This long post is now split into two parts. Click here to return to the main Contents.

• Appendices
• Footnotes
• What the experts say
• Sources
• Annexes

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Additional information 🔼

Appendices

1. The post-EU-referendum spike in racism
2. ‘White Lives Matter’ – BLM’s racist shadow
3. Gingerism – the acceptable face of racism?
4. The dark side of the Enlightenment
5. Whitesplaining
6. White privilege
7. White guilt, black victimhood

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Appendices 🔼

Appendix 1

The post-EU-referendum spike in racism

Like a fart in a lift

Here in the UK following the 2016 referendum on whether we should stay in or leave the European Union (EU), there was a wave of increased racism. It stank but was probably temporary – like a bad fart in a lift.

The UK’s working-class host community was just about coming to terms with postwar mass immigration from colonies and the Commonwealth when EU expansion into poor east European countries in 2004 led to the free movement of people morphing into almost unrestricted mass immigration of cheap labour (see above). Polls showed concern about immigration was a main reason for the referendum’s leave result.

(See my blogpost about the intractability of the EU on this issue, Four EU freedoms are indivisible, said Verhofstadt – but Blair’s mobility of cheap labour was no freedom.)

As detailed above, mass immigration has always been imposed or facilitated by governments for economic reasons with no concern for the social wellbeing of the host or immigrant communities. This was one of the roots of the Rohingya crisis (addressed by my post Halo goodbye, Suu – the Rohingya crisis).

The referendum was, in effect, the first public consultation on mass immigration to the UK since it began in the 1940s. The unexpected high turnout and leave result apparently released the trapped gas of resentment. The lofty dismissal of the issue by the liberal establishment didn’t help.

(Regarding that lofty dismissal and its political consequences, see my rolling blogpost, Brexit and free movement – the east European elephant. As a pro-immigration liberal internationalist, I voted to remain, despite the EU having become a corrupt, neoliberal, over-bureaucratic gravy-train. But I sympathised with the overlooked precariat. They had genuine, non-racist concerns about the cultural and economic effects of post-enlargement free movement. I was concerned that Labour leave voters, dismissed by remainer Labour party leaders as ignorant provincial racists, would vote Conservative – which they did in 2019.)

The repressed racism released by the EU referendum resulted in a wave of increased racist hate crime, most worryingly amongst the educated young. People seemed to enjoy indulging in racist bullying. There was also an unpleasant surge in people talking smugly about ‘reverse racism’. Such comments showed ignorance of – or contempt for – the principle that racism is prejudice plus (institutional) power.

The far right was trying to surf the wave of post-referendum racism, but has never had much support in the UK. It was reasonable to suppose that when the Brexit dust settled and the UK controlled its own immigration, the racist wave would recede, the far right would crawl back under its stone, and the UK would phlegmatically resume its slow progress towards ending racism.

(The post-referendum UK racism spike coincided with a similar rise in racism in Europe, accompanied by a significant surge in support for the populist far right. This was a reaction to the increase in immigration from Africa and West Asia – see above. It was reasonable to suppose that things were looking bad. Bring on voluntary world government).

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Appendices 🔼

Appendix 2

‘White Lives Matter’ – BLM’s racist shadow

Alt-right bollocks

The global 2020 Black Lives Matter movement made a big dent in the white western culture of racism, but ‘alt-right’ white supremacists pushed back with a cunning slogan, ‘White Lives Matter’ and its sneakier version, ‘All Lives Matter’.

Some history: in the US, many unarmed black people have been killed by white police officers, security guards and vigilantes. Those killings, widely seen as racist murders, have often gone unpunished.

In 2012, 17-year-old unarmed Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a mixed-ethnicity neighbourhood watch coordinator for the gated community where he temporarily lived.

Martin, visiting a resident with his father, was returning from a nearby convenience store when Zimmerman apparently thought he looked suspicious and challenged him. An altercation ensued, and Zimmerman shot Martin in the chest.

Zimmerman claimed self-defence. When he was acquitted of murder and manslaughter in 2013, a powerful protest slogan and movement emerged: Black Lives Matter.

The perceived message given by the killings of unarmed black people and the indifferent response of the authorities was that black lives didn’t matter. Hence the slogan: Black Lives (do) Matter.

In 2015, a far-right racist counter-slogan emerged: ‘White/All Lives Matter’. Of course white lives mattered – of course all lives mattered – but no one had given the message that white – or all – lives didn’t matter.

Unmasked, ‘White/All Lives Matter’ was a brutal white-supremacist message: black lives don’t matter – the racist murder of black people is fine.

After the killing in 2020 of unarmed George Floyd by a white police officer, Black Lives Matter became the focus of a massive worldwide protest against racism.

The far right pushed back again. Here in the UK racists posted White Lives Matter messages on social media.

Many more white people posted the sneakier ‘All Lives Matter’ slogan. Some ‘All Lives’ posters were clearly racist. Some may have wanted to counter BLM’s sanctimony. Many probably didn’t realise there was a brutal racist message behind the innocuous-sounding slogan.

By such means, the far right kept trying to stir racist hatred. Fortunately, they’ve never had much support for their swivel-eyed nonsense in the phlegmatic, pragmatic UK. (Enoch Powell was wrong.)

‘All Lives Matter’ posts have since disappeared from mainstream UK social media. Perhaps people realised by posting that slogan they’d be associated with the racist far right.

In June 2020, in a clear and high-profile instance of hate crime, a plane towed a ‘White Lives Matter’ banner over a match at top UK football club Manchester City.

The racist responsible was sacked by his firm, but Lancashire Police bizarrely concluded there was no criminal offence.

I asked the chief constable why. I got a dusty reply. Why don’t you ask him as well, dear Reader? (In 1999, Lancashire’s then police chief said, ‘Lancashire’s police force is institutionally racist’.)

The ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogan and its racist shadow now have a lower profile – as does the international campaign.

The BLM organisation has had troubles which may or may not be terminal [7] but peoples’ idea of the Black Lives Matter movement gives it the momentum to carry on – and white allyship, whilst understandably controversial, is thriving.

I like to think the smart-arse trolls of the racist ‘White Lives Matter’ far right have no future – only stale memories, sick fantasies and a short crawl back into their hole.

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Appendices 🔼

Appendix 3

Gingerism – the acceptable face of racism?

Can’t you take a joke? Mate?

This appendix is also a separate soothfairy post

Recently in my workplace I overheard some jokey chat about ‘gingers’. It wasn’t directed at a particular person but I felt uneasy, as I always do when this casual prejudice happens. It felt like a form of racism.

Prejudice against red-haired people, known as gingerism, apparently exists only in England. It’s always framed as jokey banter and is often heard in the workplace or the pub.

If anyone objects, they’re likely to be chided: ‘It’s just a bit of fun. Can’t you take a joke?’ But is it a harmless joke? Or is it actually racism seeking an ‘acceptable’ form?

In the 1950s and 60s, racist comments were commonplace in the workplace and the pub, but now they’re unacceptable in public. Perhaps ‘harmless’ jokes about red-haired people or about the Welsh, (another similarly mocked group) constitute a new outlet for the mainly redundant but dangerous and destructive anti-stranger instinct upon which racism is apparently built.

A UK Guardian article on the subject downplayed the idea of gingerism as racism, pointing out that people with red hair clearly don’t suffer the same devastating personal and institutional discrimination as people with black or brown skin.

However, the Guardian article suggested an interesting explanation for gingerism: English anti-Celtism, and – more specifically – anti-Irish feeling.

Many Irish people have red hair. Since Cromwell’s brutal colonisation of Ireland, there’s been a tendency for the English to disdain the Irish. (Hence Irish ‘jokes’.)

In the 1950s, London boarding-house signs supposedly said, ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’. (See above.) This seems to be apocryphal, but it illustrates a real prejudice.

English red-haired people bravely (Brave!) try to reappropriate the word ‘ginger’ – as US black people have reappropriated the N-word. But the bullying ‘jokes’ continue regardless.

Red-haired Neanderthals

Neanderthal humans had red hair. Having lived in Europe for over 100,000 years, they were apparently wiped out 35,000 years ago by immigrating early modern humans. (Early modern humans emigrated everywhere – they’re the ancestors of all humans.)

Perhaps ‘jokey’ bullying of red-haired people and colonialist anti-Irish sentiments are echoes of that ancient hostility.

(As well as killing Neanderthals, early humans interbred with them. Most Europeans and Asians have 1-4% Neanderthal DNA. However, red hair in modern humans isn’t inherited from Neanderthals – apparently it’s a different gene.)

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Appendices 🔼

Appendix 4

The dark side of the Enlightenment

Decolonise it

This appendix is also a separate soothfairy post

In this post, I praise the Enlightenment, the European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries led by philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, Newton, Kant, Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Adam Smith.

The Enlightenment emphasised reason. I’d looked up to it as a way out of superstition, ignorance and oppression, and as the foundation of modern liberal democracy.

However, the Black Lives Matter movement has exposed the part played by Enlightenment philosophers in justifying the slave trade and slavery by coming up with the idea of white supremacy.

I didn’t know, for instance, that Immanuel Kant said, ‘humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites’. He apparently later recanted (re-Kanted?), kind of, but the damage was done.

Before changing his mind, Kant expounded at length in his Königsberg salon about the failings of the various ‘races’ as compared with the perfect whites. He babbled authoritatively about the qualities of different African ‘races’ in terms of their suitability as slaves.

Such ‘philosophy’ was extremely useful to slave traders and ‘owners’ – not in practical terms, but in terms of moral support for their inhuman enterprise.

Now we know about the Enlightenment’s dark side, and in the woke wake of that awareness students have – understandably – called for decolonisation of the university syllabus. (The Daily Mail‘s response: ‘They Kant be serious!’)

In defence of the Enlightenment, it’s said that Kant & co. were conservative, and we should look to lesser-known radical philosophers of the Enlightenment – Baruch Spinoza, for instance – for its heart and soul.

Maybe so, but those mainstream conservative Enlightenment philosophers built our foundations – which now feel shaky.

Luckily – switch of metaphor! – the fruit of the Enlightenment, liberal democracy (currently the worst form of government apart from all the others) seems not fundamentally poisoned by this racist root. So I’ll still praise the Enlightenment – but less wholeheartedly.

The poison wasn’t Enlightenment philosophy – it was colonialism. It’d be nice to think those two heavyweight phenomena, Enlightenment and colonialism, were fundamentally separate and coincidental, rather than horribly symbiotic.

We need to decolonise our democracy but it’s easier said than done. Having ripped off and destroyed colonial countries, the UK blithely invited large numbers of residents of those countries to move and live here to help rebuild postwar Britain – then blighted their lives with postcolonial racism.

As argued throughout this post, colonial racism is apparently a twisted version of a mainly redundant anti-stranger instinct (evolved to protect against danger or communicable disease).

If we acknowledge that, we can choose to live above it (as with other ‘monsters from the id‘), so enabling us to oppose and end racism and to decolonise our minds – and our institutions.

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Appendices 🔼

Appendix 5

Whitesplaining

Let me explain…

A white person can never know what it’s like to suffer racism. It must be galling for a person of colour to hear a white person explain racism away. But racism needs explaining honestly by white people. Who better to explain racism than white people? We do it.

Racism can’t be explained away (or justified) but it can be explained. We can start by admitting it – that’s the hard part for antiracists. Then we can try to understand and explain it.

I admit to having racist feelings – but I’m antiracist! I wondered if it might be a twisted version of a mainly redundant anti-stranger instinct. I now think that’s the explanation: it’s not a belief, it’s a mainly redundant instinct, revived and twisted by colonialism.

As with other mainly redundant subconscious ancestral stuff that I’m aware of, I acknowledge the instinct – with a respectful nod to my ancestors – and, rejecting the despicable colonial twist, I choose to live above it.

That’s my whitesplanation – and my white allyship.

Regarding white allyship, white people of good will, as well as well as being aware of and choosing to live above our own racist impulses, can respond assertively but tactfully to other people’s racist speech or behaviour.

There’s an excellent guide to dealing with difficult behaviour in a calm and respectful way by Deborah Easton of Kent State University, US.

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Appendices 🔼

Appendix 6

White privilege

Just can’t give it up

The notion of white privilege came to prominence in the wake of the revived Black Lives Matter movement that followed the racist murder of George Floyd by a US police officer in 2020.

Black Lives Matter supporters said white people should give up their ‘white privilege’.

The problem with that is white privilege isn’t a positive thing that can be given up. It’s a negative thing – it’s a lack of systemic prejudice.

With the best will, white allies of Black Lives Matter simply can’t give up that systemic privilege.

However, we can work – personally and collectively – to end systemic prejudice, and thereby to extend that ‘white privilege’ to black and South Asian people.

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Appendices 🔼

Appendix 7

White guilt, black victimhood

Bad feelings but forces for good

In this post, as a white antiracist I try to understand and explain racism, I admit to my own racism and commit to living above it. I look at racism’s historical and evolutionary roots and its toxic legacy. I urge all white people to do the same.

That’s big of me, isn’t it. Have I expunged my white guilt? Obviously not fully. But kind of, yes.

However, I came across a YouTube Black History Panel discussion, Do we play the victim? and it made me wonder if I’ve painted a one-dimensional picture of black and South Asian Britons by emphasing black victimhood.

People of colour living in the west are victims – of racism. But they’re much more than that.

Perhaps I’ve fallen into the trap identified by the black author, scholar and social activist, the late Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name, bell hooks. (That’s how she styled her name.)

Black US writer and essayist Sam McKenzie Jr in his blogpost, There’s No Victim Mentality While Fighting White Racism, writes:

In her book, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, scholar-activist bell hooks penned an essay about refusing to be a victim. According to bell hooks, besides its ability to disempower, a perpetual state of Black victimhood fluffs the comfy pillows of whiteness, and it keeps the mind of whiteness at ease. Bell hooks writes that a self-determining Black identity intimidates. And she says, a self-determining Black identity doesn’t gather the sympathy, the visibility, and the platforms that victimhood can. To bell hooks, victimhood “pays homage to white victimizers” as the all-powerful holders of every solution. She also writes, “if only white people need to change, then Black people can avoid the process to undergo radical politicization.” The world needs both.

Killing Rage: Ending Racism is a collection of essays by bell hooks

Also, conservative black US academic John McWhorter in his bestselling 2021 book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America says it’s wrong for black people to be told to think of themselves as victims.

People who experience racism are victims, but the UK’s hard-won liberal social democracy (albeit a flawed work-in-progress) lets self-determined people overcome such adversity.

So McWhorter and hooks are right to question the prevalence of the notion of black victimhood. But what about white guilt?

If, as I suggest, all people are racist, and therefore – more relevantly – all white people are racist, then clearly white people are guilty.

But should black people see white people only as racists? Clearly not. Just as black people are more than victims of racism, white people are more than racists.

Given the improvements in ‘race’ relations over the last 50 or 60 years and intermarriage and friendship between black and white people, it’d be wrong for black people to be seen mainly as victims; and wrong for white people to be seen mainly as racists.

However, feelings of white guilt and black victimhood are nevertheless essential to the process of ending racism.

To be effective, they need to be channelled and perhaps de-woked and synchronised. But, despite being bad feelings, they’re forces for good, motivating the slow progress towards ending racism.

In the meantime, those bad feelings, white guilt and black victimhood, could be greatly resolved by one thing: reparations for slavery.

A massive coordinated gesture of financial reparation by the US and the European countries involved would do a lot of good.

So, probably not going to happen.

Appendices 🔼

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Additional information 🔼

Footnotes

1. Human taxonomy
2. Slavery: post-emancipation ‘apprenticeship’ and the treadmill
3. The Institute for Race Relation’s response to my saying mass immigration provokes racism
4. ‘Big, black and dangerous’ – the Blackwood report
5. FGM: pseudo-medico-justification
6. Identity politics
7. Whatever happened to Black Lives Matter?

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Footnotes 🔼

Footnote 1

Human taxonomy

We’re great apes

Taxonomically, all humans are members of the species Homo sapiens. (Some say we’re a subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.)

Homo sapiens is the only surviving species of the genus Homo, the only surviving genus of the clade (or subtribe) Hominina (AKA Australopithicina), a member of the tribe Hominini. The only other surviving hominins are Paninae (chimpanzees and bonobos).

Hominini is a tribe of the subfamily Homininae, the only other surviving member of which is the Gorillini tribe (gorillas). The Homininae subfamily is a member of the Hominidae family, popularly known as the great apes, which includes orangutans.

In biology, ‘race’ is an informal rank below the level of subspecies, the members of which are significantly distinct from other members of the subspecies. Genetic research shows the different human populations aren’t significantly distinct and therefore aren’t races.

(Apparently, the taxonomical method used above is disputed by – amongst others – proponents of the phylogenetic nomenclature method.)

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Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Footnotes 🔼

Footnote 2

Slavery: post-emancipation ‘apprenticeship’ and the treadmill

Adding injury to injury

In a 2018 in-depth UK Guardian article, When will Britain face up to its crimes against humanity, US history professor Kris Manjapra wrote:

In addition to money, slave owners received another form of compensation: the guaranteed free labour of blacks on plantations for a period of years after emancipation. The enslaved were thus forced to pay reverse reparations to their oppressors. At the stroke of midnight on 1 August 1834, the enslaved were freed from the legal category of slavery – and instantly plunged into a new institution, called “apprenticeship”.

The arrangement was initially to last for 12 years, but was ultimately shortened to four. During this period of apprenticeship, Britain declared it would teach blacks how to use their freedom responsibly, and would train them out of their natural state of savagery. But this training involved continued unpaid labour for the same masters on the very same plantations on which they had worked the day before.

In some ways, the “apprenticeship” years were arguably even more brutal than what had preceded them. With the Slavery Abolition Act, the duty to punish former slaves now shifted from individual slave owners to officers of the state. A state-funded, 100-person corps of police, jailers and enforcers was hired in Britain and sent to the plantation colonies. They were called the “stipendiary magistrates”. If apprentices were too slow in drawing water, or in cutting cane, or in washing linens, or if they took Saturdays off, their masters could have them punished by these magistrates.

Punishments were doled out according to a standardised formula, and often involved the most “modern” punishment device of those times: the treadmill. This torture device, which was supposed to inculcate a work ethic, was a huge turning wheel with thick, splintering wooden slats. Apprentices accused of laziness – what slave owners called the “negro disease” – were hung by their hands from a plank and forced to “dance” the treadmill barefoot, often for hours. If they fell or lost their step, they would be battered on their chest, feet and shins by the wooden planks. The punishment was often combined with whippings.

The treadmill was used more during the apprenticeship period than it ever was under slavery, precisely because it was said to be a scientific, measurable and modern form of disciplinary re-education, in line with bureaucratic oversight. One apprentice, James Williams, in an account of his life published in 1837, recalled he was punished much more after 1834 than before. Indeed, it is likely that slave-owners sweated their labour under apprenticeship, in order to squeeze out the last ounces of unpaid labour before full emancipation finally came in 1838.

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Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Footnotes 🔼

Footnote 3

The Institute for Race Relation’s response to my saying mass immigration provokes racism

The hostile response by the IRR to a letter from me in the Guardian, my (possibly overwrought) attempt to defend myself, and the importance of Ambalavaner Sivanandan

In August 2018 the UK Guardian newspaper reported that the founders (in 1977) of the UK Anti-Nazi League had called for a national campaign to fight racism. This was in response to the rising tide in the UK and mainland Europe of populist far-right racism, and of race-hate incidents. The UK’s 2016 EU referendum result, in which the issue of immigration played a major part, had apparently unleashed previously repressed racist feelings. Far right and neo-Nazi groups were trying to exploit this.

It occurred to me that ‘fighting’ racism was not what was needed. I wrote to the Guardian, and my letter (Chris Hughes) was published on 22 August.

In my letter, I said racism was a modern twist on a mainly redundant instinct that had been recently provoked by mass immigration, and rather than ‘fighting’ it, might it not be best to acknowledge it’s instinctive origin, and address the provocation?

Perhaps I didn’t think that through enough. Blaming mass immigration and calling for that to be addressed might sound like, ‘Send them all back’. What I meant was rather than fighting racism, we should acknowledge its instinctive base and understand its recent provocation by mass immigration – so we can continue to make racism history. That’s what I should have said.

So it’s partly my fault that I got a hostile response, in the form of a letter to the Guardian, published the next day, 23 August, from Liz Fekete, director of UK antiracist thinktank the Institute of Race Relations (IRR).

In her letter, Fekete said:

‘Chris Hughes’s claim that imposed postwar Commonwealth immigration and imposed EU free movement immigration are the provocation for racism, takes us back to the numbers game of the 1960s and the argument that it is the presence of foreigners that creates racism. The fact that a Guardian reader felt legitimised to represent such a dangerous argument demonstrates just how much territory has been ceded to Powellite frameworks and how little understanding there is in the UK today of the popular, institutional and structural elements of racism.

Stung by Fekete’s suggestion that I was a Powellite racist playing a numbers game and that I lacked understanding of racism, I fired off a reply letter to the Guardian – which wasn’t published. It said:

‘Liz Fekete wrongly implies that my views are Powellite. I pointed out that postwar mass immigration, imposed without consultation, disturbed the host community. Racist Powell was wrong: there was no mass civil disturbance – people got along. Then EU free movement forced more large-scale change on people. Governments facilitate mass migration for economic reasons with no concern for the lives of the host community – or those of the immigrants. Leave supporters aren’t racists – they want controlled immigration. When the Brexit dust settles, the racism will subside.’

I emailed Fekete. I included the text of my unpublished letter, and invited Fekete to read this blogpost. I had no reply.

I emailed Fekete again to try to persuade her I wasn’t a Powellite racist. I said although she might not want to read my whole post, perhaps she’d have time to read the section headed Powell was wrong. I’d noticed Fekete was particularly concerned about young black men being wrongfully convicted under the ‘joint enterprise‘ common law doctrine. I invited her to read the section in my post about that issue, headed Wrongful convictions of black ‘gang members’.

This time, I got a reply – from Fekete’s secretary. The reply said Fekete was pleased I shared her concerns about joint enterprise, and she’d noted my publication.

Then, a week later, on 30 August, the Guardian published a letter from Jenny Bourne, IRR company secretary and joint editor of IRR’s peer-reviewed academic house journal, Race & Class.

Enoch Powell was invoked again (as, like Hitler, he often is), this time in the context of the long-simmering row over alleged anti-Judaism in the UK Labour Party. Former UK chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks had waded in, comparing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to Powell.

In her letter, Bourne said:

‘To compare Jeremy Corbyn to Enoch Powell is outlandish…It serves to obfuscate growing racism in this country. Powell’s speech was made in the highly charged context of the arrival of thousands of Kenyan Asian British citizens and the debate over the 1968 Race Relations Act to outlaw discrimination. His language…was seemingly chosen to incite. And it was Powell who started “the numbers game” over immigration in the UK.’

Bourne went on to defend Corbyn’s anti-Zionism, but I was struck by her sentence including ‘Powell’ and ‘numbers game’ – the same two elements used by her boss, Fekete, in criticising me.

I emailed Bourne, congratulating her on getting a letter in the Guardian (it’s not easy!) and saying I disagreed with her description of Powell’s racism as a ‘numbers game’; postwar mass immigration was imposed by a paternalistic government without consultation and had distressed the host population; the government did the same thing with EU free movement; mass immigration has been imposed for global economic reasons with no concern for the people involved; and it provokes our instinctive racism – but we can choose not indulge racism, whatever the provocation.

I emailed Bourne again the next day, saying I’d come across a Times article relevant to my point that criticising mass immigration is not a racist ‘numbers game’. The article pointed out that the Rohingya crisis has its roots in mass immigration, organised by the British Empire for commercial reasons, with no consideration for the immigrant or the host populations. (The rest is history, resulting eventually, according to a 2018 UN report, in genocide.)

I got no reply. At this point, I felt I’d become a blog-nerd stalker, and I gave up the attempt at correspondence. But I also felt I hadn’t got to the bottom of it, so I did some digging.

IRR’s position, it seemed, was that identifying mass immigration as a cause of racism was the same as blaming the victims. It was identified with Powell’s infamous speech, and was seen as playing a numbers game.

The shared phraseology suggested a shared ideology, and its vehement use suggested a shared anger. I think I found the source of that ideology – and anger – in the person of a founder of IRR (in its modern form) and a great unsung hero of antiracism – I’m sorry to say I’d never heard of him – Ambalavaner Sivanandan.

Sivanandan, who died in January 2018 aged 94, was Fekete’s predecessor as IRR director and Bourne’s predecessor as Race & Class editor. He was also Bourne’s husband.

Sivanandan’s Guardian obituary said, ‘He was a tireless and eloquent voice explaining the connections between race, class, imperialism and colonialism.’

Sivanandan’s 2008 book, Catching History on the Wing – Race, Culture and Globalisation (in which he urged antiracists to take an international perspective) yielded a result in chapter 3, La Trahison des Clerks.

(That phrase, borrowed from the title of a 1927 book by French philosopher Julien Benda, translates as ‘the treason of intellectuals’. Sivanandan: ‘The intellectuals have defected, and walled themselves up behind a new language of privilege… To justify their betrayal, the postmodernists have created a whole new language of their own which allows them to appropriate struggle without engaging in it.’ Good stuff!)

In that chapter, taking on the job abandoned by the treacherous postmodernists, Sivanandan analysed the postcolonial symbiosis of poverty and racism with angry eloquence:

Racism and imperialism work in tandem, and poverty is their handmaiden.

And it is that symbiosis between racism and poverty that, under those other imperatives of multinational capitalism, the free market and the enriching of the rich, has come to define the “underclass” of the United States and, increasingly, of Britain and Western Europe… It is there, where the poorest sections of our communities, white and black, scrabble for the leftovers of work, the rubble of slum housing and the dwindling share of welfare, that racism is at most virulent, its most murderous.

And that is the racism that interests me – the racism that kills – not so much the racism that discriminates. Not because racial discrimination is not important, but because it is racist violence that sets the agenda for state racism, official discrimination, in particular. It provides the rationale for the government’s numbers game – no immigrant, no rivers of blood.

[My bolding]

There it was! The ‘numbers game’, and Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech. I assume Sivanandan must have also written elsewhere about the Powellite ‘numbers game’, but that instance served to suggest a powerful and influential precedent for Fekete’s dismissal of my Guardian letter as taking us ‘back to the numbers game of the 1960s’.

In his introduction to Catching History on the Wing, Sivanandan emphasised the need to connect globalisation and its ‘free-market system and imperial ideology’ with ‘the displacement of whole populations leading to forced migration and the consequences of that.’

Postwar mass immigration to the UK from colonies and the Commonwealth wasn’t forced, but it was a large-scale displacement, encouraged in the interests of free-market globalisation and imperial ideology.

Sivanandan’s book addressed postwar immigration in great detail, but I suggest he and his IRR successors have – for ideological reasons – denied the consequential elephant in the room: large-scale migration of black and South Asian people to a European country was bound to provoke racism in the host population.

That racism has been mitigated during the last 70 years by individual decency and friendship, and by collective campaigning. However, black and brown Britons continue to suffer daily instances of personal and institutional racist bullying which has been well defined as prejudice plus institutional power.

Whether liberal antiracists like to admit it or not, racism was a direct consequence of postwar mass immigration: a consequence presumably unforeseen by the immigrants – and ignored by those who ordained the immigration.

Sivanandan was apparently known for his aphorisms (pithy observations containing a general truth), one of which was:

We are here because you were there.

(I’d heard that nice summary, but didn’t know who said it. It was claimed by Sivanandan, but has also been attributed to Jamaican-born Marxist sociologist Stuart Hall. Deep googling produced no source for either, but it looks as if Sivanandan used it first. However, it may be older than that. Indian Workers’ Association general secretary Jagmohan Joshi reportedly said it at a 1971 meeting; and it’s been described as a popular activist credo.)

Whoever coined it, it’s an excellent epithet – and I get it. If I’d met Sivanandan, I’d have offered him a pint and an apology. Or a cup of tea.

(Maybe not tea – an aunt of mine was married to a tea planter in India during the Raj. Her stories were fascinating until I grew old enough to learn about the subjugation and environmental devastation underlying her exotic lifestyle.)

The point of Sivanandan’s compact aphorism is that the British Empire, having drained its colonies of natural assets, then exploited the inhabitants by importing them as labour. If there were consequential problems, it was the fault of the host population’s imperialist forebears. Why are ‘they’ here? Because ‘we’ were there. Fair enough.

Rigorous historical economic and political analysis is needed to understand racism. However, an examination of human nature is also needed.

Pointing out, in the course of that examination, that mass immigration provokes racism is not blaming the victims or playing a numbers game. It’s stating the bleeding obvious.

Admitting it makes it easier to rise above it, to acknowledge all black and brown Britons as full and equal citizens, and then to calmly oppose racism – both personal and institutional.

Another relevant aphorism is given in Sivanandan’s 1990 collection, Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism (which urged the oppressed to see other oppressions, and to aim for a fair society for all).

In chapter 3, Challenging Racism: Strategies for the 1980s (based on a 1983 speech given to the Greater London Council in its Ken Livingstone heyday), Sivandandan said:

‘The whole purpose of knowing who we are is not to interpret the world, but to change it.’

This was said in the context of urging black and South Asian groups to look beyond their cultural identity (Sivanandan was a left-wing prophetic opponent of identity politics) and to align their struggle against racism with other oppressed groups, and with the class struggle.

(Is the class struggle lost? Let’s hope not. See you at the barricades, Comrades!)

However, it’s good advice in general for anyone who needs nudging beyond self-awareness to social action.

For instance, knowing we’re probably all intrinsically racist is all very fascinating, but that awareness should encourage us to organise to make racism history.

As for ‘fighting’ racism (going back to the intended point of my Guardian letter), is that not an aggressive, typically male attitude? Armed with self-knowledge, can’t we just talk, reasonably? If conflict is unavoidable, the strategy should be based on Eastern-style non-aggression. Judo, or whatever. Metaphorically, that is.

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Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Footnotes 🔼

Footnote 4

‘Big, black and dangerous’ – the Blackwood report

From ‘Big, black and dangerous’ to big, black and dead

The phrase, ‘Big, black and dangerous’ has been used to describe the perception by staff of some black patients in mental health institutions

In a Guardian interview in 2017, Jacqui Dyer, then vice chair of NHS England’s mental health taskforce, was said to use the phrase:

‘“Wherever there is exclusion or detention in this society, that’s where you find over-representation of black people,” says Dyer, who argues that the notion of the black person as “big, black and dangerous” still prevails within institutional service settings.’

(More recently, Dyer became the Mental Health Equalities advisor for NHS England.)

That phrase – ‘Big, black and dangerous’ – originated as the subtitle of the 1993 report of an inquiry into the death in 1991 of Orville Blackwood while he was detained in Broadmoor Hospital, a high-security psychiatric hospital near London.

The full title of the report is:

Report of The Committee of Inquiry into the Death in Broadmoor Hospital of Orville Blackwood and a Review of the Deaths of Two Other Afro-Caribbean Patients
“Big, Black and Dangerous?”

[My bolding]

The report has been summarised by consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr John Crichton in his 1994 briefing, Comments on the Blackwood Inquiry:

In September 1991 the Special Hospitals Service Authority set up an inquiry, under the chairmanship of Professor Herschel Prins, to investigate the death of a Broadmoor patient, Orville Blackwood, and to review in the light of this case two other deaths at Broadmoor of Afro-Caribbean patients, Michael Martin and Joseph Watts (SHSA, 1993). From the outset the approach of this inquiry was fundamentally different from other recent investigations of the special hospitals; most notably it followed a less formal pattern than the Ashworth Inquiry (HMSO, 1992) which was going on at the same time. The focus was not on individual complaints or upon blame for them, but instead on the patterns of practice within Broadmoor which contributed to the tragic deaths of three patients. This report is no less hard-hitting in its recommendations than the Ashworth Inquiry, but it nevertheless managed its investigation in a way which sought to encourage staff to contribute and made recommendations which aimed to avoid scapegoating. Like Ashworth, the Blackwood Inquiry is not only important to forensic psychiatry but is relevant to all aspects of psychiatric work.

The case of Orville Blackwood

The first part of the report describes in detail the history of Orville Blackwood. He was a large Afro-Caribbean man born in Jamaica but who had moved to London at an early age. He had been in trouble with the police from an early age and by his 20s had convictions for several minor criminal offences and had served two sentences of a few weeks in prison. From 1982, at the age of 22, there was the start of a remitting and relapsing psychotic illness. Over the following two years Blackwood had nine, mostly compulsory, admissions to local psychiatric hospitals. His condition attracted several different diagnoses, including acute paranoid state, drug-induced psychosis, acute situational psychosis and psychotic reaction in an inadequate personality.

In January 1986, shortly after serving a six-month sentence for actual bodily harm and criminal damage, Blackwood was arrested for robbing a bookmakers shop with a toy gun. It was suggested that he should have been admitted to the Denis Hill medium secure unit at Bethlem Royal Hospital, but since no bed was available he was sentenced to three years imprisonment. Within a year his mental state had deteriorated so seriously he was transferred to the Denis Hill unit. In October 1987, after a settled period, Blackwood became disturbed after a trivial incident and seriously assaulted a nurse. The police were required to restrain him and transfer was arranged to Broadmoor. At Broadmoor he presented problems in management especially when he refused medication, but he did respond to fairly large doses of neuroleptics and when he was well was popular among staff and patients. He was always described as lacking insight and was bitter that he remained in hospital after the end of his custodial sentence. By 1991 there were moves for Blackwood to be transferred back to the Denis Hill unit and a Mental Health Review Tribunal had adjourned to further consider his case.

At the beginning of August 1991 Blackwood became unsettled and demanding; he set off the fire alarm, blocked his sink and was abusive to his consultant. He was managed by being placed in seclusion where damage was done to the inside of the room. On 28 August the ward doctor prepared to review Blackwood in his side room. Blackwood was quietly lying on his bed when the doctor entered into his room, allegedly without a knock or warning; there were nurses outside should he become violent. Blackwood allegedly tried to punch the doctor and was restrained. The doctor decided to administer Sparine 150 mg and Modecate 150 mg intramuscularly. The staff left the room after the administration of injections, but soon observed from outside that Blackwood had stopped breathing. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation was unsuccessful.

The report made serious criticisms about the way Orville Blackwood’s relatives were subsequently told of his death.

The committee felt that there was a knee-jerk response to patient misdemeanour and violence. Seclusion and intramuscular medication was the standard response with several members of staff available if needed. Blackwood’s increased irritability was partly understandable because of the tension from his Tribunal being adjourned, but this did not seem to be appreciated by staff. The committee found that the staff insufficiently used wider psychiatric skills to prevent and treat Blackwood’s worsening mental state. The tension between safe Incarceration and treatment is also expressed in the Ashworth Inquiry and both reports concluded that the emphasis has rested too heavily on the former. Perhaps it is unreasonable to ask nurses to be both ‘warder’ and therapist. In some secure hospitals in the United States there are separate nursing and security staff.

There has been much debate about the role of the intramuscular injections in the sudden death of psychiatric patients. The committee heard detailed evidence on this point, including the theory that the pharmacokinetics of phenothiazines are so effected when a patient is in an excited state as to make them much more cardiotoxic. The committee could not be conclusive but suggested the need for urgent research into this, especially since special hospital patients are often given very large amounts of psychotropic medication.

Similarities between the deaths of Orville Blackwood, Michael Martin and Joseph Watts

All of these Afro-Caribbean patients died in seclusion where they were placed after disagreements with other patients or members of staff which had led to them being violent. They had all been diagnosed schizophrenic and they had all been following an unhealthy diet. Orville Blackwood weighed 21 stone and despite a diagnosis of diabetes mellitus at one time still consumed large amounts of Coca-Cola and chocolate. Joseph Watts was 19 stone and Michael Martin had a ‘passion for chocolate’ and was described as heavily built at post mortem. The report makes suggestions that the SHSA investigate how the lifestyle of patients could be made healthier.

All three patients had the reputation of being likeable when well, but they also generated a fear of violence in the staff. The committee received the impression of ‘big, black and dangerous’ so frequently in their inquiry that they incorporated it, with a question mark, as their sub-title. The committee investigated the question of whether staff had been racist in their treatment. They suggest that there was a racial institutional bias against ethnic minorities, but this was not by direct acts of racism, rather by acts of omission. They quote a Health/Home Office paper which states, “the ‘colour blind’ approach of some ignores issues of race and culture and the experience of racism”. The report states, “The experience of Afro-Caribbean inner-city youngsters is not fully understood by Eurocentric psychiatry and those who work in the psychiatric system. It is important that differences are recognised and catered for” (page 51).

Conclusions

The report made 47 recommendations for action and invited themselves back to monitor progress if the SHSA agreed; in the event they did not. The report received wide media coverage and despite a second print run the SHSA has no more copies available. The task of the special hospitals is perhaps the most difficult in the whole of psychiatry and the numerous reports and inquiries about them reflect that difficulty. This report offers constructive criticism and the survival of the special hospitals depends on how such criticism is heeded.

Did the survival of special hospitals really depend on how they responded to that constructive criticism? Sadly, that worthy hope was sidelined – as usual – by lax government, allowing Broadmoor to pretty much just carry on, regardless.

Broadmoor made an effort – arguably, a token effort – to address at least some of the Blackwood report’s recommendations. Several of the report’s 47 recommendations were directed at ethnicity issues.

As a result of those recommendations, in 1996 a friend of mine, a counsellor and therapist of African Caribbean ethnic origin, was employed by Broadmoor to work with black patients on their “index offence” (the class of crime for which they were convicted), taking into account that race was a potential factor affecting their progress in the treatment at the hospital.

My friend worked in Broadmoor for six years, counselling individual men and running group therapy. After his first year there he recruited a friend and fellow-counsellor, also of African Caribbean ethnic origin, to work with him. He said they did good work together, and the work with the men was good. He said working with the institution was not so good.

It ended with them both suing the hospital for race discrimination. They lost, and it cost them £11,000 each. The fallout from that traumatic experience sadly ended their friendship. My friend says it took him many years to recover from that experience.

He’d helped the hospital by recruiting a second black counsellor. Together they’d helped many black patients, and had helped the hospital to meet some of the Blackwood report’s recommendations – and that was their reward.

Please note, dear Reader, that failure to prove race discrimination in a UK employment tribunal doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. In 2011, only 16 per cent of race discrimination claims (150 out of 950) succeeded. In a 2013 Institute of Race Relations article, historian, barrister and socialist activist David Renton provided the above statistic – and much damning case detail. Renton wrote:

The poor prospects of success in race discrimination claims are an under-acknowledged blemish of the Employment Tribunal system.

A sharp 1998 letter (not fully available in an ad-blocked phone browser without a paid subscription to the newspaper) to a national UK broadsheet newspaper by the Blackwood inquiry chair, the late Professor Herschell Prins, (written in the context of a contributor to the Lawrence inquiry saying London’s police force was institutionally racist) confirmed Broadmoor’s imperviousness to real change. Herschell wrote:

Although highly disturbing, Dr Oakley’s findings of institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police will come as no surprise to those of us whose explorations of racism takes them into institutional settings, be they open or closed. I chaired the independent inquiry into the death of Orville Blackwood in Broadmoor Hospital in 1993. He was a young Afro-Caribbean offender patient with a history of schizophrenic illness. Two earlier reports into the deaths of two other Afro-Caribbean patients, which we were asked to re-evaluate, had found no direct evidence of racism in Broadmoor and many of the witnesses at our inquiry did not believe that it was a problem in the hospital. However, we were of the firm opinion that such views were “based on an interpretation of racism founded on very crude measures” and that the staff and management just did not recognise the subtle ways in which racism could operate.

We concluded that there was racism in Broadmoor, but not on the whole deliberate or necessarily conscious; rather it was an extreme lack of sensitivity to the needs and cultural differences of ethnic minority patients. Of our 47 recommendations, several were directed at ethnic issues. These included the need to appoint black staff at senior management level and to have black representation on the managing health authority. We also offered to return to the hospital to monitor the implementation of our recommendations – an offer firmly declined at that time. Somewhat ironically, a few weeks ago, I was asked to return to Broadmoor to participate in a seminar examining how successful the hospital had been in developing its anti-racist policies and practices! I learnt that there were still no black members of senior management, neither was there any black representation on the managing health authority. It also appeared that there were even fewer black staff working on the wards than at the time of our inquiry. All institutions are notoriously impervious to change; the only way to bring about such change is to make them more openly accountable. Sadly, we still have a long way to go.

And, one might add, sadly – and shamefully – men who were under the direct care of the state, who were bigotedly seen as ‘big, black and dangerous’, and whose disturbed state may have been caused – and was certainly made worse – by personal and institutional racism, are now big, black and dead.

I asked the NHS trust running Broadmoor Hospital for a response to this footnote. They didn’t reply.

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Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Footnotes 🔼

Footnote 5

FGM: pseudo-medico-justification

Disgusting

Female genital mutilation (FGM) has been condemned by the British Council of Muslims as un-Islamic. However, FGM is promoted on Salafi Islamic websites.

For instance, prominent Salafi teacher, Muhammad Saalih Al-Munajjid, says in an article on his popular Islam QA website:

Medical benefits of female circumcision

Circumcision is prescribed for both males and females… circumcision of women is mustahabb.

[Mustahabb: recommended, but not essential; fulfilment of which is rewarded]

There are reports in the Sunnah which indicate that circumcision for women is prescribed in Islam.

Female circumcision has not been prescribed for no reason, rather there is wisdom behind it and it brings many benefits.

Mentioning some of these benefits, a Dr Haamid al-Ghawaabi* says:

The secretions of the labia minora accumulate in uncircumcised women and turn rancid, so they develop an unpleasant odour which may lead to infections of the vagina or urethra. I have seen many cases of sickness caused by the lack of circumcision.

Circumcision reduces excessive sensitivity of the clitoris which may cause it to increase in size to 3 centimeters [sic] when aroused, which is very annoying to the husband, especially at the time of intercourse.

Another benefit of circumcision is that it prevents stimulation of the clitoris which makes it grow large in such a manner that it causes pain.

Circumcision prevents spasms of the clitoris which are a kind of inflammation.

Circumcision reduces excessive sexual desire.

Munajjid goes on to quote from an article by ‘female gynaecologist Sitt al-Banaat‘*:

Female circumcision from a health point of view

For us in the Muslim world female circumcision is, above all else, obedience to Islam, which means acting in accordance with the fitrah and following the Sunnah which encourages it.

It takes away excessive libido from women.

It prevents unpleasant odours which result from foul secretions beneath the prepuce.

It reduces the incidence of urinary tract infections

It reduces the incidence of infections of the reproductive system.

* I haven’t been able to find credentials for either of these doctors. However, the publication referred to, ‘Female circumcision from a health point of view‘ can be opened from here. It apparently recommends removal of the clitoris hood, or prepuce. This procedure is FGM type 1a, according to classification by the World Health Organisation.

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Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Footnotes 🔼

Footnote 6

Identity politics

Oh boy…

This footnote is also a separate soothfairy post

In the UK and the US, the traditional left-right two-party political system seems to be running out of steam. Things are fragmenting. Consider the hot potato of identity politics.

Identity politics originated in France, was first applied in America, and has been exported back to Europe.

The concept of identity politics enables people of a particular ethnicity or other identifying factor to develop a political agenda based on their identity and their sense of oppression.

Some advocates of identity politics take an intersectional approach, addressing the range of interacting systems of oppression that result from people’s various identities.

Identity politics emerged in the 1960s and 70s from the hotbed of French postmodernism. The term was apparently first used in print in a 1977 statement by a US black feminist lesbian socialist group. An excerpt:

Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.

[My bolding]

Identity politics surged in the US in the 1980s and rose to prominence again recently, attracting controversy and criticism.

Liberal critics of identity politics say reaction against its supposedly strident demands contributed to the 2016 US election of populist psycho Donald Trump. Trump voters were said to have voted ‘white’.

Leftist critics of identity politics (eg Ambalavaner Sivanandan) say it’s a distraction from the class struggle. Other critics say the idea fosters inherently wrong or unnecessarily divisive notions of identity, or an unhelpfully exaggerated sense of victimhood.

Some identity politics groups, snarkily dubbed snowflakes, are criticised for being quick to take offence and being vindictive in their ‘cancel culture‘ pursuit of offenders.

Identity politics has been famously dismissed by batty best-selling author and psychologist Jordan Peterson. He echoes fellow bat Ayn Rand (author of Atlas Shrugged) in asserting the primacy of the individual over the group.

Loony ‘alt-right’ white supremacists have their very own version of identity politics, ‘identitarianism’, which asserts the right of white people to western culture and territories claimed to belong exclusively to them. Bless.

The elephant in the room of identity politics is racism. Does identity politics address racism? Is there such a thing as black identity politics?

Clearly, there’s a need for a collective political agenda to challenge the oppression of systemic colour prejudice, but I googled ‘black identity politics’ and got no meaningful results in the first five pages.

Apparently, the hot potato of identity politics doesn’t address racism. Perhaps a cooler and less fragmentary political movement is needed for that.

Edit: Sadly – and surprisingly (to me, anyway) – it seems the Black Lives Matter organisation, rather than being the focussed and well organised campaign supporters and donors might expect, is actually a perfect example of overheated identity politics, and has consequently disappeared down that rabbit hole.

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Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Footnotes 🔼

Footnote 7

Whatever happened to Black Lives Matter?

Digest: It disappeared down the postmodern rabbit hole of intersectional identity politics, but the beat goes on.

This footnote is also a separate soothfairy post

• Introduction
• Coming apart?
• BLM’s postmodern mission
• What’s wrong with postmodernism
• What next?
• Update: the Transparency Center

Whatever happened to Black Lives Matter? 🔼

Introduction

Started outstanding

In 2020, Black Lives Matter was big. Huge. Then it kind of faded. What was it? Was it a hashtag, a slogan, a protest movement, a campaign – or what? And what happened to it?

The Black Lives Matter movement was started in the US in 2013 by a small group of radical black feminists after the acquittal of a neighbourhood watch coordinator who shot and killed an unarmed black 17-year-old, Trayvon Martin.

The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter spread on social media, and the project expanded into a national network of local ‘chapters’.

The movement returned to the headlines in 2020 when an unarmed black man, George Floyd, was killed by a police officer. There was widespread disgust, and BLM grew into an international campaign.

Here in the UK, BLM got a lot of support – and some opposition when racists promoted the slogans ‘White Lives Matter’ and the more insidious ‘All Lives Matter’.

I added an appendix about White Lives Matter to this post. Whilst updating that section, I looked into what had happened to Black Lives Matter and discovered this tale of the unexpected. I put it in this footnote (and then in a separate post).

Despite white allyship being controversial, I considered myself a white ally of BLM. Now, I’m not so sure. Next time the badge falls off, I might not put it back.

(Update, June 2022 – the badge fell off. I didn’t put it back on my jacket. Knowing what I know now, I’d feel a fool. I put it on the shelf: a memento of innocent enthusiasm.)

Whatever happened to Black Lives Matter? 🔼

Coming apart?

The centre didn’t hold

After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, some $90m was donated to Black Lives Matter. BLM grew fast – perhaps too fast for the small group of organisers to keep up. A year later, the disorganised organisation started to come apart.

BLM’s main organisation is the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. There’s also an international network of locally based chapters.

In February 2021 the foundation said it gave $21.7m to BLM chapters, and its expenses were $8.4m. That left about $60m unexplained.

In May 2021 Patrisse Cullors, one of the three BLM founders, announced she was standing down as executive director of the foundation.

In February 2022 in a UK Guardian interview *, Cullors tearfully explained she resigned after the movement got black criticism for lack of transparency about the donations.

An April 2022 Washington Post column * criticised BLM’s use of its donations, including the secret purchase in 2020 of a $6m house in California.

The WP column drew on an April 2022 investigative article * on New York magazine news website Intelligencer about the BLM house, a 6,500-square-foot compound in Studio City, Los Angeles.

The Intelligencer article is hidden from the hard-up (like me) behind a paywall, but according to WP, it reported a $6m shambles:

• BLM said the Studio City house was both a ‘safehouse’ and a place providing:
  ‘Recording resources and dedicated space for Black creatives to launch content online and in real life focused on abolition, healing justice, urban agriculture and food justice, pop culture, activism, and politics’.
• The article said little content had been produced apart from a few videos made by Cullors for her YouTube channel.
• On Twitter, in advance of the Intelligencer report, BLM urged followers:
  ‘Spread the word: we are redefining what it means to be an activist in this generation with our new Fellowship and Creator House‘.
• On Instagram, Cullors said the purchase hadn’t been announced earlier because:
  ‘The property needed repairs and renovation‘.

In a May 2022 AP News interview *, Cullors denied wrongdoing but acknowledged she’d used the Studio City compound for non-BLM purposes, hosting parties to celebrate the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and her son’s birthday. She said:

I look back at that and think, that probably wasn’t the best idea

* Lest it be suspected these pieces challenging BLM were by racist white hacks, they were all by award-winning black journalists: Nesrin Malik (Guardian), Karen Attiah (Washington Post), Sean Campbell (New York/Intelligencer) and Aaron Morrison (AP News).

There’s more. Cullors’ friends and family have apparently had large consultancy payouts; and the $6m house was apparently bought from a developer friend who’d recently paid $3m for it.

Sorry – racist white hacks may well have been involved in the sources for the above paragraph: they’re both from the right-wing UK Daily Mail. The Mail refers to revelations in New York Magazine – but that’s behind the pesky paywall.

The impression given by the many articles and comments about all this – and by BLM’s defensive and obfuscatory response – is that BLM is more like a nepotistic cult than a well-run campaign organisation.

However, BLM’s financial irregularities seem a matter of incompetence and mission-drift with a dash of ‘looking after’ people, rather than full-on fraud. Cullors said:

Black people in general have a hard time with money. It’s a trigger point for us.

In spite of the irregularities, Black Lives Matter hasn’t quite come apart.

The BLM website gives the impression that all is well. But it’s not – as its mixed-up mission shows.

Whatever happened to Black Lives Matter? 🔼

BLM’s postmodern mission

Down the rabbit hole

So what’s Black Lives Matter about? Supporters may have assumed its idea was to oppose racist violence and institutional racism – but it’s more complicated than that.

BLM has a surprisingly radical agenda. According to BLM’s About page, its mission is to:

Eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes

Less predictably, it goes on to say:

We affirm the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. Our network centers those who have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.

There’s more like that.

According to a thoughtful 2021 National Affairs article, BLM’s founders have said their ideology is rooted in postmodern cultural theory. The article said:

A few rabid souls have ferreted out what they regard as the Marxist foundations of BLM. But this gives its prime movers too much credit. BLM has been shaped more by post-modern cultural theory than by Marxism. By their own account, the three young women who ignited this proudly “leaderless” movement have been shaped primarily by feminism and queer theory. Hence their vitriolic critique of the male-dominated black church, not to mention the traditional family.

This analysis evokes the controversial phenomena of intersectional identity politics and critical race theory.

Identity politics emerged in the 1960s and 70s from French postmodernism (which emerged in the 1950s and 60s mainly from the writings of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida).

Identity politics enables people of a particular ethnicity or other identifying factor to develop a political agenda based on their identity and their sense of oppression.

Some advocates of identity politics take an intersectional approach, addressing the range of interacting systems of oppression which result from people’s various identities.

Apparently, the complex route from postmodernism to identity politics involved:

• Critique of modern reductionism
• Abstract universalism
• A kind of essentialism
• Foucault’s genealogical politics

(However, although Foucault challenged ideas of power structure and championed marginalised groups, apparently he’s not the godfather of identity politics. He criticised ‘essentialism’, where groups are defined by fixed characteristics, saying it can limit freedom and reinforce inequality.)

The fragmentation of the ’60s ‘movement’ into ’70s ‘new social movements’ led to the first written use of the term ‘identity politics’ in a 1977 statement by a US black feminist lesbian socialist group, the Combahee River Collective. An excerpt:

Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.

My bolding

The radical BLM mission statement appears to continue the black feminist lesbian socialist theme. Co-founder Patrisse Cullors has described herself and her fellow organizers as ‘trained Marxists’. BLM has been sarcastically dubbed ‘Black Lesbian Marxists’.

Critical race theory (CRT) – also a branch of postmodernism – first arose, like identity politics, in the 1970s. According to Wikipedia:

[CRT is] a cross-disciplinary intellectual and social movement of civil-rights scholars and activists who seek to examine the intersection of race, society, and law in the United States and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice…A key CRT concept is intersectionality

My bolding

CRT recently made the news when conservatives complained about the supposed surge in feminist and critical race theory being taught in colleges and universities.

However, an Aljazeera online opinion piece by a US professor said CRT informs BLM and that’s what scares the conservatives:

The significance of Critical Race Theory at this particular juncture in American history is the way a sustained course of the theoretical groundwork now informs … Black Lives Matter. This fruitful dialectic between an academic theory and a grassroots social uprising is what frightens the custodians of the status quo who are fighting tooth and nail to protect and preserve their race and class privileges.

That’s fine, but perhaps BLM supporters wanted to stop police killing black men rather than have a fruitful dialectic with an academic theory.

Supporters – and donors – might sympathise with the complex and passionate ideas in BLM’s radical mission statement, but might be surprised to learn BLM isn’t the focussed and well-organised campaign against racist murder they – reasonably – expect it to be.

The Black Lives Matter mission, apparently inspired by postmodern intersectional identity politics, makes BLM seem more like Snowflake City than a campaign coordinator.

Whatever happened to Black Lives Matter? 🔼

What’s wrong with postmodernism

It betrays the oppressed

The ineffectiveness of the Black Lives Matter organisation is – partly, at least – the fault of postmodernism.

Postmodernism is playful, exciting and seductive, but when its theories inform and shape a campaign against racism, it’s a dangerous rabbit hole.

The danger of postmodernism in this context was nailed by the late Ambalavaner Sivanandan, a founder and director of UK antiracist thinktank the Institute of Race Relations. He accused postmodernists of betrayal.

Sivanandan, described in an obituary as ‘a tireless and eloquent voice explaining the connections between race, class, imperialism and colonialism’, was a novelist, activist and writer.

In the collection Catching History on the Wing – Race, Culture and Globalisation, Sivanandan wrote:

The intellectuals have defected, and walled themselves up behind a new language of privilege… To justify their betrayal, the postmodernists have created a whole new language of their own which allows them to appropriate struggle without engaging in it.

Taking on the job abandoned by the treacherous postmodernists, Sivanandan analysed the murderous symbiosis of poverty and racism with angry eloquence:

Racism and imperialism work in tandem, and poverty is their handmaiden. And it is that symbiosis between racism and poverty that, under those other imperatives of multinational capitalism, the free market and the enriching of the rich, has come to define the “underclass” of the United States and, increasingly, of Britain and Western Europe… It is there, where the poorest sections of our communities, white and black, scrabble for the leftovers of work, the rubble of slum housing and the dwindling share of welfare, that racism is at its most virulent, its most murderous.

Sivanandan also criticised identity politics as an inward-looking, naval-gazing exercise.

In his 1990 collection, Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism, Sivanandan urged black and South Asian groups to look beyond their cultural identity in their struggle against racism:

The whole purpose of knowing who we are is not to interpret the world, but to change it. We don’t need a cultural identity for its own sake, but to make use of the positive aspect of our culture to forge correct alliances and fight the correct battles.

So what’s wrong with postmodernism? In this context, it’s that Black Lives Matter was entrusted to oppose racist murder, but the BLM postmodernist adherents of intersectional identity politics have lacked the necessary focus.

Like the postmodernists despised by Sivanandan, they’ve appropriated the struggle – and $90m in donations – but haven’t effectively engaged in it.

Whatever happened to Black Lives Matter? 🔼

What next?

Good question

At the time of writing (May 2022), the Black Lives Matter website gives no hint of any difficulties (except to say it’s a ‘target of disinformation’). However, it continues its mixed message.

On the one hand, there’s a robust response to US government plans to advance racial justice:

One of the greatest systemic factors affecting the livelihood of Black communities is the continued over-policing, brutalization, and incarceration of our people. Violence by police tears our families apart; leaves emotional, logistical, and financial gaps in our communities; and steals the lives of so many of our loved ones before they get the chance to achieve their dreams. We need the next phase of the action plan to explicitly address how federal agencies will update their policies to hold officers and departments at the local, state, and federal level accountable for the way they engage with Black people.

On the other hand, there’s some deep woo:*

Healing justice…a portal for revolutionary visions of Black freedom…something we deserve…something we own…something we embody…something each and everyone of us must have. This month our center is ‘Collective Imagination: The Art of Healing Part III.’ We turn our conversation to sacred and luminous practices of creativity and imagination in the healing journeys of Black people. Our healers examine…the multiple ways to access Spirit and wholeness through the individual and collective body. We affirm that healthy connections hold spaciousness for healing and love…sacred healing practices…can support the transformation of individual and collective grief into collective imaginings, futures, and liberation for cultivating sovereignty and co-sovereignty.

* Woo: short for woo-woo, a sarcastic term meaning unconventional beliefs regarded as having little or no scientific basis, especially those relating to spirituality, mysticism, or alternative medicine

The esoteric beliefs expressed in the BLM woo above were presumably meant to benefit activists who felt oppressed because of their intersectional identity.

But such beliefs seemed out of place in a campaign expected by its supporters to concentrate on protecting ordinary black people – Trayvon Martin, George Floyd and many others – from racist murder by state and vigilante enforcers.

So what next? Could Black Lives Matter be saved from disappearing up its postmodern woo-woo arsehole*? Maybe.

* I’m English – I can’t write ‘asshole’. Sorry 😉

Maybe it just needed organising properly – with mission focus and financial transparency.

Maybe BLM could have kept the spirit of radical activism, but hived off the woo and postmodern cultural theory to a new sister organisation

(Black Snowflakes Matter? A suitable role for Patrisse Cullors, perhaps.)

I asked the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation for their comments. They didn’t reply.

Whatever happens with the complicated and troubled organisation, the central Black Lives Matter idea of opposition to racist murder lives on – and still has the reach and momentum to help make racism history.

Racism explained as a redundant instinct

Whatever happened to Black Lives Matter? 🔼

Update | June 2022

BLM’s Transparency Center

See-through blackwashing seen through

The Black Lives Matter website announced a ‘Transparency Center‘ which would address some of the issues raised. It said:

We are embracing this moment as an opportunity for celebration, accountability, healing, truth-telling, and transparency. We aim to move forward into this next chapter with the lessons learned, achievements underscored, and a renewed commitment to justice and powerbuilding in service to our community.

The BLM announcement said returns had been filed with the IRS (the US internal revenue service). It said the foundation spent far less on costs than other similar organisations; and went on to say:

An independent audit has revealed that Black Lives Matter’s finances are strong, the organization is financially sound, and its leaders have been good stewards of the people’s donations.

The BLM announcement said the foundation had been fully reimbursed for private events held at the ‘Creator’s House’ (the $6m LA house). It said:

The Creator’s House was purchased as a space of our own, with the intention of providing housing and studio space for recipients of the Black Joy Creators Fellowship in service of Black culture and the movement.

My bolding

(There was an interesting report on the Black Joy Creators Fellowship – a fellowship for black artists and influencers who live in the Creator’s House – by conservative watchdog Capital Research Center.)

BLM announced three new board members ‘with an extensive background in racial justice work’.

That sounded good, but googling showed one of the three had a history of financial delinquency, all three were financially linked through consultancy payments, and all three were connected to BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors.

Cronyism, mismanagement, consultancy payments – it looked as though nothing much had changed, and the ‘transparency’ was mainly whitewashing. Or should that be blackwashing?

The Transparency Center announcement attacked ‘misinformation from the right wing’, saying:

The right has taken up this cause, hoping to sow mistrust in our work via their media outlets. They have spread misinformation and have taken what is really an important conversation for our community, trashed it, and used their coverage as some sort of validation of their racist allegations. We hope that this is the beginning of a real conversation for our people about the dynamics of our power and our relationship to money.

It was disingenuous to characterise the tsunami of black criticism as a ‘conversation for our community‘ which had been ‘trashed’ by misinformation from the racist right.

The black criticism wasn’t, as the announcement implied, a cosy private conversation. IFt was a public condemnation which fell on BLM like a ton of bricks. It caused co-founder Cullors to resign.

It looked as if BLM was painting critics as right-wing racists, downgrading the devastating black criticism to a ‘conversation’ and thereby swerving the criticism.

It was a shame. In 2020 I was an enthusiastic white ally of Black Lives Matter. In 2022, as a critic of BLM, I’d like to have wished the newly would-be-transparent organisation well. But it wasn’t looking good.

Again, I asked the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation for their comments. They haven’t replied.

Whatever happened to Black Lives Matter? 🔼

Back to link 🔼 | Footnotes 🔼

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Additional information 🔼

What the experts say

Having thought racism must be mainly instinctive, I looked for evidence. There’s plenty of research, some support for the idea, some opposition and some academic warfare!

1. Some feedback from racism experts
2. Cognitive neuroscience
3. Evolutionary psychology
4. Cultural psychology
5. Summary of evidence
6. Evolutionary vs cultural psychology

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
What the experts say 🔼

What the experts say | 1

Some feedback from racism experts

Interesting stuff

I emailed some academics, writers and organisations involved with racism issues, suggesting they might like to read this post and respond.

From the response, it seems some of those working in this field are vested in a totally historical/environmental approach, and are disappointingly opposed to the very idea of evolved prejudice; others are encouragingly open to the idea; and some, surprisingly to me, have already accepted it to a greater or lesser extent.

Contents: Ian Law | Marcel Stoezler | Steven Neuberg | Zahia Smail Salhi | Melissa McDonald | Marissa Lithopoulos | Frances Aboud | Hauwa Mahdi | Ayesha Tarannum | Neal Curtis

Feedback 🔼

Professor Ian Law, deputy director of the centre for ethnicity and racism studies, University of Leeds, UK, was opposed. He said of my post:

A provocative and highly speculative piece with which I fundamentally disagree.

He seemed shocked by the very idea of a racist gene; and, in support of his opposition to my suggestion, pointed out there’s no such thing as ‘race’ – which was odd, because I’d pointed out the very same thing in support of my suggestion. (Perhaps he – understandably, busy man, do it myself, skim-reading – didn’t read it properly.) He went further, and said because there’s no such thing as ‘race’, there’s no such thing as ‘racism’. (Sophist, or what?) He also said I had no evidence for my case. I asked him if he thought the behaviour known (rightly or wrongly) as ‘racism’ is wholly learned, and what evidence he had for that. He didn’t reply.

Feedback 🔼

Dr Marcel Stoezler, senior lecturer in sociology specializing in the theory and history of antisemitism, modern nationalism and critical theory, Bangor University, Wales, UK, said:

I remain unconvinced by the idea of a gene for racism. I think there are simpler, historical explanations.

My bolding

After a brief exchange of increasingly argumentative emails, Dr Stoetzler said the question of whether cultural or mental characteristics are genetically inherited has no practical implication, unless for a fascist. Hmm.

Feedback 🔼

Steven Neuberg, professor of psychology, Arizona State University, US – see also Evolutionary psychology, below. After the exchange of a few emails about evolutionary psychology evidence, Neuberg said:

We agree more than disagree.

Neuberg said he doesn’t like to use the word ‘racism’ because it oversimplifies, masking important complexities which are critical for reducing prejudices; but he agreed with me that we can override instinctive prejudices, and acknowledging them as such, and understanding them better, will help. He pointed out he’s written:

If we ignore our evolutionary past, we are likely to ignorantly fall prey to the prejudices that have resulted from it. If we confront our evolutionary past (and its psychological consequences) with scholarly rigor, we can more truly know the nature of these prejudices and do something about them.

My bolding

(I like Neuberg’s blithely split infinitives.)

Feedback 🔼

Zahia Smail Salhi, professor of modern Arabic studies, University of Manchester, UK, said:

Very interesting and interested!!.

Feedback 🔼

Professor Melissa McDonald, principal investigator of the personality and evolutionary psychology laboratory, Oakland University, Michigan, US, said:

It would have been extremely unlikely that our ancestors ever encountered a member of another racial group. Thus, it would be very unlikely that we could have evolved to be “racist” in particular. Indeed, exposure to racial outgroups is a relatively recent occurrence in our species’ history. And long before that, we were likely to have developed other mechanisms for detecting and encoding information about the groups we lived in, and the groups we competed with for resources. Modern evolutionary psychologists have suggested that our propensity for racism is built on the scaffolding of mechanisms that function to produce coalitional intergroup bias.

My bolding

Feedback 🔼

Marissa Lithopoulos, PhD practitioner, researcher and teaching assistant, University of Ottawa, Canada, who has written about evolved prejudice for schools science website CurioCity (see Evolutionary psychology, below) said:

Great blog post. I found it really interesting!’

My bolding

Feedback 🔼

Frances Aboud, professor of psychology, McGill University, Canada, who researches the development of racial prejudice in children, said:

You have some profound and some rambling thoughts in this blog. I found some of it interesting.

My bolding

She made several points in opposition to the idea of evolved racism and colourism: many rural places in Africa have no shadism; psychologist Harold Fishbein claimed evidence for evolved racism (in his book The Genetic/Evolutionary Basis of Prejudice and Hatred) but it wasn’t convincing; and studies show infants aren’t racist. Several emails later, Professor Aboud conceded:

There might be a heritable tendency to be wary of the unfamiliar…There would also have to be some input from the environment…When developing programs to reduce prejudice, one would want to consider all these things’.

My bolding

(In response to Professor Aboud’s comment, I de-rambled this post, which, having been tweaked and expanded, had lost some coherence. I’ve confined most of the rambling to the footnotes, appendices and annexes.)

Feedback 🔼

Dr Hauwa Mahdi, senior lecturer in the school of global studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, said of my post:

It is certainly interesting and takes up issues in new directions.

However, Dr Mahdi doubts racism is evolved. She favours a historical explanation combined with race as a social construct. She said that, as a black person, she hasn’t experienced prejudiced feelings towards any particular ethnic group. She said she thinks any evolved behaviour is grounded in social constructs. She referred me to the sociology concept of habitus, which says group culture and personal history shape body, mind and social action.

Habitus is apparently a catch-all concept which claims to explain all behaviour – including the widespread persistence of mainly unconscious irrational behaviour such as racism – without recourse to instinct.

My thoughts: If racism and colourism are wholly social constructs, then they’ll be easier to get rid of – eventually. But if they’re evolved behaviours, or – as seems likely – have become conflated with evolved anti-stranger prejudice, they’ll be more difficult to counter. We’d have to start by acknowledging those evolutionary roots.

Feedback 🔼

Ayesha Tarannum, administrative officer, Muslim Council of Britain, said:

I enjoyed reading your piece. It was insightful and thought-provoking; – I commend you in discussing issues not often discussed within society, such as colourism.

My bolding

Feedback 🔼

Professor Neal Curtis, head of media and communication, University of Auckland, New Zealand, has written an excellent article on the racist suspension of rights common to both US ‘kill-box’ drone strikes and the killing of innocent black men by US police. He said:

I tend to agree with most of what you say.

However, Professor Curtis pointed out that my argument for universal colour prejudice is weakened by the lack of social dominance power relationships in black-on-black shadism.

Feedback 🔼

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
What the experts say 🔼

What the experts say | 2

Cognitive neuroscience

More interesting stuff

Cognitive neuroscience addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain. Brain studies, – especially of the two almond-shaped amygdala clusters – show a tendency for negative reactions to photographs of dark-skinned faces.

A 2008 article, Look Twice, by Susan Fiske of Princeton University, US, refers to 20 years of social neuroscience research showing how prejudice operates automatically and unconsciously.

A 2012 Nature Neuroscience paper, The neuroscience of race by Elizabeth Phelps of New York University and others, describes the complex neurological process by which “racial” bias operates in our brains, unknown to our conscious selves.

A 2013 paper, Amygdala Sensitivity to Race Is Not Present in Childhood but Emerges over Adolescence by Eva Telzer of the University of North Carolina and others, hypothesised that such bias is unlikely to be innate but instead emerges through learning.

However, the paper said infants as young as 3–6 months can discriminate between European American (EA) and African American (AA) faces; heightened amygdala response to AA faces is found in both EA and AA adults; and besides responding to significant emotional stimuli, the amygdalas are involved in fear-related learning, and in detecting and responding to threats.

These three factors, combined with Fiske’s and Phelps’ unconscious process, suggest a possibly innate origin. The authors’ (non-hypothetical) insistence that colour prejudice is wholly learned may be a case of wishful thinking.

The possible evolutionary aspect of the prejudice shown in these amygdala studies remains unaddressed, as far as I know.

In 2016 it was reported that research by University College London neuroscientist Hugo Spiers and others, Anterior Temporal Lobe Tracks the Formation of Prejudice, showed the brain responds more strongly to information about groups portrayed unfavourably, adding weight to the view that the negative depiction of ethnic or religious minorities in the media can fuel racial bias.

As with evolutionary psychology, this is fascinating stuff. Negative media depictions of ethnic groups derive, of course, from centuries of colonial defamation. So perhaps nurture – in the form of historical defamation – has developed the culture of modern racism; and nature – in the form of evolved prejudice pathways in the brain – locks it in.

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
What the experts say 🔼

What the experts say | 3

Evolutionary psychology

Yet more interesting stuff

Evolved prejudice can be considered from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, which seeks to identify human psychological traits that are evolved adaptations. There’s plenty of research showing prejudice is one of them.

Biologist, stem cell researcher and science writer Marissa Lithopoulos of the University of Ottawa has written a readable and informative introductory article, The science of racism: Evolution on Canadian charitable educational website CurioCity.

From the world of evolutionary psychology prejudice studies, Steven Neuberg of Arizona State University argues that human prejudice evolved as a function of group living. A 2008 paper, Managing the Threats and Opportunities Afforded by Human Sociality, by Neuberg and Catherine Cottrell of New College of Florida explores the evolutionary aspect of prejudice and social valuation. It says human social preferences are constrained by our evolved nature as ultrasocial animals; and people stigmatise those seen as threatening their group.

In a 2012 chapter, Danger, Disease and the Nature of Prejudice(s), Neuberg and Mark Schaller of the University of British Columbia expound further on the evolutionary aspect of prejudice. (The main scenarios for evolved prejudice, apparently, are the threats of danger or disease.)

A 2001 paper, Origins of Stigmatization: The Functions of Social Exclusion by Robert Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania and Mark Leary of Duke University also argues for an evolved prejudice towards those who, amongst other things, are thought to carry communicable disease.

Two 2017 studies by researchers at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and their collaborators from the US, UK, France and China, show that six- to nine-month-old infants demonstrate bias in favour of members of their own ‘race’ and against those of other ‘races’.

A 2017 Nature – Human Behaviour paper, Relating pattern deviancy aversion to stigma and prejudice by Anton Gollwitzer of Yale University and others showed that aversion towards non-social pattern deviancy (for example, a row of triangles with one triangle out of line) predicted aversion towards ‘socially deviant’ people such as black individuals in children as young as six. The effect crossed cultures (US and China), and was ‘of a moderately large magnitude’.

(The research as described in the journal’s abstract – it costs $99 to read the rest – raises a question: why were black people classed as ‘socially deviant’? Did that mean deviant from a white norm? Were all the subjects non-black?)

The paper didn’t address the possible evolutionary aspect, but this might show how evolved prejudice develops in an individual.

Clearly, stigmatising those seen as threatening your group doesn’t amount to racism, and early humans weren’t exposed to different ‘races’ during the period when innate prejudice would have evolved; but racism might be a twisted, globalised version of that ancient tribal instinct.

A 2023 paper published by Nature Portfolio/Scientific Reports, Racism is not about “race” by Paola Bressan of the University of Padova, Italy, showed not only that people behave as though the parasites of unfamiliar individuals were more dangerous, but also that strangers’ ethnicity matters when it’s a proxy for unfamiliarity.

In other words, there’s evidence for evolved stranger-aversion, and different ethnicity enhances ‘strangerness’.

Warning
Anyone seeking evidence from this academic field should beware: the theoretical approach of evolutionary psychology has generated substantial controversy and criticism – from the rival field of cultural psychology. See below..

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
What the experts say 🔼

What the experts say | 4

Cultural psychology

On the other hand…

• Background
• EP smears in cultural psychology paper

Cultural psychology 🔼

Background

Integrity at risk

This post focuses on individual racism and finds evidence for innate prejudice in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology (‘EP’).

Another major psychology field, cultural psychology (CP), favours the examination of social structures that are collectively racist.

CP has produced much helpful evidence for socialised institutional racism but sometimes puts its scientific integrity at risk by its hostility towards EP.

Cultural psychology 🔼

EP smears in cultural psychology paper

Smearer smeared

In 2017, Current Directions in Psychological Science, the peer-reviewed flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science (see below), published a paper, Racism in the Structure of Everyday Worlds: A Cultural-Psychological Perspective by Phia Salter of Davidson College, North Carolina, and others.

The paper is weakened by its many coded and implied but unjustified criticisms of EP:

• ‘A waste of energy’
• ‘Limiting’
• ‘Seeks exclusivity’
• ‘Evidence is irrelevant’
• ‘Led by individualistic ideologies’
• Conclusion

Racism explained as a redundant instinct

EP smears in cultural psychology paper 🔼

EP ‘a waste of energy’

Irrational

The paper implies EP is a waste of energy. It concludes:

Energies should be directed toward identifying and dismantling the cultural-psychological structures that are the source of injustice and promote individual bias in the first place

My bolding

Of course energies should be directed to that noble end. But does that mean – as the paper implies – it’s a waste of energy to identify and counter the evolved psychological structures that are also a source of individual bias?

Antiracist energy isn’t rationed. It should be directed towards a holistic understanding of the causes – systemic and individual.

Racism explained as a redundant instinct

EP smears in cultural psychology paper 🔼

EP ‘limiting’

Symbiosis overlooked

The paper implies EP has a limiting effect on racism research.

EP, in seeking to explain individual racism, argues that human prejudice evolved as a function of group living. For instance, Professor Melissa McDonald, of Oakland University, Michigan, has said:

Modern evolutionary psychologists have suggested that our propensity for racism is built on the scaffolding of mechanisms that function to produce coalitional intergroup bias.

My bolding

However, the CP paper implies EP is individualistic rather than group-based. It associates the ‘typical’ idea (ie, EP) with ‘individualist ideologies’, and says it’s ‘limiting’ when used exclusively. The paper says:

Conventional understandings of racism typically locate the driving force in the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of biased and prejudiced individuals. Individualist ideologies that prevail in Western…settings inform…psychological science’s conception of racism as individual-level phenomena…Without denying the role of individuals in the psychology of racism, there are limitations when racism is exclusively explained as rooted inside individual minds.

…The problem with restricted focus on individual bias is that it obscures the institutional, systemic, and cultural processes that perpetuate and maintain race-based hierarchies.

My bolding

The paper reluctantly accepts the role of individuals in racism, but aims to avoid the ‘limitations’ of that ‘conventional’ approach, which, it says, if applied exclusively can obscure cultural processes.

But… individual racism fuels systemic racism – they’re symbiotic: both need to be understood and countered.

Racism explained as a redundant instinct

EP smears in cultural psychology paper 🔼

EP ‘seeks exclusivity’

Exaggeration

The paper implies EP seeks to impose its approach exclusively:

There are limitations when racism is exclusively explained as rooted inside individual minds.

My bolding

There’s apparently some truth in this one – it seems some EP practitioners do indeed seek exclusivity. Wikipedia says:

Some evolutionary psychologists argue that evolutionary theory can provide a foundational, metatheoretical framework that integrates the entire field of psychology in the same way evolutionary biology has for biology.

My bolding

But whatever EP’s metatheoretical ambitions, its current theoretical work doesn’t hamper CP.

The paper’s concern about ‘limitations’ if the ‘individual’ approach is applied ‘exclusively’ seems exaggerated. Perhaps it reflects CP’s wider concerns about EP’s territorial threat.

Racism explained as a redundant instinct

EP smears in cultural psychology paper 🔼

EP evidence is ‘irrelevant’

Disrespectfully dismissed

The paper dismisses EP evidence as irrelevent. In asserting that culture shapes psyche (and not the other way round), it says:

This direction emphasizes that tendencies of racism are not simply the natural outgrowth of some innate disposition but instead emerge as people interact with cultural worlds that promote and facilitate racialized experiences and racist habits of mind.

My bolding

That phrase – ‘not simply the natural outgrowth of some innate disposition’ – casually dismisses the large amount of complex peer-reviewed evidence for the evolved stranger-aversion thought by EP to underly racism.

Racism explained as a redundant instinct

EP smears in cultural psychology paper 🔼

EP ‘led by individualistic ideologies’

Smear miss

The paper gratuitously associates EP – ‘individual’ is apparently code for EP – with ‘individualist ideologies’:

Individualist ideologies that prevail in Western…settings inform…psychological science’s conception of racism as individual-level phenomena…

My bolding

It’s true that EP addresses individual racism, but it does so by analysing group behaviour. In that sense, EP is informed by communalism, the opposite of individualism.

It’s certainly not true that EP is informed by ‘individualist ideologies’,

Individualist ideologies are those propounded by, for instance, gateway-to-the-right libertarian Ayn Rand and individualist psychologist Jordan Peterson.

Fortunately, such ideologies don’t prevail anywhere (except in their own echo-chambers). Perhaps the paper means to refer to the general – arguably, prevailing – non-ideological trend of self-centred individualism in society.

However, EP isn’t ‘informed by’ that societal trend either. In seeking to explain individual racism, EP is informed by an evolutionary perspective.

To suggest otherwise by invoking the controversial ideas of Rand and Peterson is a clumsy smear.

(Elsewhere, the paper implicitly acknowledges the group focus of EP, saying the ‘typical’ approach – EP – extrapolates from ‘out-group vs in-group research paradigms’.)

Racism explained as a redundant instinct

EP smears in cultural psychology paper 🔼

Conclusion

False comparison

Perhaps cultural psychology paper writers feel – culturally – obliged to criticise environmental psychology.

The unjustified criticism, the dismissiveness, the mis-spin, and the lack of any direct mention of evolved bias in Salter’s paper, show the fields of CP and EP are at entrenched loggerheads.

Salter’s aim – to improve understanding of structural racism – is admirable, but the paper is marred by false comparison. Cultural psychology doesn’t look better if evolutionary psychology is made to look bad.

The interplay between biology and culture is complex, but the two approaches are (or should be) complementary, not incongruous.

I asked the paper’s lead writer, Professor Phia Salter, for a response. She didn’t reply.

Cultural psychology 🔼

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
What the experts say 🔼

What the experts say | 5

Summary of evidence

My hunch was right

Obviously, I’ve just skimmed the surface. Googling reveals a lot more evidence out there to support the idea that protective bias against ‘outgroup’ strangers is innate.

What remains unexplained by evolutionary psychology is the unconscious colour prejudice shown by amygdala studies. Early humans weren’t exposed to different populations, so colour prejudice hasn’t evolved.

It’s thought by some it may emerge after early childhood – in which case it can only be a culturally ingrained postcolonial phenomena.

Probably, colonialism and slavery revived a mainly redundant anti-stranger instinct, and – crucially – twisted it into colour prejudice, which became entrenched in postcolonial power structures.

Cultural psychology (when its not too busy attacking evolutionary psychology – see below) seeks to understand how feedback from those power structures enhances bias.

It can be argued that recent colonialism isn’t the cause, because racism existed before then. If it did, it was probably due to the historical domination of much of India and Africa by light-skinned West Asian and European invaders, and the associated power structures.

However, even in that older historical context, the boosted racism of recent colonialism and slavery may be the most likely cause of the unconscious colour prejudice shown in amygdala studies.

It may be that dark skin seen by light-skinned Europeans emphasises ‘strangerness’ and so triggers unconscious evolved stranger aversion, which is then consciously expressed as racism – power plus prejudice.

Progress is being made towards understanding racism – thereby helping to oppose it – but the further research needed is hampered by the unnecessary conflict between the two main academic fields involved: evolutionary psychology and cultural psychology.

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
What the experts say 🔼

What the experts say | 6

Evolutionary vs cultural psychology

Nature, nurture or Nietzsche

• Volcanic history
• The Association for Psychological Science
• The American Psychological Association
• North-Eastern Evolutionary Psychology Society
• My analysis
• ChatGPT analysis
• Hope for integration

Evolutionary vs cultural psychology 🔼

Volcanic history

Open warfare

This post leans on the apparently reasonable theoretical approach of evolutionary psychology (EP).

But EP has generated substantial criticism from the rival field of cultural psychology (CP).

The ongoing rivalry between CP and EP effectively obstructs understanding. According to Wikipedia, the beef has lasted for more than two decades – and has got quite heated.

An Amazon synopsis of a book referenced in Wikipedia’s article describes the conflict as:

A hornet’s nest of claims and counterclaims, moral concerns, metaphysical beliefs, political convictions, strawmen, red herrings, and gossip

UK sociologist Hilary Rose and her husband, the late neuroscientist Steven Rose, editors of the book Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, dismissed EP as relying on:

shaky empirical evidence, flawed premises, and unexamined political presuppositions

Robert Kurzban‘s review of the Roses’ book, Alas Poor Evolutionary Psychology: Unfairly Accused, Unjustly Condemned, described opponents of EP as:

filled with self-righteous rage, smug dismissals, and unremitting invective…scoundrels who would through innuendo, mischaracterization, and yes, even outright dishonesty, shame and dishonor a foe they little understand, and therefore fear.

Volcanic stuff.

Evolutionary vs cultural psychology 🔼

The Association for Psychological Science

Brakeaway group hostile to evolutionary psychology

One of the two main US psychology organisations, the Association for Psychological Science (APS) – a 1988 breakaway from the American Psychological Association (see below) – apparently ignores the field of evolutionary psychology (EP) altogether.

In 2018, the APS peer-reviewed flagship journal Current Directions in Psychological Science published A Special Issue on Racism edited by Jennifer Richeson of Yale University.

The Current Directions special issue addressed the nature of racism, how it affects individual cognition and health, and how best to combat it. There’s no mention of EP.

The APS seems to exclusively prefer the concept of cultural psychology – how cultures shape psychological processes. I asked Professor Richeson about this. She hasn’t replied.

The APS doesn’t just ignore EP – it actively opposes it. Outright hostility towards EP seems commonplace in APS papers.

For instance, a 2017 peer-reviewed Current Directions paper (see my non-peer review, above), whilst admirably seeking to investigate ‘historically derived ideas and cultural patterns that maintain present-day racial inequalities‘, spoils things by saying – amongst many other clumsy smears – the approach of addressing ‘individual’ racism (code, apparently, for EP) can ‘obscure’ such investigation.

The paper doesn’t mention evolved bias except in a dismissive reference to ‘some innate disposition’. As with Current Direction’s special racism issue, it doesn’t use the E-word at all.

Such wilfull blindness, dogged bias and false comparison compromises the eponymously proclaimed scientific integrity of the Association for Psychological Science.

Evolutionary vs cultural psychology 🔼

The American Psychological Association

The old guard – favours evolutionary psychology

In contrast to the Association for Psychological Science (APS) – see above – the other main US psychology organisation, the larger American Psychological Association (APA), founded in 1892, apparently embraces evolutionary psychology (EP) – and seeks integration with ‘other approaches’.

APA journal Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, edited by Catherine Salmon of the University of Redlands, California, says it addresses:

…the study of human behavior from an evolutionary perspective, with an emphasis on work that integrates evolutionary theory with other approaches and perspectives from across the behavioral sciences.

My bolding

The journal wants to integrate EP with ‘other approaches’. Presumably that includes cultural psychology (CP). That’s good. But would the gatekeepers of the ‘other approaches’ reciprocate?

I asked journal editor Professor Salmon about differences between the APS and the APA with regard to EP and CP. She didn’t reply.

Update, 2025: Salmon no longer edits Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. I asked the current editor, Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago, for his comments. He hasn’t replied.

Evolutionary vs cultural psychology 🔼

North-Eastern Evolutionary Psychology Society

EP champs

The journal Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, mentioned above, is published by the American Psychological Association but is actually the flagship journal of the NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society (NEEPS), founded in 2007 as a hub for:

scholars who study psychological questions from an evolutionary perspective

I asked eminent evolutionary psychologist and NEEPS co-founder Glenn Geher of the State University of New York at New Paltz if he’d comment on the conflict over evolutionary psychology. Professor Geher replied, saying:

Many feminists believe that the premises of evolutionary psychology are incongruous with a feminist agenda.

Evolutionary vs cultural psychology 🔼

My analysis

Let’s work together

Applying a form of scientific determinism to how women behave and think was bound to cause controversy in the age of feminism. No doubt patriarchal assumptions marr scientific integrity in all academic fields of psychological inquiry. However, mate-selection and its associated behaviour is central to evolution. It’s bound to be central to evolutionary psychology (EP) studies.

It’s ironic that feminists apparently oppose EP, given that the memorably provocative feminist slogan, ‘all men are rapists’ (meaning, of course, all men are potential rapists), relies on genetic determinism.

Rape, like racism, might be genetically determined, but that doesn’t excuse it. EP studies modules of evolved behaviour, but they don’t amount to a mechanistic explanation of human behaviour.

Humans aren’t the sum of instincts – or cultural pressures. Men can choose not to rape. We can all choose not to be racist. Our behaviour’s the result of complex, holistic, chaotic systems involving nature, nurture, thought, language, reason, imagination, desire, conscience, morality, faith and, above all, choice (aka free will).

In so far as they’re conscious, these complex aspects of human mentality may have transcended their origins, whether evolved or cultural. They may never be fully understood by psychological science.

But if any useful understanding is to be achieved, the academic barriers between culture and biology need replacing – with bridges

Evolutionary vs cultural psychology 🔼

ChatGPT analysis

Not bad for a chatbot

Update, March 2023
I asked the recently released ‘AI’ super-chatbot ChatGPT about the conflict between evolutionary and cultural psychology. This is part of the response:

These two perspectives can sometimes be seen as competing with one another, with evolutionary psychology criticized for being reductionistic and ignoring the importance of cultural and social factors, and cultural psychology criticized for being relativistic and ignoring the role of biology in shaping behavior.

However, it is important to note that these two perspectives are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and there has been increasing recognition that both biological and cultural factors can play important roles in shaping human behavior. Many researchers now seek to integrate these two perspectives, and there are growing efforts to develop a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the complex interplay between biology and culture in shaping human behavior.

My bolding

Evolutionary vs cultural psychology 🔼

Hope for integration

Hope not hate

In this post, I’ve suggested racism is based on an instinct. That puts me on the side of evolutionary psychology. But there’s no need for sides.

It’s obvious that – as with all animals – human behaviour is largely genetically determined. How else would natural selection work?

(The implementation of instinct isn’t fully understood. See my annex on Rupert Sheldrake and his intriguing – if controversial – explanation, morphic resonance.)

However, it’s also obvious that behaviour is conditioned by culture.

The conflict between evolutionary and cultural psychology is pointless – there should be a truce, followed by a merger. Academics are notoriously territorial, but there’s enough common ground for all.

Workers in the fields of evolutionary psychology and cultural psychology should end their mutual hostility. They should cooperate to understand racism – thereby helping to end it.

Evolutionary vs cultural psychology 🔼

What the experts say 🔼

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct – contents 🔼
Additional information 🔼

Sources

Reviews, reports, polls and surveys referred to in this post

1. The Blackwood report | 1993
2. Attitudes to living in Britain – A Survey of Muslim Opinion | 2006
3. Polling of British Muslims | 2015
4. Europeans Fear Wave of Refugees Will Mean More Terrorism, Fewer Jobs | 2016
5. The Casey Review | 2016
6. Opinion poll: Unsettled Belonging | 2016
7. The Lammy Review | 2017
8. The Angiolini review | 2017
9. UK govt: Ethnicity facts and figures | launched 2017
10. Ofsted annual report | 2017
11. Ofsted annual report | 2018
12. Independent Review of the Mental Health Act 1983 | 2018
13. UN report on racism in the UK | 2018
14. National Conversation on Immigration | 2018
15. National Secular Society poll | 2018
16. Police use-of-force statistics, England and Wales: April 2017 to March 2018 | 2018
17. Sentencing Council report | 2020
18. Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities: The Report | 2021
19. Visit to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent | 2023

Sources 🔼

Source 1

The Blackwood report, 1993

Report of The Committee of lnquiry into the Death in Broadmoor Hospital of 0rville Blackwood: “Big, Black and Dangerous?”

See Footnote 4

Sources 🔼

Source 2

Attitudes to living in Britain – A Survey of Muslim Opinion, 2006

To see this survey, please install the LinkedIn SlideShare app

This GfK/NOP social research study for Channel 4 Dispatches (UK TV investigative documentary series) found 30 per cent of UK Muslims wanted to live under Sharia law, 28 per cent wanted Britain to be an Islamic state, and 22 per cent thought the 2005 7/7 London bombings in which 52 people were killed and over 700 injured were justified because of British support for the ‘war on terror’.

Sources 🔼

Source 3

Polling of British Muslims, 2015

This survey found that following the emergence of Islamist terror group ISIS in Syria, 15 per cent of British Muslims had some sympathy with those who’d gone to fight with them.

Sources 🔼

Source 4

Europeans Fear Wave of Refugees Will Mean More Terrorism, Fewer Jobs, 2016

Sharp ideological divides across EU on views about minorities, diversity and national identity

This Pew survey showed most Europeans believed the influx of refugees across the continent would mean fewer jobs and more terrorism.

Sources 🔼

Source 5

The Casey Review: A review into opportunity and integration, 2016

This UK government-commissioned independent review by government official Dame Louise Casey confirmed segregation was at worrying levels. It blamed cultural misogyny and patriarchy, and public bodies that ignore or condone divisive religious practices for fear of being called racist or Islamophobic.

Sources 🔼

Source 6

Unsettled Belonging: A survey of Britain’s Muslim communities, 2016

This poll, commissioned by centre-right thinktank Policy Exchange included the finding that 31 per cent of UK Muslims thought the US government was behind the 9/11 New York attacks. Only 4 per cent thought Islamist terror group al-Qaeda was responsible. Policy Exchange has been criticised for ‘demonising’ Muslims, but the research was carried out by a reputable polling organisation. The report had a forward by Muslim Labour MP and shadow minister Khalid Mahmood who said, ‘The readiness to believe in conspiracy theories and the mentality of victimhood of which it speaks…is holding [Muslims] back and ensuring that…we are locked in a paranoid and at times fearful world view.’

Sources 🔼

Source 7

The Lammy Review, 2017

An independent review into the treatment of, and outcomes for, black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals in the criminal justice system

This UK government-commissioned independent review by black Labour MP David Lammy found those who were charged, tried and punished were disproportionately likely to come from minority communities.

Sources 🔼

Source 8

The Angiolini review, 2017

Report of the independent review of deaths and serious incidents in police custody

This government report by senior lawyer Dame Elish Angiolini into deaths in custody found a possible racial factor: ‘Racial stereotyping may or may not be a significant contributory factor in some deaths in custody. However, unless investigatory bodies operate transparently and are seen to give all due consideration to the possibility that stereotyping may have occurred or that discrimination took place in any given case, families and communities will continue to feel that the system is stacked against them.’ The government response to the report promised some reforms but contained no reference to the ethnicity of those who died in police custody.

Sources 🔼

Source 9

Ethnicity facts and figures, launched 2017

UK government project: impact of ethnicity on everyday life

The UK government’s ‘Racial disparity audit’ displays updated survey findings. When launched in 2017, it found the rate of white people in work was higher than that of ethnic minorities – with a larger gap in the North than the South – and those from non-white backgrounds were under-represented at senior levels in public sector jobs.

Sources 🔼

Source 10

Ofsted annual report, 2017

Annual report by Amanda Spielman, chief inspector of education, children’s services and skills

Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, is a non-ministerial department of the UK government, reporting to Parliament. In a section headed ‘Shared values’, the 2017 Ofsted report strongly criticised private faith schools which deliberately resist ‘British values’.

Sources 🔼

Source 11

Ofsted annual report, 2018

A year later, the 2018 Ofsted report expressed continued concern about unregistered faith schools.

Sources 🔼

Source 12

Independent Review of the Mental Health Act 1983, 2018

Modernising the Mental Health Act

This government review, commissioned by then UK premier Theresa May, concluded sweeping reforms were needed to restore rights to mental health patients and end the ‘burning injustice’ of people from ethnic minorities being disproportionately sectioned. However, this aspect was barely mentioned in official responses to the review report.

Sources 🔼

Source 13

UN report, 2018

Visit to the UK: report of the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance

This UN report expressed serious concerns about racism ‘rooted in the fabric of UK society’. The report highlighted the disproportionate number of people of African descent and from other ethnic minorities dying due to the excessive use of force by state security agencies.

Sources 🔼

Source 14

National Conversation on Immigration, 2018

This survey, in which almost 20,000 people took part, was hosted by anti-fascist group Hope not Hate and human rights thinktank British Future alongside the House of Commons home affairs committee. The findings were given as evidence to the committee’s inquiry, Immigration policy: basis for building consensus, and informed the committee’s recommendations. The survey found a large minority of people in the UK thought immigrants don’t integrate properly; and anti-Muslim prejudice was widespread. Participants believed British culture was under threat because people were forced, usually by schools and councils, to pander to ‘political correctness’ and the sensitivities of Muslims. The survey also found most people wanted EU migration to be better managed.

Sources 🔼

Source 15

National Secular Society poll, 2018

British public opposes religious influence in education, poll finds

An opinion poll carried out by Survation for the National Secular Society found a large majority of a representative sample of the British public was opposed to religious influence in education.

Sources 🔼

Source 16

Police use-of-force statistics, England and Wales, 2018

Figures released in 2018 by the UK home office showed black people were more likely than white people to have force used against them by police, especially with firearms, Tasers and AEPs (attenuating energy projectiles – AKA rubber bullets).

Sources 🔼

Source 17

Sentencing Council report, 2020

This report by advisory body the Sentencing Council for England and Wales found black and minority ethnic offenders were far more likely to be sent to prison for drug offences than white offenders.

Sources 🔼

Source 18

Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities: The Report, 2021

This report, also known as the Sewell report (after the commission chair, black conservative educational consultant Tony Sewell), came under heavy criticism, mainly due to its outright denial of institutional racism.

Back to link 🔼

Sources 🔼

Source 19

Visit to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, 2023

At the invitation of the UK government, the UN working group reported on ‘current legal, institutional and policy framework and measures taken to prevent racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance faced by people of African descent in the United Kingdom’. The report raised serious concerns – which were rejected by the government.

Back to link 🔼

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct – contents 🔼
Additional information 🔼

Annexes

1. Mass immigration and the US
2. Economic pressure
3. The power of language
4. Genes or morphic resonance?
5. Therapy for instinctive racism
6. Or was God an astronaut?

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Annexes 🔼

Annex 1

Mass immigration and the US

The American way

In recent times, compared with the UK’s challenging postwar experiences, the US – like Canada and Australia – had an arguably more positive relationship with mass immigration.

The ‘New World’ (new to the explorers and subsequent immigrants, if not to the Native Americans) was built on large-scale immigration – as symbolised by the Statue of Liberty. However, attitudes are changing. Wikipedia says:

Public attitudes about immigration in the U.S. were heavily influenced in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. After the attacks, 52% of Americans believed immigration was a good thing overall for the U.S., down from 62% the year before, according to a 2009 Gallup poll. A 2008 Public Agenda survey found half of Americans said tighter controls on immigration would do ‘a great deal’ to enhance U.S. national security. Harvard political scientist and historian Samuel P. Huntington argued in Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity that a potential future consequence of continuing massive immigration from Latin America, especially Mexico, might lead to the bifurcation of the United States.

My bolding

US president Donald Chump, whose right-wing populist shtick openly stokes fear of immigration, clearly benefits from this current revival of nativism.

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Annexes 🔼

Annex 2

Economic pressure

Free money

In western countries, racism – whatever the deeper cause – is fed by poverty. Bollocks-ideology racist groups target poor white people. The insecurities of that increasingly large underclass (championed as the precariat by radical economist Guy Standing) could be resolved by paying all adult citizens an unconditional state income. (See my post about this trending idea, Robots could mean leisure.)

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Annexes 🔼

Annex 3

The power of language

Respect the dark

In English, the words ‘dark’ and ‘light’, used to describe people’s skin colour, come pre-loaded with values: night and day; danger and safety; cold and warmth; badness and goodness. I am the light, said Jesus, supposedly. ‘White’ and ‘black’ have similar baggage: good and evil.

Even the word for the development of modern liberal ideas, the Enlightenment, is tonally prejudiced. If reason is enlightenment, ignorance is darkness. It even sounds like a skin lightening product: Enlightenment Cream, containing the bleach of reason. Rub it well on your dark superstitious ignorance.

(My unsolicited post-Enlightenment advice to all western Muslims to lighten up involves a mischievous homonym. The phrase refers, of course, to lightness in weight – cultural weight in that case.)

(Also, the Enlightenment isn’t all liberal love and light. See my appendix, The dark side of the Enlightenment.)

The pre-loaded values aren’t inevitable. It was good that the sun ‘returned’ after the winter solstice (or so said the powerful priestesses of the ruling sacrificial cult) but apart from that, goodness and reason have no intrinsic association with light; and dark isn’t bad.

Some say the current high status of light and lightness is a symptom of a relatively immature patriarchy; and that a prehistoric mature matriarchy – probably not so much a feminist paradise as a bloodthirsty Wicker-Manish cult – valued the moon and the sun more or less equally.

Rational mystics urge us to value light and dark equally, because they’re both part of life. But we ignorant masses love the light and fear the dark. None of this helps when trying to understand and resist colour prejudice.

Fear of the dark is childish. Fear of dark-skinned people, conscious or not, is stupid. White people should grow up. Grow a pair. Black is beautiful. Or – at least – no weirder than white.

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Annexes 🔼

Annex 4

Genes or morphic resonance?

Rupert the Radical

I’ve suggested there’s a gene for racism. Apparently it’s scientifically incorrect to talk about ‘a gene for’ something. But it’s a useful phrase in common speech, and should be understood as lay shorthand for the complex and not fully understood process of genetic coding.

Science can’t explain how genes code for instinctive behaviour. Radical biologist Rupert Sheldrake claims genes are incapable of coding behaviour.

Sheldrake’s hypothesis of morphic resonance suggests instincts are habits remembered in an evolved organising field which resonates with the brain of the individual.

I’ve suggested racism is based on a mainly redundant instinct. I asked Sheldrake if, according to his hypothesis, an instinct that’s outlived it’s evolutionary purpose might nevertheless survive and continue to affect behaviour.

In his reply, Sheldrake acknowledged a redundant instinct might continue to resonate.

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Annexes 🔼

Annex 5

Therapy for instinctive racism

NLP will set you free

It’s a bit like NLP (neuro-linguistic programming). A young child (ie early or pre-humans) has faced a danger perceived as life-threatening (communicable disease) and has been protected by a powerful defence mechanism (evolved anti-stranger behaviour).

The deep-rooted defence, having done its job at the time but no longer needed, stands by. Revived and warped by challenging circumstances (colonialism), it blooms into systematic negativity (full-blown racism), blighting adulthood (recent times).

NLP treatment, as I understand it, is to hypnotise the client, and persuade the redundant ‘part’ to retire. But hypnotherapy can’t banish an ancient instinct.

You’d have to acknowledge the instinct with due respect (and perhaps a psychedelic shamanistic ritual or two); and then, empowered by being aware of the evolutionary roots of the ugly historical fruits (racist feelings), rise above them.

As wonderfully illustrated by the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet, we’ve got tons of nasty stuff going on down there – monsters from the id, as the movie had it. If we admit it, it’s easier to live above it.

(Or how about group therapy with Racists Anonymous? Hi. I’m Chris – I’m a racist.)

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct
Annexes 🔼

Annex 6

Or was God an astronaut?

Of course he was. Hello? Virgin birth? Von Däniken?

Some writers suggest that once upon a time, dear Reader, humanoid alien visitors created our human ancestors with genetic engineering to do mining and agricultural work, and they inserted a racist gene to deter one branch of their workforce from mating with another one.

The aliens supposedly managed their workers by also inserting genes for work ethic and obedience, and by posing as gods. Having stocked up, and getting fed up with their increasingly rebellious slaves, they apparently flooded the planet – perhaps to hide the evidence of what they’d done from the powers that be (Intergal?) – and cleared off.

With the help of some sympathetic departing aliens, so the story goes, a few of us built arks (and loaded animals, two by two). Those few survived the genocidal cataclysm – and so did our creators’ legacy: modified cross-species genes for work ethic, religious obedience and racism.

Nice. Thanks. Anyway, humanity survived – and, dear Reader, we all lived happily(ish) ever after.

Woo? Hah!

Yes, I know…morphic resonance has been dismissed (albeit prematurely and defensively) as pseudoscience; NLP never lived up to its promise; and God as an astronaut, er, lacks evidence…but I like the ideas!

Annexes 🔼

Imagine this

Imagine by John Lennon and Yoko Ono

You may say they’re hypocrites (think fur coats) but they’re not the only ones – and you can’t necessarily judge the art by the life. A fabulously beautiful – if a bit cheesy – song.

Copyright 1971, Northern Songs. Lyrics quoted without permission.

Racism explained – as a redundant instinct 🔼

They say…

Quotes from emails about this post

I read your blogpost, and couldn’t agree more. Keep up the good work!

Dr Pratinav Anil
University of Oxford

For most of your points I would fully agree

Professor Mahzarin Banaji
Harvard University

I took a look at your blog and really enjoyed it

Professor Anton Gollwitzer
Yale University

Interesting stuff

Professor Glenn Geher
State University of New York at New Paltz

Looks good – Kudos!

Professor Susan Fiske
Princeton University, US

Well written

Dr John Crichton
University of Edinburgh, UK

A really good read

Dr Gavin Evans
Birkbeck, University of London

Provocative and highly speculative…I fundamentally disagree

Professor Ian Law
University of Leeds, UK

I remain unconvinced

Dr Marcel Stoetzler
Bangor University, UK

We agree more than disagree

Professor Steven Neuberg
Arizona State University, US

Very interesting

Professor Zahia Smail Salhi
University of Manchester, UK

Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that racism is built on [evolved] intergroup bias

Professor Melissa McDonald
Oakland University, Michigan, US

Great blog post…really interesting!

Marissa Lithopoulos
University of Ottawa, Canada

Some profound thoughts…There might be a heritable tendency to be wary of the unfamiliar

Professor Frances Aboud
McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Interesting…takes up issues in new directions

Dr Hauwa Mahdi
University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Insightful and thought-provoking

Ayesha Tarannum
Muslim Council of Britain

Interesting…relevant to the ongoing discussion about British values

Errol Barnett
Integration faith division, communities and local government, UK government

Oddly intriguing

Mark Gardner
Community Security Trust, UK

I tend to agree with most of what you say

Professor Neal Curtis
University of Auckland, New Zealand

Very interesting reading

Dr Sheena Kalayil
University of Manchester, UK

Thought-provoking. Much of what you say I agree with

Dr Dinah Morley
People in Harmony, UK

Very interesting

Professor James Nazroo
Synergi Collaborative Centre, UK

They say… 🔼

Comments

I had to split this post in two because it was too big. To comment, please click on the link, “Comments”, above, to go to to the Comments section in the first (main) part. Thanks.

The plumber’s in your bathroom
Your place of stink and steam
They know your dirty secrets
They know your dirty dreams
They’re in the heart of your home
The animal part that’s private
Your private parts are known to them
They understand your pipes and taps
And drains. They politely ignore the stains.
The plumber’s in your bathroom
Let’s hope they sort it out this time
Let’s hope the bill’s not big
Let’s hope they finish soon
So you can go and mess it up
With your dirty poo and pee
But the plumber’s still in your bathroom
Make them a cup of tea
…