Racism in the neoliberal age

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