by Martin Relph
I have been concerned for some time now about how difficult
it has become to understand the nature of racism in this age of neoliberalism.
We are hardly living in a post-racial society but neoliberals would have us
believe that we are now living in a far more racially tolerant society, despite
the reality of growing inequalities and greater divisions. Politically, I think
it is vital that we dispel the myth that neoliberalism has created a less
racist society and return to an understanding of racism as inextricably linked
to colonialism, capitalism and imperialism.
On a personal level, three separate instances have prompted
me to challenge the prevailing neoliberal notion of racism and to write this
article. I am a white male who has been in a relationship with a black female
since the end of the 1970s. Not so long ago, someone suggested to me that it
must have been awful for us when we first started going out together compared
to how things are today. The second thing that got me thinking was an interview
last year of the so-called comedian Jim Davidson on BBC’s Newsnight programme by
Jeremy Paxman. Unchallenged by Paxman, Jim Davidson stated that Britain is
nowhere near as racist as it was in the 1970s and that it is now a much better
place to live in. Finally, in my previous job at a college of further education
I was co-opted to work on “equality and diversity impact measures” and was
quite surprised to discover that ethnic monitoring did little other than
reinforce the racial stereotypes held by managers and members of staff within
the institution.
Whilst I accept that black and brown people are more
established in Britain than they were in the 1970s, inequalities are certainly
much greater and I would argue that the attacks on working class communities
that we have witnessed over the past forty years have impacted especially adversely
on black communities. What the neoliberals have done is to individualise racism
so that racism is treated as a facet of human behaviour. Moreover, neoliberals
have chosen to ignore the historical context of race so that it has become much
more difficult to challenge the racist bias that prevails within many of our
institutions here in Britain. Within institutions, “equality and diversity” has
become the neoliberal tool to promote the view that racism is down to the
prejudice of individuals and that institutional racism does not exist. The
result has been that in many institutions workers are actually afraid of being
accused of being racist while at the same time, for historical reasons, there
is a deep racial bias within those same institutions. At the aforementioned
F.E. college where I worked on equality and diversity, one manager suggested to
me that the organisation had now gone beyond the stage where anyone could “play
the race card”. Yet within the same institution, when presented with data that
showed that black, mixed-race, Pakistani-origin and white students from
deprived post codes performed below average educationally, the majority of managers
only seemed to be interested in confirming their own stereotypes. This, of
course, fits perfectly with the neoliberal agenda of blaming poor people for
their own misfortunes because of their family backgrounds.
I would also challenge the view that Britain is a less
racist society than it was in the 1970s. At secondary school, I found Enoch
Powell’s rants upsetting but at the same time I was inspired by the Civil
Rights Movement in the United States led by Dr Martin Luther King. In 1970’s
Britain, in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement and the move towards
liberation on the African continent, there was a definitely a drive towards
creating a more racially just society here at home. At the time, I was into
funk music and I remember how racially integrated the fans of that particular
music were. There were also several British multiracial popular music bands
including the Foundations and Hot Chocolate. By the end of the 1970s, the 2
Tone sound dominated the music charts with bands like The Specials, The
Selecter and The Beat that appealed to black people and white people alike.
When Channel 4 started to broadcast in 1982, it was a wonderful, multicultural
TV channel. I still have my collection of videos of Latin American and African
films that were shown on Channel 4 in its early days. I wonder if Channel 4 had
broadcast Benefits Street at that time whether they would have, instead of
depicting poor people in a bad light, focussed on the benefits of living in a
multiracial community.
Trevor Phillips famously quoted that Britain was
“sleepwalking to segregation”. I do feel that this is what has been happening
as traditional working class communities have been destroyed. However, unlike
Trevor Phillips, I consider this to be down to neoliberalism rather than
multiculturalism. Britain was not a slave society nor have we witnessed the
genocide of our indigenous peoples on our own soil. The peculiar brand of
racism that we have here was therefore developed in line with British
imperialism. As racism is an anachronism to neoliberals, problems that arise
within our society that are related to our imperial past are explained as
problems of human behaviour. Islamophobia is a case in point, where attacks on
Muslims are seen as individual acts of religious intolerance instead of being
connected to Britain’s long and continuing involvement as an imperial power in
the Muslim world. The real problem here is, in fact, not religious intolerance
but the racist bias of the political establishment and the mainstream media
that considers white blood to be superior to the blood of non-white people,
including Arabs and Afghans.
I started off by saying that it is important that we dispel
the myth that neoliberalism has created a more racially tolerant and just
society. By its very nature, neoliberalism is far from being egalitarian.
Neoliberals believe in privatisation and in relation to racism they have
privatised racist attitudes while they have ignored structural racism and the
racist practices of institutions. At the same time, the poor and marginalised
within our society have been pressurised to find solutions to their problems
and then blamed if they do not succeed.
Martin Relph
Respect Party member
November 2014
