Fear of difference/ fear of sameness

Fear of difference/ fear of sameness

Race, identity and belonging

Fear of difference/ fear of sameness

Race, identity and belonging

2. Paul Gilroy, After Empire, Routledge 2004. 76

Fear of difference/ fear of sameness

Race, identity and belonging

Fear of difference/ fear of sameness

Race, identity and belonging

Fear of difference/ fear of sameness

Race, identity and belonging

Race, identity and belonging