New racisms,new racial subjects? The neo-liberal moment and the racial landscape of contemporary Britain

Abstract

The articles in this volume reflect upon a very specific moment in the social architecture of British society: a moment that brings financial meltdown together with some sizeable shifts in the racial and ethnic landscape of the UK. As a ‘neo-liberal revolution’ heralds the end of public services and the end of the welfare state, it proclaims ‘the end of race’ as well. But cultural retrenchment and coded xenophobia have also been sweeping the political terrain, accompanied by ‘new racisms’ and ‘new racial subjects’ that only close contextual analysis can unpick. Against those who suggest that we live in a post-racial time, the research presented offers friction. By focusing on particular locations in Britain at a particular moment, the articles explore local stories of ‘race’ and racism across changing sociopolitical ground.     

The uses of racism: whitewashing new Europeans in the UK

In many respects, recent East European migrants in the UK look like past migrants to the UK: they left poorer parts of the world in search of work and the better life in the UK. But in other respects, they look different: they are white. Their putative whiteness, however, has not exempted them from the effects of racism. But while there is growing evidence of how they have been targets of racism, less attention has been focused on how they are also perpetrators of racism. The purpose of this paper is to compare the ways Hungarians and Romanians wield ‘race’ to assert and defend the relatively privileged position their putative whiteness affords them in the UK's segmented labour market. I argue that these migrants mark, evaluate and rank difference in racialized ways to secure both social-psychological and material benefits.     

Commitment and paradox in sociological research: School integration in Israel*

Panethnicity ‐ the development of bridging organizations and the generalization of solidarity among ethnic subgroups ‐ is important theoretically because it focuses attention on ethnic change, and allows one to assess the relative importance of structural and cultural factors. In this article we present a framework for the study of panethnicity, generate research questions from this framework, and then test these questions by examining panethnicity within four broad racial/ethnic groupings: Asian Americans, Native Americans, Indo Americans and Latinos in the United States. A review of these four cases demonstrates that those groups with the greatest cross‐subgroup structural similarity (Asian Americans and Indo Americans) also display the greatest panethnic development and potential, despite their considerable cultural diversity. This suggests that structural factors are more important for understanding the development of panethnicity and, by extension, for understanding ethnic change generally.     

Bringing the “General Strike” Back In: DuBois,Slavery and Emancipation

ABSTRACT

The “general strike” of slaves in the Civil War was a direct action that involved millions of small and large acts of defiance by slaves. These actions pushed President Lincoln from hesitation to full on military action, although this chapter of history has been neglected. The work of W.E.B. Du Bois reinserted the agency of slaves in their own liberation through the “general strike” but this analysis has also been pushed to the margins. David Roediger's “Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All' is an important corrective to this historical omission.     

Looking for immigration law

Culling the Masses by Professors David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín is an impressive work that makes important scholarly contributions. It analyses the trend in the USA, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina away from explicit racial discrimination in immigration laws. One layer of the book's argument examines how ‘vertical’ (domestic) and ‘horizontal’ (external) forces led these countries to abandon explicit racism. In another layer, the book argues that this anti-racist turn was not a product of democracy. Instead, racist immigration laws were often the product of democratic influences and institutions. The nuanced examination of external influences on national immigration laws in Culling the Masses is an invaluable contribution. However, its inconsistent definition of ‘immigration law’ across countries leaves incomplete both its assessment of racism in the present-day immigration laws, and in turn, its assessment of the relationship between democracy and racism.     

Including exclusion: the enduring problematic gap between the race and ethnicity paradigms

In the article, “U.S. Racial and Ethnic Relations in the Twenty-first Century”, Zulema Valdez and Tanya Golash-Boza present a compelling argument, suggesting the existence of a gap in race theoretical paradigms and ethnicity theoretical paradigms. They suggest that these two theoretical frames focus on both different social processes and levels of analysis, and argue for a merging of the central tenets of these paradigms in order to facilitate more complete theoretical analyses of racial and ethnic processes in the U.S. While we see great value in this project, we suggest that the authors miss an enduring and problematic gap between these theoretical frames because they do not fully explicate how race/racism theory articulates the fundamentally interconnected relationships between the racial social structure, group-level processes, and individual-level racial dynamics in a manner that ethnicity theory fails to capture.     

Post-race,post politics: the paradoxical rise of culture after multiculturalism

Declarations of the end of race ignore the continuing impact of racism upon socio-economic inequality in ‘racial states’. Nevertheless, the idea of post-racialism has gained ground in a post-9/11 era, defined by a growing suspicion of diversity. Clearly racialized, this suspicion is couched in cultural-civilizational terms that attempt to avoid the charge of racism. Hence, attempts to counteract the purported failure of multiculturalism in Europe today pose culturalist solutions to problems deemed to originate from an excess of cultural diversity. This is part of a deepening culturalization of politics in which the post-race argument belongs to a post-political logic that shuns political explanations of unrest and widening disintegration in favour of reductive culturalist ones. The culturalization of politics is elaborated by relating it to the displacement of the political that originated with the nineteenth-century ascendance of race, thus setting ‘post-racialism’ firmly within the history of modern racism.     

Reflexivity,tradition and racism in a former mining town

In this article I examine the formation of white working-class racialized discourses in a former coal-mining town in Leicestershire. I draw upon my ethnographic research in the area to explore the conditions in which young white adults confront, challenge and question what they perceive to be others’ conventional racist attitudes and beliefs, for example, the racist attitudes of members of their nuclear and extended families, friends and acquaintances. I argue that it is vital to examine these “moments of questioning” if white hegemony in predominantly working-class areas is to be understood.     

The limitations of ‘inter-racial contact’: stories from young South Africa

This paper argues that, while the demise of apartheid has led to many situations in which South Africans now come into closer contact with one another, this increased ‘contact’ does not amount to greater racial integration. Contact occurs within a context of unequal power relations in which ‘whiteness’ continues to be privileged over ‘blackness’. The result is that white people tend to benefit more from contact with the racial ‘other’ than black people, who often experience this contact as reinforcing their expectations of continued white dominance and privilege. While contact may undermine blatantly racist practices and overt racial conflict, racialized patterns of reasoning continue to exist, often unnoticed and unchallenged. These include the assumption that race is an incontrovertible fact of experience, the privileging of whiteness, the assumption that there exist different (biological) races which evince different forms of social behaviour and that these are essential properties of people rather than being historically or socially contingent.