Black and South Asian postwar immigrants to the UK and their descendants are often asked ‘Where are you from?’ – a question loaded with a queasy mixture of idle curiosity and unconscious or semiconscious racism.
Begun 2019 | Revised 2025 | 1,300 words | Contents
How should they respond to that loaded question? It’s a minefield.
For a white Briton like me, asking that question of a brown or blackBriton who’s a stranger or casual acquaintance is a bad idea. Much worse is asking as a follow-up question:
Where are you really from?
Such questions are inconsiderately intrusive and, at best, microracist. Although the questioner might not consciously realise it – the question, unpicked, is likely to mean:
Your skin colour and facial appearance suggests your ethnic origin isn’t north European – so in which country are your family origins? Actually, though, I don’t really care where you’re from. My question is mainly rhetorical and microracist. I’m really just drawing attention to your otherness.
A 2022 high-profile incident at a charity reception involving a UK royal aide, ‘Lady’ Susan Hussey, and a black British charity worker, Ngozi Fulani, is a good example of this phenomenon.
Hussey questioned Fulani’s origins, repeatedly asking where she was ‘really’ from. This was witnessed by several other people and then reported by TV and newspapers.
Former royal aide Susan Hussey | Photo: Getty
‘Lady’ Hussey – daughter of the 12th ‘Earl’ Waldegrave, widow of former BBC chairman and life peer ‘Baron’ Hussey, godmother to heir ‘Prince’ William, and a close friend of ‘King’ Charles, ‘Queen’ Camilla and the late ‘Queen’ Elizabeth – resigned after the incident.
At an arranged meeting two weeks later in Buckingham Palace, Hussey apologised to Fulani, and Fulani accepted Hussey’s apology.
However, in spite of that stage-managed resolution, the unpleasant incident supports Meghan Markle’s implied claim of racism in the royal household; and flags widespread casual racism amongst the ruling class.
If the question, as in that case, seems offensively rhetorical, the asker’s bluff can be called: ‘Why do you want to know?’
If the question seems genuine, and worthy of a helpful response, it might nevertheless be not so easy to answer.
For an answer to be accurate – and understood – both parties need good geopolitical and historical awareness. It can get complicated.
For instance, If a British person of South Asian appearance is known to be a Muslim, they might not be – as might be assumed – of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin. Many UK Muslims have origins in the Indian state of Gujerat. (Almost 20 percent of Indian people are Muslims.)
Many South Asian people came to the UK from Kenya and Uganda. South Asian communities were established beforepartition in East Africa and the Caribbean, mainly in Kenya, Uganda and Trinidad. They were there because of another piece of clumsy and careless social engineering by the Brutish Empire:indentured servitude.
From 1834 to 1917, following the ending of slavery, many people were induced to move from India to other colonies as indentured labourers for the empire. Unsurprisingly, the conditions were harsh and the wages low. The workers were derogatively called ‘coolies’.
Indian indentured labourers, seeking to escape the poverty and famine frequent during colonial rule, came mainly from the Punjab and Bengal regions (both later severed during partition).
On completing their indenture, some Indian people stayed on in Africa or the Caribbean. They were joined by family members and formed thriving expatriate communities, albeit protected by the brutal stranglehold of empire.
After those colonies gained independence, many South Asian residents moved to the UK. Those in Uganda were famously expelled by Idi Amin. In Kenya, harsh changes to citizenship rules prompted mass voluntary emigration.
Those UK immigrants, whilst identifying by religion, often also identify by their diaspora community. For instance, people may identify as Kenyan Muslims.
My South Asian Muslim wife, when asked ‘Where are you from?’, sometimes says ‘Nairobi’. Her ethnicity is Punjabi but she was born in Kenya and spent her childhood there.
The person asked that question could give an informative reply, such as:
My family origins are Punjabi Muslim in what’s now Pakistan. In the late 1800s my grandfather went from the Punjab to work in what’s now Kenya. Our family lived there before coming to the UK in the late 1960s.
They could summarise it: ‘Pakistan’. But the question is more likely to provoke a passive-aggressive and deliberately obtuse reply, such as, ‘I’m from Leicester – where are you from?’ (or the deliberately annoying ‘from my mother’s womb’).
The hidden question, ‘Why are you here?’ at least offers the possibility of debate and reason; but behind that lurks the racist rhetorical question:
Why don’t you go back there?
For postwar immigrants to the UK and their descendants, such racism is never far below the surface.
Note: My post Racism explained as a redundant instinct suggests racism is a redundant anti-stranger instinct revived and twisted by colonialism and postcolonialism – and, sadly, provoked by the postwar mass immigration carelessly engineered by a patrician government. We antiracists choose to reject and oppose that twisted impulse and to embrace our brilliant multicultural society.
Thoughtful white Brits aware of all that – or just wary of the social minefield – don’t ask that awkward, loaded question. But it does get asked.
If I was a British person of colour asked by a white person, ‘Where are you from?’, and the question seemed intrusive, I’d want to challenge it, but it in a non-hostile way.
I’d initially bat it back by – politely – saying, ‘How do you mean?’ If they indicated they were asking about my ethnic origin rather than my place of residence, I’d ask – still politely, if possible:
Why do you want to know?
The questioner might well find it difficult to explain themselves. Serves them right.
British people of colour people also ask the question, ‘Where are you from?’ of each other. The purpose is to find out the other’s origins: country, religion, region, town, caste, class, whatever.
That’s a different can of worms – and it doesn’t excuse white Brits asking that question. As always, context is crucial. The context is the white west and – as always – racism is prejudice plus power.
Osler takes the question seriously, exploring her complex Empireland* family heritage, but she starts by explaining how that question can undermine one’s sense of belonging and nationality with its implied accusation:
You don’t belong here – you’re not British
Clearly, not everyone asking that question is aware of the toxic smog it stirs up – but ignorance is no excuse. Osler suggests a barbed comeback: having answered (or not answered) the question, turn it around and ask:
Where are you from?
* Note: The resonant name Empireland was used by award-winning British journalist Sathnam Sanghera as the title of his 2021 best-selling book, which shows how the Brutish Empire shaped modern Britain but has been airbrushed out of cultural awareness and is barely even taught in schools.
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 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‘. This seems to be apocryphal, but it illustrates a real prejudice.
English red-haired people bravely (Brave!) try to reappropriate the word ‘ginger’ – as African Americans 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.)
I was scolded on a local Facebook page for criticizing the phrase ‘mixed race’. The scolder said: ‘I’m mixed race – that’s what I call myself.’ ‘Yes, but…’ I thought.
Meghan Markle, aka Duchess of Sussex | Photo: Shutterstock
Here in the UK, people have their ethnicity labelled, like it or not. But the phrase ‘mixed-race’ is loaded with prejudice. Isn’t it?
We’re asked to tick a box for our ethnic identity on forms gathering data for marketing or discrimination-monitoring purposes. The UK police use ethnic identity codes to describe suspects. The UK census asks, ‘What is your ethnic group?’
People of colour might, on the one hand, see such labelling as a form of racism. On the other hand, the concept of ethnicity allows people of colour to identify themselves – in positive terms.
Either way, ethnic identification is here to stay. So… is it OK to say ‘mixed-race‘? No. How can it be OK? ‘Race‘ is known to be a false category cooked up by white supremacists with fake science which falsely claimed the different human populations are separate races in a hierarchy of superiority.
Racists, of course, don’t care about the science. They just discriminate against people who look different or have a different culture whether they’re a ‘race’ ot not.
Non-racists also fudge the issue – with the slippery postmodern ‘social construct’. The words ‘race’ and ‘mixed-race’ are in widespread use by both white people and people of colour. In that context, race is supposedly a neutral social construct which simply describes the different human populations.
Even the Guardian (centre-left, the UK’s only national daily newspaper not owned by billionaires) uses ‘mixed race‘ to describe, for instance, Meghan Markle. (The usually brilliant Guardian style guide is silent on the subject.)
When ‘mixed-race’ is used in a social-construct sense, the toxicity of the word ‘race‘ is somehow shut out. The vile supremacist ideology scratches at the door, but is just ignored. The usage may be considered harmless but it carries the baggage of slavery.
As a zealous and pedanticantiracist, I objected to the use of the phrase on a local Facebook page and got a hostile response. People said, ‘I’m mixed-race – that’s what I call myself’.
But why would anyone accept ‘mixed-race‘ as a description of themselves, loaded as it is with outmoded prejudice?
Science-denying racists say there are different human races, some of which are intrinsically superior to others. They’re wrong.
Pseudo-scientific racists, from ‘Enlightenment’ philosophers Kant and Locke onwards, tried to justify colonialism and slavery by claiming Europeans are inherently superior to other ‘races‘.
They aren’t, of course, but the pseudo-science rolled on. In the 1930s and 40s it reached its nadir, contributing to Nazi ‘justification’ for the Hollocaust.
In the 1960s US racists tried to prove white superiority by ‘intelligence testing’ black Americans against white Americans. The ‘tests’ were worthless – culturally loaded and fundamentally flawed.
Racist claims of white supremacy were bound to fail. The science of taxonomy shows there are no human ‘races’. All modern humans are a single species, Homo sapiens (the only surviving species of the genus Homo).
Some taxonomists say we’re all a subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens (the only surviving subspecies of Homo sapiens).
(That difference of opinion doesn’t detract from the science. It shows the inevitable difficulty of establishing exact patterns of evolution.)
Either way, actual science says we’re all in the same category of creatures.
Some early Homo sapiens groups left Africa and settled elsewhere, evolving distinct characteristics and forming ethnic groups, known in biology as populations.
Race is a slippery concept, but in biology it’s an informal rank below the level of subspecies, the members of which are significantly distinct from other members of the subspecies.
Genetic research has confirmed the obvious: apart from some single-gene disorders*, the differences that evolved between different human populations, albeit visually and culturally obvious, are not significantly distinct. This means the different populations are not races in any scientifically meaningful sense.
* Single gene disorder: genetic disease caused by a mutation in a single gene Some single-gene disorders are specific for certain populations, like Tay-Sachs disease among Ashkenazi Jews, cystic fibrosis in Caucasians, thalassemias among people from Southeast Asia and the Mediterranean countries, and sickle cell disease in people of Western African origin.
In spite of the scientific account of one humanity, racist pseudo-science limps on. But in any case, most white racists don’t care if there are scientifically meaningful races or not. They just want to indulge in bullying people from a different group, regardless of whether that group is a ‘race’ or a ‘population’.
Anyway, regardless of the science, racists can freely call such different populations ‘races’. ‘Race’ is now supposedly a social construct – meaning population!
But for what it’s worth, real science has trashed the racist fake science: there are no different human races, just one humanity with different populations – which are becoming increasingly mixed.
The different human populations are becoming mixed. The historical causes are bad but the mixing is good.
Increased travel in recent centuries brought large numbers of people of different ethnicity face to face for the first time in human history. Unfortunately, most of that contact was colonial.
The consequent vile transatlantic slave trade to the Americas and carelessly engineered UK postwar mass immigration resulted in black and white people living in the same countries, mainly the USA and the UK. Inevitably, in spite of racism and conflict, they’ve mixed – and that’s a Good Thing.
Before pseudo-scientific racism was rumbled, racists sneered about ‘miscegenation‘. And amongst ethnic minorities there’s pressure to resist assimilation and preserve cultural heritage by not ‘marrying out’.
But marrying ‘out’ doesn’t have to mean loss of cultural heritage – it can be seen as marrying in. Some dodgy lyrics aside, Blue Mink were right: what we need is a great big melting pot.
Ethnicity is often related to religion, and there may be concern that marrying ‘out’ will dilute religion and therefore morality. But here in the western melting pot, we live in a post-religious age. God – as the source of morality – is dead.
Fortunately, as social animals we have innate goodness – and any innate badness can be constrained by the rule of law, preferably under liberal democracy (the worst form of government apart from all the others).
(Non-religious spirituality, on the other hand, is alive and well – and isn’t affected by inter-ethnic mingling.)
People say race is a social construct. But the word ‘race’ is still toxic, and the abstract idea of a social construct can be misunderstood – and misused.
Science shows there are no human races, but some say ‘race’ is a social construct which doesn’t have to be scientifically meaningful – it’s just a way of describing the different human populations.
A social construct is said to be a concept or category that exists due to shared agreement within a society, rather than being based on objective reality. It’s a fine example of slippery postmodern relativity.
Such usage is now widespread. ‘Race’ as shorthand for populations of different ethnicity is used by people of colour in speech; and by black and white writers and speakers in non-racist media. For instance, the liberal, antiracist UK Guardian newspaper happily describes Meghan Markle as ‘mixed race’.
But devious racists use the social construct idea to blur the issue and keep talking about ‘race’ despite the evidence there are no races. Confusion between ethnicity and race is the loophole in the social construct through which racists slip.
The social construct idea has complex theoretical academic origins. Not everyone gets it. Many people reading or hearing the word ‘race’ in the media, unaware of any ‘shared agreement’ about what it means, might understandably assume it refers to an objective reality and means what it says.
Many people reading or hearing the word ‘race’ will think – and will be encouraged to do so by loophole racists – that it means what it meant in the days of empire, slavery and Holocaust, when ‘races’, identified by appearance or culture (or both), were ranked in order of superiority, with white at the top and black at the bottom.
Despite its frequent use by non-racists as – supposedly – a social construct, the word ‘race’ is fundamentally toxic and redundant. For antiracists, the solution to this linguistic dilemma is to abandon the flimsy social construct context and stop using the word ‘race’.
Race as a social construct is fraught with difficulty. The idea that ‘race’, the toxic invention of fascists and greedy colonialists, can be used to mean ‘ethnic group’, a harmless biological reality, is typical of postmodern moral relativity. Postmodernism is fun – but dangerously unreliable .
(‘Race’ is, of course, implied in the word ‘racism’ but until the misnamed thing ends, the word will probably continue to be used, trailing its toxic root. Unless there’s a better word.)
Ethnic identity is used negatively by racists. But it’s used positively by people of colour – and usefully by public services such as the census and the police.
Racists use ethnic identity negatively to assert their imagined superiority. However, people of colour identify themselves positively as, for instance, black British, Asian British or mixed ethnicity, thereby identifying their family origins, the colour of their skin, and their cultural allegiances.
The UK censususefully records ethnicity statistics which can help shape progressive policies. And apparent ethnicity can be useful to describe an unknown person. In the Facebook warning that prompted this post, a man harassing women in a park was described as ‘mixed-race‘.
The UK police use radio shorthand identification codes, known – tautologically – as IC codes, to describe suspects to colleagues. For instance, IC3 stands for black, IC4 for South Asian and IC5 for East Asian. There’s no IC code for people whose appearance indicates mixed ethnicity. However, IC7 means unknown.
During ‘stop and search’ operations, police use more complex ‘self-defined ethnicity‘ codes. People stopped are asked to choose one of 18 codes. The codes follow census categories (see below) by including options for mixed ethnicity.
(Although such ‘racial profiling‘ is useful to the police, it’s also abused by them. For instance, the controversial practice of stop and search is overused against young black men by a force repeatedly said to be institutionally racist.)
Which words are acceptable alternatives to ‘race’? Ethnicity? Heritage? Ancestry?
‘Race’ is used in what’s meant to be a neutral social-construct sense to describe the different human populations. But the supposed neutrality of that context doesn’t mask the word’s stench of bigotry. An alternative to the toxic word ‘race’ is needed.
Ethnicity
The UK governmentstyle guide recommends the word ‘ethnicity’:
We refer to ethnicity and not race…We don’t say ‘mixed people’ or ‘mixed race people’. We usually say ‘people with a mixed ethnic background’…
‘Ethnicity’ is an awkward mouthful of a word, and might seem blunt. But its meaning is clear – and it’s neutral.
The UK census uses the phrase ‘ethnic group‘. It quacks like a nerdy Dalek:
‘What is your ethnic group?’
Under ‘Mixed or multiple ethnic groups’, the UK census lists several options, including write-it-yourself in 18 characters or less (good luck with quadruple ethnicity):
(The insensitive Dalek means well. UK public services being mainly multicultural, the data can shape progressive policy.)
Heritage
The government guide and the census don’t use the word ‘heritage‘ – perhaps partly because there’s a connotation problem.
‘Heritage‘ could sound like something to do with the National Trust collection of stately homes – many of which, according to a 2020 NT report, have links to the slave trade and colonialism.
But ‘heritage’ has some merit as an alternative to ‘race’. ‘Mixed heritage‘ is a syllable shorter than ‘mixed ethnicity‘; and ‘heritage’ is easier to say than ‘ethnicity’, lacking that awkward ‘thn‘ sound.
Also, ‘heritage‘ sounds less personal and direct than ‘ethnicity‘. ‘Your heritage‘ sounds more discrete and less intrusive than ‘your ethnicity‘.
And when addressing someone’s cultural background, ‘heritage’ is more meaningful than ethnicity.
Note: The notion of cultural heritage might not be as innocuous as it sounds. Perhaps racism is boosted by culturism, in that the ‘strangerness’ of people of African or Asian ethnicity living in the west indicates a different culture. That cultural difference – perhaps perceived unconsciously – might elicit fear and prejudice in the ignorant.
Ancestry
Then there’s ‘ancestry‘, which is acceptable if the context is understood.
So…
‘Heritage‘ and ‘ancestry‘ are useful non-toxic alternatives to ‘race‘ and they’re less direct than ‘ethnicity‘. But they’re ambiguous and euphemistic. We’ve all got mixed heritage and ancestry – we haven’t all got mixed ethnicity.
So – with some reservation – I’ll mainly use ‘ethnicity‘ in this post – it’s more meaningful.
If you have more than one ethnic identity, would you want to say how many? If so, how would you say it – and when?
Some people describe themselves as having dual ethnicity. They want people to be aware of the challenges and benefits of having two different ethnic backgrounds.
That’s understandable. But ‘dual ethnicity‘ or the occasionaly used ‘biracial‘ – which includes that word – can be seen as pointlessly limiting.
(It brings to mind the horrible word ‘half-caste‘, which leads to a hell-hole of outdated racist numerical classifications like ‘quadroon‘.)
What if you have more than two ethnicities? If, say, one of your parents has African ethnicity and the other parent has dual South Asian and European ethnicity, would you say you have triple ethnicity (or you’re triracial)?
What if your parents have four ethnicities? It’s increasingly possible: say, East Asian, South Asian, African and European. Would you say you have quadruple ethnicity? (It sounds a bit like ‘quadroon’…)
‘Mixed ethnicity‘ is discreet and flexible, giving enough information without a number. It says, in effect:
As you may infer from my facial appearance, I have more than one ethnic identity and that’s an important part of my character. I’ll give more information if and when it’s appropriate.
Some black antiracist campaigners say mixed-ethnicity people should identify as black – but how can it be right to deny part of your ethnic identity?
Some radical black antiracists say: ‘If you’re not white, you’re black’. They’re saying people of mixed ethnicity should identify solely as black (meaning non-white, ie black or brown).
One such proponent was the late Darcus Howe, the black UK broadcaster and antiracist campaigner. Fellow UK activist Sunder Katwala has recalled being on the receiving end of Howe’s rhetoric.
Katwala, the mixed-ethnicity director of immigration think-tank British Future, wrote about the encounter in the conclusion to his 2012 BF report The Melting Pot Generation.
Katwala and Howe were chatting after a TV discussion (about a controversial remark made by a black politician). Katwala apparently referred to himself as ‘mixed-race’, and Howe objected. Katwala recalled their exchange:
“Mixed race? What’s all this mixed race nonsense? If you’re not white, you’re black.”
That old point was jovially roared at me with some emphasis by one of this country’s leading public raconteurs on race and racism.
“But I’ve never thought I was black. Shouldn’t it be up to me to decide?”
“What are you then?”
“British. And English. My parents are from India and Ireland, so I’m half-Asian and mixed race as well.”
“British? Why don’t you call yourself Indian? Are you ashamed of your father, boy?”
Howe was forcefully expressing the well-known position of radical antiracism: ‘mixed‘ is nonsense – if you’re not white, you’re black.
It’s an understandably angry political response to mixed-ethnicity people experiencing racism because they’re not white.
It’s a proud and noble gesture. But should people of mixed ethnicity feel obliged to deny a significant part of their cultural heritage? Isn’t the antiracist cause best served by people of colour feeling free to express their full identity?
Some mixed-ethnicity people call themselves ‘mixed-race’. It’s easy to say – and difficult to criticise.
Some people of mixed ethnicity say:
‘I’m mixed-race – that’s what I call myself. Don’t tell me what to say!’
It must be difficult enough being brown-skinned in a white world – facing microracism (‘Where are you from?’) and conscious and unconscious personal and institutional bias – without having a would-be white saviour (I’m white, by the way – hi!) tell you how you should or shouldn’t describe yourself.
Whitesplaining word-nerd virtue-signaller – who do I think I am? It’s like a white person telling black Americans not to use the N-word: ‘I say, you rapper chappies – you really shouldn’t use that bad word.’
Except it’s not like that. When a mixed-ethnicity person uses the phrase ‘mixed-race‘ to describe themselves, they’re not re-appropriating the word ‘race‘ in a playfully political way.
They’re giving white people permission to use that phrase – and they’re inadvertently agreeing with zealous racists, the only people who think there actually aredifferent races.
The question remains: why would anyone choose ‘mixed-race‘ as a description of themselves, knowing it to be loaded with outmoded prejudice?
Perhaps mixed-ethnicity people call themselves ‘mixed-race‘, thinking, ‘So what? Who cares? It’s a social construct. It’s just what people say. And it’s only two syllables.’
Fair enough. Also, maybe they’re winding up mitherers like me. If so, damn – you got me!
I just hope it’s not an example of that depressing phenomenon, internalised racism.
‘Mixed race’ is easy to say and ‘race’ is now supposedly a neutral social construct. But shouldn’t that toxic word be retired?
Some people choose to describe themselves as ‘mixed-race‘. The word ‘race‘ has ugly roots, but when it’s understood as a social construct rather than a fake biological category, perhaps it seems better than the non-toxic alternatives.
The main alternative, ‘ethnicity‘, isn’t an easy word. Although it’s harmless and clear in meaning, it’s a difficult, official-sounding word. It doesn’t roll off the tongue easily – it’s definitely not a people’s word.
But in spite of that, ‘ethnicity‘ is still better than ‘race‘, isn’t it? The phrase ‘mixed race‘ is easy to say but even in a social-construct context it remains loaded with fake science and colonial notions of white superiority.
Shouldn’t the word ‘race’ be left in the shameful past where it belongs?
‘Mixed ethnicity‘ is a mouthful. It’s got academic roots, three extra syllables and an awkward ‘thn‘ sound. But it obviates the toxic word ‘race’, and in its neutral clarity it celebrates our differences and embraces their mixing.
A commenter on this post (see below) points out that young people of mixed ethnicity tend to refer to themselves simply as ‘mixed’. That’s a cool solution. When used in context, the abbreviation ‘mixed’ keeps the meaning while avoiding bothuncool words: ‘race’and‘ethnicity’.
For older people (like me) the – less cool – solution is:
Don’t say: he’s mixed-race
Do say (if you must): he’s mixed-ethnicity
Started August 2016 | last updated May 2025 | 40,500 words | 1hr 45m | Contents | They say…
Racism hurts | Photo: Alamy
In which I suggest racism is a nasty modern twist on an ancient anti-stranger instinct.
Digest
Q: How come there’s so much racism around?
A: It’s genetic. Colonialism and pseudoscientific racism revived an anti-stranger instinct. Postcolonialism, mass migration and separatist Islam have made things worse.
(Some readers, seeing the words ‘genetic’ and ‘mass migration’, may have read no further, assuming this is a standard ultra-racist pseudoscientific justification for racism. It isn’t – it’s just the opposite. Let me explain…)
Purple: countries that were colonised by Europe | Image: Black Maps / Freepik Flaticon
All black and brown people in the west experience racism. See, for instance, this study of black students’ experiences at a UK university. As a white person – hi – I can only imagine how horrible that is. But why the racism?
In this post, I suggest racism, meaning power plus prejudice, is an ancient anti-stranger instinct revived and twisted by colonialism.
European colonialism and postcolonialism have fucked up the whole world. See the map above.
(Imagine if European expansion had been like Star Trek instead. Go boldly – if you must – but don’t fuck everything up when you get there.)
Apologists for colonialism say empire ‘civilised’ the world. But the brutality, theft and genocide carried out by European colonialists – my forebears – vastly outweighs any benefits allegedly due the empire’s so-called ‘civilising’ effect (for instance, railways).
European colonialism and racism went hand-in-hand. We white Europeans believed we were a superior race. We weren’t.
Now we know there are no different human ‘races’. It was always a fake concept. So-called ‘racial’ differences are superficial. Everyone with half a brain knows that. Now.
So if there are no ‘races’, how come there’s so much postcolonial racism around? Mainly because racists don’t care whether there are ‘races’ or not. They’re simply prejudiced against non-white or non-western groups, call them what you will.
This post is my attempt to understand that inexcusable prejudice. The purpose of understanding it is to end it.
I start by admitting to my own (unwanted) racist feelings, and suggesting we’re all racist. I also:
Address black-on-black colour prejudice, or ‘shadism’
Suggest racism might be innate
Explain how ‘scientific’ racism is rubbish but was used to justify the slave trade and the Holocaust
Suggest mass immigration and separatist Islam have provoked innate/postcolonial racism in the UK and Europe
Conclude that if we acknowledge and address evolved prejudice, humanist goodness can prevail
Present much additional information and comment in addenda
So, I’m antiracist, but I’m sorry to say I have racist feelings. I don’t want them, and there’s no justification for them. Having acknowledged the unwanted impulse, I choose not to indulge it, but to live above it, and to challenge its expression by others.
But it’s still there – and I don’t think it’s just me. I think probably we’re all racist.
If that’s true, there’s clearly a difference between voluntary racists – people who consciously indulge racism – and involuntary racists – people who are unconsciously racist, who probably don’t realise it and might well deny it.
Unconscious racism (also known as aversive racism), especially when expressed through institutional racism, blights millions of lives. But for the sake of simplicity, this post uses ‘racism’ mostly to mean voluntary racism – the public face of unconscious racism.
We white liberals rightly resist the feeling of racism, or we understandably suppress it – but it’s still there. An irrational suspicion of strangers, especially dark-skinned strangers, persists – and has been intensified in the west by recent circumstances and pressures.
Part of it is colour prejudice, a phrase fallen out of fashion, having been replaced by the blander catch-all, ‘racism’. But colour prejudice, now sometimes known as ‘colourism‘, is still a real thing.
Racism and colourism are rubbish – so why do they persist? One clue might be shadism.
Shades of dark | Poster for documentary film Dark Girls by Bill Dukes and Donald Channsin Berry
Liberal idealists might be surprised and dismayed (I know I was) to learn there’s a strong undercurrent of colourism among people with brown or black skin.
In this semi-secret culture of prejudice, sometimes known as ‘shadism‘, lighter skin is considered good, and darker skin is considered bad.
James Brown, 1971: black and proud | Photo: Evening Standard/Getty
The global skin-lightening market is growing. It’s forecast to be worth over $12bn a year by 2027. The biggest market is South Asia (the geographically vague but politically correct UK name for the Indian subcontinent – see my post, Asian, Indian, Pakistani) and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the South Asian diaspora.
South Asian shadism is often mixed with prejudice based on class, caste or region, but there’s also shadism within such groups. There’s almost an obsession with skin tone. For instance, someone with a lighter skin will typically be considered a better marriage prospect than someone with darker skin. Encouraged by adverts featuring Bollywood stars, many South Asians – mainly women – use skin lightening products.
Shady business – skin-lightening advert
So…finding out about shadism, and reflecting on my own unwanted racist feelings made me wonder: might there be a gene for racism and colourism?
After starting this post as speculation, I realised there’s evidence for evolved group prejudice, of which racism might be a modern version; and for unconscious colour prejudice which might be innate. See below.
European colonialism and postcolonialism have fucked up the whole world, with any alleged benefit hugely outweighed by the brutality, murder and theft. That can’t be said often enough.
Postcolonial culturally ingrained white delusions of superiority, combined with white institutional power, is the conventional explanation for white-on-black racism, conscious or unconscious. But perhaps that’s not the whole story.
Similarly, black-on-black and brown-on-brown shadism might be mainly explained by internalised racism caused by the historical domination of much of India and Africa by light-skinned West Asian* and European invaders; and by colonialism, slavery and postcolonialism. But there might be more to it.
*Note: West Asia is the politically and geographically correct name for the region labelled by Eurocentric colonialists as the Middle East.
There’s evidence: a cognitive neuroscience study found that infants as young as 3–6 months could discriminate between European American (EA) and African American (AA) faces, and that both EA and AA adults had heightened amygdala response to AA faces – indicating fear.
However, the researchers suggested that such bias was unlikely to be innate but instead emerges through learning. So perhaps there isno more to shadism than internalised racism.
But can recent history really be the only explanation? What if there’s something wider, deeper and older going on? Is there a nasty gene for prejudice lurking in our ancestral woodshed?
Evolutionary psychology says such behaviour may have evolved as inter-group protection against communicable disease. Has an ancient defence been revived and twisted by modern colonialism into modern racism?
Racist gene | Getty Images
Some scientists dismiss the idea of a gene for racism, but their dismissal seems to be a horrified denial rather than an evidence-based conclusion. Our genes haven’t been fully decoded yet, and perhaps never will be. A racist gene can’t be ruled out – except by wishful thinking.
Racism is usually considered to be a belief. But what if it’s actually an instinct?
To be fair to the horrified scientists, it’s unlikely our early ancestors encountered other population groups, so it’s unlikely we could have evolved a specifically racist gene.
However, evolutionary psychology suggests racism is built on the scaffolding of an anti-stranger instinct evolved to protect against danger and communicable disease. Presumably, darker skin emphasises strangerness and boosts the bias – hence colour prejudice.
There’s good reason to think of racism as an instinct. If it’s a twisted version of a mainly redundant but reactivated anti-stranger instinct, it’d be widespread and irrational – and it is.
There’s no reason to think of racism as a belief. Supremacist racists often hold associated political or religious beliefs, but all attempts to rationalise and dignify racism with ideology or ‘science’ are rubbish – like a drunk trying to act sober.
Racism doesn’t need ‘scientific’ justification – it lurches on regardless. But pseudoscientific racism also lurches on, stalking mainstream science.
Science now knows better, but a few hundred years ago, pseudoscientific racist ideology was all the rage. An early example of bad science, it was used to justify two of the worst things in human history: the slave trade and the Holocaust.
‘Scientific’ or ideological racism is based on the obnoxious and fallacious idea that the different human populations are separate races in a hierarchy of superiority.
It started when influential 18th-century European Enlightenment philosophers, claiming to rationally explain the natural world, defamed non-white populations as inferior, thereby providing intellectual justification for the racist brutality of empire – including four hundred years of the slave trade.
Racists have historically used pseudoscience to claim African populations were genetically less intelligent then other populations. But the intelligence ‘tests’ used were culturally biased. Wikipedia:
Pseudoscientific claims of inherent differences in intelligence between races have played a central role in the history of scientific racism. In the late 19th and early 20th century, group differences in intelligence were often assumed to be racial in nature. Apart from intelligence tests, research relied on measurements such as brain size or reaction times. By the mid-1940s most psychologists had adopted the view that environmental and cultural factors predominated.
In the mid-1960s, physicist William Shockley sparked controversy by claiming there might be genetic reasons that black people in the United States tended to score lower on IQ tests than white people. In 1969 the educational psychologist Arthur Jensen published a long article with the suggestion that compensatory education could have failed to that date because of genetic group differences. A similar debate among academics followed the publication in 1994 of The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Their book prompted a renewal of debate on the issue and the publication of several interdisciplinary books on the issue.
A 1995 report from the American Psychological Association responded to the controversy, finding no conclusive explanation for the observed differences between average IQ scores of racial groups. More recent work by James Flynn, William Dickens and Richard Nisbett has highlighted the narrowing gap between racial groups in IQ test performance, along with other corroborating evidence that environmental rather than genetic factors are the cause of these differences.
So, although most psychologists said environmental and cultural factors had twisted the ‘results’, biased professionals persisted in claiming evidence for an inherent ‘racial’ difference in intelligence. They were full of shit.
Taxonomically, all modern humans are Homo sapiens sapiens, the only surviving subspecies of the species Homo sapiens, the only surviving species of the genus Homo[1].
Racists say there are different human races, some of which are intrinsically superior to others. They’re wrong.
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.
Interpreters of genetic research have confirmed the obvious: the different human populations are not races in any scientifically meaningful sense – they’re just people with superficial evolved differences from one another. In other words, there are no human races.
However, racists ignore such technicalities. They continue to call ethnic groups ‘races’, regardless of scientific evidence.
The problem is – so does everyone else, whether non-racist or antiracist. ‘Race’ is now widely considered to be a ‘social construct’. In that context, the word ‘race’ is used as a synonym for ethnicity.
The problem with that is that, as implied by the abstruse terminology, the concept of ‘social construct’ has complex academic origins. Not everyone gets it – and racists take full advantage of that confusion.
(There’s also no such thing, strictly speaking, as ‘the human race’ – but ‘the human subspecies’ isn’t catchy. ‘The human race’ is a harmless and inclusive phrase in common use – but ‘humanity’ is better.)
Racial profiling using IC codes can be useful to the UK police when identifying a suspect to other officers. However, it can also be abused by the police, for instance in the controversial and problematic practice of ‘stop and search‘. This dragnet practice continues to be used, especially in London, and especially against young black men.
The 1999 Macpherson inquiry into police mishandling of the racist murder of black Briton Stephen Lawrence famously concluded the London Metropolitan police force was institutionally racist.
Over 20 years later in 2020, the Met chiefsaid she’d implemented Macpherson’s recommendations, and the Met was now not institutionally racist.
However, in June 2021, a former Met chief superintendent, the highest-ranked ethnic-minority woman in the force (who retired in 2019 after being cleared of a gross misconduct charge, suing the Met for ethnicity and gender discrimination, and agreeing a confidential settlement), said the Met was still institutionally racist.
In December 2021, UK police chiefs were reported to be considering a public admission of institutional racism.
In March 2023, in the wake of the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Metropolitan police officer, it was reported that a government review found the Met to be not only institutionally misogynistic but also racist, corrupt and homophobic.
The superficial differences between populations are used – and abused – by the UK police. However, they also feature more positively in the complex self-declared ethnic categories used for the UK census and for discrimination monitoring.
Ethnicity is clearly related to ‘race’, but it’s relatively non-toxic. It’s used mainly to implement anti-discrimination practices and to support ideas of multiculturalism.
The concept of ethnicity allows people to identify themselves as, for instance, black British or Asian British, thereby voicing their own feelings about who they are in positive terms which include family origins, the colour of their skin, their nationality and their cultural allegiances.
(The word ‘Asian’ in ‘Asian British’ is short for South Asian and means having ethnic origins in the Indian subcontinent. See my post Asian, Indian, Pakistani – what’s in a name?)
‘Mixed race’ is frequently used as a description or self-description in the context of ethnicity. The problem with this epithet is that there are no human races. ‘Mixed ethnicity’ is better.
The widely used acronym for non-white ethnic minorities in the UK, BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic), and its less-used alternatives BME (black and minority ethnic) and BEM (black and ethnic minorities), not to mention BAMO (black, Asian, mixed or other ethnic group) are used to support antiracist and multicultural policies.
The intention is to redress the effects of personal and institutional colour prejudice (for instance, on mental health), but, perhaps because the phrase ‘colour prejudice’ is not in current use, linguistic difficulty and consequent controversy have ensued.
The US import, ‘person of colour‘, is considered acceptable (at the time of writing) but, perhaps inevitably, causes controversy.
Acronyms such as BAME are criticised for suggesting people whose ethnicity includes African ethnicity (‘black’) are racially different from those whose ethnicity includes South Asian ethnicity (‘Asian’) and from other ethnic minorities.
In 2021 the gov.uk website, under the heading ‘Writing about ethnicity’, said ‘BAME’ was ‘not helpful’:
The terms BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) and BME (black and minority ethnic) are not helpful descriptors because they emphasise certain ethnic minority groups (Asian and black) and exclude others (mixed, other and white ethnic minority groups). The terms can also mask disparities between different ethnic groups and create misleading interpretation of data.
In March 2021, the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities recommended the government stop using the term BAME.
One of the recommendations in our final report on COVID-19 disparities, published in December 2021, was to address specific ethnic minority groups rather than address ethnic minorities as a single group (through for example use of the term ‘BAME’). This was supported by research commissioned by the Race Disparity Unit (RDU), which found that British ethnic minority people are three times more likely to agree that the term ‘BAME’ is unhelpful than disagree.
[The wording of this government style guide has since been changed. but the gist is the same.]
That may seem reasonable, but without a collective term, how can the effects of institutional racism be understood? The Conservative government elected in 2019 was accused of seeking to downplay or even deny institutional racism.
The term ‘BAME’ might be disliked by most ethnic minority people, but a collective descriptor is essential to rooting out institutional racism. It’s been suggested the phrase ‘ethnic minority’ is better.
Then there’s the hot potato of identity politics[6], which enables people of a particular ethnicity or other identifying factor to develop a political agenda based on their identity and their sense of oppression.
The genetic variations found in different human populations are mainly superficial but they may:
have health implications
be used by the police to describe you
be used to discriminate against you
be part of your positive self-identity
inform your political action
The different populations aren’t races. There are no different races – we’re all ‘just’ human. But that makes no difference to racists. They’re happy to discriminate against their fellow humans if they’re not white.
Science shows there are no human races, but some say ‘race’ is a social construct that doesn’t have to be scientifically meaningful – it’s just a way of describing the different human populations.
According to Wikipedia, a social construct is a concept or category that exists due to shared agreement within a society, rather than being based on objective reality.
‘Race‘ as a social construct is used by non-racists as shorthand for populations of different ethnicity. It’s used in that way in speech by people of colour; and by both black and white writers and speakers in non-racist media. For instance, the liberal, antiracist UK Guardian happily describes Meghan Markle as ‘mixed race’.
But devious racists use the social construct idea to blur the issue and keep talking about ‘race‘ despite the evidence there are no races. Confusion between ethnicity and race is the loophole in the social construct through which racists can slip.
The social construct idea has complex theoretical academic origins. Not everyone gets it. Many people reading or hearing the word ‘race’ in the media, unaware of any ‘shared agreement’ about what it means, might understandably assume it refers to an objective reality and means what it says.
Many people reading or hearing the word ‘race’ will think – and will be encouraged to do so by loophole racists – that it means what it meant in the days of empire, slavery and Holocaust, when ‘races’, identified by appearance or culture (or both), were ranked in order of superiority, with white at the top and black at the bottom.
Despite its frequent use by non-racists as – supposedly – a social construct, the word ‘race‘ is fundamentally toxic and redundant. For antiracists, the solution to this linguistic dilemma is to abandon the flimsy social construct and stop using the word ‘race‘.
(‘Race‘ is, of course, implied in the word ‘racism‘ but until the misnamed thing ends, the word ‘racism’ will probably continue to be used, trailing its toxic root.)
‘Racism’ is the wrong word – because there are no races. However, until racism the thing ends, racism the word will probably continue to be used, trailing its toxic root, the word ‘race’ (long overdue for retirement, but surviving as a supposedly neutral social construct). But is there a better word or phrase?
‘Colour prejudice’ is more accurate than ‘racism’, but the phrase is out of fashion – and it doesn’t account for white-on-white anti-Judaism. Culture prejudice, also known as culturism could account for anti-Judaism.
But ‘culturism’ won’t do as a replacement for ‘racism’ – it’s too polite. ‘Prejudice’ might be thought a better term than ‘racism’ – but it’s too broad. There’s prejudice against minorities not identified by ethnicity or culture – like single mothers or the super-rich.
Other near-synonyms for racism, such as ‘bigotry’ and ‘bias’ are also too broad. The obscure term ‘ethnicism’ can be used as a more accurate synonym for racism but it also has different meanings, making it unsuitable.
As long as the thing (mis)named as racism exists, we need a word for it – and the word ‘racism’ apparently has no alternative. So for the time being, it’ll have to do – misnomer or not.
The misery of slavery has, of course, existed in nearly every culture, nationality, and religion from ancient times to the present day – with or without any ‘justification’. Estimates of the number of slaves today range from 21 to 46 million. Perhaps this shows humans have an innate capacity to see certain ‘categories’ of our fellow humans as ‘other‘.
Thought to be rare amongst hunter-gatherer populations, slavery really took off after the invention of agriculture about 11,000 years ago. Perhaps hunting and gathering was an interesting and sociable activity, whereas farming was boring and tedious. Perhaps thoughts turned to how to get someone else to do it for you, preferably for free. Farming led to city states, which led to warfare and captive slaves (and which later led to capitalism and wage slavery). Bingo!
The Bible condones slavery. Its claimed moral superiority was used by cynical racist colonialists and deluded missionaries to destroy indigenous African culture, but the ‘Good Book’ blithely accepts the fundamentally immoral practice of slavery.
For instance, in the Old Testament check the terms and conditions that follow the Ten Commandments. In Exodus 21:26 slavery is clearly accepted as perfectly normal.
The New Testament continues to accept slavery. For instance, in Ephesians 6:5, the letter writer, possibly ‘Saint’ Paul, urges slaves to obey their masters.
Jesus’s powerful message of meekness triumphant was cynically exploited by colonialist Christian missionaries to encourage African acceptance of the European occupation – and of slavery in the Americas.
(What would Jesus – apparently a real person and a radical teacher – think of such wickedness done in his name? Jesus said, Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, but that was coming from an occupied Jew, not from an imperialist Roman.)
The much-romanticised Anglo-Saxon age in Britain featured slavery, known as chattel slavery. Norman invader William the Conqueror is rightly hated for his legacy of land-grabbing aristocracy – see my post, The super-rich – law and order – but he did at least one good thing: he ended chattel slavery.
Four hundred years after the end of Saxon chattel slavery, European colonialists reinvented slavery. Bolstered by ideological racism, they latched onto existing African slavery systems and created the massive Atlantic slave trade, thereby instituting a whole new level of organised vicious inhumanity.
An estimated 12 million slaves were forced into the Atlantic trade between the 16th and 19th centuries. About four million died in Africa after capture, 1.5 million died on board ships, and 10.5 million reached the Americas to work on plantations.
The death rate on plantations was high, a result of overwork, poor nutrition and work conditions, brutality and disease. Many plantation owners preferred to import new slaves rather than provide the means and conditions for the survival of their existing slaves.
Kindness and conscience eventually prevailed. Opposition to slavery and to the slave trade began in the 1770s. The abolition of slavery was completed in the Caribbean by 1850; and in the US by 1865.
The US didn’t compensate the ‘owners’ of enslaved people, but the British did. Disgustingly, the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act required British ‘owners’ to be compensated.
The UK government borrowed £20m, equivalent today to £17bn. (It took until 2015 to complete the loan repayment.) 47,000 ‘owners’ got compensation.
No money and no apology has ever been given by the UK or the US to the enslaved people or their descendants.
As well as compensating ‘owners’, Britain managed to continue the racist brutality. Instead of being freed, enslaved people under British rule were forced to continue their slavery for four more years in the name of ‘apprenticeship‘.
Under the ‘apprenticeship’ regime, the brutal punishment for working too slowly or taking time off included being hung by the hands from a plank and forced to ‘dance’ a treadmill [2].
The legacy of slavery wasn’t quite so bad in the Caribbean. After abolition, former slaves were in the majority in the islands, and, after independence – achieved between 1962 (Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago) and 1983 (St Kitts and Nevis) – their descendants went on to assume power.
However, the UK African Caribbean minority – those who migrated to the UK in the 1950s and 60s and their descendants living in the UK – have faced, like the African American minority, prejudice and disadvantage (see below) due in part to the legacy of slavery.
The profits from slavery created vast wealth for white UK and US ‘owners’ of enslaved people. None of the perpetrators of that vile crime were held to account – and none of the proceeds were confiscated.
On the contrary, after the abolition of slavery, 47.000 – yes, 47 thousand – UK ‘owners’ were compensated by the UK government. On average, they got about £400,000 each by today’s values.
The African enslaved people were given nothing – except, in the case of US freed people, the famous broken promise of forty acres and a mule.
We white Europeans and Americans can humanely forgive our dead forebears their crimes against humanity if we want, but we’re obliged by justice to compensate the
victims’ heirs.
The German government has rightly paid over $90bn in compensation to the Holocaust survivors and the victims’ heirs.
But there’s a shameful lack of any equivalent compensation paid to the heirs of the victims of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas by the governments that permitted, colluded with and perpetrated those terrible crimes.
The descendants of enslaved people have been given nothing except the after-effect of slavery: devastating personal and institutional postcolonial racism.
Black descendants of of the victims of slavery understandably resist being seen wholly as victims themselves because it undermines their fight against racism. Nevertheless, they are victims – of post-slavery racism and, as such, they’re entitled by natural justice to compensation.
The hollocaust is hard to think about – but think about it we must. First, some history…
There’s been anti-Jewish racism since the Jews’ most recent exile from Israel by the Roman empire, and their consequent dispersion throughout Europe.
Exile and diaspora is the conventional narrative – but apparently it’s more complicated than that. Apparently, historically, there was no expulsion two thousand years ago.
But however it came about, Jewish diaspora communities lived in Europe. They lived mainly in productive harmony with host communities, but cynical anti-Jewish rabble-rousing led to outbreaks of racist violence, or ‘pogroms‘; and Christian and Muslim extremism led to persecution and expulsion.
The Granada massacre of 1066, a Muslim pogrom in which approximately 4,000 Jews were killed, marked the end of centuries of peaceful coexistence with a liberal Muslim regime in Spain.
The final Christian reconquest of Spain in the late 1400s led to approximately 2,000 Jews being executed by the Spanish Inquisition and to the eventual expulsion from Spain of over 50,000 Jews.
Savage pogroms continued all over Europe until as recently as the 1940s.
16th-century Christianity reformer Martin Luther publicly recommended the burning of synagogues. Protestant Luther’s beef with Judaism was supposedly theological – but his bitter hatred betrays something less ethereal.
Reformer and anti-Jewish racist Martin Luther | Painting: Lucas Cranach the Elder
(Ironically, Luther’s modern namesake, Protestant minister and black civil rights leader Martin Luther King, publicly spoke out against black anti-Judaism. He acknowledged Jewish participation in the civil rights movement and he actively – controversially – supported the state of Israel.)
Encouraged by the original Luther’s widely disseminated anti-Jewish rhetoric, 19th-century German ‘race’ theorists and philosophers ramped up the anti-Judaism.
Those 19th-century German ‘race’ theorists invented the pseudoscientific word ‘antisemitic’. (See my post on that ridiculous word for a tragic phenomenon, Antisemitism – anti-what??)
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is often accused of anti-Judaism. However, that reputation was created by his sister Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who edited his works after his mental breakdown in 1889 (from which he never recovered) and his death in 1900.
Nietzsche’s sister systematically falsified his writings to match her own virulent anti-Jewish racism. Nietzsche was arguably a protofascist, but he was deeply contemptuous of anti-Judaism and nationalism.
Förster-Nietzsche’s falsifications have since been corrected, but they were current in the 1920s and 30s. The main fakery was in the 1906 publication, The Will to Power.
Luther and Förster-Nietzsche were perpetuating derogatory stereotypes of Jews common in Europe for centuries, as exemplified in literature by Shakespeare’s Shylock and Dickens’s Fagin.
For instance, the ‘blood libel’ was a widespread anti-Jewish slur dating back at least as far as the tenth century CE. The blood libel – ridiculously – accused Jews of murdering Christian children to use their blood in the baking of Passover bread.
Such stereotypes found their ultimate expression in the fake but influential 1903 document, The Protocols of The Elders of Zion. The highly detailed document purported to reveal a Jewish plot for world domination.
The Protocols of The Elders of Zion was exposed as fraudulent in the early 1920s, but it was taught as factual to schoolchildren in 1930s Nazi Germany. It’s still touted around amongst modern conspiracy theory enthusiasts. (David Icke thinks the ‘Elders of Zion’ are actually extradimensional beings.) Anti-Jewish prejudice, unlike most other forms of racism, isn’t colour prejudice. It’s not a reaction to people’s skin colour – it’s white-on-white prejudice.
As with Islam, Judaism is a religion, not a ‘race’. But, alhough Judaism contains different ethnic strands, the European Jewish diaspora can be said to be a ‘population’, like African or South Asian people. In the social construct sense, they’re a ‘race’. But they’re not a population easily identifiable by appearance. So how does the prejudice arise?
Anti-Jewish prejudice must be a form of culturist racism: specifically – historically – prejudice against the Jewish diaspora, where people of a different culture came to live in or near a settled neighbourhood, not as individuals but as a self-contained community.
Such Jewish diaspora groups arrived at established communities throughout Europe as fringe communities. Romani travellers, also known as Gypsies, who kept moving rather than settling, were similarly outsiders – and were similarly wiped out in the Holocaust.
Jews – like Gypsies – are voluntarily outsiders, not wanting to integrate but keeping to themselves and to their own culture. This marks them out for prejudice – in that being different means being seen as a threat.
The cultural differences are actually harmless – Jews aren’t actually plotting to rule the world – it’s the difference itself that causes fear, probably mainly unconsciously, which manifests as racism.
Culturism, of course, works one way. Racism is power plus prejudice, so the power is with the European majority and the prejudice is against the outsider minority.
(Culturism, as well as underlying white-on-white anti-Judaism, probably also boosts white-on-black colour prejudice, in that a different skin colour indicates a different culture.)
European anti-Judaism climaxed in the 1940s in Nazi Germany with the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler’s insane, genocidal ‘final solution to the Jewish question’.
Hitler’s anti-Jewish fascism was boosted by:
Widespread, centuries-old European anti-Jewish stereotypes and culturist racism
The anti-Jewish writings of German uber-Protestant Martin Luther
Racist 19th-century German pseudoscientific ‘race’ theory
The protofascist ‘übermensch‘ writings of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
The anti-Jewish falsifications by Nietzsche’s fascist sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche in his posthumous book, The Will to Power.
The 1903 document The Protocols of Zion, exposed as fake in the 1920s but taught as factual in German schools in the 1930s
Racist, pseudoscientific US eugenics programmes funded by the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and John Kellogg.
Nazi Germany’s increasingly brutal 1930s anti-Jewish campaign ended in genocide when Jews were sent to extermination camps. In the death camps, the German state systematically murdered six million Jews.
Between 150,000 and 1.5 million Romani people were also murdered by the state.
For those of us who a) think about it and b) are not psychopathic racists, the Holocaust’s meticuously organised murder of six million Jews haunts our imagination. It’s difficult to imagine how people could have done that.
In 1961 the trial of high-ranking Nazi Adolph Eichmann took place in Israel. Eichmann, who’d been instrumental in organising the Holocaust, famously said he’d merely obeyed orders.
Yale professor Stanley Milgram, a US Jewish social psychologist, heard about Eichmann’s defence and posed this question:
What is there in human nature that allows an individual to act without any restraints whatsoever, so that he can act inhumanely, harshly, severely, and in no ways limited by feelings of compassion or conscience? My bolding
Milgram then conducted a famous and controversial series of ingenious experiments – with shocking results.
Milgram showed that ordinary people in thrall to white-coated authority figures were willing to inflict what they believed to be severe pain and even death on strangers. (The strangers were played by actors.)
Questions have understandably been raised about the ethics and methodology of Milgram’s experiments. Their relevance to the Holocaust has been questioned. But Milgram’s basic findings still hold true.
The Holocaust authority figures themselves must have had some form of empathy-deficient mental disorder such as psychopathy. But more disturbingly, in that situation ordinary people were able to set aside their empathy.
Perhaps, however, the Holocaust executioners were not only acting in blind obedience to authority, but were also indulging an instinctive racist urge.
Ironically, extreme nationalism – a main factor in the Holocaust – is now a charge made against the powerful US-backed state of Israel in its ongoing conflict with Palestinian people, many of whom were expelled from their homes and homeland during the controversial establishment of the state, which began in 1948.
Equally ironically, the number of Palestinian people registered as refugees (in 2025) is six million. (There are about seven million Jewish people living in Israel.)
Following an attack on Israel in October 2023 by Hamas, the militant group running the Palestinian Gaza Strip, Israel launched the one-sided Gaza ‘war’ against Hamas during which many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, including children, have been killed or seriously injured by the IDF – the Israeli ‘defence’ forces.
Mahmoud Ajjour, nine, lost both arms during an Israeli attack on Gaza City | Photo: Samar Abu Elouf / New York Times
The International Criminal Court (ICC) accused the Israeli premier of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and – in the final irony – Israel was accused of genocide.
Note, May 2025: Rightwing Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu, accused by the ICC in 2024 of war crimes and crimes against humanity, has been on trial in Israel since 2020 on multiple charges of corruption. In the last (proportional representation) election in 2022, he got 23% of the vote and was able to form a governing coalition with far-right groups. To keep their support and stay in power, he continues the all-out war on Hamas and continues killing Gazan civilians. Is Israel suffering from collective post-Holocaust PTSD psychosis?
(The next election is due in October 2026.)
Supporters of the Palestinian cause who criticise Israeli Zionism are accused (perhaps correctly in some cases) of anti-Jewish racism. And so it goes.
A June 2018 news report said a major Israeli winery faced calls for a customer boycott after its chief executive admitted to discriminating against employees of Ethiopian origin to accommodate demands from devout Ashkenazi (Jews of European origin) hardliners, who’d questioned whether all the Ethiopians were Jewish, and, therefore, whether the wine was kosher.
A Sephardi (Jews of North African origin) chief rabbi reportedly said there could be no explanation other than ‘pure racism’.
Outside Israel, despite the terrible lesson of the Holocaust, anti-Judaism continues to thrive.
A 2008report by the US department of state found there was an increase in anti-Judaism across the world, and both old and new expressions of anti-Judaism persisted.
A 2012report by the US bureau of democracy, human rights and labor noted a continued global increase in anti-Judaism, and found Holocaust denial and opposition to Israeli policy were used to promote or justify anti-Judaism.
Is there a gene for racism? Ideological, ‘scientific’ racism is now known to be rubbish, but still it creeps on. The racist legacy of the slave trade and the Holocaust continues to grow and spread, perhaps feeding on an instinctive drive.
We now know there are no different human ‘races’, but racism persists. The name’s wrong, but the thing’s real – real but wrong. Racism persist because racists don’t really care about science. They’re just prejudiced against non-white ethnic groups – and Jews (see above).
I’m disgusted – perhaps with presentist hindsight – by my colonising, slave-trading, Jew-hating European forbears. Like Roy Harper, (in that context) I hate the white man and his plastic excuse – but I also blame the genes.
As for being disgusted with one’s criminal ancestors, that only helps if it leads to justice for the victims.
The German government has paid substantial compensation to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust and their heirs. Disgracefully, the heirs of the victims of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas have been paid nothing.
I’m pro-immigration but I suggest the careless implementation of postwar mass immigration and the more recent adoption by many UK Muslims of separatist Salafism have inevitably provoked racism.
If racism’s based on an instinct that’s mainly redundant but still active, then it can be provoked by mass immigration.
As a pro-immigration liberal antiracist married to a Muslim woman of Pakistani ethnic origin (whose family emmigrated to the UK from Kenya in the 1960s), I’m well aware this is a thorny subject. However, donning the gardening gloves of reason and goodwill, I’ll, er, grasp the nettle.
This section addresses in detail the painful truth – understandably but unhelpfully much avoided by liberals – that mass immigration to the UK has provoked racism in the host community.
The immigrants – apart from the minority of UK Muslims who practice racism-provoking self-segregation (see below) – are blameless. The blame lies with the patrician administrators who – twice recently – have ordained mass immigration for economic reasons with no thought for the social wellbeing of host or immigrant communities.
On the first occasion, at the end of World War II mass immigration from colonies and former colonies was considered necessary to help rebuild Britain. Cue Enoch Powell (see below) and the National Front.
On the second occasion, the enlargement of the European Union and the UK’s lax interpretation of the EU principle of free movement of people led to unrestricted immigration to the UK from relatively poor East European countries (see below). Cue UKIP and Brexit.
In both instances, if the host community had been consulted, had agreed large-scale immigration was necessary and had been prepared for two-way cultural integration, there might have been a more welcoming atmosphere.
Recent large-scale migrations to Europe from the Middle East and Africa (see below) have also provoked racism.
Those refugees and economic migrants are driven to leave their homes (often going into debt to pay traffickers) by the cruelty of corrupt autocrats who go effectively unchallenged by the international community.
The corrupt and brutal autocracy in Syria (where civil war has created 14 million displaced people and refugees, one million of whom have sought refuge in Europe) is not only unchallenged by the international community but is supported by a superstate, Putin’s corrupt and brutal Russia.
Warning
The idea that mass immigration provokes racism can be misunderstood as racist propaganda. Some antiracists, wedded to the liberal defence of immigration, see any criticism of mass immigration as victim-blaming and a racist ‘numbers game’.
It’s a bit like any criticism of Zionism being seen as anti-Jewish.
(For instance, see the hostile response by UK antiracist thinktank the Institute for Race Relations to a letter from me in the UK Guardian newspaper [3].)
There’s not much racism in the UK, is there? We might have been brutal in the empire and in Ireland, but back home, on the whole, we’re a welcoming, tolerant country, aren’t we?
Well, not really. Our mainly dormant – possibly innate – racism has been provoked by recent mass immigration.
There have, of course, been invasions and migrations of people from far and wide into Britain for thousands of years (including, briefly, North African Roman soldiers and their families). We’re a mongrel nation.
The last successful invasion was the Norman conquest in 1066. (The so-called Glorious Revolution in 1688 was technically a successful invasion, but was actually a relatively bloodless coup by the ruling elite.)
After 1066, we English were mainly Anglo-Saxon peasants (English-speaking, of German origin) with a French-Norman ruling class (French-speaking, of Scandinavian origin), with some Britons and Vikings.
People from all over the world continued to migrate here from time to time – but mass immigration is a recent phenomenon.
Mass migration to the UK began in 1948 after World War Two (with the arrival of the Empire Windrush ship from Jamaica) when a paternalistic government, without consulting the people, enabled and encouraged large-scale immigration from some countries in the colonies and the Commonwealth (a voluntary association of former UK colonies).
The British Nationality Act 1948 gave all colonial and Commonwealth citizens the status of ‘citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’ and recognised their right to work and settle in the UK and to bring their families with them.
There was a perceived need for large-scale immigration to help rebuild Britain’s shattered economy – and to boost falling population numbers.
The 1949Royal Commission on Population Report said (in Chapter 12) that to prevent a decline in the numbers of young people, 170,000 immigrants a year would be required. But the report cautioned:
Even, however, if it were found practicable to secure a net inward balance of migration on anything like this scale, we should have to face serious problems of assimilation … Immigration on a large scale into a fully established society like ours could only be welcomed without reserve if the immigrants were of good human stock and were not prevented by their religion or race from intermarrying with the host population and becoming merged in it … There is little or no prospect that we should be able to apply these conditions to large scale immigration.
In revealing contrast, the UK’s great and good said, in effect:
Give me immigrants of good human stock
Disregarding that snobbish patrician crap, the commission gave a sobering warning: there was little or no prospect of a friendly welcome or of successful assimilation.
The tragic fulfilment of that forecast had nothing to do with the quality of the ‘human stock’, and everything to do with their racist reception.
In spite of the commission’s clear verdict that mass immigration would not succeed, politicians ploughed ahead with their policy of encouraging it.
(Policy makers continue to sanction mass immigration for economic reasons or due to neoliberal ideology with the same lack of concern for the social well-being of either host or immigrant communities.)
Most postwar immigrants came from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan. This immigration continued through the 1950s, 60s and 70s.
Also, from 1968-74, South Asian communities in Kenya and Uganda (former British colonies in East Africa) were made or encouraged to leave, and were able to come to the UK.
Indigenous British people hadn’t been consulted. Sadly, many resented the sudden appearance of large numbers of dark-skinned foreigners – with, in the case of those from India and Pakistan, foreign languages and religions.
Poignantly, many immigrants say they expected a welcoming atmosphere. Instead, they faced hostility, personal racism and an unoffical colour-bar, meaning exclusion from lodgings, pubs and churches, etc.
Polls have repeatedly shown that opposition to immigration persists. However, that persistent undercurrent of resentment isn’t only anti-immigrant – it’s also a resentment of imposed change.
For instance, the 1950s exercise was repeated more recently when the UK government, again without consulting the people, allowed mass immigration from poor east European countries under the freedom of movement rule of the European Union (EU). (See below.) Most western EU member states exercised their right to restrict such immigration, but the UK didn’t.
Finally given a say, in a 2016referendum, the UK electorate then voted – by a small majority, but unexpectedly – to leave the EU.
An insightful post-referendum analysis* by acclaimed UK weekly The Economist showed that although immigration was a major factor, the high numbers of migrants didn’t bother Britons so much as the high rate of change.
* The Economist article isn’t readable without a subscription.
In the 1950s there was also large-scale immigration from Ireland. Many Irish immigrants experienced racism (if not colourism). Signs in lodging house windows are supposed – perhaps apocryphally (deep googling produced no convincing photos) – to have said, ‘No blacks, no Irish, no dogs’.
Such white-on-white English prejudice aginst Irish people is no doubt a relic of the long and troubled history of England’s brutal colonialisation of Ireland.
The 1950s immigrants were – supposedly – needed to meet the labour requirements of postwar reconstruction by working in the newly created National Health Service and nationalised public utilities, such as London transport.
The 1950s and 60s saw a very low rate of unemployment as a result of the postwar ‘boom’. These factors probably mitigated the resentment and racism, but it certainly existed – and, sadly, still does, especially in the older generation.
1957: many women came from India to work as nurses in the newly created NHS | Photo Popperfoto/Getty Images
The term ‘darkies’, common then but now rightly banished (although apparently in current use in the world of black-on-black shadism), was crude and insensitive, but not necessarily hostile.
In the wake of postwar mass immigration and the racism it provoked, organised racist groups emerged, but have never had mass support. They peaked in the 1970s after Enoch Powell’s notorious speech.
After the intial culture shock of postwar mass immigration, relations between immigrant and host communities gradually became friendlier and more relaxed, but resentment and racism persisted, resulting in occasional outbursts, like the 1958Notting Hill riots, and, in 1962, tighter immigration controls.
However, a rising tide of antiracism led to anti-discrimination laws in 1965 and 1968.
Then, in 1968, came Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech, in which Powell, then Conservative shadow (opposition party) defence minister, criticised colonial and Commonwealth immigration and anti-discrimination law – and forecast race war.
An over-educated racist, Powell forecast coloured immigrant communities clashing with indigenous white communities. He quote the Roman poet Virgil, who, in about 30 BCE, foresaw the River Tiber foaming with blood.
(Powell’s queasy mixture of classical referencing and political psychosis brings to mind a more recent politician: Boris Johnson.)
Powell was sacked from the shadow cabinet. His career was effectively over, and he sank into richly deserved political obscurity. But he’d touched a nerve. London dock workers went on strike to support him. (The dockers had form – in the 1930s, many of them marched with Oswald Mosley‘s fascist, anti-Jewish Blackshirts.)
‘Don’t knock Enoch’ – striking dockers march on Parliament | Photo: Getty
Powell touched a nerve, not just with the militant dockers, but with many ordinary people. It was the first time an elected representative had publicly voiced people’s resentment of imposed mass immigration.
Hostility to postwar immigration, as expressed by Powell and his supporters, contributed to the 1971 Immigration Act, which limited the right to reside in the UK to those with a prior link (such as a parent or grandparent born here).
Powell’s speech is still remembered, 50 years later. People looking for an excuse for racism still say, ‘Powell was right’.
However, in what he actually said, Powell was wrong. His stirring verse failed to mask the banal stink of racism. Powell couldn’t imagine black and white getting on together. His forecast – that irreconcilable ‘racial’ differences would cause mass blood-letting civil disturbance – was false prophecy.
There have been occasional ‘race riots’ – arising from injustice – but there’s been no foaming of blood. Instead, most citizens have accepted a pragmatic mixture of multiculturalism and integration.
We hippies imagined all the people living life in peace in a great big melting pot. (We overlooked Lennon’s hypocrisy and Melting Pot’sdodgy lyrics.) Happily, thanks largely to antiracist campaigning and legislation, that’s more or less how it’s been.
Despite the disturbing spike in racism following the UK’s 2016 EU referendum (see above), younger people generally seem far less racist and colourist than previous generations. However, racial prejudice persists.
Despite a lessening of racial tension, Britons with African Caribbean and South Asian ethnicity (now comprising about 14 percent of the UK population) continue to face prejudice and discrimination, institutional and otherwise.
For instance, a 2017 UK government ‘racial disparity audit’ found the rate of white people in work was higher than that of ethnic minorities – with a larger gap in the North (13.6 percent) than the South (9 percent) – and those from non-white backgrounds were under-represented at senior levels in public sector jobs. The survey findings were displayed in a government website, Ethnicity Facts and Figures.
Also, 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 – soft-nosed impact projectiles fired from a single shot launcher, often called ‘rubber bullets’).
The figures showed black people experienced 12% of the 313,000 use-of-force incidents in 2017-18, despite constituting only 3.3% of the population according to the 2011 census. White people, constituting 86% of the population, experienced a more proportionate 73% of use-of-force incidents.
Black people were subjected to an even higher proportion of incidents where police used firearms (26%) and Tasers or AEPs (20%). By contrast, white people were proportionately less likely to be subjected to the use of firearms (51%) and Tasers or AEPs (67%).
Black Britons also suffer discrimination in the criminal justice system and disproportionate mental health problems.
In 2017 the UK government commissioned the Lammy Review, an independent review by Labour MP David Lammy into the treatment of, and outcomes for, black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals in the criminal justice system (CJS).
The review found significant over-representation. Despite making up just 14% of the population, minority ethnic men and women made up 25% of prisoners, while over 40% of young people in custody were from minority ethnic backgrounds.
If the prison population reflected the make-up of England and Wales, there would be over 9,000 fewer people in prison – the equivalent of 12 average-sized prisons. There’s greater disproportionality in the number of black people in prisons in the UK than in the United States. These disproportionate numbers represent wasted lives and a source of anger and mistrust.
The independent review found that many of the causes of over-representation lay outside the CJS, as did the answers to it. People from a black background were more than twice as likely to live in poverty as those from a white background. Black children were more than twice as likely to grow up in a lone-parent family. Black and mixed-ethnicity boys were more likely than white boys to be permanently excluded from school and to be arrested as a teenager.
The review found these issues started long before a young man or woman entered the CJS and therefore couldn’t be addressed by the CJS alone.
However, the review found that ethnic minority individuals faced bias, including overt, covert and unconscious discrimination, in the CJS; and more could be done to reduce the proportion of ethnic minority individuals in the CJS and to ensure all defendants and offenders were treated equally, whatever their ethnicity.
The Lammy Review findings were reinforced by January 2020 research published by UK advisory body the Sentencing Council. The research report found black and minority ethnic offenders were far more likely to be sent to prison for drug offences than other defendants.
The odds of a black offender getting an immediate custodial sentence were 1.4 times the odds for a comparable white offender. For South Asian offenders and those in other ethnic groups, the odds were 1.5 times greater.
South Asian offenders got custodial sentences 4% longer than those for white offenders.
Lammy said these figures built on the findings of his review, which recommended prosecutions against some black and minority-ethnic suspects be deferred or dropped to help tackle bias in the system.
One particular aspect of ethnic minority over-representation in the CJS deserves special attention: the wrongful convictions of black ‘gang’ members under the legal doctrine of ‘joint enterprise’.
Many young black men have been wrongfully convicted in the UK under the common-law doctrine of joint enterprise. This long-established principle allows defendants to be found guilty of offences committed by another person if they ‘agreed’ to act together in a joint enterprise.
A 2014 government committee report found clear evidence of disproportionality in ‘joint enterprise convictions:
Almost 500 people were convicted of murder between 2005 and 2013 as secondary parties in joint-enterprise cases.
A large proportion of those convicted were young black or mixed-ethnicity men. Many offences were recorded as gang-related attacks.
37% of those serving very long sentences for joint enterprise offences were black (11 times the proportion of black people in the general population, and almost three times as many as in the prison population).
A charity, Joint Enterprise – Not Guilty by Association (JENGbA), told the committee 80% of the convicts they were helping were black. According to JENGbA, joint enterprise was targeting the most marginalised sections of society, and was having the effect of breaking communities apart.
The committee’s report suggested two main reasons for the disproportionate impact of joint enterprise on young black men:
Black and minority ethnicity men might be over-represented in the kinds of communities where young men typically hung around in groups labelled by outsiders as gangs.
An association might exist unconsciously in the minds of the police, prosecutors and juries between being a young ethnic-minority male and being in a gang, and therefore being involved in forms of urban violence.
This personal and institutional prejudice could be subtle. For instance, the word ‘gang’ was often used, rather than ‘group’, in public discourse about crime to signal ethnicity rather than to describe the links within a group of suspects.
The 2017 Lammy Review (see above) found there was a settled narrative about young ethnic minority people associating in gangs, but far too little attention paid to the older criminals who provided them with weapons and used them to sell drugs; and the criminal justice system must avoid equating gang membership with young people simply associating in groups.
The London Criminal Courts Solicitors’ Association in its submission to the Lammy Review said in the absence of educational or employment progression, or ambition, it may have become a default position for ethnic minority youngsters to fall in with a ‘gang’ offering certainty of identity and rewards, albeit high-risk and short-term.
The review, noting that children as young as twelve were being recruited by gang leaders to sell drugs, urged the prosecution service to review its role in protecting vulnerable individuals who were coerced into gang activities by powerful adults.
People from UK ethnic minorities, especially young black men, have disproportionately died in custody. Major factors were said to be racism and the use of excessive force.
‘Deaths of people from BAME communities, in particular young black men, resonate with the black community’s experience of systemic racism, and reflect wider concerns about discriminatory over-policing, stop and search, and criminalisation.’
The government response to the report promised some reforms but contained no reference to the ethnicity of those who died in police custody.
In 2018, UN human rights experts expressed serious concerns about racism ‘rooted in the fabric of UK society’. Their 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. The report said:
‘The deaths reinforce the experiences of structural racism, over-policing and criminalisation of people of African descent and other minorities in the UK.’
My bolding
Data disclosed by the Metropolitan Police in August 2017 showed people of African descent and those belonging to ethnic minority groups, in particular young African and African Caribbean men were twice as likely to die as white people after the use of force by police officers and the subsequent lack or insufficiency of access to appropriate healthcare.
According to the UN experts, these deaths occurred in many circumstances, following the use of force involving:
Firearms
Tear gas agents
Long-handled batons
Electroshock weapons (Tasers)
Physical restraint resulting in the inhibition of the respiratory system and asphyxia
Restraint equipment
Denial of appropriate healthcare
The UK governmentreportedly responded to the concerns of the UN experts by recognising that further improvements were needed to develop solutions on healthcare in police custody, inquests and legal aid, and support to families.
Black people in the UK also suffer disproportionately from mental health problems as a result of institutional and personal racism.
Black British and Asian British communities have strong cultural taboos about mental health problems. Such taboos stop individuals accessing NHS services. This is most prevalent in the black community.
Paradoxically, however, UK men of African Caribbean ethnic origin were 17 times more likely than white men to be diagnosed with serious mental health conditions such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and four times more likely to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
The disturbing statistics also showed black people were six times more likely than white people to be inpatients in mental health units; and, because of cultural pressures in the black community, they reported mental health issues significantly later than white people. Such delays deepened any problems, and led to more black people being sectioned.
Concern has been expressed about the level of state violence inflicted on black people detained in psychiatric settings, and the routine use of Taser firearms in hospital settings.
Mental illness is no more common in Africa or the Caribbean than in the UK – but an American Psychological Association paper showed racism can make people mentally ill. Immigrants were generally more likely to develop mental illness than the host community – but the risk was doubled for black migrants to white-majority countries, and the risk was increased again in their children.
Racism is always prejudice plus power. Racism experienced by people of African Caribbean ancestry living in the white-majority UK has carried – in addition to the toxic baggage of empire experienced by all generations of postwar colonial and Commonwealth immigrants – the painful legacy of slavery. Black people in the white US had similarly disproportionate mental health problems.
Mental health services stand accused of institutional racism in their treatment of black patients. The racist notion of black male mental health patients as ‘big, black and dangerous’[4] is said to prevail in institutional service settings.
A 2018 independent review of the Mental Health Act, 1983, commissioned in 2017 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 the official responses to the review’s final report.
The review process included a Mental Health Act Review African and Caribbean group, due to make recommendations on ensuring people of African and Caribbean descent with mental health challenges got the treatment and support they needed when and where they needed it; and had their dignity, liberty and autonomy respected as far as possible.
The group, which reported directly to review chair Simon Wessely, proposed to:
Look at the implementation and practice of the Mental Health Act as experienced by people of African and Caribbean descent or heritage
Identify and evaluate relevant evidence and data to support recommendation development
Identify and appraise aspects of relevant legislation, and issues that impact people of African and Caribbean descent
Identify effective practice and propose solutions to identified issues, which would work in the best interests of people of African and Caribbean descent
The review’s final report said black people were four times more likely to be detained under the ‘outdated’ Mental Health Act than white people. Such detention enabled patients to be kept on a secure ward and treated against their will.
The review said the Mental Health Act was still necessary so people who were a risk to themselves or others could be held. However, it said patients were too often denied a say in treatment – which could include electroconvulsive therapy.
It also said there was a need to challenge bias (said to be largely unconscious) against ethnic minority patients which led to the excessive use of restraint and community treatment orders.
Black patients were subjected to these orders at nearly ten times the rate of whitepatients. Those subject to such orders were required to keep to strict conditions – medication regimes, assessment schedules and living arrangements – or risk being returned to hospital.
In an initial response to the review, the government promised to legislate for two of the review’s 150 recommendations. This would allow those detained under the Act to:
Nominate a person of their choice to be involved in decisions about their care
Express their preferences for care and treatment, and have these listed in statutory ‘advance choice’ documents
These proposed improvements didn’t address the review’s ‘burning injustice’ of people from ethnic minorities being disproportionately sectioned – albeit they might help to reduce the subsequent mistreatment of black patients.
In any case, the review’s ‘burning injustice’ clarion call apparently fell on deaf ears. The initial government response said the review was meant to improve the Mental Health Act, following (among other issues) ‘racial disparities’ in detention under the Act. In all the published responses – by the government, premier May and two other stakeholders – that was the only mention of the systemic racism highlighted by the report.
It was the policy of the UK Tory government to deny systemic racism following a whitewashing 2021 review set up after Black Lives Matter protests. The review[18] found there was ‘no evidence’ of ‘institutional racism’.
But in January 2023 a UN working group[19] of experts on people of African descent accused the UK of failing to address systemic racism against black people. An interim statement highlighted concerns:
‘We have serious concerns about impunity and the failure to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system, deaths in police custody, ‘joint enterprise’ convictions and the dehumanising nature of stop and search.’
‘We strongly reject most of these findings. The report wrongly views people of African descent as a single homogeneous group and presents a superficial analysis of complex issues that fails to look at all possible causes of disparities, not just race. We are proud that the UK is an open, tolerant and welcoming country but this hard-earned global reputation is not properly reflected in this report.’
The racism provoked – but not excused – by postwar mass immigration persists, if mainly as an unseen undercurrent. It has serious consequences, especially for young black men.
These consequences are acknowledged by society and government but are inadequately addressed.
Above the ongoing undercurrent of postwar racism, there’s a new wave of conflict between immigrant and host communities. This racism-provoking conflict is between some UK Muslims and, er, the UK.
Islam isn’t a ‘race’, of course. But most western Muslims have ethnic origins in South Asia or North Africa. This section addresses in detail how some imported Muslim behaviour has provoked racist hostility.
Many South Asian immigrants to the UK in the 1950s and 60s were Muslims (mostly from Pakistan, which then included East Pakistan, now Bangladesh).
As in the world Muslim population, some 90 percent of UK Muslims are Sunni. Since the 1980s, many UK Muslims have been influenced by an extreme version of Sunnism.
Oil-rich Saudi Arabia has spent billions over the last four decades on an international programme to replace mainstream Sunnism with Wahhabism/Salafism, a Sunni-based extreme fundamentalist ‘true’ version of Islam.
This programme has funded religious teachers, faith schools and mosques in the UK and elsewhere. Reviews and surveys (see below) indicate this ideology has been adopted by a large minority of UK Muslims.
There are now two main sources of racism-provoking conflict between some UK Muslims and the host community, both deriving from Saudi-exported Salafism:
Deliberate self-segregation
A supportive or ambivalent attitude towards Islamist terrorism
When Muslims are criticised with regard to these issues, representatives often avoid answering the criticism by describing it as Islamophobia.
The main source of racism-provoking conflict between some UK Muslims and the host community is that over the last 40 years many UK Muslims have become increasingly self-segregated.
Most colonial and Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants integrated naturally, whilst keeping their languages, traditions and religions – by just living here. However, many Muslims, having originally done that, began in the 1980s and 90s to segregate themselves in accordance with the widely adopted Saudi-exported Salafi version of Islam.
Expressions of the self-segregation practised by some UK Muslims include:
The wearing of Arabic clothing
Separatist education
Acceptance or encouragement of female genital mutilation (FGM)
Changes in clothing are an obvious sign of the segregation fostered by Saudi-exported separatist Islam.
In the 1970s, UK Muslim women (mostly of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin) generally wore either a salwar kameez (a traditional outfit originating in the Punjab region, now popular throughout South Asia) or western clothes, sometimes with a loose headscarf. Muslim men wore mainly western clothes.
Now, many UK Muslim women wear Arabic clothing, including an abaya, a full-length shapeless robe, usually black, with a hijab, a tight nun-like headscarf. Some wear a niqab, an eye-slit veil, or a burqa, a one-piece garment covering the head, face and body, often having a mesh screen to see through. Some also wear black gloves, all year round.
None of these are specifically prescribed by the Quran, which said women should dress more modestly than was the custom at the time by covering their breasts with their headscarves and by not dressing in a way that flaunted their bodies. In a separate verse the Quran says women should ‘draw’ their cloaks or shawls when they go out. (Depending on the interpretation, this might have meant over their heads, or it might have meant also over their faces.)
Face veils aren’t Islamic clothing – their use predates Islam.
Despite the frequent use in general discourse of the Arabic word ‘hijab‘ to describe the tight headscarves worn by some Muslim women (and the use of ‘Hijabi’ to describe the wearer) there’s no Quranic derivation. The word is only used in the Quran in another sense, meaning a partition or curtain. The Arabic words abaya, niqab and burqa are also not in the Quran.
Most UK Muslim men continue to wear western clothes. Some now wear a traditional longer men’s version of a shalwar kameez; and some now wear an Arabicthawb (or thobe), a long robe, usually white, especially on Fridays for the mosque visit.
The eye-slit niqab and the one-piece burqa, banned in some European countries, provoke controversy, criticism and, unfortunately, racism. When worn in Europe, they create an impression of deliberate separation, nicely symbolising the current tendency for some Muslims living in the west to segregate themselves.
Presumably, Islam’s origin in the Arabian Peninsula is said to be the reason some UK Muslims – many of Pakistani origin – now wear Arabic clothing. But the practice was instigated in the 1980s by Saudi Arabian propagators of separatist Islam.
There’s no religious reason for wearing Arabic clothing. Its cultural effect is to emphasise self-segregation and to provoke Islamophobic racism.
Separatist Islamic teachers exported to the UK or trained here as part of the Saudi Salafi/Wahhabi programme have been criticised for their illiberal views, especially on homosexuality and women’s equality.
For instance, in 2016 a UK Islamic faith school lost its appeal against education watchdog Ofsted, which placed the school in special measures because it had library books that said a wife can’t refuse sex and a husband can beat his wife if it’s not done ‘harshly’. The judge said the books contained views inimical to fundamental British values.
Ofsted’s 2017 annual report, in a section headed ‘Shared values’, strongly criticised private faith schools that deliberately resist ‘British values’.
The Ofsted report said:
A core function of education is to teach the values and culture that bind society
There’s no conflict between such teaching and religious pluralism
Teaching fundamental British values encourages respect and tolerance for others’ views
The report identified schools that sought to isolate young people from the mainstream, that failed to prepare them for life in Britain. Such schools disseminated beliefs that clashed with British values or equalities law.
In some of the faith schools found to be inadequate, the premises were unsafe, dank and squalid. Basic checks, such as whether staff were suitable to work with children, weren’t in place. Ofsted inspectors found instances of:
Sectarian and sexist texts that encouraged domestic violence and the subjugation of women (for instance a book titled Women Who Deserve to Go to Hell)
Refusal to acknowledge lesbian, gay and bisexual people
Children being taught mainly religious texts with a restricted curriculum leaving them with little or no ability to read and write in English, no qualifications, no skills to get work, and no preparation for life in modern Britain
In some cases, children were being educated illegally in unregistered faith schools with no safeguards to make sure they were safe and receiving a decent education. Such schools exploited loopholes in definitions of education, and were deliberately not registered to avoid regulation.
The report said legislation was inadequate to tackle unregistered schools. There was no record of children who’d never been in school, and there was no requirement to register a child being home-educated. Parents could decline a home visit by the local authority.
The report section concluded this matters because the ‘British values’ of democracy, tolerance, individual liberty, mutual respect and the rule of law are the principles that keep society free from the radical and extreme views that can lead to violence. bbb
The 2017 Ofsted report’s criticism of unregulated faith schools was clearly aimed at some Muslim schools, but, weirdly, the report didn’t specify which faith the problem faith schools belonged to (apart from naming Al-Hijrah School, a Birmingham Muslim school, as an example of bad practice).
This could only have been because of an exaggeration of the worthy, politically correct, liberal multiculturalism that – quite rightly – pervades public sector institutions. Multiculturalism is currently under attack, and the misguided multiculturalists who prevent criticism of separatist Islam help no one.
A 2016 independent review into opportunity and integration found segregation at worrying levels (see below). It blamed cultural misogyny and patriarchy but also blamed public bodies that ignore or condone divisive religious practices for fear of being called racist or Islamophobic.
In spite of the problem faith schools not being openly identified in the Ofsted report, it’s clear that many of the schools criticised were Muslim schools whose aim was to promote separatist Islam, to segregate pupils from mainstream society, and to resist ‘British values’.
(My post, Patriotism – for scoundrels addresses the UK policy of trying to encourage integration by teaching ‘British values’ in schools. I suggest such values aren’t exclusively British – they’re European Enlightenment values.)
A year later, the 2018 Ofsted report expressed continued concern about unregistered faith schools.
In the 2018 report overview, ‘HMCI [Her Majesty’s chief inspector] commentary’, under the heading ‘Regulation and inspection powers’, Ofsted head Amanda Spielman said her power to intervene in such settings on behalf of young people remained too limited.
Spielman said the continuing problems associated with such schools included:
A lack of consistent oversight or quality assurance
Education and pastoral support often not of the level children should expect
Young people who’d left such settings unable to read English and without basic maths
Some settings operated by those with fundamentalist religious beliefs, leading to a risk of radicalisation
Faith settings such as yeshivas and madrasas providing religious instruction for five and sometimes six days a week, from early in the morning to late into the evening
However, the 2018 Ofsted report said too often, when inspectors identified a setting putting children at risk, current legislation was too weak to allow Ofsted to close it down or prosecute the people running it. A lack of proper definition of ‘full-time’ education allowed providers to continue running potentially dangerous institutions.
Regarding independent registered faith schools, the 2018 Ofsted report said inspection outcomes remained substantially weaker for faith schools than for non-faith schools. Only just over half of faith schools were judged good or outstanding, compared with three quarters of non-faith schools. Nearly a quarter of all faith schools were judged inadequate at their most recent standard inspection.
Jewish schools came out marginally worst. Only Forty-six percent of Jewish schools were judged good or outstanding at their most recent inspection, compared with fifty-two percent of Muslim schools and sixty-three percent of Christian schools.
Ofsted apparently accepts that registered faith schools have a place in British society – as long as they teach the values and culture that bind society. (Such teaching is, in any case – regardless of Ofsted’s enthusiasm for it – a legal requirement for independent schools in England.)
However, a 2018opinion poll found a large majority of a representative sample of the British public was opposed to religious influence in education.
The poll didn’t distinguish between different religions, and therefore didn’t identify Muslim schools as the main problem with faith schools. Neither – explicitly – did either of the two annual Ofsted reports referred to here. Perhaps both Ofsted and the commissioner of the poll wished to avoid accusations of Islamophobia. (See above.) Nevertheless, Muslim schools clearly are where the main problem lies, in both public perception and official reporting.
The problem with some Muslim schools, whether registered or not and regardless of their comparative inspection outcomes, is that they preach separatism and take religious influence to extremes. In so doing, such schools contribute significantly to the racism-provoking self-segregation practised by some UK Muslims.
Female genital mutilation (FGM) or cutting (also euphemistically known as female circumcision) is another high-profile imported behaviour which emphasises the racism-provoking self-segregation of some UK Muslims.
FGM has traditional pre-Islamic roots but has been adopted by some strands of Islam and is promoted by Salafism as a religious obligation.
Predating Islam in its African origin, FGM was later adopted by some strands of Islam, mainly in North Africa and the Middle East, and has recently been imported to the UK by Saudi clerics, Somalian refugees and by other, non-Muslim, African migrants.
Islam in Somalia was traditionally Sufi, but many Somali Muslims now follow Saudi-exported Salafism. Although no FGM procedures are required in the Quran, Salafism promotes FGM, and it’s widely considered to be a religious requirement by Somali Muslims.
Some 9,000 cases were logged by the NHS in 2016-17, mostly in pregnant women of African ethnic origin, and mostly carried out outside the UK. It’s thought these recorded cases might be the tip of an iceberg, with over 50,000 girls at risk of FGM in the UK.
FGM has been illegal in the UK since 1985 but, so far, there’s only been one conviction – of the Ugandan mother of a three-year-old girl.
Police found evidence of witchcraft, including spells aimed at silencing professionals involved in the case. The convicted woman wasn’t a Muslim, but the evidence of witchcraft shows the level of superstition involved in this pointless tradition, and belies the pseudo-medical justification for FGM given on Muslim Salafi advice websites (see below).
Somali parents are known to take their daughters home for FGM. Others club together to import cutters. This practice has led to FGM tourism, as people come to the UK from Europe to get their daughters cut.
FGM, often described as a cultural custom, is inextricably associated with conservative Islam. FGM has been condemned as un-Islamic by the Muslim Council of Britain. However, all four major schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence pronounce on FGM and allow it. Such jurisprudence is considered fallible and changeable, but at the time of writing:
In the Hanafi school of law, FGM is ‘permissible’.
In Maliki, it’s ‘a preferred act’.
In Shaf’i, it’s ‘an obligation’.
In Hanbali, it’s ‘an honourable thing’.
FGM is promoted by Salafi Islam, and may therefore be gaining support amongst UK conservative Muslims of Pakistani ethnic origin, especially in self-segregated areas in the north of England.
Prominent Salafi teacherMuhammad Saalih Al-Munajjid, on his popular Islam QA website, says in an article headed ‘Medical benefits of female circumcision’:
‘Circumcision is prescribed for both males and females… circumcision of women is 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.’
Munajjid goes on to quote two doctors (neither of whom seem to actually exist) who list in gruesome detail[5] many spurious reasons to commit the revolting crime of FGM.
This rubbish by the esteemed scholar and his mystery medics is published on a highly popular Islamic advice website. Similar advice is given on many other Islamic websites.
Given government concern about segregation and the lack of mainstream educational opportunity for many UK Muslim women and girls (see below), and given the spread of Wahhabi/Salafi teaching in the UK, there’s good reason to be concerned that tens of thousands of UK Muslim girls might be at risk of FGM.
There’s some anti-FGM campaigning from within UK Islam. The Muslim Council of Britainhas collaborated with the African women’s support and campaigning organisation Forward to raise awareness of the dangers of FGM and to warn practitioners they face up to 14 years in prison if they subject girls to the practice. The small Bristol FGM survivors’ group Daughters of Eve aims to protect young girls from FGM-practicing communities.
However, as with UK Muslims’ response to Islamist terrorism (see below), the widespread, high-profile campaign needed is missing. Denial, indifference and ambivalence have muted the response.
There are several UK charities opposing FGM, but there’s no national campaign organised by UK Muslim women. Muslim women who disagree with FGM should come together and speak out loudly and clearly against this barbaric practice.
I asked the two main UK Muslim women’s organisations, the Bradford-based Muslim Women’s Council and the national Muslim Women’s Network, about this. Neither organisation has replied.
The continuing practice by some UK Muslims of mutilating their young daughters for religious reasons compounds the problem of Muslim self-segregation – and disgusts the host community.
Given FGM’s clear association with separatist Islam and the general conspicuous silence of UK Muslim women, this bizarre practice – brutal misogyny carried out by women – can only increase anti-Muslim racism.
In 2016 the UK government commissioned the Casey Review, an independent review by Dame Louise Casey into opportunity and integration. It found segregation at worrying levels.
The review focused on the effect of segregation on Muslim women and children. It said many Muslim women are denied their basic rights as British residents, have poor English language skills, and experience economic inactivity, coercive control, violence, and criminal acts of abuse, often enacted in the name of cultural or religious values.
The review said children are often excluded from mainstream education, are segregated from wider British communities, and lack sufficient checks on their wellbeing and integration.
The review blamed cultural misogyny and patriarchy. It also blamed public bodies which currently ignore or condone divisive religious practices for fear of being called racist or Islamophobic.
I am not denying that there is a problem in Muslim communities, but I would not put it down to self-segregation. We have to look at the broader picture, at education qualifications, at economics, at social mobility, at barriers in the jobs market.
[My bolding]
The secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain said any initiative which facilitates better integration of all Britons should be welcomed, but the review was a missed opportunity. He said:
We need to improve integration, and it needs to involve the active participation of all Britons, not just Muslims.
[My bolding]
Sadly, such responses are typical of Muslims’ defensive reaction to criticism. The attempt to deflect criticism is misguided – there’s no need to ‘look at the broader picture’ or to have the ‘participation of all Britons’. What’s needed, especially for the sake of segregated Muslim women and children, is for Muslims who segregate themselves to stop doing it.
The 2016 review called for more English language classes for isolated groups. A 2017 report by a UK parliamentary group on social integration said immigrants should have to either learn English before coming to the UK or attend classes when they arrive.
The parliamentary group said integration should begin on arrival in the UK, and speaking English is a prerequisite for meaningful engagement with British people. (This would apply not only to Muslims but also to recent east European immigrants. See below.)
In 2018, UK government communities minister Sajid Javid (subsequently promoted to home secretary following the Windrush scandal) said in a Guardian interview that 770,000 people living in England spoke little or no English. Javid promised to expand the teaching of English for immigrants. He said up to 70% of those unable to speak the language were women, most of whom were from Pakistani or Bangladeshi communities.
Javid, a high-profile Muslim politician, said he’d been subjected to regular racist attacks on social media – echoing a similar comment by London mayor Sadiq Khan. He described the ‘Punish a Muslim‘ letter sent to people in several cities and to four Labour MPs as sick and a crime.
Javid, whose parents were Pakistani immigrants, spoke movingly about his mother’s struggle to learn English. He said as a schoolchild he was called the ‘P-word’ and was physically attacked for being a different colour. He said although British society was now much more diverse and united than when he was a child, there were now too many communities that were very segregated.
Government statistics based on data from the 2011 census, published on the website Ethnicity facts and figures, said:
726.000 could speak English but not well, and 138,000 spoke no English (making a total of 864,000)
Three in five (60%) of those who couldn’t speak English well were women
Of those with a Pakistani or Bangladeshi ethnic background, women were five times more likely than men to speak no English
However, Javid’s figures were close enough. Referring to evidence including the recent independent review into opportunity and integration (see above), Javid announced a £50m government plan to boost integration in Britain. He said the government intended to tackle segregation by:
Acting against cultural practices not compatible with the British way of life such as polygamy
Tackling disproportionately low take-up rates of free childcare by South Asian women
Using the roll-out of universal credit to target ethnic minorities and help them to integrate better
The Conservative’s universal credit scheme was an ongoing universal disaster, but Javid’s other ideas had possibilities. Alternatively, the £50m could have helped moderate Muslims to end self-segregation themselves.
According to a 2016 poll, 53% of UK Muslims wanted to integrate more, an aspiration which could perhaps have been boosted into a Muslim campaign against the Saudi-imported fundamentalism that fosters segregation and provokes anti-Muslim racism.
Saudi-exported separatist Islam has resulted in many UK Muslims deliberately segregating themselves. Islam is said to be not only a religion but a way of life. Saudi separatist Islam teaches that European Muslims should protect their way of life from the influence of the ‘decadent’ host community.
The consequent self-segregation – as manifested in Arabic clothing, illiberal schools, female genital mutilation, and coercive control of women – provokes anti-Islamic racism.
A 2018 survey of attitudes to immigration, the National Conversation on Immigration by anti-fascist group Hope not Hate – in which almost 20,000 people took part – found a large minority of people in the UK think immigrants don’t integrate properly. The survey also found 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.
UK national newspaper The Guardian reported that another Hope not Hate 2018 poll – of 10,000 people – found 35 percent thought Islam was generally a threat to the British way of life, compared with 30 percent who thought it was compatible.
The finding highlighted by the Guardian is in Hope not Hate’s report, State of Hate 2019, under Section 2 – Hate crimes / Attitudes towards Muslims in Britain / Extremism. The report is useful, but framing that finding as an extremist hate crime isn’t.
A 2016 poll showed most UK Muslims want to integrate more. To address the findings of widespread anti-Muslim feeling, that silent majority will have to speak up and oppose Salafi extremism. It’s not enough to cry ‘Islamophobia’.
Haredi Jews living in the UK also segregate themselves. But Jewish communities, longer established, have developed a low profile. Inevitably, given the persistence of anti-Judaism, they attract racism. But they don’t provoke it.
Salafist Muslims, on the other hand, have a much higher and more provocative profile – partly because of their attitude towards Islamist terrorism.
In addition to segregation, the other main source of racism-provoking conflict is some UK Muslims’ supportive or ambivalent attitude towards the sectarian and anti-western Islamist terrorism which has killed and seriously injured thousands of people in Europe and elsewhere.
Most UK Muslims say they oppose Islamist terrorism and it’s un-Islamic. But polls reveal ambivalent or even supportive attitudes towards Islamist attacks and movements.
The terrorism is carried out by a very small minority of Muslims. The Bipartisan Policy Center, a US thinktank, estimated in 2014 that there were about 100,000 active Islamist terrorists, worldwide. That’s 0.006 percent of the world’s estimated1.6 billion Muslims.
The 2011 census showed 2.7 million Muslims living in the UK. UK security service MI5estimated in 2016 that 3,000 people in Britain may have posed a terrorist threat, and more than 850 had travelled to territory in Syria and Iraq controlled by Islamist terror group ISIS, some of whom may have wanted to return to the UK as ISIS suffered military reverses on the ground.
3,000 is a small percentage of 2.7 million (0.1), and 850 is a much smaller percentage (0.03), but that’s still a lot of people – and that doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from shockingly anti-west views fostered by Saudi extremists and, as revealed by opinion polls, held by a large minority of UK Muslims.
A revealing NOP social research survey of British Muslim attitudes was published in 2006.
A “SlideShare” version can be seen by installing the LinkedIn SlideShare app, and downloading the survey
.The survey found 30 percent of UK Muslims wanted to live under Sharia law, and 28 percent wanted Britain to be an Islamic state. (ISIS declared itself as the ‘Islamic State’ in Syria in 2006, but the 2006 social research question was referring to the general idea of an Islamic state.)
Most shockingly, 22 percent of those surveyed 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 (see below).
Following the emergence of terror group ISIS in Syria, a 2015 survey found 15 percent of British Muslims had some sympathy with those who’d gone to join ISIS in Syria.
(The spin given to the results by the newspaper that commissioned the 2015 survey was controversial, and the survey was criticised for polling people with Muslim names living in mainly Muslim areas, thereby, supposedly, targeting less well-educated Muslims in ‘ghetto’ areas. However, the methodology seems to have been generally sound.)
The minority anti-west views shown by these polls were probably fostered by Saudi extremists. The US state departmentestimates that over the past four decades Saudi Arabia has invested more than $10bn (£6bn) worldwide in replacing mainstream Sunni Islam with its extremist Wahhabism.
Some of that money has funded Islamist terrorism. EU intelligence experts estimate 15 to 20 percent of the $10bn has been diverted to al-Qaida and other violent jihadists. A leaked US cable said:
‘Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qa’ida, the Taliban…and other terrorist groups.’
A New York Timesarticle explains not all Islamist terrorism is inspired by Saudi Wahhabi/Salafism. Salafism has historically been apolitical, and most Salafis are not violent.
However, the anti-west views held by a large minority of UK Muslims appear to stem from the imported puritanical Salafist belief that the Muslim world must be held separate from the west. In common with all Islamist terrorists, Salafism believes there’s an irreconcilable clash of civilisations.
The war on terror, AKA the ‘global war on terrorism‘, launched by (idiotic) US president George W Bush following the 20019/11 attacks by the Afghanistan-based al-Qaeda, has been widely seen by Muslims as a war against Muslims.
At a conservative estimate, some 1.5 million people, mostly Muslims, were killed during the war on terror, including an estimated 90,000 terrorists. Some five million people remain displaced.
UK prime minister Tony Blair was widely criticised by UK citizens for giving military support for the Iraq and Afghan wars. The reasons given for the Iraq war were false. (See below.)
The war on terror, which started as an understandable retaliation for the horrific 9/11 attacks, turned into a strategically incompetent neo-colonialist shambles. However, that didn’t justify the mass murder of UK civilians – as one in five UK Muslims believed.
Muslim representatives insist terrorism is un-Islamic. Denial material included with the homilies circulating amongst devout Muslims goes further, claiming those involved are mentally unstable loners who aren’t practising Muslims, and therefore their acts of terror have no connection with Islam.
The example is given of the Nice truck attacker, a Tunisian petty criminal who used alcohol and drugs. He killed and injured over 500 people.
The Nice attacker may be described by deniers as a non-Muslim, but, lapsed or not, he apparently considered himself to be a Muslim. The only known motive for his attack is that, according to ISIS’s claim, he responded to their call for Muslims to target citizens of coalition nations fighting against the ‘Islamic State’.
In any case, most western Islamist terrorists don’t fit that denial-friendly profile. Many UK Islamist terrorists are said to have been educated and apparently living a normal Muslim lifestyle.
The bland assertion that Islamist terrorism is un-Islamic doesn’t really help, given that, according to the 2006 and 2015 surveys, 22 per cent of UK Muslims thought the 2005 7/7 terrorist attacks were justified and 15 per cent had sympathy with those who’d gone to fight with ISIS.
Also, there’ve been no major public Muslim protests about the terrorist groups claiming to be Islamic. There’ve been large Muslim demonstrationsagainst offensive cartoons, and there was strong Muslim participation in the huge demonstration against the Iraq war. But there’ve been no mainstream UK Muslim demonstrations against al-Qaeda or Isis. A small Shia demonstration against Isis had no support from the Sunni majority.
A headteacher friend told me that in her mainly-Muslim UK state primary school the day after the 2001 9/11 attacks, Muslim children were singing chants in favour of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. After Bin Laden’s death in 2011, hundreds of UK Muslims saw fit to demonstrate their support for him.
The lack of Muslim opposition to terrorist groups claiming to be Islamic, and the disturbing evidence of Muslim support for terrorist groups, actions and leaders make Muslim claims that Islamist terrorism is un-Islamic highly unconvincing.
Such unbelievable denial, far from averting hostility, provokes anti-Muslim racism.
Many Muslims subscribe to elaborate ‘false-flag’ conspiracy theories which claim supposedly Islamist terror acts were actually carried out by government agencies in order to discredit Islam.
A 2016 opinion poll found, astonishingly, 31 per cent of UK Muslims thought the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks, and only 4 per cent thought al-Qaeda was responsible.
The poll was commissioned by controversial centre-right thinktank Policy Exchange (which has been criticised for ‘demonising’ Muslims) but was carried out by a reputable polling organisation. Policy Exchange’s report had a forward by Muslim Labour MP and shadow minister Khalid Mahmood. He concluded:
‘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.’
Belief in such 9/11 conspiracy theories contributes to Muslim opposition to the ‘war on terror’. In his 2009book, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, award-winning UK journalist David Aaronovitch pointed out that because a significant number of educated Pakistanis believe George W Bush brought the towers down on 9/11, they don’t believe the fundamental premise on which the Afghan war on terror was waged – and, therefore, countering al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan is made even more difficult.
However, the Iraq war was different, in that there was an actualconspiracy by US president Bush and UK premier Tony Blair to justify it.
The Bush administration falsely claimed agents of Saddam Hussein had met 9/11 al-Qaeda hijacker Mohammed Atta. To get ‘proof’, they tortured captured Islamists into ‘confessing’. Blair helped out by falsely claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
This shabby conspiracy and the consequent shambolic action and aftermath contributed – understandably – to Muslim opposition to the war on terror.
It’s understandable Muslims feel disrespected or demonised by the host community with regard to Islamist terrorism. It’s understandable Muslims resent having to justify themselves after every attack.
Islam as followed by most Muslims is, as they say, a religion of peace. The Quran says killing an innocent person is a sin, and war is only permitted in self-defence.
And yet…Islamist terrorism, however ‘un-Islamic’, clearly comes from within Islam – so bland denial, although understandable, actually makes things worse.
In 2016 the Muslim Council of Britain, an umbrella body for mosques, schools and associations, announced its own programme to prevent young Muslims being radicalised. However, by 2018, there was no sign of the programme. I asked the MCB what happened to it. I got no reply.
Muslims who are serious about addressing Islamist terrorism must publicly acknowledge that it comes from within their religion – and then take steps to weed out the Salafi influence that feeds it.
The typical Muslim response of denial provokes criticism from the host community – which then produces Muslim accusations of Islamophobia.
When Muslims in the UK (and elsewhere in the west) are criticised for not integrating, or for not accepting any responsibility for the terrorism coming from within their religion, Muslim representatives react defensively, and describe the criticism as Islamophobicpersecution.
(For real persecution of a Muslim minority – and a modern example of bollocks racist ideology – check out the near-genocidal persecution of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, previously known as Burma. The Myanmar junta, fronted at the time by formerly saintly Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, is responsible for this crime. See my post, Halo Goodbye, Suu – the Rohingya crisis.)
There’s also a suggestion critics of Islam are racist. As most UK Muslims are of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, it’s possible liberal critics of Islam in the UK are being – perhaps unintentionally – racist or colourist.
It’s certain many less-liberal indigenous UK citizens harbour feelings of racist Islamophobia – feelings enhanced by the provocations of Saudi-exported separatist Islam.
As a white critic of separatist Islam who’s already admitted to having racist feelings (albeit unwanted), perhaps I should examine my own attitude towards UK Muslims more closely at this point.
I feel distaste and intolerance towards the aspects of UK Islam I’ve been criticising here. (See also my liberal critique of Islam in the UK, Fear of Islamophobia.)
I’m sorry to say these aspects provoke racist feelings in me about Muslims. But acknowledging those feelings doesn’t mean indulging them. I try to live above them.
Actually, my wife is a Muslim. Her family is of Pakistani origin, via east Africa. Fortunately for our marriage, although she’s a believer she’s not very religious – and neither are many of her extended family. My wife and I argue about how to load the dishwasher, but not about Islam. She wears western clothes day-to-day, and Pakistani clothes with a loose headscarf at formal family or cultural events.
(I love my wife dearly. She wouldn’t like to be written about here, but she never reads my blog, so that’s OK.)
I know a relationship between a white man and a woman of colour can be considered suspect by those aware of inter-ethnic power dynamics. I mention my Pakistani-Kenyan Muslim wife and her family not to show how tolerant and liberal I am but to show I realise from personal experience that to criticise separatist Islam is to generalise about a minority of Muslims.
Careless generalisation can be destructive, but accurate generalisation is an essential part of effective criticism. The separatist Muslim minority, being assertive and highly visible, provokes a degree of indiscriminate anti-Muslim racism in the host community; but generalised, informed criticism of that minority is not Islamophobia – it’s tough love.
There are, of course, openly racist anti-Islamic groups throughout Europe trying to stoke fear of ‘Islamisation’. There are reasons to be concerned about some UK Muslims’ anti-west views as shown in the 2006 survey (above) – but there’s clearly no conspiracy.
And organised anti-Islamic groups have little support in the UK. At a 2016 high-profile election to replace a member of parliament, the two far-right candidates both got less than five per cent of the vote (meaning they lost their £500 deposits).
After the horrors of 9/11, the 7/7 London bombings, the coordinated Paris and Brussels attacks, the vehicle attacks throughout Europe, the 2017Manchester bombingand the threats made by ISIS, it’s natural to fear further Islamist atrocity.
Research suggests humans have evolved a tendency to stigmatise those seen as threatening their social group. (See What the experts say 2, below.) No doubt the host community’s rational fear and instinctive response contribute, along with the issues of segregation and terrorism denial, to simmering anti-Muslim racism.
Far-right racist extremists claim Muslim immigration to western Europe is a Trojan horse, with a hidden agenda to replace liberal democracy with an Islamic state.
The far-right idea of an organised plot by UK Muslims to destroy democracy is a paranoid delusion, but an opinion pollhas shown a large minority of UK Muslims support the idea of a UK Islamic state. The moderate majority of UK Muslims keeps quiet, allowing the extremist minority to take centre-stage.
Assuming liberal democracy will continue, what future hope is there for the reconciliation of separatist Muslims with moderate Muslims, and of all Muslims with largely secular western host communities?
Must the Wahhabi-inspired, racism-provoking self-segregation and ambivalent or supportive attitude towards Islamist terrorism fester on, or can this conflict between some UK Muslims and the host community be resolved?
Some Muslim critics of separatist Islam call for reform. Considering Christian Reformation began 1,500 years after the start of Christianity, perhaps, 1,400 years after the start of Islam, Muslim reformation is due.
However, reform is a double-edged sword. One edge is extremism. Salafism itself, the extremist puritanical source of the racism-provoking behaviour of some UK Muslims, is a reform movement; and the Christian Reformation quickly became mired in extremism.
Top Christianity reformer Martin Luther started well by opposing the corrupt Roman Catholic church and by translating the bible from Latin into German. But he then became a zealous anti-Jewish extremist whose views later contributed to the Nazi Holocaust.
Despite its founder’s racist extremism the Reformation was mainly good for society in general. It ended the political power of the church and paved the way for the age of reason (AKA the Enlightenment), leading to our modern secular liberal democracy.
The Reformation was also, arguably, good for believers, insisting the Bible was the only source of Christian authority, and the church should be a community of the faithful rather than a priest-led hierarchy.
However, in the course of achieving these worthy outcomes, the Reformation caused a massive amount of collateral damage. For instance, Protestant Puritans murdered up to 50,000 women after torturing them into confessing to ‘witchcraft’.
If Islam is to reform itself, perhaps it could learn from Christianity’s mistakes.
In the meantime, as a grateful beneficiary of the 18th-century European Enlightenment, I offer this unsolicited but respectful suggestion to all western Muslims: lighten up!
Keep the religion and lifestyle, if you want, but don’t make it any more separate than it needs to be. Enjoy the western post-Enlightenment freedom and hard-won liberal democracy.
(Democracy is the worst form of government, they say, except for all the others – including theocracy.)
In 2016 the UK government commissioned an independent review, the Casey Review, into integration and opportunity in isolated and deprived communities.
The review found that Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic populations and Muslim faith populations live disproportionately in the most deprived areas in England. It confirmed that Muslim segregation was at worrying levels.
The review blamed not only cultural misogyny and patriarchy but also the public bodies which ignore or condone divisive religious practices for fear of being called racist or Islamophobic.
Liberals are likewise reluctant to criticise Muslim behaviour and opinion for fear of sounding like the most prominent UK critic of Islam, the despicable Nigel Farage. But we cowardly liberals should grow a pair.
The consequence of ignoring the self-segregation practised by a large minority of UK Muslims is far worse than any culture war attacks on those who speak up. Left uncriticised, Salafi self-segregation will sow more discord and will provoke more Islamophobic racism.
UK polls show most Muslims want to integrate more. That majority needs to get a grip and kick out the Saudi-exported Salafism.
Another semi-racist cause for resentment in the UK was the unrestricted immigration from relatively poor east European countries, allowed under the European Union’s freedom of movement rule, which resulted in over three million EU citizens moving to the UK.
This provoked resentment amongst the indigenous white working class. They resented the sudden appearance in their towns and cities of large numbers of strangers with foreign languages and shops.
A Polish shop in Bath, UK | Photo: Andrew Parsons/i-Images/ZUMA
There were rational concerns about the undercutting of wages, and about pressure on housing, education and healthcare – but, although there was no colourism in this case, there was clearly an element of white-on-white racism.
During the run-up to the 2016 UK referendum on whether to remain in or leave the European Union, such concerns were either ignored by the metrocentric mainstream media, or were described – and dismissed – as provincial racism. The dismissed views of the white working class are now known to have played a big part in the Leave result – a result that confounded the expectations of nearly all commentators and pollsters. (However, see my prophetic post, Brexit and the east European elephant.)
(After the Brexit vote, there was a nasty increase in reported ‘hate’ crimes against people thought by the haters to be immigrants or from an immigrant community. The referendum and the result apparently unleashed previously repressed anti-immigrant racism.)
The 2018survey of attitudes to immigration, the National Conversation on Immigration – in which almost 20,000 people took part – found most people wanted EU migration to be better managed.
140,000 EU nationals successfully applied for UK residence in 2016, twice the number in 2015. It was predicted at least 500,000 more east Europeans would come to the UK over the following two years before we were due to leave the EU.
When we left in 2020, free movement from the EU to the UK ended. EU nationals living here at that time were allowed to stay. In 2021, there were approximately four million EU-born residents in the UK.
Large numbers of people have recently unofficially entered Europe from Africa and west Asia (AKA the Middle East). Some are refugees; some are economic migrants
Those coming from Africa pay large amounts of money, often borrowed, to traffickers (known euphemistically as ‘migration brokers’) to get to Libya. They then pay even more and risk their lives to try to cross the Mediterranean to Italy in overcrowded rickety boats, hoping to get – mainly – to Germany or Sweden.
By the end of November 2016, a record 170,000 people had arrived in Italy from North Africa since the start of the year. Similar numbers of people had been arriving for several years.
Many have died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. The 2016 death toll was expected to exceed 10,000.
The vast majority of refugees and migrants were Muslims. Those who made it and were allowed to stay, or managed to stay illegally, were welcomed with compassion and sympathy by some, but faced hostility and racism from others who feared job losses and terrorism.
Recent Islamist terror attacks in Paris, Brussels, Nice and Berlin were carried out by Muslims, and they exploited migrant routes and EU open borders.
A 2016 survey showed most Europeans believed the influx of refugees across the continent would mean fewer jobs and more terrorism.
This fear has resulted in the increasing popularity of far-right, racist, populist, nationalist groups and parties in mainland Europe.
To address this, Europe will have to pick its way through the possible responses: stronger border controls, better legal pathways, and development intervention in origin countries.
The solution to economic migration, of course, is to make poverty history. The IMF and the World Bank should create social credit (but not the Big Brother Chinese version!) instead of debt and austerity.
(Imagine: no need for greed or hunger; a brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people sharing all the world.)
Over 82 million people have been displaced from their homes, and six million people are living in camps. Six. Million.
The war in Syria, which prompted a recent refugee exodus, was made intractable by Putin’s Russia and western dithering. The Arab Spring attempt to sow democracy in place of dictatorship has gone backwards to a winter of discontent.
The parasitic ISIS, al-Qaeda and Taliban (and their Muslim warlord imitators) murder, rape, torture, enslave and displace civilians in the name of God. Billions of aid dollars, which could have brought law and order, have disappeared offshore.
The United Nations was well meant and can help refugees, but it can’t enforce peace. A world federation with teeth could replace the oligarchs and warlords, and bring peace – and prosperity.
(For fictional inspiration, consider Star Trek’s United Earth government, which ended poverty, disease and war within fifty years.)
(You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.)
As for the Islamist terrorism making European host populations wary of refugees and migrants, the solution for the threatened west is to speed up the development of new technology which could end oil dependency; and then to sanction Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and cut off the terror funding and sponsorship.
The matching solution for the anti-Islamist western Muslim majority is to end dependence on Saudi money, remove the Saudi influence from mosques and schools, and put an end to the twisted Salafi fundamentalism that’s poisoned their religion of peace.
(You may say I’m an Islamistophobe – and you’d be right.)
Some antiracists say identifying mass immigration as a cause of racism is the same as blaming the victims. It’s identified with Enoch Powell’s infamous speech, and seen as ‘playing a numbers game’. Alternatively, it’s simply stating the bleedin’ obvious.
If an instinctive wariness of strangers has been twisted by colonialism into racism, then mass immigration to the relatively affluent and secular west from relatively poor countries where people have different skin colour, languages, religions and traditions was bound to provoke racism in the host population.
Economic pressure – real or perceived – and fear of Islamist terrorism add to the host population’s resentment of mass immigration imposed by policy or circumstances, about which – apart from the EU referendum – they’ve never been consulted.
With good will, radical monetary reform to reduce inequality and acceptance of the need for two-way integration, western countries could embrace mass immigration. The good will would involve us acknowledging racism as based on a mainly redundant instinct, choosing to live above it – and organising to make racism history.
‘Race’ is a fake category cooked up with fake science. There are no different human races – just human populations with differences which – apart from single-gene disorders – are superficial.
However, racists don’t care whether or not there are different human races. They’re prejudiced against non-white ethnic groups, regardless of how such groups are classified or what they’re called.
There’s also white-on-white racism in the form of prejudice against Jewish, Romani, Irish and east European people:
Prejudice in Europe against Jewish and Romani people found extreme expression in the Holocaust.
Prejudice against Irish people was rife in the UK in the 1950s during the the postwar building boom.
Prejudice in the UK against east European people during the immigration boom that followed the 2004 enlargemnt of the EU led disastrously to Brexit (the British exit from the EU).
Such white-on-white prejudice is probably due to a combination of culturism and perceived competition for scarce resources.
As for the toxic word ‘race’, it’s frequently used in a non-toxic form in non-racist media. Both black and white writers and speakers use the word ‘race’ to describe the different human populations. In that context, ‘race’ is supposedly a neutral social construct.
‘Race’, apart from the slippery social contstruct context, is fake, but racism – white-on-black or white-on-white – is all-too real, blighting millions of lives. To overcome racism, an understanding of its history – ancient and modern – is needed.
It’s probable that an ancient, mainly redundant but still active instinctive bias against strangers that evolved to protect against danger and communicable disease has been revived and twisted by colonialism into racism – or, more accurately, colour prejudice.
Differences in facial appearance and skin colour presumably enhance ‘strangerness’. That currently manifests as white-on-black prejudice. Racism is prejudice plus institutional power.
Modern racism began with colonialism, when Europeans encountered different-looking Asian and African people in the context of colonial subjugation.
The self-justifying colonialist assumption of white superiority was boosted by the influential writings of Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant.
For instance Kant – the preacher of moral egalitarianism – said:
Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the white race. The yellow Indians have a somewhat lesser talent. The Negroes are much lower.
(From an anthropology lecture published in the collection Physical Geography)
Kant apparently later recanted, kind of, but the colonialist assumption of white supremacy he promoted persisted – and persists still as postcolonial racism.
In the postcolonial world, institutional power is still held by the white west – and so is the associated prejudice against people of colour.
Colonisation resulted in 200 years of racist ‘race theory’. It was used to justify slavery and the Holocaust.
The horrifically brutal 400-year Atlantic slave trade transported more than 15 million African people to work as slaves in the Americas.
The slave trade caused a vast loss of life for African captives before, during and after the transportation. The exact number remains unknown, but many millions were murdered.
The profits from slavery created vast wealth for the white UK and US ‘owners’ of enslaved people. None of the proceeds of that vile crime were confiscated and no reparation has been paid.
On the contrary, after the abolition of slavery, 46.000 UK ‘owners’ were compensated by the UK government. On average, they got about £400,000 each by today’s values.
African enslaved people and their descendants now living in the Americas and the UK got nothing – except the after-effect of slavery: devastating personal and institutional racism.
‘Race theory’ was also used to justify the equally horrifying German Nazi Holocaust, a permanent scar on the face of mankind. It arose from twisted nationalism and pseudoscientific anti-Jewish racism.
Six million Jewish people were murdered because they were Jewish.
(Ironically, six million Palestinians have been displaced as refugees since the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel. There are seven million Jews in Israel.)
Unlike with slavery, significant reparation has been paid. Germany has paid over €90bn in compensation to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust and their heirs.
We now know the pseudoscientific ‘race theory’ used to justify the terrible inhumanity of the slave trade and the Holocaust was complete bollocks.
But the damage was done and the legacy lingers on as racism – and as new ‘race theory’ (like the old one but, deprived of ‘science’, nastier and more devious).
Postwar mass immigration has fostered racism in the UK. Some antiracists, wedded to the defence of immigration, are unwilling to admit that – but it’s patently true.
Mass immigration, postwar from colonies and the Commonwealth, and more recently from Eastern Europe, effectively imposed without consultation, has distressed the host population – and that distress has manifested as racism.
All immigrants whose skin is brown or black, or who speak a different language, or who dress differently have suffered direct racism. Such casual cruelty is a consequence of the careless social engineering of mass immigration.
State-sanctioned mass migration to the UK was driven by economic and demographic policy in the UK and by deep-rooted inequity and insecurity in the countries of origin. Policy-makers treated people as fodder.
Racism is firstly the responsibility of the racist, but the policy-makers who carelessly ordained mass immigration share responsibility for the consequential racism.
South Asian Muslims form a large part of the UK postwar immigrant population. Some imported Muslim behaviour has provoked racist hostility.
For the first 30 years or so, UK Muslims integrated naturally, as did other immigrant communities. But since the 1980s, Saudi-exported separatist Salafism has set many UK Muslims against the core Enlightenment values that underpin western liberal democracy.
The Salafist influence on UK Muslims manifests in Arabic clothing, illiberal education, opression of women, advocacy of FGM (female genital mutilation) and a sympathetic or ambivalent attitude towards Islamist terrorism – all of which provokes a critical response in the general host population and gives ammunition to openly racist groups.
In response to criticism of Muslim separatism, Muslim representatives cry ‘Islamophobia’ – and racist Islamophobia increases.
Hundreds of thousands of desperate economic migrants and asylum-seekers from Africa and Asia are trying to get to Europe for a better life. Europeans, feeling the pressure and fearing Islamist terrorism, get more racist.
We antiracist liberals feel obliged to defend immigration as a Good Thing. From our media and moral high ground we argue that immigration is good for the cultural and economic wellbeing of the host nation; and that criticism of immigration is racist.
However, the large scale of recent immigrations makes less liberal (and less articulate) members of European host populations feel genuinely insecure – and racism feeds on insecurity.
Racism-provoking migration to Europe will continue as long as the world is a place where people feel they need to leave home to find a better life.
Antiracist groups and legislation have commendably raised consciousness and made racism unacceptable, but still it persists. We antiracist white liberals wring our hands helplessly. But we can help – by admitting to our own racism, and by acknowledging that racism may have evolutionary roots.
Racism deniers regularly appear on comments forums portraying antiracism as ‘reverse racism’, that is, anti-white racism. That’s despicable and deliberate dishonesty. Here in the white West, opposing racism isn’t anti-white – it benefits all.
Some still try to rationalise their prejudice with pseudoscientific racism and its even-more-evil younger brother, genism, but it’s bullshit. There’s no reason for racism – so why does it thrive?
Historical colonialism is the conventional culprit – and it plays a big part – but the widespread persistence of irrational racism and colourism, even amongst people of colour, suggests perhaps nature, rather than nurture, is the supervillain.
If we have racist or colour-prejudiced feelings, we instinctively try to justify or explain them. Human minds have evolved to analyse patterns. Most well-educated liberals find no justification, so they deny those feelings. Some over-compensate by claiming to be ‘colour-blind’.
Institutional colour-blindness is advocated by the civil rights movement, but claiming to be personally colour-blind is yet another insult – if a more subtle one – to people of colour. It’s a manifestation of the crippling white guilt which prevents honesty and progress.
Less well-educated conservativescan find justification for racism – in populist nationalism or pseudo-science. So they indulge their racist feelings. Thus racism can spread as an idea or belief. Definitions of racism usually describe it – wrongly – as a belief. It’s not a genuine belief – it’s a twisted version of a mainly redundant instinct, dressed up – and spread around – as a fake belief.
If we acknowlege that racism is instinctive, we can resist that toxic idea and live above it.
We’re social animals, dependent on our group. Evolutionary psychology suggests racism is built on the scaffolding of an anti-stranger instinct which probably evolved to protect our group from danger and communicable disease.
Colour prejudice is harder to explain. It’s unlikely our ancestors would have encountered different populations. Exposure to different populations is a relatively recent occurrence in human history. It’s therefore unlikely we could have evolved to be colour prejudiced.
Prejudice against darker skin, presumably learned, has been confirmed by cognitive neuroscience studies (see below). No doubt, colonialism and postcolonialism are largely to blame for that. Perhaps the darker skin of the human populations encountered by colonialists emphasised and revived the underlying anti-stranger instinct.
The cognitive neuroscience studies may be relevant to shadism, the black-on-black prejudice against darker skin manifested in the multi-billion-dollar skin-lightening industry.
But shadism is hard to explain. An expert pointed out that my argument for universal colour prejudice is weakened by the lack of social dominance power relationships in black-on-black shadism. Perhaps, sadly, there’s an element of internalised racism in shadism.
Shadism and all other forms of indulgence in the revived anti-stranger instinct are a form of bullying – a collective sociopathy.
Racism and colour prejudice don’t make sense. So where does the strength of feeling come from? Does it come from culturism?
Perhaps racism is boosted by culturism, where the ‘strangerness’ of people of African or Asian ethnicity living in the west indicates a different culture – and that difference elicits subconscious fear and prejudice.
This boosts racism, which, as always, is power plus prejudice. So subconscious culturism works in one direction: the power is with ignorant white westerners and the prejudice is against black and brown immigrants – because their different appearance implies a different culture.
At a conscious level, racist groups claim to defend western values against the different culture of immigrant minorities. Fortunately, most westerners don’t fall for such swivel-eyed drivel.
Culturism would also explain white-on-white racism. For instance, anti-Judaism must be based on a perception – perhaps lagely unconscious – of that minority’s cultural difference.
Culturism might play a part in racism but perhaps not enough to account for racists’ strength of feeling. Perhaps that can be explained by the power of the id.
Well, sod the id. Let’s think for our (higher) selves.
In this post, I’ve tried to understand the origins of racism, the reasons for its current prevalence, and the consequences of indulging it. The purpose of that understanding is to help end racism.
Colour me racist – blame my genes. I admit I have racist feelings, but they’re unsought and unwanted. Feeling that impulse and knowing what it is, I choose not to indulge it.
If we acknowledge racism’s instinctive origin, we can put it in the bin with the other monsters from the id. Then we can live above it in a great big melting pot.
The bin of the past is strong – but the pot of the future has the superpower of consciousness.
White people should acknowledge the terrible damage wrought by European colonialists and fascists – but shouldn’t be paralysed by guilt. If white-majority people have feelings of colour or culture prejudice, they don’t have to blame themselves. They can blame their genes – and colonialism.
We white people are guilty – to a greater or lesser degree – of personal and institutional racism. But admitting that and accepting that racism is a twisted instinct would free well-meaning white people from paralysingwhite guilt.
Such awareness would let white people choose to reject that mainly redundant instinct – and to 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.)
Along with legislation and collective action, such individual white allyship can help to end the racism – conscious and unconscious – which infects institutions and blights the lives of all non-white people and other minorities living in the racist west.
We’re puppets of our selfish genes, to a degree – and one or more of them might be trying to make us racist. If so, our best hope is to consciously counter our racist instinct with reason and conscience – fortunately provided by other, more useful, genes – and so give our puppet show a happy ending.
Then, dear Reader, if reparation for slavery is paid, we can all live happily ever after. (Apart from climate crisis, war and poverty.)
Happy puppets (apart from Statler, Beaker and Sam) | Photo: The Muppets
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 below). Polls showed concern about immigration was a main reason for the referendum’s leave result.
As detailed below, 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 global 2020Black 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.
Trayvon Martin | Photo: Splash News / Corbis
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.
George Floyd | Photo: Ben Crump Law Firm
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.
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 it’s 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.
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 below.) 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 black US author. scholar and social activist Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name, bell hooks. (That’s how she stylises her name.)
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.
People who experience racism arevictims, 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 peopleareguilty.
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.
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 genusHomo, the only surviving genus of the clade (or subtribe)Hominina (AKA Australopithicina), a member of the tribeHominini. The only other surviving hominins are Paninae (chimpanzees and bonobos).
Hominini is a tribe of the subfamilyHomininae, the only other surviving member of which is the Gorillini tribe (gorillas). The Homininae subfamily is a member of the Hominidaefamily, popularly known as the great apes, which includes orangutans.
The crown of evolution | Image: source unknown
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.)
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.
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.
‘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 2018UN 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.
Ambalavaner Sivanandan | Photo: Jane Bown/The Observer
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.’
(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.
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.
‘“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 1993report 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?”
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 1998letter (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.
Female genital mutilation (FGM) has been condemned by the British Council of Muslims as un-Islamic. However, FGM is promoted on Salafi Islamic websites.
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.
Here comes a snowflake! | photo: Anest / istockphoto
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 politicsdoesn’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.
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.)
Noir noir: Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter | Photo: Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times
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.
In February 2021the foundation said it gave $21.7m to BLM chapters, and its expenses were $8.4m. That left about $60m unexplained.
In May 2021Patrisse Cullors, one of the three BLM founders, announced she was standing down as executive director of the foundation.
In February 2022 in a UK Guardianinterview*, Cullors tearfully explained she resigned after the movement got black criticism for lack of transparency about the donations.
An April 2022Washington Postcolumn* 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 2022AP Newsinterview*, 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. Cullorssaid:
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.
Fun with Foucault – postmodernist Michel Foucault at home in Paris, 1978 | Photo: Martine Franck / Magnum
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 2021National Affairsarticle, 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 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.)
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
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 SnowflakeCity than a campaign coordinator.
Postmodernism critic Ambalavaner Sivanandan | Photo: Jane Bown/The Observer
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.
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.
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.
George Floyd: an ordinary black man murdered by the white police | Photo: Ben Crump Law Firm
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.
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 BLM woo’s esoteric beliefs are presumably meant to protect activists who feel oppressed because of their intersectional identity, but they seem out of place in a campaign meant to protect ordinary black people like Trayvon Martin and George Floyd – and many others – from racist murder by the police.
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 needs organising properly – with mission focus and financial transparency.
Maybe it could keep the spirit of radical activism, but hive off the woo and the 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 Matteridea of opposition to racist murder lives on – and still has the reach and momentum to help make racism history.
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.
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 greater or lesser extent.
Professor Ian Law (deputy director, 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.
Dr Marcel Stoezler (Bangor University, Wales, UK) said, ‘I remain unconvinced by the idea of a gene for racism. I think there are simpler, historical explanations’. 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.
Steven Neuberg (professor of psychology, Arizona State University, US – see What the experts say 2, below) said, after the exchange of a few emails about evidence from the world of evolutionary psychology, ‘we agree more than disagree’. He 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.
Professor Melissa McDonald (principle investigator of the personality and evolutionary psychology laboratory at Oakland University in 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.
Marissa Lithopoulos (PhD practitioner, biologist, stem cell researcher and teaching assistant, University of Ottawa, Canada, who has written about evolved prejudice for schools science website CurioCity – see What the experts say 2, below) said, ‘Great blog post. I found it really interesting!’
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’. 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.)
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. 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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Two 2017studies 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 2017Nature – 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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.)
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.
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 middle-eastern and European invaders, and the associated power structures.
However, even in that 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.
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.
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
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.
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 Racismedited by Jennifer Richeson of Yale University.
The Current Directionsspecial 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.
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’ve asked the current editor, Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago, for his comments.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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’.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Yes, Leslie Nielson had a career before Airplane! | Poster image: MGM
(Or how about group therapy with Racists Anonymous? Hi. I’m Chris – I’m a racist.)
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!
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.
Feel free to comment. All comments will be answered. (By me.) To leave a comment, scroll to the end of the comments. (Blame WordPress.com for that rubbish design quirk.)
Why am I, a white English man (hi!), writing this? Am I a closet racist, annoyed by having large numbers of brown-skinned people living here, and having to call them ‘Asian’? No. And yes.
Does ‘Asian’ annoy me? Yes. Call me a pedant – I suppose I am – but that’s why I started writing this post. It’s clearly wrong to identify your regional origin as ‘Asian’, but everyone says it as though it’s perfectly reasonable.
It’s apparently short for ‘South Asian’, but the abreviation to ‘Asian’ makes it annoyingly meaningless.
Some abbreviations are meaningful in context. For instance, the self-description ‘mixed’, used as an abbreviation for mixed race or mixed ethnicity, keeps the meaning. The abbreviation ‘mixed’ meaningfully describes that person’s ethnic identity.
But even when the context makes ‘Asian’ obviously an abreviation of South Asian, it remains annoyingly meaningless. The abbreviation ‘Asian’doesn’t meaningfully describe that person’s regional or ethnic identity.
There’s no problem with naming the UK’s black Caribbean ethnic group. There’s been some debate about wording and hyphenation, but ethnic identity has always been clear from the name.
But there has been a problem with clearly naming and identifying the UK’s other main ethnic minority. The solution has been to use the politically correct but inaccurate name, ‘Asian’.
The phrase ‘political correctness’ may be a casualty of the culture wars but it survives, and – properly applied – protects minorities. So PC is OK by me – but the meaningless inaccuracy isn’t.
It’s been overlooked because ethnicity’s a sensitive issue. But what the heck – I’m going to look at it. Sensitively.
Am I a closet racist? No. I’m an antiracist and pro-immigration liberal. I support multiculturalism and diversity. My wife’s a Muslim with family roots in what’s now Pakistan.
However, I think we’re all unconsciously racist because of a redundant but revived evolved behaviour: an anti-stranger prejudice evolved to protect against communicable disease.
The ancient anti-stranger instinct was revived and twisted by white-supremacist colonialists, who – encouraged by ‘Enlightenment’ philosophers such as Immanuel Kant – viewed the darker-skinned people they subjugated as inferior.
Differences in facial appearance and skin colour presumably enhance ‘strangerness’. That manifests as white-on-black prejudice (because racism is prejudice plus institutional power).
In the postcolonial world, institutional power is still held by the white West – and so is the associated prejudice against people of colour.
So I have racist feelings, based on an anti-stranger instinct twisted by colonial culture into colour prejudice – but I don’t want those feelings and there’s no justification for them.
Having acknowledged and understood those racist feelings, I choose not to indulge them but to live above them – and to oppose racism in others as best I can.
Maybe I’ve protested too much. But I hate racism and the terrible racist crimes of my European forebears.
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As for having large numbers of South Asian (and African) people living in Britain, it’s fine by me – they’ve livened things up no end. But not everyone thinks so.
Postwar mass immigration provoked widespread racism, unconscious in origin but consciously ‘justified’.
It’s a liberal’s quandary: if you speak about this, you can be accused of victim-blaming. But I’ll speak – or write – about it anyway.
Mass migration to the UK began in 1948 after World War Two when a patrician government, without consulting the people, enabled and encouraged large-scale immigration from some countries in the colonies and the Commonwealth.
This was said to be needed to rebuild Britain’s shattered economy and to boost falling population numbers.
Poignantly, many immigrants say they expected a welcoming atmosphere. Instead, they faced hostility, personal racism and an unofficial colour-bar, meaning, for instance, exclusion from lodgings, pubs and churches.
In the face of that racism, a pithy ripost emerged: ‘We’re here because you were there’ – meaning postwar mass immigration was a postcolonial phenomenon.
If the British people had been consulted and had agreed mass immigration was needed, and if both natives and immigrants had been better prepared for two-way integration, there might have been a more welcoming atmosphere.
Currently, 13% of people in the UK are black, South Asian or mixed-ethnicity, and despite antiracist progress, the racism that began 70 years ago persists and still blights the lives of many black and South Asian people.
But for antiracist multiculturalist natives like me, the presence of postwar immigrants and their descendants has improved life in Britain immeasurably.
If only South Asian people would sort out their collective name…
In Shakespeare’s best known play, Romeo and Juliet, teenager Juliet is forbidden to see Romeo because of a family feud. He’s a Montague and she’s a Capulet. A frustrated Juliet exclaims:
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.
Juliet’s right, of course, to say a rose’s human-given name doesn’t affect its nature-given smell. But she’s wrong to suggest naming’s unimportant.
Her passionate plea disregards the problem of nominative versus universal names, as expounded by William of Ockham (he of Occam’s razor).
In what we call reality, there’s no universal flower. Real flowers have different smells. The significance of nomination is that the name of the flower and of its variety – the name of the rose (!) – indicates its unique characteristics, including its particular sweet smell.
Likewise, Romeo’s Montague heritage couldn’t be so easily dismissed. The differences indicated by the lovers’ family names had tragic consequences (albeit compounded by the play’s melodramatic chain of events).
The name’s Asian – South Asian | Image: Reddit user DocPBJ007
Naming of flowers (or families) is one thing – but naming of human ethnic groups is another matter. Why do they have to be named? We’re all human. Is it racist?
There are no human races, just human populations with differences which, apart from single-gene disorders, are genetically superficial.
Dodgy lyrics aside, Blue Mink were right: what we need is a great big melting pot. That’s happening – people are now ‘mixed’.
British South Asian people call themselves ‘Asian’ when referring to their ethnic community, and when formally identifying their ethnicity.
They talk about ‘Asians’; and they voluntarily identify as Asian British or British Asian in ethnicity surveys used for the census and to monitor discrimination.
How did that start? It started because of two instances of clumsy colonialism: postwar mass immigration and the 1947 Partition of India.
Postwar mass immigration was made possible by the British Nationality Act 1948, which gave citizens of British colonies and the Commonwealth (a voluntary association of former colonies) the status of Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies, and recognised their right to work and settle in the UK and to bring their families.
This allowed the UK government to sponsor large-scale immigration to help rebuild the British economy and replace falling population numbers after WW2.
This typically clumsy piece of social engineering had many unforeseen consequences, one of which – the subject of this post – is that UK citizens with origins in the former colony of India ended up calling themselves ‘Asian’.
From 1948 onwards, many people from British colonies and former colonies answered the call and came to the UK. Many people came from the former colony of India.
But following the partition of India in 1947 (another – more tragic – piece of clumsy social engineering by the British), there’s been a problem with how people from that part of the world are described here in the UK.
Many UK citizens are of Pakistani, Indian or (since 1972) Bangladeshi origin. Before partition, they could all have been described as ‘Indian’.
But after partition, Pakistanis were offended if called Indian, Indians if called Pakistani, and Bangladeshis if called Indian or Pakistani. And Sri Lankans if left out.
The solution has been to use the name ‘Asian’. Call yourself ‘Asian’ if you want. But it’s just wrong. And using it could invite ridicule:
The obvious problem with people of Pakistani, Indian or Bangladeshi origin calling themselves ‘Asian’ is, of course, the absurd geographical and linguistic inaccuracy.
So, OK, ‘Asian’ in this context is clearly a careless contraction of the more accurate and occasionally used ‘South Asian‘ – but the contraction is annoyingly meaningless.
It’s not an abbreviation, carrying the meaning of the full expression – it’s just meaningless and wrong!
Asia’s a huge continent, stretching from Turkey to the eastern edge of Russia. With this careless contraction, three countries occupying about one twentieth of Asia’s land mass have, in effect, hijacked the name of the whole continent.
The geographic region of South Asia includes Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, as well as Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal, Afghanistan and the Maldives. (There are quibbles: some say Iran is included; some say Afghanistan isn’t, it’s in West or Central Asia.)
The six geographic Asian regions are North Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, West Asia (confusingly, part of the region misnamed by Eurocentric colonialists as the Middle East) and South Asia.
The six regions of Asia, including South (or Southern) Asia | Mapsofworld
‘South Asian’ has a tiresome extra word – but unlike ‘Asian’, it makes sense. It’s used in the UK mainly in the media* to mean Pakistani, Indian or Bangladeshi.
It’s not much used in everyday speech, except by a few politically correct pedants like me. It’s easier to say ‘Asian’, sure – but it’s meaninglessly inaccurate!
* UK newspaper the Guardian insists – wrongly – in spelling it ‘south Asian’ with a small ‘s’. See below.
The main polite alternative to ‘Asian’ or ‘South Asian’ is ‘from the Indian subcontinent‘. This occasionally used phrase is geographically accurate but somewhat politically incorrect.
The Indian subcontinent is a geological entity: the terrestrial part of the Indian Plate, which separated from supercontinent Gondwana about 100 million years ago, drifted North and collided with Asia 55 million years ago. (The collision created the Himalayas.)
Drifted together – before and after | iStock
‘Subcontinent’ is a geographical term meaning subdivision of a continent – in this case Asia. It’s Asian now, innit.
Humans are thought to have arrived in the Indian subcontinent about 50,000 years ago.
The Indian subcontinent now homes the nations of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, as well as Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal, and the Maldives. It’s South Asia minus Afghanistan.
‘From the Indian subcontinent’ is more accurate than ‘Asian’ or even ‘South Asian’, and it’s useful when it might be unclear to say ‘South Asian’ (for instance in the Q&A, above), but it sounds clumsy, and can smack of Orientalism and empire.
A politically correct version of the name, the South Asian subcontinent, sounds equally clumsy. The simplified – and enigmatic – ‘from the subcontinent’ is cooler. Man.
Britons with brown or black skin are often asked, ‘Where are you from?’. British South Asian people can hardly say, ‘I’m Asian. I’m from Asia’. Nor are they likely to say, ‘I’m from South Asia‘.
How should South Asian people respond to that loaded question? It’s a social minefield.
A white Briton asking that question of a brown or blackBriton who’s a stranger or casual acquaintance is a bad idea. ‘Where are you really from?’ is much worse.
Such questions are inconsiderately intrusive and, at best, microracist.
Although the questioner might not consciously realise it – the question, unpicked, is likely to mean:
Your skin colour and facial appearance suggests your ethnic origin isn’t north European, so in which country are your family origins? Actually, though, I don’t really care. My question is mainly rhetorical and microracist. I’m really just drawing attention to your otherness.
A 2022 high-profile incident involving a UK royal aide and a black British charity worker is a good example of this phenomenon.
Former royal aide Susan Hussey | Photo: Getty
The aide, ‘Lady’ Susan Hussey, widow of former BBC chairman ‘Baron’ Hussey, close friend of ‘King’ Charles, ‘Queen’ Camilla and the late ‘Queen’ Elizabeth, and godmother to monarchy heir ‘Prince’ William, resigned after the incident.
The incident supports Meghan Markle’s implied claim of racism in the royal household; and flags widespread casual racism amongst the ruling class.
If the question, as in that case, seems offensively rhetorical, the asker’s bluff can be called: ‘Why do you want to know?’
If the question seems genuine, and worthy of a helpful response, it might nevertheless be not so easy to answer.
For an answer to be accurate – and understood – both parties need good geopolitical and historical awareness. It can get complicated.
For instance, If a British person of South Asian appearance is known to be a Muslim, they might not be of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin. Many UK Muslims have origins in the Indian state of Gujerat. (Almost one in five Indian people are Muslim.)
Many South Asian people came to the UK from East Africa, mainly from Kenya and Uganda. South Asian communities were established beforepartition in East Africa and the Caribbean, mainly in Kenya, Uganda and Trinidad. They were there because of another piece of clumsy and careless social engineering by the Brutish Empire:indentured servitude.
Between 1834 and 1917, many people were induced to move from India to other colonies as indentured labourers for the empire. Unsurprisingly, the conditions were harsh and the wages low. The workers were derogatively called ‘coolies’.
Indian indentured labourers, seeking to escape the poverty and famine frequent during colonial rule, came mainly from the Punjab and Bengal regions (both later severed during partition).
On completing their indenture, some stayed on in Africa or the Caribbean. They were joined by family members and formed thriving expatriate communities, albeit protected by the brutal stranglehold of empire.
After those colonies gained independence, many South Asian residents moved to the UK. Those in Uganda were famously expelled by Idi Amin. In Kenya, harsh changes to citizenship rules prompted mass voluntary emigration.
Those UK immigrants, whilst identifying by religion, often also identify by their diaspora community. For instance, people may identify as Kenyan Muslims.
My South Asian Muslim wife, when asked ‘Where are you from?’, sometimes says ‘Nairobi’. Her ethnicity is Punjabi but she was born in Kenya and spent her childhood there.
The person asked that question could give an informative reply, such as:
My family origins are Punjabi Muslim in what’s now Pakistan. In the late 1800s my grandfather went from the Punjab to work in what’s now Kenya. Our family lived there before coming to the UK in the late 1960s.
They could summarise it: ‘Pakistan’. But the question is more likely to provoke a passive-aggressive and deliberately obtuse reply, such as, ‘I’m from Leicester – where are you from?’ (or the deliberately annoying ‘from my mother’s womb’).
The question ‘Where are you from?’ might seem like casual curiosity framed as a friendly enquiry, but it’s microracism – at best.
To unpick it further, behind that innocent-seeming question – though, again, the questioner might not consciously realise it – lies a worse one: ‘Why are you here?’
The questioner might therefore reasonably be told to fuck off, or be given the pithy retort that emerged from antiracist immigrant activism:
If you’re asking why I’m here, we’re here because you were there’.
The hidden question, ‘Why are you here?’ at least offers the possibility of debate and reason; but behind that lurks the racist rhetorical question: ‘Why don’t you go back there?’
For postwar immigrants to the UK and their descendants, such racism is never far below the surface.
Note: My post Racism explained as a redundant instinct suggests racism is a redundant anti-stranger instinct revived and twisted by colonialism and postcolonialism – and, sadly, provoked by the postwar mass immigration carelessly engineered by a patrician government. We antiracists choose to reject and oppose that twisted impulse and to embrace our brilliant multicultural society.
Considerate white Brits, whether aware of all that or just wary of the social minefield, don’t ask that awkward question, ‘Where are you from?’
And if they need to refer to the ethnicity of someone apparently having origins in the Indian subcontinent, they’ll usually follow the (inaccurate) convention of referring to such people as ‘Asian’.
If I was a British person of colour asked by a white person, ‘Where are you from?’, and the question seemed intrusive, I’d want to challenge it, but it in a non-hostile way.
I’d initially bat it back by – politely – saying, ‘How do you mean?’ If they indicated they were asking about my ethnic origin rather than my place of residence, I’d ask – still politely, if possible – ‘Why do you want to know?’
The questioner might well find it difficult to explain themselves. Serves them right.
British people of colour people also ask the question, ‘Where are you from?’ of each other. The purpose is to find out the other’s origins: their country, religion, region, town, and caste or class.
That’s a different can of worms – and it doesn’t excuse white Brits asking that question. As always, context is crucial. The context is the white west and – as always – racism is prejudice plus power.
The convention of calling people from India, Pakistan or Bangladesh ‘Asian’ apparently began in the 1950s and became widespread in the UK after the launch of the BBC Asian Network radio station in 1989.
McCarthy’s thesis includes a photo of a 1960Radio Times of Kenya page showing an Asian National guide.
Photo: Liam McCarthy
British colony Kenya was home to a large South Asian community. The Kenyan Asian National radio service apparently ran from the 1950s to the late 1960s.
Most examples of ‘Asian’ in McCarthy’s thesis, dating from the 1960s to the late 1980s, are from BBC documents and radio programme names. However, a Leicester vox pop example from 1975 shows there was also some common usage during that time.
In 1989 the use of ‘Asian’ became more widespread after the BBC launched its Asian Network radio station to provide:
‘…speech and music output appealing to British Asians’
My bolding
Asian Network’s music was specified as being from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
By 1995, the Guardian newspaper was using both ‘Asian’ and ‘South Asian’ in this context. (However, the Guardianbizarrely insisted – and still does – on spelling the ‘South’ in ‘South Asian’ wrongly – with a small ‘s’. See below.)
In 2001, the UK census first used ‘Asian’ in this context, with the heading ‘Asian or Asian British’. The options were Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi (and, confusingly, ‘Any other Asian background’).
Since the late 1970s, UK police identity codes known (tautologically) as IC codes have been used to identify over radio the apparent ethnicity of suspects and victims. Currently, IC4 is ‘Asian’, meaning people apparently of Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi ethnicity.
So, although ‘Asian’ became more widespread after 1990, it’s apparently been in use since the 1950s, close to the causation point: the 1947 partition of India.
(If anyone knows how it arose in the first place – presumably in the early 1950s – please tell me.)
‘Asian’, meaning from India, Pakistan or Bangladesh, has been in widespread use since 1989 – but there’s been some resistance.
A 2002Asian Networkpoll found most UK South Asian people disliked being called ‘Asian’. A Guardianreport on the station and its poll said South Asian people would prefer to be described by their country of origin.
Description by country of origin would work on self-identification forms, but there’d be difficulties with how South Asian people are referred to by others. (How would people know, without asking that toxic question: ‘Where are you from?‘)
Also, the three main South Asian communities – Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi – aren’t the same. They campaign for the differences to be understood. But how should they be referred to collectively when necessary?
Apparently, some people of Pakistani origin said they’d rather be called ‘Indian’ than ‘Asian’ – because that would at least convey a regional cultural identity.
(Some young people of Pakistani origin use‘Indian’ with deliberate irony to mean anyone or anything from either India or Pakistan. See below.)
However, in spite of such understandable reservations, UK South Asian people, presumably aware of the difficulties for all concerned (and perhaps subconsciously yearning for subcontinental unity), seem mainly willing to accept the collective ‘Asian’ identification.
Not long ago, Pakistan was India, and some British people – lazily or nostalgically – still think of ‘India’ as the name of the region. So the most likely way to cause offence (now the racist P-word has become as unacceptable as the N-word) is to inadvertently call someone who happens to be of Pakistani origin ‘Indian’ or vice versa.
However, young UK people of Pakistani origin often use ‘Indian‘ themselves – knowingly ironically – when referring to anyone or anything from either India or Pakistan, as in the catchily assonant (and internally alliterative) meme, ‘It’s Indian, innit‘ (optionally said with a culturally appropriated Jamaican rudeboy accent).
It’s probably best not to try this if you’re not young and South Asian – or West Indian (!) (It’s complicated, innit, postcolonial, geopolitical cross-cultural urban slang.)
Do UK South Asian people living in England ever identify as Asian English, or do they prefer ‘Asian British’?
In 2014 researchers found most South Asian people in Scotland preferred to be known as ‘Scottish Asian’ rather than ‘Asian British’. They also found minority groups are more likely to claim a Scottish identity in Scotland than an English identity in England.
I’ve never come across anyone identifying as Asian English – and Googling it gives no relevant results. Does a person living in England and identifying as Asian British, who’s family roots are in, say, Pakistan, understandably think of themselves as Pakistani rather than English?
There’s one good reason for British South Asian people to avoid Englishness: it’s been tainted by association with anti-immigrant groups.
Far-right, racist, nationalist groups have claimed to defend England against Islam and other immigrant cultures.
The previously little-used English flag, the red cross of St George (a not-very-English Roman soldier of Turkish-Greek origin serving in Palestine), has been hijacked by the racist Right.
The current widespread use of the English flag in support of the England football team – you don’t see it in photos of England’s 1966 world cup victory – might well cause concern in immigrant communities.
1966 – plenty of racism then, but no St George flags / PA
The UK ‘Union Jack’ flag as shown above was used in the logo of racist party the National Front. The NF, big in the 1970s, has all but disappeared. Current racists groups favour the red-cross English flag.
Perhaps British South Asian people do well to steer clear of the complicated issue of Englishness. It’s probably best left to the indigenous English.
Research shows British South Asian people are unlikely to claim English identity. One possible reason is that Englishness has been hijacked by flag-waving nationalist neo-Nazi groups.
Those groups have freely used the provocative Crusaderred cross of the ‘St George‘ English flag in their campaigning, and have claimed to ‘defend’ England against Islam and other immigrant cultures.
Nationalist racists began organising against Jews in the 1930s, and were later keen to exploit the tension which followed postwarmass immigration to the UK.
That immigration, ordained for economic and demographic reasons with no consultation and no concern for the social wellbeing of immigrant or host communities, inevitably disturbed the locals. There was widespread racism.
The far right tried to exploit that, with some limited success – the National Front was quite big in the 1970s – but it’s never had much support in the phlegmatic UK. Enoch Powell was wrong.
Powell’s notorious 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech warning of mass civil disturbance was false prophecy. Powell quoted a Roman poet foreseeing the River Tiber ‘foaming with blood’, but – despite occasional ‘race riots’ caused by racist injustice – there’s been no foaming of blood in the UK.
Thanks to common sense and goodwill, and to antiracist campaigning and legislation, most citizens of all ethnicities have accepted a pragmatic mixture of multiculturalism and integration.
There’s been talk recently, in the face of illiberal teaching in some segregated faith schools, of promoting British values – but the values prescribed aren’t exclusively ‘British’. They’re the European Enlightenment values that underpin modern liberal democracy.
The solution to segregation is not for immigrant communities to be made to somehow acquire ‘Britishness’ – it’s for those communities to stop self-segregating. Britishness is what happens when you live here without segregating yourself.
If there are ‘British values’, one of the best, ironically, is a stoical indifference to national pride and flag-waving patriotism. (See my post, Patriotism – for scoundrels.)
There was a disturbing spike in racism following the UK’s EU referendum in 2016 (in effect, the UK’s first public consultation on immigration) but younger people generally seem far less racist than previous generations.
Despite that lessening of inter-ethnic tension, black and South Asian Britons continue to face prejudice and discrimination, both personal and institutional.
The Black Lives Matter movement raised awareness of that conscious and unconscious racism, and has encouraged antiracists to speed up the UK’s slow progress towards ending racism.
Apart from the Saudi-exported Salafi self-segregation practised by some UK Muslims (which damages women and children and provokes racism), multicultural England doesn’t need defending against immigrant cultures – it’s made of them.
Racist nationalists who claim to defend England can shove their flags, and crawl back under their stone.
Nationalism: a rant
It’s natural to feel affection for your country, but nationalism, with its flag-waving banality and its dangerous, narrow-minded ideology is an unnatural abomination.
The danger of nationalism is shown by the murderous religious conflict in India associated with the rise of populist prime minister Narendra Modi, his Hindu nationalistBJP party and the Hindu nationalistRSS paramilitary group he belongs to.
(The RSS also operates internationally, promoting its Hindu-supremacist ideology, Hindutva, to the Indian Hindu diaspora. See my blogpost about the 2022 Leicester riots, The riots: Hindutva in Leicester.)
Globally, the nation state’s had its day. The big states are powerful but can’t stop global warming. The so-called United Nations is toothless – it helps victims but pussyfoots with perpetrators.
To right nationalism’s wrongs – environmental destruction, poverty, corruption, disease and war – what the world needs now is love, tough love: transnational federated World government. With teeth.
Left: Asian woman, UK. Right: Asian man, US | Getty Images
In the UK, ‘Asian’ is used to refer to anyone apparently of South Asian ethnicity. However, in the US, ‘Asian’ refers to people of East Asian ethnicity. This avoids offending Japanese people by calling them Chinese, and vice versa. As with Pakistan and India, there’s historical enmity between the two countries.
‘Asian’ in the US – as blatantly inaccurate as the UK version – is apparently a careless contraction of ‘East Asian’. The geographic region of East Asia includes China and Japan as well as South Korea, North Korea, Taiwan, and Mongolia.
In the UK, ‘Asian’ and ‘Asian British’ mean the same: South Asian. But in the US, ‘Asian American’ has a more formal and broader meaning than ‘Asian’ – it means having ethnic origins in one of three Asian regions: South Asia, Southeast Asia or East Asia.
(Southeast Asia is Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines and East Timor.)
‘Asian American’ and ‘Asian British’ are both carelessly innacurate, perhaps reflecting imperialist arrogance.
‘Asian British’ excludes the five other geographic Asian regions. ‘Asian American’ is slightly less innacurate, only excluding three Asian regions.
The centre-left Guardian, the UK’s most-read quality daily newspaper, bizarely insists on writing ‘south Asian’ with a small ‘s’, as in this 2021 headline:
Gene common in south Asian people doubles risk of Covid death, study finds
However – shock, horror – the Guardian‘s got it wrong. It should, of course, be ‘South Asian’ with a capital ‘S’.
This isn’t one of the ‘typo’ errors the Guardian used to be famous for (giving it the nickname the ‘Grauniad‘). The paper has deliberately printed ‘south Asian’ with a small ‘s’ since it first started using the epithet a few decades ago. (See, for instance, this 1993 article.)
It’s not just an issue of grammar. The Guardian‘s idiosyncratic lower-case ‘s’ effectively demeans South Asian people. That’s clearly not the liberalGuardian’sintention – but it’s the inevitable effect of the paper’s grammatical anomaly.
I’m a long-time Guardianreader, but I only recently noticed the ‘south Asian’ spelling. I turned to the A-Z Guardianstyle guide, normally a shining beacon of omniscient clarity – but it was disappointingly flawed.
The Guardianstyle guide had no entries for ‘Asian’ or ‘South Asian’. This was a surprising omission by a liberal paper (rightly) championing multiculturalism. ‘South Asian’, meaning Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi, is a sensitive, circuitous, polite, and politically correct element of multiculturalism. Its use in the Guardian deserves a clear explanation.
The main problem, however, is the Guardian‘s bizarre insistence on spelling ‘south Asian’ with a small ‘s’.
I complained to the Guardian about their ‘south Asian spelling. In reply, they quoted this, from the style guideG section:
geography
distinct areas are capped up: Black Country, East Anglia, Lake District, Midlands, Peak District, Potteries, West Country, etc; but areas defined by compass points are lc: the north, the south-east, the south-west, etc.
This is nonsense as an explanation for their ‘south Asian’ spelling. Defined geopolitical areas such as South Asiaare‘distinct areas’. They’re not ‘areas defined by compass points’ – the compass point is part of their proper name.
The Guardian style guideS section has several entries beginning ‘south’. For ‘South America’, the compass-point element is capitalised, but for ‘south-west England, the south-east, south Wales, etc’, it isn’t.
Only two Asian regions are mentioned in the Guardian style guide. The guide’s E section gives ‘east Asia’ and ‘south-east Asia’.
The Guardian rule seems to be that capitals for compass-point elements are allowed in the names of Guardian-defined ‘distinct areas’ (eg East Anglia) or continents (eg South America) but are denied in the names of ‘areas defined by compass points’, (eg, the north).
That denial is apparently extended to major geopolitical regions with a compass-point element in their name (eg ‘south Asia’).
According to its own fuzzy logic, the Guardian should consistently spell the names of all Asian regions the same way. However, in the section heading shown below, ‘Central Asia’ is spelt correctly – with a capital ‘C’!
It’s probably pointless (geddit?) to explain why the Guardian‘s wrong to write ‘south Asian’ with a lower-case ‘s’, so here goes nothing.
All major broadcasters and publishers, including Gov.uk, the BBC, Wikipedia and National Geographic, write ‘South Asia’ with a capital ‘S’. They give proper-name status to all such major geopolitical regions.
Gov.uk’s style guide has no entries for ‘Asian’ or ‘South Asian’, but the website uses capital ‘S’ throughout for South Asia. Gov.ukarticle title:
Overcrowding in South Asian households: a qualitative report
‘Points of the compass…are capitalized…when they form part of a proper name…If [a region] is consistently capitalized in reliable sources…then the direction word in it is capitalized’
The Wikipedia entry for South Asia capitalises both words throughout.
A water crisis looms for 270 million people as South Asia’s glaciers shrink
Everyone else also apparently disagrees with the Guardian. I googled ‘south asian’, and in the first five pages of results, all instances except two – a total of 44 (disregarding those where ‘South Asian’ began a sentence) – were spelt with a capital ‘S’. The two exceptions were from the Guardian.
The Guardian prides itself on its independence, but this looks like a bad case of They Were All Out of Step But Jim (as in the humorous American World War I song).
The Guardian style guide is instructively unhelpful. Its C section, under ‘capitals’, lists sixteen ‘main principles’ for its policy of minimising the use of capitals – but there’s no principle listed for capitalising regions such as South Asia.
The guide’s G section, under ‘geography’ (see above), does at least address the issue. It allows capitals for ‘distinct areas’ (such as, apparently, East Anglia) but denies them for ‘areas defined by compass points’.
The Guardian apparently puts South Asia in the latter category. That’s nonsense. If East Anglia qualifies as a ‘distinct area’, then surely South Asia does – it’s a major geopolitical region comprising eight countries (see above); and ‘South Asian’ is used in the UK media to mean Pakistani, Indian or Bangladeshi.
Geographically and politically (in either sense), South Asia clearly deserves proper-name status – as do all Asian regions. Proper names should, of course, be capitalised.
The Guardian‘s current minimal-capitals versions, ‘south Asia’ and ‘south Asian’, lack definition. They’re not proper names – they’re effectively vague and vacuous. The reader might understandably wonder what part of Asia is being referred to.
If I were South Asian (in the UK sense of having Pakistani, Indian or Bangladeshi ethnicity), I might well feel – perhaps subliminally – somewhat downgraded and mildly insulted. (Is that what you want, Guardian? ‘Cause that’s what’ll happen.)
The Guardianstyle guide section on the use of capitals says:
We aim for coherence and consistency, but not at the expense of clarity
Clarity requires ‘South Asian’ to have a capital ‘S’ – and so does history. The Guardian, liberal flagship of the British media, should consider that the need to use a regional name as a collective proxy for British South Asian people arises from the British-organised partition of India.
If the Guardian were to fall in line with all other media and give proper-name status to South Asia, it’d be a small measure of historical restitution – and a large measure of common courtesy.
When I asked the Guardian about this, their response, in quoting their style guide entry on geography (see above), was – perhaps predictably – dismissively and obtusely defensive.
However, in response to my point that the Guardianstyle guide should have an explanation of the use of ‘South Asian’ to mean Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi, they said they might consider adding ‘a specific entry for south Asia’.
That was begrudging – and stubbornly ungrammatical – but it was a start.
However, it was also an end. They haven’t changed the spelling – and they haven’t added ‘a specific entry for south Asia’. Hi fucking ho.
We say ‘Asian’, meaning South Asian, because people of South Asian ethnicity might be ‘from’India, Pakistan or Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan). It’s all because of partition.
Pakistan was created in 1947 by the devastating partition of India, Britain’s clumsy and careless division of two Indian provinces, the Punjab and Bengal, which inevitably led to the violent deaths and forced relocation of millions of people.
The perfidious British rulers were mainly to blame for the partition disaster – but who else was to blame? Was it Muslim leader Muhammad Jinnah?
It’s often assumed partition happened because Jinnah insisted on a Muslim nation. Jinnah’s Muslim Leaguedid vote for separation in 1940, but that’s not the whole story.
Jinnah, a secular leader, was determined to protect Muslims from political isolation. His preference was for a federated India, but that idea was blocked by Indian National Congress leader Jawaharlal ‘Pandit’ Nehru, leaving Jinnah no choice but separation.
That’s a shame – it could have been the USI, with the Punjab and Bengal as multicultural federal states. Instead, they were ripped apart by partition.
Saying ‘Asian’ or ‘South Asian’ is a small reminder of that big tragedy. When remembering it, however, don’t blame Muslim pragmatist and man of principle Jinnah.
Blame the real villain:Hindu nationalist and colonial colluder Nehru.
In which I write a robust, generalised, secular humanist critique of Islam in the UK without being Islamophobic
Nice art – shame about the self-segregationPhoto: Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji
Warning: the following article contains strong opinions. Devout Muslims of simple faith may wish to move along; anyone else, please read on…
Am I Islamophobic, frightened of Islam? If I believed the many rabid anti-Islamic websites out there, saying that Muslim immigration is a Trojan horse, about to destroy democracy, I probably would be. But I dont; and I’m not.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, here in the UK, I’ll explain why I don’t much like Islam as it is at the moment; and how that doesn’t make me Islamophobic.
Fact: Oil-rich Saudi Arabia spends billions of dollars on the international promotion of Wahhabism/Salafism, widely recognised as one of fundamentalist Islam’s most extreme movements. Much of the money funds children’s education in British faith schools and mosques.
Fact: A headteacher friend told me that in her mainly-Muslim state primary school the day after 9/11, Muslim children were singing pro-Osama bin Laden chants.
Fact: There were demonstrations in London by Muslims against the war in Iraq and against offensive cartoons, but there have been no demonstrations against al-Qaeda or Isis. PR statements of condemnation and claims that Islam is a religion of peace are made, but Muslims have not accepted any responsibility for the brutal terrorism coming from within their religion. Many Muslims resort to elaborate conspiracy theories or blame foreign policy to justify denial.
Fact: A UK opinion poll has indicated significant support amongst Muslims for young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria. Another poll showed that a significant number of UK Muslims believe the 2005 7/7 London bombings were justified because of the west’s war on terror.
Does writing those things in a blog make me Islamophobic?
Fact: Muslims are taught that they shouldn’t live in a non-Muslim country, but if they do, they shouldn’t befriend non-Muslims. (Actually, despite being a native non-believer – I’m agnostic – I find UK Muslims friendly. But the teaching is there.)
Fact: A religious message has been circulated calling for Muslims to foster or adopt refugee Muslim orphans to save them from the ‘alien environment’ of non-Muslim homes. (Many ‘alien’ non-Muslims had come forward, but very few righteous Muslims had done so.)
Is it Islamophobic to say those things?
Fact: According to supposedly reliable contemporaneous reports, the prophet Muhammad at the age of 54 began having penetrative sex with a nine-year old girl, who’d been his ‘wife’ since the age of six.
Islamophobia?
The accusation of Islamophobia is the knee-jerk defensive response by Muslim spokespeople to any criticism of Islam. This is like the accusation of antisemitism made in response to any criticism of Israel or Zionism. (See my blog on the weird word ‘antisemitism‘.)
Words matter. As a critic of Islam, am I Islamophobic? The suffix ‘phobia’ can mean ‘aversion’, but it’s usually taken to mean ‘irrational fear’ (as in ‘claustrophobia’, meaning fear of enclosed spaces). The widespread use of the word ‘Islamophobia’ deflects criticism. Critics must be either irrational or fearful or both, so they can be ignored. Say the magic word, and the criticism doesn’t need to be addressed.
Am I irrationally frightened of Islam? We all could be rationally frightened of Islam, after the horrors of 9/11 and 7/7. (I say ‘we all’, because some of the victims were Muslims.) But personally, in spite of that, I’ve got no fear of Islam – rational or irrational – or of Muslims in general. So no, I’m not Islamophobic.
‘Anti-Islamic‘ is better than ‘islamophobic’, but that’s not quite right either for a liberal critic of Islam. What if you don’t like Islam as it is, but you’re not actually against it? There should be a suffix or prefix for ‘dislike it as it is at the moment’ – but there isn’t.
There’s a long-term grumbling undercurrent in the British host community of semi-coherent resentment of the post-war immigration project. The sudden influx of large numbers of foreign people, many with foreign languages and religions, was a shock.
If the host community had been consulted and had agreed to mass immigration, there might gave been a more welcoming and trusting environment, which might have made integration more successful.
(My post, Patriotism – for scoundrels addresses the current policy of trying to promote integration by teaching ‘British values‘ in schools.)
When resentment and distrust are aimed at Muslims, as they sadly often are, ‘Islamophobia’ is as good a word as any to describe it. But it won’t do as a blanket response to any criticism.
Openly anti-Islamic racist groups in the UK and Europe try to stir up fear of Islam, but fortunately they have little support in the UK. However, any western criticism of Islam inevitably risks conflation with racism. Most UK Muslims are of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin and are therefore, like all immigrant communities, victims of racism.
Victimhood can become a bad habit – hence, perhaps, the over-use of the provocatively misleading word ‘Islamophobia’ – but the victims aren’t to blame. As the Archbishop of Canterbury has said, racism is deeply embedded in British culture. Liberal critics of Islam should tread lightly.
(Racism is a different – albeit, related – subject, with its own deep-rooted complexity. See my post Racism explained as a redundant instinct, which includes a detailed account of the racism-provoking self-segregation practised by a large minority of UK Muslims.)
Is there such a person as a moderate Muslim? Google it, and you find many writers and thinkers, both Muslim and non-Muslim, saying ‘No’. The Muslim ‘No’ argument is that it’s not acceptable to be moderately dedicated to Islam; ‘moderate’ Muslims are on the slippery slope to apostasy and Hell.
Ordinary Muslims – decent, honest and friendly – are moderate, aren’t they? Thats what an anxious host community would like to think. But a powerful and communal ideological commitment combined with a sense of being beleaguered can nudge the most ordinary person into a bunker mentality.
(UK Muslims’ sense of being beleaguered, or even persecuted, is somewhat ridiculous when compared to real persecution. See my article about the previously saintly Aung San Suu Kyi and her Myanmar goverment’s brutal persecution of the Rohingya Muslims, Halo Goodbye, Suu – the Rohingya crisis.)
Moderate or not, Muslims say that Islam isn’t just a religion, it’s a way of life – one which must be preserved, and not be contaminated by integration with the decadent host community. This reluctance to integrate is the cause of most of the criticism, and of the consequent paranoid accusations of Islamophobia.
Symptoms of the host community’s supposed decadence include our acceptance of homosexuality and equality for women, and our lack of religious faith.
Young UK Muslims are often torn between the Islamic lifestyle – which secures their position in their extended family and the wider Muslim community – and the western lifestyle, which isn’t really that decadent, and which has attractions other than the merely material – mainly, the freedom to live how you want, within the protective barrier of reason and secular law.
This tension is expressed in a few cases by joining Isis (to escape temptation and see the world); or lapsing; and in most cases isn’t expressed at all, but simply bubbles under the surface. Perhaps surprisingly, many Muslim families have one or more lapsed or semi-lapsed members who are still very much part of the family.
In any case, the non-western lifestyle of most UK Muslims is not purely Islamic. Pakistani and Bangladeshi cultural traditions – north Indian, as they were for centuries before partition – are mixed with Islamic principle. For instance, most Islamic weddings ignore Quran-ordained simplicity in favour of expensive three-day celebrations with lavish gifts of gold jewellery and clothes.
Other unislamic traditions are less benign. Most UK ‘honour’ killing victims from 2009 to 2014 were of Pakistani origin. (1)
Muslims are entitled, of course, to preserve their way of life (within the law of the land), whether it’s strictly religious or not. There are other insular ethnic-religious groups in the UK that insist on keeping to a special lifestyle – for example, orthodox Jews. But Muslims are the only such group who’s religion is associated with worldwide sectarian and anti-west violence.
Muslims often say that the violence is unislamic. Even if that’s accepted (perhaps with some scepticism), there’s a worrying tendency for the culture of Islam in the west to self-segregate into an ideological supremacist fortress – nicely symbolised by the provocative wearing of eye-slit face veils.
Secular humanists look on with wariness and some distaste – but not Islamophobia.
(1)’Honour’ killing victims: Of the 22 out of 29 reported cases of ‘honour’ killings and attempted killings in 2010 where the ethnicity of the victim was known or alleged, 15 were of Pakistani origin (3 were Indian, 1 was Bangladeshi, 1 Palestinian/Syrian, 1 Kuwaiti and 1 white British) – The Henry Jackson Society database – reported cases of ‘honour’ killings and attempted killings in the UK between 31 December 2009 and 31 December 2014.
(The neoconservative HJS has form for being anti-Islamic, but these statistics appear to be sound.)
I put this to some Muslim scholars, liberals and reformers. So far, there have been two respondents, both reformers. They say that Islam needs to shed man-made sects (Sunnism, Sufism and Shiitism), disregard the extra texts (hadiths) and rely on the Quran, the interpretation of which is human and fallible. However, reform can have a bad side. The Wahabi/Salafi movement is a reformist movement, albeit an ultra-conservative Sunni one. Christian Reformation’sMartin Luther, a nasty piece of work, was calling for the burning of synagogues some 500 years ago. Thank goodness for the Enlightenment.
Muhammad’s nine-year old ‘wife’
One respondent said that the hadith about Muhammad having sex with his nine-year old ‘wife’, Aisha, is fabricated. However, there are apparently many supposedly reliable hadiths attesting to this ‘consummation of marriage’.
Some Muslims argue that Aisha was aged between 15 and 19 when the marriage was consumated, but most Muslims seem to accept that it happened when the girl was nine. Many Muslims apparently deal with criticism about it by saying that in a tropical climate, as in Arabia, girls reach puberty earlier, and that the nine-year-old must have been sexually mature.
I haven’t found any scientific evidence of earlier female puberty due to a hot climate. (I found some contradictory evidence: that girls mature later in hot climates.)
In any case, the idea of a 54-year-old man having sex with a nine-year-old girl, even if by by some freak of nature she’d reached puberty, seems profoundly wrong – at any point in history.
(There are also claims in anti-Islamic sites that Muhammad practised ‘thighing‘ on his child bride before she was nine. None of the ‘evidence’ links work. This appears to be a complete fabrication.)
A UK Guardian article by political editor Anushka Asthana reported the concerns of a leading expert on race and integration that British society is increasingly divided along ethnic lines, with segregation in schools, neighbourhoods and workplaces. In another article in the same edition, Labour MP Chuka Umunna warned of a ‘more ethnically segmented nation‘. Neither article explicitly mentioned Muslim communities, but both mentioned Oldham, a town in Greater Manchester which in 2001 was the scene of violent ethnically-motivated rioting between between local and Muslim communities.
So how come two commentators gave views on increasing segregation without mentioning the Muslim community?
The first Guardian article mentioned above gave the views of Professor Ted Cantle. I emailed Cantle, Chukka Umunna and Anushka Asthana, asking if they’d avoided mentioning Muslims. Umunna and Asthana haven’t replied (but see Update 2, below). Cantle replied, saying: ‘I would very much like details of the extent of segregation of Muslim and other faith communities. Unfortunately most of the analysis is in relation to ethnicity. I suspect that Muslim communities have become more isolated, as they feel somewhat beleaguered, and other communities have moved away from Muslim-associated areas.’ (My bolding.)
On this blog article, he said: ‘I am wary of over-generalisations about the Muslim community. I have learnt over the last 15 years just how diverse it is – theologically, culturally, politically, nationally, socially etc. I thought your blog failed to represent this diversity, even if some of the points may have been fair comment.’ Ouch.
On the first point, surely ‘Pakistani’ is effectively synonymous with ‘Muslim’, so if you know that people’s ethnicity is Pakistani, you know their faith is Muslim; and it’s common knowledge that Muslim communities tend to choose segregation, especially in the case of education, for religious reasons.
I put this to Prof Cantle. He said that (contrary to what I was suggesting) most Muslims are not Pakistani. He referred me to a residential-pattern analysis of the 2011 census figures, which does indeed show that in 2011 there were 2.7 million Muslims, but only 1.1 million people of Pakistani origin. That’s a surprisingly (surprising to me, anyway) low 40%. (A further 646,000 people were of Bangladeshi, Turkish or Somali origin, and there were about 100,000 converts, leaving about 900,000 Muslims of unknown ethnic origin. Apparently.)
Fair enough – the census has spoken. So why did I think that most UK Muslims were of Pakistani origin? I think it’s because whenever Muslims appear in the UK media, whether ordinary people, politicians, community leaders, writers, artists, actors, musicians or TV pundits, they’re nearly always of Pakistani origin. In other words, UK Muslim culture is represented by people of Pakistani origin. So arguably, when analysing UK trends, ‘Pakistani’ and ‘Muslim’ are effectively interchangeable.
Also, the census analysis addresses residential segregation; but what about educational segregation? That subject was discussed at length in the Guardian article – without any mention of faith groups. Can there really be no details available of the extent of educational segregation of Muslim and other faith groups? It’s well known that Muslims choose educational segregation for religious reasons, and that this has been a matter of high-profile public concern for some time (eg, the murky but inconclusive Trojan Horse affair). So it’s difficult to see how this can be overlooked in an in-depth expert review of the subject. (And what about the Wahabi/Salafi oil money funding UK faith schools?)
Other faiths have their own conservative schools, of course, most of which are funded by the state – whereas Muslim schools, on the whole, aren’t. The solution, though, is not to have more state-funded Muslim schools, but to end all state-funded faith schools, and enforce the teaching of the Enlightenment values of liberty, self-determination and personal responsibility that Western liberal democracy is built on. Western values, if you like. (Just dont call them ‘British’ values. See more on the legislation requiring the teaching of British values in my blog article, ‘Patriotism – for scoundrels‘.)
In any case, Muslim self-segregation applies to other areas of life as well.
I’ve since found that, contrary to what Prof Cantle said, there is published research on faith-based segregation. But for whatever reason, Cantle, Umunna and The Guardian are not discussing this. I suspect that the reason is their fear of being thought to be Islamophobic or – even worse – politically incorrect.
Another integration expert, Professor Tariq Modood, has told me that only 7% of Muslims choose Muslim faith-schools as compared with 50% of Jews.
However, that may be a function of the very low number of state-sanctioned Muslim schools as compared with other faiths. Also, the perception of educational segregation comes not so much from the numbers as from the illiberal Wahabi/Salafi teaching that is sought to be imposed.
Guardian polical editor Anushka Asthana (see Postscript 2, above) has finally replied (after some prompting) to my question about the two Guardian articles that discussed segregation without mentioning Muslims. She didn’t refer to the Chukka Umunna article; but she said that in her article, Prof Cantle did mention faith schools. However, I think the Guardian should set things right by explicitly addressing Muslim self-segregation.
