After Michael Banton: some reflections on his contributions to the study of race

ABSTRACT

A year after the death of Michael Banton, Solomos focuses on his contributions to the study of race and ethnic relations. Over a period that began in the 1950s and continued until his death on 22 May 2018, Banton continued to make important contributions to a number of scholarly areas, including the study of race relations in urban communities, the history of racial thought, policing and community relations, and the understanding of race equality policies. His work in all of these areas has helped to shape a field of scholarship and research, and is likely to remain a point of reference for future generations of researchers. In reflecting on Banton’s varied contributions Solomos argues that there is much to be gained from engaging with his work. He concludes by exploring some of the critiques of his key contributions.     

Enoch Powell's ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech: Fifty Years On

Fifty years ago, Enoch Powell made what still is one of the most notorious speeches in postwar British politics. Its tone was shocking for its use of inflammatory references to ethnic minority immigrants. Immigration continues to be divisive and references to it by politicians inevitably lead to comparisons with Powell. The aim of the collection is to examine Powell's speech from a number of perspectives, exploring how it was viewed both by contemporaries and in the light of subsequent developments. The objective of this article is to examine Powell's motivations, impact and legacy.     

Integration or Black Power?

Integration politics experienced a postcolonial crisis in the late 1960s. This was a crisis driven by the simultaneous and inter‐related eruption of Powellism and Black Power. This article uses the crisis of integration politics to show the Powellite conjuncture from its other side, as it played out in the reconstitution of black British politics. It shows how black activists responded to the rise of Powellism by demanding that the politics of integration be either abandoned or reframed, to more fully shake out the colonial inheritances that lurked within it. The integration proposed by the postwar project of race relations was problematic from its inception; Black Power used Powell's intervention to expose these problems and demand change.     

‘Strangers in their own land’: Powellism’s policy impact

ABSTRACT

In this paper, Solomos provides an account of the impact of Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech on policy agendas about race relations and immigration. He argues that Powell’s intervention helped to shape policy frames around race and immigration in its immediate aftermath and beyond. By exploring the impact of the speech on the policy climate, his paper argues that perhaps the most important aspect of the speech is the way it helped to shape the policy agendas of both the Conservative and Labour parties, even as Powell himself was marginalized from mainstream politics. He concludes by suggesting that Powell’s intervention links up with contemporary debates and preoccupations about race and immigration.     

Prologue: the riddle of race

ABSTRACT

Bernard explores the myth of racelessness as it is currently circulating in American social discourse. The election of the first black American president has unleashed the term across the cultural landscape, from the mainstream media to the classrooms in which she teaches African American literature. Students use the term as a twenty-first-century incarnation of the civil rights-era concept of colour blindness. But racelessness does not represent an aspiration for equality as much as it represents an ambition to turn away from the realities of difference. It is code for a common ambition to avoid the realities of institutional racial inequalities, as well as personal experiences of cultural difference. The myth of racelessness intersects uncomfortably with current academic discourse that promotes the view of race as a social construction. Scientifically proven and irrefutably true, this discourse does not allow any room for the social experience of race and racial difference as it is lived by everyone every day, whether we like it or not. The election of President Barack Obama is a portal on to this current confusion about the concept of race, specifically, and blackness, in particular. Many pundits have speculated that Obama would not have been electable if he had had dark skin, if he were irrefutably black, in colour and culture. The fact that he himself has elected to call himself ‘black’ serves as the platform of Bernard's essay on the case of race in the United States.     

Managing South African transformation: the story of cricket in KwaZulu Natal, 1994–2004

Sport has historically been an important element of South African popular culture, even though it was divided along racial lines for much of the country's history. In post-apartheid South Africa, sport is seen by politicians, sports officials and many ordinary people as a means to surmount race and class barriers and to forge nationhood. But sport remains a site of acute contestation over what transformation means: ‘merit’ versus ‘affirmative action’, beneficiaries of change, pace of transformation and so on. This conflict reflects the broader tensions over how South African society should be restructured. Change in racial composition at the level of leadership, coaching and players since 1990 has failed to transform cricket into a ‘people's game’. The cricket establishment is following the lead of government in prioritizing the empowerment of a minority. Class privilege has replaced race privilege. At the same time, tensions generated by change are producing further hostility along the fault lines of race and class. There is, for example, a conflict over resources among those previously labelled ‘Black’: Indians, Coloureds and the majority African population. These struggles reveal the fragmented nature of post-apartheid South African society, notwithstanding attempts to define South Africa as a ‘rainbow nation’. The historical, social, economic and cultural legacy of South Africa's conflicting pasts, the impact of globalization—and sport is a principal front of globalization, generating vast economic revenue and creating intolerable pressure to succeed—as well as post-apartheid discrepancies in economic and social conditions are all making it difficult to forge a united national culture, despite the attempt to use sport for the ‘mythic enactment’ of a collective South African identity. The tensions discussed in this article continue to be alive though the ‘patterns of prejudice’ are manifesting themselves in different forms.     

Post-racial paradoxes: rethinking European racism and anti-racism

ABSTRACT

The advent of a post-racial understanding of racism has changed the way in which Europe sees itself and its ethnic minorities. The concept of the post-racial emerged in the United States to describe a belief that America was no longer a racist society and the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land was a public and highly visible confirmation of that state of affairs. A global post-racial culture has taken hold of western plutocracies in which racism is universally denounced but increasingly difficult to pin down. Sayyid's study, by using a decolonial analytics, examines the different ways in which racism is imagined and how this imagination shapes the way in which the post-racial appears. The paper goes on to sketch out an alternative account of the post-racial as an aspect of the various trends that have been described as being post-political.     

Race,Islamophobia and the politics of citizenship in post-unification Germany

ABSTRACT

In the immediate aftermath of German reunification, as in the wake of the recent humanitarian crisis, Germany experienced notable ‘peaks’ of racist agitation and violence. In the 1990s, as today, the post-Communist eastern regions of Germany tend to be perceived as the hub of such racism. In this article, Lewicki revisits both ‘peaks’ via an examination of numerical evidence for verbal and physical racist violence in the former East and West of Germany. Rather than conceiving of racism as ‘cyclical’ or a specific legacy of the Communist dictatorship, her analysis suggests that political projects in Germany’s past and present have retained distinct structural incarnations of race. Far-right activists could thus successfully channel animosities resulting from the terms of unification into nationalist and racist resentment: momentarily more so in the East, but increasingly also in the West. The politics of citizenship, Lewicki argues, has provided a key means of perpetuating, reaffirming and cementing racialized hierarchies in the two post-war German states, but also in reunified Germany.     

Embodying ‘the Nordic race’: imaginaries of Viking heritage in the online communications of the Nordic Resistance Movement

ABSTRACT

Kølvraa’s article focuses on the cultural imaginary of the Scandinavian extreme right by analysing the online presence of the so-called Nordic Resistance Movement. He seeks to show how the cultural imaginaries of this National Socialist organization make use of the Scandinavian Viking heritage in three distinct ways. First, to produce a distinctly Nordic form of National Socialism and thus potentially make this ideology palatable to Nordic publics. Second, to differentiate their racially oriented political project from a wider far-right or populist right concern with the defence of European Christian heritage and/or civilization against Islam. And, third, to thematize and perform a certain hyper-masculine identity, especially in the context of martial and sporting competitions arranged by the organization.     

Subjective racism,objective racism: the French case

Drawing on a recent survey on xenophobia and racism in France (autumn 2000), Mayer and Michelat compare answers to questions about minorities (measuring objective racism) with answers to a question on a respondent's own feeling as to his or her own racism (subjective racism), and to an open question about what it means to be 'racist'. The results show that, for three-quarters of the sample, the objective and subjective dimensions overlap: the level of subjective racism goes up with scores on the objective racism scale. But there are two deviant groups. The scrupulous (10 per cent), often to be found among principled Catholics or Communists, feel themselves to be racist in spite of their low scores on the objective scale, while the deniers (14 per cent) do not think of themselves as being racist in spite of their high scores. In line with theories of 'subtle racism', members of this latter group seem to be aware of an anti-racist norm and do not consider themselves to be racist, in contradistinction to racists, who admit being so, and are even proud to transgress the norm.     

“Are You Thinking What We're Thinking?” Immigration,Multiculturalism and the Disavowal of Racism in the Run-up to the 2005 British General Election

The overt expression of racist discourse in the public realm is today—even in the case of far-right organizations like the British National Party—avoided at all costs. Yet approaches by competing political parties to the “populist” issue of asylum/immigration in the months preceding the 2005 General Election were clearly informed by negative ideas of racial difference.

This article sets out to describe the conceptual logic and rhetorical structures of political discourses of cultural pluralism underwritten by the spectre of racism. This “official multiculturalism” is in large part shared by mainstream political parties and national news media, and is predicated on the self-conscious disavowal of racism and racist intent, while simultaneously serving to attack or problematize the existence or behaviour of certain racialized groups, both within and without the nation.

I argue that such interventions increasingly circulate around definitions of legitimate cultural citizenship; that is, on ideas of civil society predicated on normative models of belonging to multicultural Britain. I will consider how the electoral campaigns of both Labour and Conservative parties were carefully constructed with a view to their reporting in the news media, and the extent to which such discourses of (multi)cultural citizenship publicly disavow—yet remain strongly marked by—exclusionary concepts of racialized difference.     

Race,rape and capital punishment in Connecticut to 1830

ABSTRACT

Goodheart's narrative of the death penalty in early Connecticut argues that the racist depiction of black men as violent sexual predators who preyed on white women goes back hundreds of years and flourished in New England. The depiction of African American men as lascivious and dangerous was well established during slave times. The resulting prosecutorial treatment of black-on-white rape was remarkably consistent during the colonial and early national period. After the only white man was hanged for rape in 1693, the remaining five executions were all of Blacks. No one of any race was hanged for the rape of a Native American or African American woman. A marker of the marginalization of African Americans is that the final person hanged in Connecticut for a crime other than homicide was a black man for rape in 1817. This persistent pattern of prejudice is a telling example of the impact of race on criminal justice, especially the capital crime of rape.     

The Language of Race

The 1991 Census form for households in Great Britain included, for the first time, a question about ethnic group. The question had nine boxes, eight for named ethnic groups and one for 'any other'. One box had to be ticked for each member of the household. Brian Klug discusses his own reaction to the (so-called) ethnic question, and explains why, as a Jew of European extraction, he did not tick the box marked White. He examines several issues raised by the ethnic question, including the following: why this question is different from other questions on the form; the definition and use of the words 'racial' and 'ethnic'; the vocabulary of colour ('black', 'white' etc.) in the language of race; the idea that 'white' is an ethnic category; the claim that the ethnic question is an instrument for combatting racism; one proposal for improving the question by removing the 'racial' components in the categories.     

Teaching Obama: history,critical race theory and social work education

ABSTRACT

Barack Obama's first autobiography, Dreams from My Father (1995), explores themes of race and identity up to the late 1980s in the life of the first African American president. The book emphasizes Obama's personal struggle as the son of an interracial couple, and the social and environmental context that shaped his growth and transformation. Using the tools of critical race theory, Freeman illustrates how Obama's autobiography can be used in the classroom to explore an individual's developing racial consciousness in the 1970s and 1980s, and as a prism through which students can understand what it means to live in the post-civil-rights-movement era. Obama's life history illuminates how the ideas and meanings of racial progress in the United States are contested and struggled over on a daily basis at both the micro and macro level.     

‘Who are ya?’ The national identities and belongings of British Asian football fans

British Asian men and women are known to be passionate followers of football, travelling far and wide to support the England men's team. Yet, despite evidence to support this, it is popularly thought that they cannot be authentic supporters of the nation as their loyalties are divided between England and their ancestral places of ‘home’. The findings of Ratna's research are mainly based on the oral testimonies of British Asian male and female football players/fans. Using their stories about following the game, her paper unpacks notions of national belonging by specifically exploring the interconnections of race, ethnicity, religion and gender. She argues that national inclusiveness is not guaranteed for British Asian fans; the changing articulations of race, ethnicity, religion and gender may lead to contingent, contradictory and complex patterns of national inclusiveness and exclusiveness.     

New Labour,racism and ‘new’ football in England

ABSTRACT

Bradbury and Williams begin by examining aspects of the genealogy of incidents of fan racism at the Spain v. England international football match in Madrid on 17 November 2004, and the public outcry in Britain that followed. They raise questions about the possible ‘strategic mobilization’ by Spanish fans of apparently racist epithets as a response to the use, by the English football authorities before the match, of prominent anti-racism symbolism. The main body of the article then considers the British public response to Madrid within the context of the Blairite New Labour policy on football racism in England from the late 1990s. It argues that Labour's Football Task Force from 1997 constituted an entirely new direction for sport and government policy in Britain. However, by drawing on the comments of some of the key figures involved, Bradbury and Williams further contend that, both structurally and ideologically, the Task Force was preset to limit its own investigations on the nature and effects of racism, specifically in the English game. Although the Task Force's report, Eliminating Racism in Football, has had some positive effects—for example, on Football Association policy or in stimulating local anti-racist initiatives—its narrow focus and its relatively underdeveloped understanding of the racism problem in professional sport led its members to de-emphasize the significance of forms of institutionalized racism within English football. Research and commentaries on racism in the English game since that report was published in 1998 suggest that problems of racialized exclusion in football remain. Bradbury and Williams conclude that the public outrage in Britain about the incidents in Madrid reflect an over-concentration on silencing public expressions of racism—combating overt, collective fan outbreaks—at the expense of addressing the racialized structures of power that continue to shape access, opportunities and acceptance of ethnic minorities within professional football in England.     

A Haitian in Paris: Anténor Firmin as a philosopher against racism

ABSTRACT

Bernasconi's essay locates Anténor Firmin's De l’égalité des races humaines (1885) in the context of the discussions of the science of race at the time, and argues that when seen in that light the book should be considered a work of philosophy as well as a contribution to the science of its day. Particular attention is given to the debate between monogenesis and polygenesis, the impact of Charles Darwin on the discussion of the human races, particularly through the work of Clémence Royer, and the role of positivism within anthropology. Although Firmin addressed the contributions of Charles Darwin and Arthur de Gobineau to the understanding of race, they were not his main focus, which was to expose the fallacies employed by the advocates of racial inequality. Firmin's reliance on the Comtean doctrine of progress makes it impossible for us to embrace his overall theory today without considerable reservations. Nevertheless, the ease with which he exposed the prejudices of many of the leading scientists of his day provides an invaluable challenge to all those who want to excuse their failure to promote racial equality on the grounds that they were simply ‘children of their time’.     

Three-Fifths a Racist: A Typology for Analyzing Public Opinion About Race

Is race politics primarily about symbolic racism, principled conservatism, or group conflict? After almost three decades, this debate among some of our best scholars seems scarcely closer to resolution, yet the theoretical, empirical, and normative issues at stake remain enormous. All three parties to the debate falsely assume that the causal structure driving opinion about race policy is homogenous. I reorient and advance the debate by showing how a methodological shift to a data-driven taxonomy of subjects can elucidate how race politics really is complex. I use this taxonomy to run new analyses, and to explain and assess the seemingly contradictory results of previous contributions to the debate. Each of the major parties to the debate is partially right in their account of public opinion about race politics, but about independently identifiable sub-sets of subjects.     

The (im)plausibility of racism in Europe: policy frameworks on discrimination and integration

ABSTRACT

Rodríguez Maeso and Araújo analyse the reproduction of a dominant understanding of racism in policy discourses of integration and discrimination used by monitoring agencies in Portuguese and European Union (EU) institutional contexts. More specifically, they question the political concern over racism and discrimination vis-à-vis the idea of Europe ‘becoming increasingly diverse’ and the need to gather ‘evidence’ of discrimination. To that end, they examine periodic reports issued by EU monitoring agencies since the 1990s—paying specific attention to reporting on school segregation of Roma pupils in Portugal—and national integration policies and initiatives that, since the 2000s, have targeted mainly Roma and black families and youth. They argue that the dominant discourse of integration and cultural diversity conceives of racism as external to European political culture, and as a ‘factor’ of the ‘conflictive nature’ of social interactions in ethnoracially heterogeneous settings. This paves the way for calls for the ‘strengthening of social cohesion’—on the assumption that policy initiatives need to act on the ‘characteristics’ of so-called ‘vulnerable’ populations—whereas institutional arrangements and everyday practices remain unchallenged.