The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain - Softcover

Kundnani, Arun

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745326455 ISBN 13: 9780745326450

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

'Before you can solve a problem you have to understand it. Arun Kundnani not only understands the roots and ramifications of contemporary racism but explains it clearly, linking the local, the global, the political and the cultural. An incisive book at a decisive moment.' Gary Younge 'An illuminating analysis of the historic development of British racism, and how this has evolved into the current debates about the demonisation of immigrants, asylum-seekers, Muslims, the war on terror, segration, assimilation, multi-culturalism and Britishness.' Herman Ouseley, former Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality 'Kundnani expertly dismantles the racism informing much of current political discourse. This is an important contribution to the struggle against racism.' Councillor Salma Yaqoob, Vice-Chair of Respect 'Kundnani guides us through the history and origins of the nebulous forms of today's "new" racism, placing economic and political exploitation back at the heart of the issue. An invaluable book for confusing times.' John Pandit, member of Asian Dub Foundation 'Cutting through the media-hyped public hysteria on issues around multiculturalism Kundnani has produced a highly accessible and valuable historical analysis of racism shaping contemporary policy-making.' Ruhul Tarafder, 1990 Trust Is Britain becoming a more racist society? Arun Kundnani looks behind the media hysteria to show how multicultural Britain is under attack by government policies and vitriolic press campaigns that play upon fear and encourage racism. Exacerbated by the attacks of 9/11 and 7/7, Kundnani argues that a new form of racism is emerging that is based on a systematic failure to understand the causes of forced migration, global terrorism and social segregation. The result is a climate of hatred, especially against Muslims and asylum seekers, and the erosion of the human rights of those whose cultures and values are perceived a

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Arun Kundnani is an Adjunct Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and teaches terrorism studies at John Jay College. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Leiden University, Netherlands, an Open Society Fellow, and the Editor of the journal Race and Class. He is the author of The End of Tolerance (Pluto, 2007) and The Muslims Are Coming! (Verso, 2014).

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The End of Tolerance

Racism in 21st-Century Britain

By Arun Kundnani

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2007 Arun Kundnani
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-2645-0

Contents

Acknowledgements, vi, 
Foreword by A. Sivanandan, vii, 
Introduction, 1, 
1 Echoes of Empire, 10, 
2 From Dependency to Displacement, 26, 
3 Seeds of Segregation, 40, 
4 We Are Here Because You Are There, 55, 
5 Asylum and the Welfare State, 72, 
6 The Dialectics of Terror, 90, 
7 The Halabja Generation, 106, 
8 Integrationism: The Politics of Anti-Muslim Racism, 121, 
9 Migration and the Market-state, 141, 
10 Here to Stay, 153, 
11 The New Leviathan, 165, 
12 Community: Theirs and Ours, 180, 
Notes to the Text, 189, 
Index, 215, 

CHAPTER 1

Echoes of Empire

One thousandwogs [equals] fifty frogs [equals] one Briton. One European is worth twenty-eight Chinese, or perhaps 2 Welsh miners worth one thousand Pakistanis. – BBC journalists' formula for the newsworthiness of disasters, early 1970s1

Racism is conventionally thought of as a matter of individual prejudices and the ways that these are expressed in word and deed. On this view, racism describes any kind of hostility or offensiveness on the basis of race, culture, nationality, religion or other kinds of belonging. It is closely related to parochialism or xenophobia and is often seen as a part of human nature or national culture, perhaps the regrettable but necessary correlate of patriotism. It is also this view of racism that focuses attention on the need for cultural sensitivity and awareness, the need for everyone to be equipped with a working knowledge of other cultures and sufficient respect to avoid causing offence. This is not necessarily a false account of racism but it obscures a larger truth. For racism is also about society as a whole and the relations between different societies, their structures and their processes and the power relationships they embody – the ways in which some groups of people profit from the systematic exclusion and subordination of other groups, which, in turn, result in some groups living lives that are harder, shorter and less free. This alternative, structural view of racism is important because it directs us to racist laws, conventions, practices, institutions and ways of thinking, not just individual acts and attitudes. It is a view of racism that also calls our attention to the machinery of states in sustaining racist practices. Crucially, it puts racism into history, asking us to consider how particular forms of racism come to exist and who profits from them. It also sets the experiences of different groups of victims of racism against the common social structures that have excluded them and asks how those structures have interacted with other forms of oppression, such as those of class or gender. In taking racism to be an aspect of society as a whole, it moves beyond questions of whether one region or class of society is more or less racist than another. Finally, it abandons attempts to account for different racisms in terms of different 'national characters' and instead explains the shifting character of racism in different contexts in terms of the political struggle against racism, its progress or lack thereof. It is only the structural view that can fully explain the changing nature of racism in Britain and guide the fight for racial justice.

The modern idea of racial identity appears to have its origins among the Portuguese of the sixteenth century, who sought to legitimise their early development of the Atlantic slave trade and the plantation economies of the 'New World'. By the end of the seventeenth century, England had surpassed the Portuguese in the supply of slaves, primarily to the Caribbean. The more that slave-traders and sugar-planters faced criticism and rebellion, the more they turned to the idea of Africans as a subhuman category of being in order to provide quasi-intellectual cover for the violent transportation of slaves from Africa to the Americas. It was the need to insulate the lucrative slave trade from moral condemnation that prompted the first attempts to create a systematic ideology of racism and solidified the fateful association of African features with inferiority. The raw material for this systematisation was a prior legacy of unorganised racial beliefs, superstitions and fears directed at Africans, such as the association of blackness with monsters and the devil and the idea of Africans as closer to the animal world. Before the intervention of the slave trade ideologists, the perception of Africans had been less rigidly defined. To Elizabethans, it was not the African as such but the 'Blackamoor', with connotations of an Islamic threat, that conjured racial fears. Although Islam was a multiracial civilisation, it was reduced in the European mind to the 'Moors' and associated with Africans. In the suspicion of the 'moor', race and religion were intertwined in a way that would recur in later centuries. The Islamic world of the 'East' was demonised as a monstrous realm, needing to be captured by Christendom and transformed according to a God-given mandate. Not for the last time, the East was allotted a role within a Western drama not of its own choosing.

AN 'IMPERIAL RACE'

England's eighteenth-century domination of the slave trade carried with it the beginnings of the mass diffusion of the modern concept of racism. The racism produced by the Caribbean sugar plantations was recycled to legitimise the expansion of British colonialism in India at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Racist ideology became central to the growing tentacles of British capitalism and its imperial project. It was over the hundred-year period of high imperialism from the mid-nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth that racism was popularised to the British public and a racial view of the world came to be widely adopted. As the historian Marika Sherwood has written:

from the mid-nineteenth century ... the building of an empire and the containment of labour troubles at home ... required the institutionalising of an earlier myth of the superior Englishman, now with a civilising mission. It required also the derogation of everyone else to an immutable racial hierarchy whose bottom rung was occupied by Africans.

Thus 'a new national ideology of beneficent imperialism' was propagated by an army of

writers, philosophers, economists, scientists and politicians, the churches and their missionaries, empire societies, children's and women's organisations ... the purveyors of popular culture, including magazines and the formal education system.

At first, this was an entirely middle-class ideology in which 'lower classes' were also conceived in terms of race: the working classes were imagined as 'literally racially distinct from the middle and upper classes'; the Irish, too, were interpreted as literally 'dark'. Notions of the 'racial health' of populations became a mounting obsession and gave racism a pseudo-scientific veneer, in which physical differences were taken to be signs of differing aptitudes for civilisation. The influential nineteenth-century anthropologist John Beddoes compiled an index of 'nigresence', cataloguing the inhabitants of the British Isles by their racial features. His conclusion was that 'nigresence' was increasing in the lower classes owing to the presence of Irish immigrants, whom he described as 'Africanoid'.

But from the late nineteenth century, racial categories were...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745326455
• ISBN 13: 9780745326450
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 232
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland